Chapter 9: Friday

Twenty-Four Years Ago

Jack Culverin pulled into the guest parking lot at the Culverin Hill distillery and parked near the front door. He got out but didn’t bother locking the door of his three-year-old Camry; the parking lot was inside the guarded gate so random car theft was simply not an issue. He stretched and scratched; he had been driving all night, held together with coffee and No-Doz, and surviving on whatever he could scrounge up at rest stops along the way.

Jack entered the lobby and saw the receptionist, Sharon Terwilliger, at the front desk and working on a computer. Sharon had been working at the front desk for as long as Jack could remember, and if pushed, he would guess as long as his father could remember. The distillery was not large enough and public enough that they needed a pretty young receptionist with big tits and long legs to impress anybody coming in the door. Sharon looked like a somewhat dumpy great-great-grandmother one breath away from death.

“Jack, welcome home,” she said, smiling.

“Sharon, they still have you shackled to the front desk? I thought you’d be running this place by now!” he teased.

Sharon snorted derisively. “Your father is afraid I’ll take over and fire him.”

“Probably double our profits if we did that.”

“Triple them!”

He nodded and laughed. “He in?”

She shook her head. “No, he didn’t come in today. He told me yesterday they were expecting family and was taking the day off. You didn’t know?”

Jack shrugged. “Huh. No, I just drove down from Cambridge. This is your golden opportunity for a boardroom coup.”

“Don’t push me. Your father might be the first one I fire, but you’ll be number two.”

Jack laughed at that. “Jerry in back?”

She nodded and shifted slightly in her seat. She pressed a button with her foot and there was a buzz and click on a door to her side. “Go on back. He’s the third one I’ll fire.”

Jack laughed some more and pushed open the door to the distillery. His destination was the head of the production side, Jerry Hampton. Jack waved to a few people he saw on the way to the master distiller’s office. He knocked on the open door and stuck his head in.

Jerry looked up and grinned. “Christ, they let anybody in here!” He stood up and stuck out his hand.

Jack reached out and shook it. “Sharon said the same thing, and then threatened to fire the gate guard who let me in.”

Jerry laughed. “She probably said the same thing to Jacob Culverin himself.” Jacob was the first Master of Culverin and had died in 1814.

“Probably.”

Jerry pointed at one of the chairs facing his desk and the two men sat down. “Back for the summer?”

“Summer and fall. I’m doing an internship in the fall, but Dad has me starting this summer.”

Jerry nodded. “It’s time you got out of the plant and into the office.”

“You, too?”

“Yeah, me, too. You know we’re right. It makes no sense putting a Princeton grad slash Harvard Business School student to work on the line in a distillery. It’d be like having one of your father’s thoroughbreds pulling a plow. It’s time, and past time, for you to move along.” Jerry smiled. “A master distiller who knows how to run the business? That’s a powerful combination, boy! The sky’s the limit then!”

Jack shrugged and gave a wry smile. He had been working at the distillery since he was a boy. At first, he had earned pocket change emptying garbage cans in the offices, but when he turned fourteen and got his working papers, he began spending serious time there. At sixteen he had been able to begin working throughout the complex. He loved the distillery and the whiskey business and made no bones about his plan to work there full-time once he graduated from college.

Jack’s father, Willis Culverin, had gone along with the idea, but had put some rules in place. “You want to work here, that’s fine, but your name is on the door, just like mine and just like the men who started this place. You are going to start at the bottom. You want to run this place someday; you go to college and learn how to do that. I don’t need Enoch’s ghost coming back to haunt me if you fuck it up!”

Jack had agreed with that. He was young and smart and didn’t think he would fuck it up. He thought the distillery was a potential gold mine and wanted to grow it larger; he just needed to figure out how to do that. The family had the money to send him to a good college, and he got a degree in business at Princeton. For the last year, he had been at the Harvard Business School. He’d done one internship at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ocala. Now he was going to do a long internship at Culverin Hill. After that, it would be back to Cambridge for his final classes. He would probably graduate with a Harvard MBA in two years.

“You’re probably right. Anyway, I start a week from Monday, over on the other side of the building.”

“Just don’t piss off Sharon. They’re still looking for the body of the last guy who got her mad.”

Jack nodded and gave an elaborate shiver at the thought.

Jerry said, “Hey, you want to do me a favor? Your dad called down and asked me to send up a few cases. You want to run that up?”

“Yeah, sure. You want to load it in my car?” responded Jack.

“I already have it in the back of one of the pickups.”

Jack stood up. “I’ll do it now. I’ll run it up and then come back down and get my car. After that I am sleeping for a few days. I am beat.”

Jerry led him out the back of the plant and pointed him towards a pickup truck parked at one of the loading docks, with the instruction that the keys were in the truck. Jack headed over to the truck and looked in the back. There were a couple of cases of Culverin Dew whiskey, and another two cases of Culverin Mist, their premier whiskey. He got behind the wheel and started it up. It would only be a few minutes more before he got home.

Rebecca Culverin was bored. At sixteen she was a bundle of teen angst, and the world revolved around her and not always to her liking. First, there was the timing. She had been invited by some friends to go with them to Galveston, but her parents had made her come with them to Springwater. Springwater? What the hell was there to do in North Carolina? She wanted to go to the beach!

