even a week before, when he had arrived on a private jet from his hideaway in Manhattan. He had come back to Easterly to make sure Miss Aurora was okay after she had collapsed. He had stayed home because of everything that had happened in such a short time, the trajectory of his family hitting an iceberg hidden in the currents of fate and destiny, the seemingly impenetrable hull of the Bradfords’ two-hundred-year history, of their extraordinary financial and social position, pierced by a reversal of fortune from which a recovery seemed … impossible.
“We can leave.” Lizzie arched her foot again. “We can sell this place and take the money and live a very nice life far away from all of this.”
“Don’t think I haven’t considered it. And hey, I could support us by playing poker. It’s not classy, but I’m learning that bills don’t care where the money to cover them comes from.” He laughed in a hard burst. “Although my family has been living off of liquor revenue all these years, so how should I ever judge?”
For a moment, her heart sang as she pictured the two of them on another farm in another state, tending a small patch of good, clean earth that yielded corn and carrots and tomatoes and green beans. She would spend her days working for a small city taking care of their municipal plantings. And he would become a teacher at the local high school and maybe coach basketball or football, perhaps both. Together, they would watch each other’s faces grow lined from laughter and love, and yes, there would be children. Towheaded, straight-haired children, boys who would bring home tadpoles and girls who would climb trees. There would be driving permits and high school proms and tears when everybody went off to college and then holiday joy when the house would fill back up with chaos.
And when the sun finally set upon them, there would be a porch with a pair of rocking chairs on it, set side by side. When one passed on, the other would soon follow. Real Nicholas Sparks stuff.
No more private jets. No more jewels and oil paintings of so-and-so’s great-great-great-grandfather. No more Easterly with its seventy-person staff and its acres of formal gardens and its unrelenting grind. No more parties and balls, Rolls-Royces and Porsches, fancy, soulless people smiling with empty eyes.
No more Bradford Bourbon Company.
Although the product itself had never been the problem.
Maybe he would even take her last name so that no one in their new life would know who he was, who his family was.
He would be as she herself was, an anonymous person living a modest life—and yes, there might not be majesty in her fantasy of the two of them. But she would take the simple graces of mediocrity over the empty grandeur of great money every day of the week. And twice on Sunday.
“You know, I can’t believe he killed himself,” Lane murmured. “It just doesn’t seem like something he would do. He was far too arrogant for it—and hell, if the great William Baldwine was going to commit suicide, it would have been more fitting for him to put one of Alexander Hamilton’s dueling pistols to his mouth and pull the trigger. But jumping off a bridge he’d considered ‘garish’? Into water he wouldn’t deign to give to a barn cat? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Lizzie took a deep breath. And dared to put into words something she herself had been wondering. “Are you … thinking maybe someone killed him?”
SIX
Red & Black Stables
Ogden County, Kentucky
Sweet smell of hay.
Oh, the sweet smell of hay and the stomping of hooves … and the ice-cold concrete of the aisle that ran between the mahogany-doored stalls.
As Edward Westfork Bradford Baldwine sat outside his thorough-bred stallion’s sawdust-floored bedroom, his bony ass was suffering from a frigid recontouring, and he marveled at how, even in May, the stone was so cold. Granted, it was dawn, but the temperature outside was seventy even without the sun’s help. One would think that the ambient benevolence of late spring would be more generous with its climatic attentions.
Alas, no.
Fortunately, he was drunk.
Lifting the bottle of—what was it? Ah, vodka. Fair enough—to his lips, he was disappointed to find such a light weight in his hand. There was only an inch left in the bottom and the thing had been three-quarters full when he had limped his way out here. Had he put all those ounces away? And damn it, the