Page 13 of Lost With You
She argued, “But I’ll need pictures.”
“You can take the phone out for that. But you won’t be able to save the pictures to the cloud, even if you tried. There’s a whole stretch of wilderness we’ll be passing through that’s too remote from cell towers.”
She chewed on that complication as she picked up the burger. “I’ll keep a journal. I’ve got a notebook somewhere in that car.”
He didn’t doubt it. She had a whole life in that car. Why was she so unhooked from any reasonable sense of home, family…or lover?
“About this trip,” she said after washing down a bite with a swig of beer. “Tell me how you got the idea.”
All business, she was. “Did you notice those clay pots on the shelves in the living room?”
“I did. Two-tone glazed jugs with finger handles. Cream and brown in color?”
“Those are my great-grandfather’s moonshine jugs.”
She raised a brow. “Your great-grandfather was a bootlegger?”
“Many of my ancestors were, every male going back nearly two centuries. My grandfather—we call him Pops—was the last.”
“A family business, then.”
“Exactly.” She was chowing down on the burger, shooting questions between bites, but he saw her mind working with an intellectual curiosity that kicked up his attention. “Pops was born about the time Prohibition ended, but the illicit import-export business carried on well after. At least around these parts, it did. He always remembered those days with a great fondness and was pretty pissed they ended on his watch.”
“Heaspiredto be a bootlegger?”
“It was about the challenge and the independence and living off the land.” He glanced around the yard, watching the way the shadows of the trees stretched over the clearing as the light turned mellow, just like in his childhood. “It was a great way to grow up, listening to Pops’ stories. My brothers and sisters didn’t play hide-and-seek, we played ‘beat the feds’.”
She laughed, showing a flash of teeth. “Do you have a lot of siblings?”
“Yes. The MacCabes are a fertile and volatile clan. You?”
Her laugh faded. Man, she didn’t like talking about herself.
“One sister,” she said, offering that up like a ration. “No cousins. So your Pops had no compunction about telling impressionable kids he was a lawbreaker?”
“Hell no. To us it seemed like Pops came out of the Old West, when outlawing was whitewashed to sound like fun. The truth is…nobody really believed his stories. Not the adults, anyway.”
“Nobody,” she said, “but you.”
She tilted her head, one eye narrowing, in invitation to tell him more. But his libido responded as if that look were an invitation for something else altogether.
Get a grip, dude.
“There’s evidence that Pops spoke truth.” Dylan took a careful swig of beer, watchful about lowering his inhibitions. “When cleaning this place out, I found a copper moonshine pot still in the shed. All green and corroded through, but the real thing nonetheless.” They threw it out after Pops had been moved away. “The clay whiskey jars in the living room are the real things, too. They gave credence to Pops’ talk about secretly marked trails and petroglyphs carved into rocks.”
“Is this why you became a historian?” she ventured, leaning in. “Because of your Pops’ stories?”
He straightened at the idea. He’d never considered Pops’ influence on his life choices, beyond this particular expedition, but he supposed his own curiosity about the past had been born in this very cabin. “This isLast of the Mohicansterritory. Pops’ stories drew a picture of a time when this land wasn’t fenced off as private property or relegated to park status, when Native Americans still lived here the way they did for thousands of years.”
“You don’t think Grandpa MacCabe kissed the Blarney Stone once or twice?”
He raised his beer again and watched her over the top. “You’re not a romantic, Casey Michaels.”
“Absolutely not.”
Too quick, that response. She had been a romantic, once. Maybe that fiancé she didn’t want to talk about had killed that sensibility.
“Call me a cynic,” she said with a forced laugh. “Do you have any idea how many crazy stories I’ve heard in my travels?”