Yes, her older brother and sister had both taken a couple of weeks in Springwater several years ago, and they had loved it, but they were such dweebs anyway. Okay, so they goofed off and got laid a lot, but she could do that in Dallas - or Galveston! Worse, they had flown here in a morning. She had just driven here with her parents, a two-day trip that felt like two weeks. There had been construction delays the entire way, the weather had been awful, they had to spend a night in a Motel 6 with mold in the bathroom, and there had been lines at every bathroom and food stop along the way. Meanwhile, she had to listen to Stan and Elaine talk about the place like it was the fucking Oracle of Delphi! Every Culverin needed to go home and visit Culverin Hill at least once, like it was a pilgrimage to Mecca or something! How boring was that?

They had arrived last night, late, and Rebecca had simply gone to bed. She knew her parents were going to stay up late and talk to her relatives, but she was beat. She wasn’t quite sure how they were all related, but Culverin wasn’t that common a name, and her parents had simply told her to call them Uncle Willis and Aunt Jenny.

Rebecca had slept late that morning, and when she woke up, the house was empty. That was another reason she was unhappy. Even though her room was larger than her room back home, and had its own bathroom, she focused on the fact she had to live out of a suitcase. Then, after cleaning up and dressing, she had gone downstairs. She found a note in the kitchen for her. Her parents and her aunt and uncle had gone riding and wouldn’t be back until after their picnic lunch. Riding? Horses? And really, a picnic lunch? How boring was that?

Rebecca just shook her head. She knew what kind of riding her parents were doing; she just wondered whether her father was riding in one direction with Aunt Jenny and her mother was riding in the other direction with Uncle Willis, or if the four of them had all ridden off together. Since when did her parents ride? The only riding the two of them ever did was riding each other, which they did constantly. She also knew, because her mother had told her more than once, that variety was the spice of life, and that her parents liked to swing and swap and fool around. By now they would have spread out a few blankets and be screwing their brains out somewhere on the mountain she was now stranded on.

That just made Rebecca even more unhappy. It wasn’t that she had anything against screwing. Rebecca Culverin hadn’t been a virgin for years! She could have gotten laid at the beach! What the hell was there to do in North-fucking-Carolina? There was good reason she was unhappy. Now, with nobody around and nothing to do and no food to eat, she left the kitchen. Maybe she could look around before heading back up to her room to mope.

Rebecca left the kitchen and was going through the foyer towards the stairs when she saw a beat-up old pickup truck pull into the driveway. A sign was on the truck’s door for Culverin Hill Spirits, so it must be related to the family somehow. Her father had said it was the best whiskey in the country, not that he let her drink any. That wasn’t very fair either now that she thought about it. Her name was on it, after all! She watched while a grungy-looking guy climbed out of the pickup and headed towards the door. Unbelievably, he came right in the front door!

“Excuse me, but are you supposed to be here?” she asked.

Jack Culverin stopped in the doorway. “Excuse me?” A very pretty girl he had never seen before was standing in the foyer and looking rather imperious.

“Who are you?”

Jack figured this must be one of their guests and decided to play along. He was still in the old and comfortable clothes he had worn while driving down from Boston, an old work shirt with the sleeves cut off, some baggy cargo shorts, and a pair of ancient Nikes. He tapped the faded nametag sown onto the breast pocket of the shirt and said, “I’m Jack. Who are you?”

“I am Rebecca Culverin. Are you supposed to be here? Did you come up from the brewery or something?”

“It’s a distillery.”

“Whatever.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was told to bring up some supplies.”

“Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to bring them in the front door. Maybe you should drive out back,” she replied. Rebecca had seen enough British television on PBS to know that servants were supposed to use a back door. Her mother liked Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey and had more than once commented that her children should use the servants’ entrance!

Jack bit his lip to keep from laughing. Whoever Rebecca Culverin was, she was absolutely hilarious! She was also extremely pretty. She looked to be in her mid-teens, a brunette with long, thick hair and dark brown eyes, and a breathtakingly stunning face. Even wearing just some cut-off shorts and a plain t-shirt it was obvious she had long legs, a trim figure, and a very interesting bust. “Sorry about that, ma’am. Out back?”

“Yes. I saw some cars around by the back door. I’ll meet you there.” Rebecca knew from television that servants needed to be watched over, so they didn’t steal anything.

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll drive right out back.”

Jack managed to keep his composure until he got out to the pickup truck, and then broke out laughing as he climbed inside. He drove around the house to the back door and had to wipe the smile off his face when he saw her standing at the doorway. He went to the back of the truck and lifted out a case of whiskey and carried it towards the kitchen. Once inside he asked, “Where does it go, ma’am?”

Rebecca blinked at that. She had no idea where things had to be put away. “Uh, set it down here, on the table.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jack placed the case of whiskey on the table and turned to face her. “Are you one of the owners, ma’am?”

That was a question she could answer. “No, that would be my aunt and uncle. I’m staying with them for a week. Not that it’s any of your business!” Rebecca suddenly realized she shouldn’t be really talking to this man. Just like on the TV shows, the upstairs people shouldn’t mingle with the downstairs people.

“Sorry about that.” Jack headed back outside, smiling to himself, and shaking his head. Rebecca missed his attitude completely. He returned with a second case of whiskey. “So, you’re just visiting? Sounds like fun. Met anybody yet?”