The Rickhouse

Ruby Linwood is four foot eleven and fires people for sport.

"You're late," she says, when your rental car crunches to a stop on the gravel at 7:58.

"It's two minutes to eight," Margo says.

"In Kentucky that's late." Ruby looks you both up and down from the porch of a white farmhouse with green shutters. She's wearing jeans, rubber boots and a man's denim jacket three sizes too big, the sleeves rolled into fat cuffs. Her hair is white and cut short as a boy's. Her eyes are black and absolutely merciless. "So. Chicago sent me two."

"We're a team," you say.

Margo says, at exactly the same time, "We're both finalists."

Ruby's eyebrows climb. "Uh huh." She turns and walks down the porch steps. "Come on, then. Let me show you what you're fighting for. And don't touch anything. You'll smell like the barrels for a week."

Linwood Hollow sits in a fold of green hills an hour outside Louisville. There's a limestone spring that runs clear and cold over pale rocks, a stone stillhouse with copper pots gleaming through the windows, and rickhouses, tall black-stained wooden barns where the barrels sleep for years. The air smells like caramel and wet oak and something sharp underneath, like a match just struck.

"Angel's share," Ruby says, breathing in. "What the whiskey gives up to the air while it ages. Mae used to say it's the only tax she ever paid gladly."

Inside the first rickhouse it's dim and cathedral-quiet. Barrels stacked to the rafters, nine stories of them, each one chalked with a date. Light comes through the slats in thin gold bars.

A young man drops down from a ladder at the end of the row. Tall, curly-haired, sawdust on his shoulders, grinning. "Gran. Are these the new ones?"

"Corwin, my grandson. Head distiller. Don't let the hair fool you, he's smarter than both of you." Ruby pats a barrel. "These are from 2017. Mae's last year. She laid them down in March and was gone by Thanksgiving."

"I'm sorry," you say.

Ruby waves it off. "Don't be sorry. Be good at your jobs." But her hand stays on the barrel a moment longer than it needs to.

Margo has been quiet. She's wearing flats today and a camel trench, hair back in the chignon, and somehow she looks even more beautiful in a barn than in a boardroom, which is profoundly unfair. Corwin keeps glancing at her and walking into things. He's hit two barrels and a post.

"Mrs. Linwood," Margo says. "The letter. The 1974 letter. Is that Mae's signature?"

Ruby's face closes like a fist. "It looks like it."

"That's not what I asked."

"It looks like her signature," Ruby says, "and it is not her word. Mae Linwood would have sold me before she sold that recipe. And she would never have sold me." She looks at Margo, hard. "You ever love somebody like that, Ms. Faraday?"

Margo doesn't answer. Ruby turns those black eyes on you.

"What about you?"

"Not yet," you say.

"Hm." Ruby looks between the two of you for one long, uncomfortable second. Then she turns and walks toward the door. "Well. You're both young."

Ironbridge arrives at ten for their court-approved site inspection, in two black SUVs that make the gravel sound expensive.

First out is Bartek Thibault. You've seen him argue once, in a federal appeal you watched from the back row: silver bow tie, honey-slow New Orleans voice, a smile like a man inviting you onto his yacht so he can push you off it. He's handsome in an oiled, deliberate way, and he knows it.

"Ladies," he says. "Ms. Linwood. What a lovely morning to lose a distillery."

"Get off my porch, Bartek," Ruby says pleasantly.

"I'm not on your porch, ma'am."

"Get off the part of my land that's near my porch."

Then the passenger door of the second SUV opens, and a woman steps out.

She is, objectively, one of the most beautiful women you've ever seen. Dark curls falling to her shoulders, olive skin, red mouth, a white silk blouse and wide trousers that move like water. She takes off her sunglasses, and her eyes are warm brown and amused, and they go straight past Ruby, straight past you, and land on Margo.

"Hello, Margo," she says.

You feel Margo go still beside you. Not her usual stillness, the controlled kind she wears in court. This is different. It's the stillness of something that's been hit.

"Petra," Margo says.

"Petra Halvard," the woman says, turning to you with a smile and her hand out. "General counsel, Ironbridge Spirits. You must be the other finalist."

You shake her hand. Her grip is warm and firm and lingers half a second. "Ava Wynne. How did you know there was another finalist?"

"Oh," says Petra, sliding her sunglasses back on, "I keep up with Margo's career."

You glance at Margo. Every bit of color has drained from her face. Her lips are pressed together so hard the red lipstick has gone thin.

The inspection takes three hours. Ironbridge photographs the stillhouse, the rickhouses, the labels, the spring. Thibault makes small talk about bourbon with Corwin, who is too polite to bite him. Petra walks the property in heels without once stumbling, and every time she passes Margo she says something so quiet you can't hear it, and every time, Margo looks away.

You don't ask. It takes all of your considerable self-control. You don't ask.

The drive back is fifty-eight minutes long. Margo says nothing for all of them.

You try once. "So. Petra Halvard."

"Watch the road, Wynne."

"I am watching the road."

"Then keep watching it."

She stares out the passenger window at the hills going blue in the dusk, and her hand, the one in her lap, is closed so tight her knuckles are white.

At the hotel she goes straight into the bedroom. The doors close. You hear the shower run for a long time.

You eat cold room-service pasta alone at the desk and read deposition transcripts until the words blur. Then you lie down on the velvet sofa under the too-short blanket with both pillows, hers and yours, and stare at the ceiling.

Midnight. Twelve-thirty. One.

The festival is still going somewhere below, a banjo and somebody laughing. Through the double doors there's a sliver of lamplight. She's awake too. You can feel it, the way you can always feel her across a courtroom, a conference table, an entire banquet hall.

You think about Petra Halvard saying I keep up with Margo's career like it was a private joke. You think about Margo's white knuckles.

You think: It's none of your business, Ava. She's your competition. Go to sleep.

Your phone buzzes on the coffee table.

You pick it up. The screen lights your face in the dark.

Margo Faraday.

You look at the bedroom doors. The lamplight beneath them. Ten feet of carpet and a closed door between you, and she is texting you.

The message is still loading. Three dots, appearing, disappearing, appearing again, as if she's written it and deleted it a dozen times.

Then it arrives.