Whiskey Hunting Part 2

*If you missed the first half of this tale, Part 1 of my Whiskey Hunting essay is at the end of my last blog post. Here's the finish in Whiskey Hunting Part 2. 

I was intrigued that Adam’s friends believed more whiskey was stashed somewhere in our home. They said check the gun safe.

It took a minute to open that beast in our storage room, but I was smugly satisfied to find only guns, ammo, paperwork – exactly what I expected.

No whiskey. After all, I told Adam to quit buying it.

Chris pointed to the top of the safe. I looked up to see a line of identical boxes conveniently turned backwards so the whiskey bottle on the front didn't show. Blanton's. He had a few bottles upstairs. Must have saved the boxes.

Chris gave a wry smile at this stupid statement.

I poked a box with my finger sure it would move easily because it was empty. It didn’t. I poked the next box and the next. Chris laughed. I could only shake my head as I discovered the rows of boxes went two deep, no three deep.

Well, that was it. We found the secret stash. A small pile of Blanton's. Of course, Adam was collecting bottles to spell "BLANTON'S" with the famous horse-running corks like everyone else.

Chris disagreed. We nosed around the storage room, but it was all luggage, Christmas décor, old hockey gear.

Well, besides that chip box. That seemed out of place. We don’t store large boxes of single-serve bags of chips down here. That’s a pantry item for school lunches.

I cracked open the box and saw bottles. It looked like stuff from our old house. A whiskey Adam won in a golf tournament, some wine my cousin made. But soon each bottle I pulled out was a brand-new bottle of really good whiskey.

Noticing this box was stacked on top of another, I opened the second box to find brand-new bottles of really, really good whiskey.

Oh Adam.