“Why do you think this is a bottle of London dock rum?” Cray asked, settling into a chair next to the table and examining the bottle as the rest of us took a seat and Astra hopped into my lap.
Barclay clasped his hands together, rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “A series of coincidences and lucky meetings led me to the woman I got this bottle from when I visited London last summer. I visited a lot of bars—”
“No kidding,” Luke joked.
“Obviously.” Barclay smiled. “Even Alastair’s bar. It’s really pretty good. We’ll have to check it out when we go to the gin festival.”
My ears perked up at this. Us? Going to London? OMG! Then I focused on Barclay’s story.
“I met these guys at Trailer Happiness in Notting Hill—oh, wow, the drinks there—anyway, they were real rum history nuts, talking about odd places and people they’d talked to, and they said one of the craziest was Louisa. ‘Just goes to show you can’t believe everyone with a story,’ one of them said.”
“The currency of the liquor trade is outrageous stories,” Neil noted.
Barclay nodded. “I know, but I was curious. I asked them who this Louisa was, and they said it was an odd old lady they’d met at a fundraiser for the London zoo where they were tending bar. She was a volunteer there, and she told them she grew up with a really interesting rum and still had a few bottles left. When they asked her what it was, she claimed it was rum that survived the dock fire in 1933. They thought that was hysterically funny.”
“Age and eccentricity are not to be trifled with,” Cray said, and we all laughed.
“Too true.” Barclay leaned back and looked around. “You guys know how obsessed I am with rum. I decided I wanted to talk to Louisa myself. I went to the zoo office three times asking for a volunteer named Louisa before I found someone who knew who I was talking about and told me she actually volunteered at the Zoological Society library. So I went there and got lucky. She was working. I told her I was interested in rum, and she told me she had a story—”
“Get on with the story, already!” Melody said to our chuckles.
Barclay smiled. “OK. I took her out for tea, and it turned into a whole afternoon thing. She invited me back to her flat for homemade scones—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Melody said.
“I’m getting to it! She told me her father worked at the No. 2 Rum Warehouse at the West India Docks in 1933 and was there that night, playing cards with friends, when the fire broke out. His first thought was apparently to save a barrel that was a particular prize of his supervisor’s—partly, I think, because he saw that the inevitable was going to happen. The fire spread quickly, and the whole place was going to burn down. And he thought it would be ‘cheeky,’ in her words, if he stole it right out from under his boss’s nose. Though he referred to it as a ‘rescue,’ she said.
“The barrels were pretty unwieldy. What made me suspicious of Fizz’s bottle was that I couldn’t connect how he got a vintage bottle from what was essentially a barrel operation. The barrels were measured and tested in a long shed that ran alongside the warehouse and then transferred into the warehouse. Later they were blended and bottled and moved out.
“Anyway, Louisa said her father convinced his mates to roll this barrel out of the warehouse and into a lorry one of the guys had nearby during the confusion surrounding the fire.” Barclay threw in little bits of droll English accent as he talked. “She learned all this later, as she wasn’t born until 1941.”
“Sounds a bit suspicious,” Cray said.
“Maybe so. But it was all so interesting and specific. She said the rum was from Guyana and had been aging in the warehouse for thirty years. Thirty years! It must have been fantastic then. Imagine what it tastes like now!”
“And what do you think of it?” I asked Cap before realizing that he was asleep, his empty glass in his lap. He might’ve been drinking the rarest rum any of us had ever tasted and fell asleep doing it.
Cray looked upon him with pity and held up the bottle, which he’d been cradling while Barclay spoke. “The bottle has no formal label. It’s handwritten. ‘Father’s rum, 1903, Guyana, West India Docks.’ Implying it was made in 1903 and aged in the warehouse until the fire. Louisa’s work, I take it?”
Barclay nodded. “She said he and his friends hid the barrel until they could find bottles for the rum and never told anyone they took it. So there’s a slim chance there might be more out there. He never labeled his for fear he might get caught someday. She took it upon herself to label the last few bottles after he died.”
