Chapter 11
Staying Underground
He laughed at himself somewhere around the library, a short involuntary sound that a passing student glanced at and then politely ignored.
Not because any of it was funny, exactly, but because the alternative was a kind of alarm that wouldn't be useful to anyone, least of all him.
He had walked into this the way he walked into most things — sideways, without a map, through a door that had seemed interesting at the time — and the question now wasn't how he'd gotten here but what he was going to do about it now that he was.
He didn't have an answer yet. But he had more information than he'd had an hour ago, and a person on the outside he trusted, and that was at least a foundation to stand on while he figured out the rest.
He dropped the biscuits at the apartment, let Marv out briefly, and headed to office hours.
Two students came in during the two-hour window — both with paper questions that were genuinely about their papers, which Gary found straightforwardly refreshing.
He answered them clearly and with more confidence than he'd expected to have, and both left looking like something had been resolved, which was apparently what office hours were for.
By nine he was packing up, feeling the particular satisfaction of a morning that had produced something concrete amid a week full of things that hadn't.
He drove out to the Steele farm in the early afternoon.
? ? ?
Lou was waiting outside the distillery when the Jeep came through the gate, which suggested he'd either heard the tires on the gravel or had been watching for him. He met Gary at the car with a pair of heavy work gloves in one hand, extended without ceremony.
"Let's get to it," he said.
They got to it.
The work was physical in the straightforward, honest way Gary had come to appreciate about the Steele operation — nothing complicated about moving a barrel except that a barrel of bourbon weighs close to five hundred pounds and requires specific handling if you want it to arrive at its destination with the aging process intact and your back in the same condition it started in.
Lou knew the system the way he knew the property — completely, without having to think about it — and Gary followed his lead, learning the logic of the layout as they went.
Each barrel had a location that corresponded to where it was in the aging process.
New batches went into the cooler sections of the stone building where temperature consistency was highest and the early years of aging could proceed without interference.
Middle-aged product lived in the central racks, rotated periodically so the spirit contacted the char evenly as the barrel breathed through seasonal temperature changes.
The older barrels — the ones that had been sitting for decades, the ones Lou handled with a care that went beyond professionalism into something closer to respect — occupied the far end of the storage room, cool and still and largely left alone.
Some of what they moved Thursday was new product being positioned for its first years.
Some was mid-range inventory being shifted to fill gaps in the rack system or align with specific order timelines.
And some — the part Gary paid closest attention to while keeping his expression entirely neutral — were older barrels being pulled forward into the bottling rotation at Lou's direction.
They worked for two hours without stopping. The physical effort was real and Gary was glad for it — the specific clarity that comes from doing something demanding with your body while your mind runs quietly in the background.
Around four, Nancy appeared at the distillery door — or possibly a woman from the house staff, Gary couldn't be certain at the distance — and left a covered tray on the work table near the entrance without interrupting.
When they took a break twenty minutes later, the tray turned out to contain Texas patty melts assembled with the seriousness the Steele kitchen brought to everything — local grass-fed beef, thick-cut bread, cheese that had clearly come from somewhere specific, the whole thing still warm under the cloth.
Gary ate his standing up and didn't apologize for how fast it went.
They worked on through the late afternoon, finishing the last of the day's orders just before six — bottles filled, labels applied to match the correct product line, inventory logged in the handwritten ledger Lou kept on the work table with the careful, old-fashioned precision of a man who had learned early that paper didn't crash and didn't get hacked.
Lou stood back and looked at the completed work with the quiet satisfaction of a man who runs a tight operation and recognizes when a day has gone exactly as planned.
"This gets me through most of the weekend," he said. "Maybe further." He looked at Gary. "I appreciate it. More than the timing makes obvious."
"Good work," Gary said, genuinely.
He paused, keeping his tone easy. "One thing I noticed when we were moving those older barrels earlier — the back section.
Something felt off about the count. Like the spacing was wrong for the inventory, if that makes sense.
Might be worth checking the logs on the batches we don't move often — the older product that doesn't go into regular rotation. "
Lou's expression shifted almost imperceptibly — not alarm, more the careful attention of a man registering information he hadn't had before.
"I'll pull the logs this weekend," he said.
"We've had inventory discrepancies before — nothing significant, but Mom keeps close watch for a reason.
" He paused. "Before I was born, the property went through a period where outside people had access and things got complicated.
Since then we've had accounting oversight built into everything.
Eyes and ears on the books at all times.
" He said it without elaborating, which told Gary that Lou knew the shape of the history even if he didn't have every detail.
Lou crossed to the small desk near the bottling station and wrote out a check with the same methodical care he brought to the inventory ledger. He handed it to Gary without making it into anything bigger than it was.
"Sunday dinner?" he asked.
Gary thought about it — Stu and Amber's on Sunday, the line dancing commitment Saturday morning, the general principle of keeping some distance from the Steele orbit while he figured out what he was going to do with what he knew.
"I'll skip this Sunday," he said. "But I can be here again Thursday if you need me. Continue what we started today."
Lou nodded, the small satisfied nod of a man whose week had been solved. "Works for me." He walked Gary toward the door. "Mom's going to tell you about line dancing on Saturday."
"She already has. So has Sue."
Lou laughed — the easy, genuine version. "Have fun with that. Those ladies have been running that class since before I could drive. You're going to hear some stories."
Gary drove back toward Renton in the cooling evening, the check on the passenger seat, the day's physical work sitting in his shoulders in a way that felt earned, the conversation with Lou running quietly in the back of his mind.
Lou had confirmed the accounting oversight without knowing he was confirming anything.
Eyes and ears on the books. Which meant if Jed and Brett's operation had left any trace in the inventory logs — and Gary now had reason to believe it had — someone was eventually going to find it.
The question was whether they'd find it before the buyers on the other end of those barrels started asking questions of their own.
? ? ?
Friday moved at a pace that suited Gary's current preference for simplicity.
Classes in the morning, a focused workout, a quiet afternoon of reading that he got through without interruption.
Jenkins stopped him briefly on the way out of the building to make two announcements: first, that Gary was settling in well, which he offered with the straightforward warmth of a man who meant it; second, that next Friday was Halloween and a faculty and graduate student costume party was happening and Gary's attendance was not optional.
Which made it easy for Gary when Belle texted to let him know there was a Halloween party out at Dove Cove the following Friday — her crowd, she said, which Gary translated to mean the age bracket that made him feel like a chaperone rather than a guest. He told her he'd think about it, which was true in the sense that he thought about it briefly and concluded that a faculty party was a considerably better use of the evening than standing on a dark lakeshore with people a decade younger trying to appear casual about everything he now knew was sitting under the Steele property.
The weekend delivered what it had promised — quiet, largely domestic, the kind of days that refill whatever the week has emptied out.
He stayed off campus as much as possible Friday evening and Saturday morning besides his commitment of line dancing class, which suited both his mood and his general policy of reducing his visibility in the county until he had a better read on who was watching what.