stood there and giggled a little. She’d gone to a slumber party two weeks ago and they’d played Clue. Miss Scarlet in the bedroom with the candlestick...
Noises came from the side of the house, jarring her from her delirium—something falling over, something else cracking and wood splintering like a door coming off the hinges. The water in the house was a foot high now, muddy and stinking and ice-cold. The shattered remains of the lamp covered the bed like glitter. In the window seat sat the bottle of Red Thread. Tamara picked it up and smashed it against the wall. The red ribbon around its neck fell into the water. She fished it out and grabbed her grandfather’s hand, twisting the ribbon around his index finger. He moaned and Tamara gasped. The water reached her knees.
Tamara grasped her grandfather by the ankles and dragged him off the bed. She couldn’t get any traction at first, but terror gave her strength. She tugged and lugged and pulled. His penis hung out of his unzipped pants like a fat earthworm. If she had garden shears handy, she would cut it off his body.
With one final yank on his belt loops, Tamara heaved him off the bed into the cold dirty water. And then, because she knew she had no other choice if she wanted to survive this night, she grabbed two fistfuls of his Lee Majors hair and shoved his head under the water.
Some part of his brain must have registered what was happening to him. He thrashed hard after the first inhale of muck, but she had the advantage now and wasn’t going to lose it. She held him down until he stopped moving and, to be on the safe side, long after he stopped moving.
When it was done, she stood there looking at him there in the water, floating, seaworthy as a garbage bag. He didn’t look like a person anymore.
From the other room came a screeching sound—the river rearranging the furniture. Tamara ripped the silky pink cover off her bed and shook the broken glass out of it. Wrapping it around herself like a shawl, she waded through the now knee-deep water to the door. The house had gone mad. Chairs floated. Papers and books bobbed on the surface like toy boats. The smell of sewage permeated the air. Somewhere a light flickered and Tamara had a new fear then—electrocution. She heard a squeak and saw movement in the water—a gray rat swimming down the hall to save itself. Panicking, Tamara forced her way past a china cabinet now turned on its side and floating and made it to the stairs. She rushed upstairs to the bathroom and hit her knees in front of the toilet. For what felt like an hour she wretched and vomited. She threw up so hard her throat tore and she urinated on herself. She could taste blood in her mouth.
Then the lights went out.
Tamara blinked, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. With the pink blanket around her again, she dragged herself to her feet and felt her way down the hall to her grandfather’s office. It faced the highway instead of the river. If the water kept rising, it would be the last room to flood. The door wasn’t locked, and if it had been, she would have busted the door down for the pleasure of breaking something. Inside the office she saw a black box on the desk. In the dark the telephone looked like a cat curled up and sleeping. Should she call for help? She didn’t know. She’d been warned once not to touch the telephone in a storm, but it wasn’t lightning. Carefully she picked up the receiver. The line was dead. She was all alone in the house with her grandfather’s dead body.
Tamara went to the window. The lawn was gone. The manicured horse pastures crisscrossed with white board fences—gone. Cobblestone driveway—gone. The stone fence built long before the Civil War by slave labor—gone. Now there was only water. Water water everywhere. Only the stable up on a high knoll had been spared. If the water kept rising, it would be the next to go. And so would she.
When she was a little girl in Sunday school, she had learned the story of Noah and his ark. From what she remembered from her lessons, God had promised He would never destroy the world with a flood again and He’d given the rainbow as a sign of His promise.
It seemed as if God had changed His mind.
Tamara turned from the window and found her grandfather’s pack of cigarettes on his desk and the matches in the top drawer where he kept his fancy pens and stationary. She didn’t light a cigarette, but she did light the candles she’d found in the top drawer. The sight of the candles on the desk gave her an idea. She started digging through the drawers. If God destroyed by water, she would destroy by fire. Tonight she wanted to destroy everything. Business papers. Letters. Her grandfather’s Last Will and Testament if she could find it so she wouldn’t inherit anything because she didn’t want it. She didn’t want a brick of this place. She didn’t want a dime. In a drawer she found a handgun and bullets. Granddaddy’s revolver her mother had threatened to use to shoot Kermit. Tamara opened the window and held the gun out over the water. Except...no. What if she needed that later? She closed the window, kept the gun. The police might come for her. She wouldn’t let them put her in jail for what she did. She’d rather die first than take the blame. Her mother had set her up, left her alone so her grandfather could have his way with her. Her mother would burn for this, too.
Tamara dug every sheet of paper out of the drawers. She tossed his ledger books into the wire wastebasket, an appointment book, anything she could get her hands on. Anything she could burn, she would burn.
Papers weren’t enough. Accounts weren’t enough. She wanted to burn the very heart of Red Thread. The bottle. The first bottle and Veritas’s red ribbon. Where was the bottle?
She picked up a candle and walked around the room, looking along the walls, across the tables. In the corner of the room she saw a girl holding a candle. Her. Her reflection in the glass front of Granddaddy’s liquor cabinet. She raised the candle to the cabinet and peered inside, spying row upon row of amber-colored bottles tied at the neck with a red ribbon. The glass bottles danced with the light of her candle flame, and for a moment it appeared they all held fire inside them. Tamara set her candle down, wrapped the pink blanket around her arm and with her elbow smashed in the glass.
Tamara dropped the blanket on the floor and stood on it out of the way of the broken glass. She’d been hurt enough tonight. Red Thread wasn’t ever going to hurt her again. She dug through the cabinet looking at every bottle by candlelight. One bottle was from this year. Another from 1970. Another bottle was old enough its ribbon had faded to a dull pink, but it wasn’t old enough to be the bottle she sought.
Then she saw it.
In the very back of the cabinet on the bottom shelf in a glass box all its own was the bottle. The first bottle. She pulled out the box and slid the glass lid off the top. From a nest of red velvet, she lifted the bottle out. Around the neck hung a limp and ratty ribbon, rust-colored with age. She set it on the counter, smiling. She didn’t know what she should do with it. Drink it? Pour it into the river water? So many choices, each one better than the last. She had to think of something good, something that would hurt Granddaddy and Jacob Maddox even in their graves.
Tamara would wait, think it over. In the meantime, she should hide the bottle again. She went to put it back in its velvet bed and noticed something else in the box with the bottle—an envelope. An envelope her grandfather had hidden.
She pulled it out and examined the front. The handwriting...she knew this handwriting.
Her father... Daddy.
He’d written this letter. It was addressed to her grandfather. She kissed the words on the paper because she missed him so much. Tamara took the letter, took her candle and walked to the desk chair, where she sat to read it, the bottle long forgotten.
Dad,
By the time you receive this letter, I’ll be dead. I can’t stay on this earth another day. Every single day of my life has been a lie. I do not love my wife. I have never loved my wife. I have never loved any woman and never will. It is my greatest regret that I chose your money over my soul and allowed Virginia to be trapped in this prison of a marriage with me.
You can have your money. If you’ve seen my soul anywhere, I’d like to have it back.
I am not taking my life to punish you so much as to free Virginia from this farce of a marriage and from the Maddox family. I fear she will make the same choice I did, taking