“And she gave a bottle to you?” Luke asked Barclay in disbelief.
“The last one!” Barclay shrugged. “I think she liked me. She said she was old and alone and didn’t have anyone to leave it to. And I think she liked that I believed her.”
“Provenance is damned difficult to prove,” Cray said. “This probably wouldn’t be worth much at auction just for that reason, though the story is fairly irresistible.”
“Well, I don’t want to sell it,” Barclay said. “I don’t even want to keep it, if it means some fanatic is going to kill me for it. I want to drink it. With all of you.”
I nodded toward the open sliding doors that led into Cap’s room. “Think he’d mind if we borrowed a glass?”
“I’ll look,” said Melody, not waiting for an answer. She came back in a moment with a sleeve of plastic cups. “Even better!”
As she set out the clear cups, a hush fell over us all. We were about to taste history—maybe. It was natural to be skeptical. But like Barclay, I had a feeling Louisa might have been telling him the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it.
Cray did the honors, pouring a small amount of the dark gold liquid in each cup. We passed them around until we each had one. We watched Cray first as he went through his ritual of sniffing and rolling the cup, eyeing how the rum clung to the sides.
He looked up at us. “Someone should make a toast.”
“Not me,” Barclay said.
“I will.” Neil raised up his cup. “To good stories, good rum and great friends.”
I caught his eye and smiled as I raised my cup as well. Then I took a deep whiff of the rum’s wonderful, darkly sweet aroma.
Astra’s nostrils flared, and she nudged the hand that held my cup. “Not for you, girl,” I told her and took a small sip. The rum was complex and smooth at the same time, mellow sweetness tinged with heat and wood and just a hint of smoke—not from the fire, I guessed, but from its aging.
A sigh moved through the group like the wind in the palm trees.
“It’s excellent,” Luke said. “Not that I’m an expert.”
“It is excellent,” Barclay said reverently.
“Yes,” I breathed, prompting a raised eyebrow from Neil.
Melody murmured her approval, and we all looked at Cray.
He was still holding the elixir in his mouth; he swallowed as he felt our collective gaze. And his eyes sparkled. “This is very fine. And very old. And I’d like to believe this is just what Louisa said it was.”
“Like to believe?” Barclay asked. “But you don’t?
“Actually, my dear, I think I do.” Cray took another sip, and his eyes closed in happiness.
We all exchanged a glance. Cray thought it was the real thing!
I sipped even more slowly after that.
The rum might have been a treasure, but it was also an opportunity to experience history, a beautiful moment to share with friends. Soon our chatter picked up as we enjoyed our drink and the evening and one another’s company. Cap even woke up and gladly accepted another small pour in his glass, accompanied by the short version of the story. This time he was alert enough to appreciate it and drank as reverently as we did.
When we’d finished, a few fingers’ worth of rum remained in the bottle.
“You take it, Cray,” Barclay said.
“Oh, I couldn’t,” he said, but he perked up like a kid at Christmas.
“It should go to someone like you. You’ll appreciate it and take care of it.”
“And maybe drink it,” Cray said to our laughs.
“I hope you do. Otherwise, what good is it?” Barclay said.
I nodded. “It’s like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.”
“Agreed, Kayanne Pepper,” Cray said. “I can’t thank all of you enough for a most memorable evening. And Barclay? I owe you one.” The collector stood, cradled the bottle in his arm and moved slowly across the grass into the shadows as Barclay beamed.
“Should he have an armed escort?” I asked.
“There’s no one who knows what he’s carrying except us,” Neil said.
“About that—I’m sorry I took your bottle.” Cap seemed almost sober now. His catnap did wonders. “I had no idea.”
“Maybe it was for the best.” Barclay sighed. “I’m actually really happy. And tired. I’m going to have sweet dreams tonight.” He got up, as did Luke. They returned the borrowed chairs, and we all said goodbye to Cap and started back toward the pool. Melody peeled off to her room, and the boys headed to theirs while Neil and I paused in the shadows to let Astra water a bush.
