her bed, wrapped her arms around her shoulders and told her the true story of Red Thread, who she was and who Levi was. The story Paris had told Cooper tonight.
Paris hadn’t taken it nearly as well as Cooper had. She’d run away from home, run back to Kentucky, driving all night in the truck Levi and Tamara had given her, Levi’s old truck he’d paid a fortune to keep running. She made it halfway to Frankfort before turning around and driving back to the island. Levi was waiting for her when she pulled into the drive.
“I’ve made that drive, too, kid,” he’d told her. “And I came back.”
“I don’t know if I can carry it,” she’d said.
“You’ll carry it here or you’ll carry it away, but you have to carry it. At least if you stay, we can help you carry it. I can help you,” he’d said, remembering that the plural would soon become that terrible singular.
After Tamara was gone, gone to wherever gods go after they die, they buried her in a clearing on the island, Levi and Paris and Bowen Berry and a dozen horses standing around her grave. Paris couldn’t leave after that. Her heart was in that island and to leave that farm was to leave herself behind. She stayed and she worked. And she learned.
She went to school down in South Carolina. Went to college, went to graduate school and eventually got her PhD in chemistry. Levi didn’t say a word about it, although she knew he knew what she was planning to do. He had plans of his own, too. When Paris was thirty-four years old, he gave her the shock of her life by asking her to marry him. She’d been horrified at first—this man who’d been a second father to her proposing marriage. But he promised it wasn’t like that. He wanted to ensure that all he had would be hers when he died and that no other Maddox—and she knew by that he meant none of the white members of the Maddox clan—could take it from her.
So Paris had married Levi because she knew that was what Tamara would have wanted her to do.
Out of respect for her husband, who had been her husband in name only, she waited until he was gone before she put her plan into action. She bought a house in Frankfort, Kentucky, a historic Georgian home on Wapping Street that had once been home to a general in the Union Army. Paris moved her now divorced mother in with her and found all their old fights mysteriously resolved. Their only disagreement these days was over Paris’s decision not to have children. She was still young enough, although time was running out. Better do it, her mother said. Better hurry. For a long time Paris had ignored that advice. It gave her a grim sort of satisfaction to kill off the Maddox line simply by not having children. But it wasn’t only the Maddox line that would die with her, it was Veritas’s, too, and truth was, she wouldn’t mind being a mother. She might even like it. So before she’d gone into The Rickhouse last night to take her chances with Cooper McQueen, she’d decided to take her chances with God and fate, too. Maybe in nine months Cooper would find out last night had been even more interesting than he’d thought it was. Fate was a train that didn’t stop until it reached its final destination. Paris knew this ride was only starting.
Now, that was a story.
Paris drove into town but didn’t go straight home yet. One more thing to do before she was done and she wanted to get it over with because Tamara was out there somewhere watching.
Inside the iron gates of the Frankfort Cemetery she parked her car and stepped out onto the soft lawn. A storm must have hit Frankfort last night, as the ground was sodden and spongy and the heels of her shoes stuck in the grass. She nearly lost one trying to pull herself free. From then on she kept to the paved walkway until she found the row she sought.
Famous men were buried in this cemetery. Men like Daniel Boone and Judge John Milton Elliott, who’d been murdered by a fellow judge, assassinated for the crime of ruling against the man’s sister in a dispute over land. The murder had made national news and the New York Times had said of it that “such a