Page 26 of Stolen Time

This went on for a few more minutes, until presumably there was no room left in the cab for any more of the jugs. Charles returned to the mine entrance, carefully boarded it back up, and then put the truck in reverse and drove slowly until he reached a wide spot where he could turn around. A few moments later, Seth heard the shifting of gears as his brother turned onto the highway and then drove off.

Going higher. Going up over the mountain.

Even though he knew he was now alone, Seth still waited a bit longer before he dared get to his feet. His mind didn’t want to accept what it had just seen, but he knew he couldn’t deny the obvious truth.

Charles was working with bootleggers, and surely Lionel Allenby, the mine superintendent, must be in on the scheme as well. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have worked so quickly to get the exploratory shaft sealed up, guessing that it would make an excellent drop spot for their moonshine.

And since Charles had continued upward along the highway, that meant he must be taking the contraband to Prescott. From what Seth had heard, the town’s Whiskey Row had become a bit more subdued after the passing of Prohibition, but it hadn’t shut down entirely, and that meant the saloons there needed to get their alcohol from somewhere.

Who was making the stuff? Someone in Jerome, or possibly farther down the hill in Cottonwood or Clarkdale?

Not that Seth supposed it really mattered. From the beginning, he’d thought Prohibition was a foolish idea — a sentiment shared by most people in the McAllister clan — since all it had done was create its own forms of crime, but he’d never thought he had much of a horse in that race. After all, he’d come of age several years after the law was passed and therefore hadn’t missed out on much, hadn’t had anything really taken away from him.

But if Charles was involved in bootlegging, then Seth was very much involved. So was their family…the entire clan.

He wanted to curse his brother’s foolishness, even if he knew doing so would only be a waste of breath.

Why would Charles have done something so stupid?

Surely it couldn’t all be about the money. Every person in their clan who was eighteen or older received a monthly stipend intended to bolster whatever they earned from theirwork. It wasn’t a huge amount, just enough to cushion their circumstances, but still, between Charles’s salary from the family business and his monthly allotment, he was doing quite well for himself. There shouldn’t have been any need for him to risk his personal safety…and, by extension, the safety of the clan…by getting involved with bootleggers.

Well, since Seth had already been in the mine shaft they were using as their hidey hole, it wouldn’t be too difficult to go inside and see whether his brother had taken the entire stash, or whether he’d left some behind.

He blinked himself into the tunnel, which was pitch black.

Damn it. He probably should have thought of that.

But his foot clinked against something metallic, and when he reached down, his fingers closed around the handle of a lantern. Just a quick thought to set the kerosene inside alight — he assumed his brother must have done the same thing, using the same witch talents they’d all been born with — and then he was better able to get a look at his surroundings.

A few feet away stood some boulders that he knew hadn’t been there the day before, and hidden behind them were several large barrels that he guessed must be full of whiskey. If anyone removed the boards from the entrance and took only a quick glance inside, they wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Well, as long as they didn’t know those boulders hadn’t been there a few days ago.

When he went over and thumped the barrels, one of them sounded hollow, telling him whoever had filled the jugs had emptied it all the way. Although he had no idea how such an operation even worked, he had to believe that the bootleggers would come to retrieve the barrel and fill it up again, return to hide it back here at an opportune time, and the cycle would start all over again.

How much were they paying Charles to smuggle the liquor into Prescott?

Probably a good bit, considering the risk he was taking. True, he was being careful, hiding the jugs in the truck’s cab rather than putting them in the bed where anyone could see them, but still, all it would take was being stopped by the sheriff for going a little too fast and the game would be over.

Or…would Charles even have to worry about the sheriff? Seth wasn’t personally acquainted with the man or the deputies in his department, but with a lot of money being thrown around, he had to guess it might not have been too difficult to pay the local authorities enough to look the other way.

What a mess. He returned the lantern to the place where he’d found it, magically snuffed it out, and then blinked himself back outside. All was quiet, which made sense. The bootleggers would do everything in their power to keep their activities hidden, and he guessed that even if they intended to come here tonight to remove the empty barrel, they’d wait until the hour was much later than eight-thirty.

Since he knew he was alone — and he knew the moonlight would be sufficient to show him what he wanted to find — he went over to the boarded-up entrance and inspected it carefully. As he’d thought, only a few nails actually held the boards in place, while the others were just for show. It would be easy enough to pull out the nails doing the actual work, remove the boards, and then close everything back up once you were done, just as he’d seen his brother do a few minutes earlier.

He had some answers…but many more questions remained.

When Seth returned to his bungalow, it was with a growing rage roiling in his belly.

How could Charles do something like this to the clan? The one rule they all lived by…the one that had been pounded into their heads from the day they were old enough to understand that the McAllisters weren’t like most people…was that they needed to live modestly and quietly, to do nothing that would attract attention to their family. Even if the authorities had been paid off to look the other way, that didn’t mean his brother still hadn’t taken an enormous risk. Seth had read enough in the papers about bloody gun battles by bootleggers over their territories in Phoenix and Los Angeles to know getting involved in that sort of operation meant doing business with all sorts of unsavory individuals. Everything in Jerome had been quiet so far — well, except for the usual sort of drunken brawls that always seemed to take place in mining towns, even during Prohibition — but there was no guarantee the current state of affairs would continue indefinitely.

The real problem was that, although he now had possession of some extremely unwelcome information, he had no clear idea what to do with it. His immediate thought had been to go to his parents and let them know what he’d seen, but he’d dismissed that notion at once. His father’s temper had always run very high, and he tended to act before he thought, never a good combination in a warlock. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have seen fit to use his magic to suspend the thief Oswald Peale upside down in the center of the mercantile until the sheriff arrived, thus making an utter spectacle that had been very difficult to explain away. Although most people agreed there should be zero tolerance for those who tried to take money right out of the cash register, they also thought Henry McAllister could have come up with a less spectacular way to restrain the thief.

But then, there were also the elders. If Seth couldn’t speak with his parents, then it made sense to go to the clan elders, let them know what he’d seen, and have them decide on the best course of action. Of course, Seth had seen on more than one occasion that they didn’t like to meddle any more than they absolutely had to, and he worried they might say that this was a family matter and that Charles’s parents should be the ones to discipline him.

Never mind that he was a grown man of twenty-five, and therefore shouldn’t be under his parents’ thumb at all.

Back and forth Seth went, and then finally decided he would speak with his brother first. He had no idea whether Charles would listen to reason, but it just seemed smarter to do what he could on his own before he brought his parents into this mess…or worse, had to go to the elders for help.