She did her business, then sniffed the ground and barked once and started tugging on her leash, trying to get under the branches.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, bending over and peering into the leaves without success. “You have a light?” I asked Neil.
Neil pulled out his phone and shone the light under the bush. I had a moment of dread as I looked. What if it was more evidence? Or, heaven forbid, the London dock rum? Or a severed limb covered with mystifying tattoos?
Like I said, rich fantasy life.
But it was nothing more scary than a discarded piece of pizza. I firmly pulled Astra away. “No way, girl. We don’t want a repeat of the car ride down when we go home tomorrow.”
“We could make her ride with Barclay,” Neil said, and I shot him a dirty look as he grinned and we resumed our stroll around the pools.
“Do you wish you could find a bottle of rum like Barclay’s?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure. Gramps got me pretty excited about treasure-hunting when I was a kid with all of his stories. There’s some part of me that still wants to find a gold coin washed up on the beach. And maybe a rare bottle of liquor, something significant.”
I thought of all the violence and shook my head. “Curiosity is great until it becomes an obsession, like it did for Fizz and Arnold.”
“Obsession can get you into trouble. So can money, if the treasure in question is really valuable. I wonder if a particular treasure is linked to what happened to my grandfather. I keep thinking about what Val said about something priceless on the Lord Archibald. I’m going to look into all of the shipwrecks he recovered when we get home, especially that one.”
“Since that’s the one he never talked about?”
“Exactly. I have a hunch.”
“Neil has a hunch,” I joked.
He elbowed me. “You don’t have any room to talk, Sergeant Pepper.”
I rolled my eyes. “I have good hunches and poor judgment.”
He transfixed me with those gray eyes and asked softly, “Am I going to have to hover over you like a guardian angel all the time?”
Be still my heart.
I fluttered my eyelashes at him and smiled. “Would that be so bad?”
Don’t miss Vexed by Vodka, Book 3 in the Bohemia Bartenders Mysteries!
Movies, murder and too much vodka …
Mixologist Pepper Revelle is thrilled the Bohemia Bartenders’ latest gig is in her backyard: a cocktail-themed film festival that draws all the usual suspects to Bohemia Beach. But good suspects are in short supply when a body wearing an antique gold coin necklace washes up on the Florida sand.
Pepper’s colleague and elusive crush Neil fears the worst for his grandfather, a treasure hunter who’s been missing for months. Meanwhile, Pepper’s big-bearded ex-boyfriend, an obnoxious celebrity mixologist with a TV crew in tow, is convinced someone’s trying to kill him, too. To Pepper’s dismay, he begs her for protection.
Stir in a couple of desperate Hollywood stars, a pushy producer, dashing distillers, a frantic festival chairman, a garnish-eating dog, vats of vodka and a double dose of danger, and Pepper’s patience is poised to pop like popcorn. Can the mixologists shake up a solution to multiple mysteries before they’re skewered like the olive in a martini?
Vexed by Vodka is the third book in the Bohemia Bartenders Mysteries, funny whodunits with a dash of romance set in a convivial collective of cocktail lovers, eccentrics and mixologists. These cozy culinary comedies contain a hint of heat, a splash of cursing and shots of laughter, served over hand-carved ice.
Thanks for reading! Want a FREE story set in the Bohemia Bartenders world? In “Baffled by Bitters,” Pepper, Neil and Astra the dog set out to learn the secret behind a discovery they’ve unearthed in the backyard of Pepper’s bar. (Timewise, the story is set after Risky Whiskey and before Wrecked by Rum, but there are no spoilers!) Sign up for my newsletter to get the story, along with fun original content, giveaways, news and cocktail recipes.
I also have a Facebook group where readers can hang out and chat about books and life — please join us in Lucy’s Lounge. And you can always find me at LucyLakestone.com.