Stonebrook Cottage (9 page)

She still had to deal with the letter from Allyson. Did she believe Allyson had written it? Did it even matter at this point? It demonstrated what Henry and Lillian believed was at stake.

And if they didn't release her from attorney-client privilege, there wasn't much she could tell Sam, anyway.

"All right." Kara tried to sound decisive, although her plan was still sketchy, in its early stages—and crazy, every bit of it. "You're going to have to trust me and let me make some decisions. I'll get you to Stonebrook Cottage and your mother, okay? I'll do what she says in her letter."

They nodded, Henry brushing at the tears on his thin cheeks. Lillian was solemn, very pale.

Kara hugged them both, squeezing hard, smelling the rancidness of their fear. The hell with everything. She had to get them safely to Stonebrook Cottage and their mother and stay one step ahead of anyone who might be after them—no matter the reason, good, bad, real or imagined.

She couldn't believe she was cutting out on Sam Temple, Texas Ranger.

She smiled suddenly, and she noticed how reassured her godchildren looked now that she was taking charge—and they were getting their way. Well, what else could she do?

"Let me throw a few things together," she told them. "Then we're out of here."

Five

P
ete Jericho regarded the stripped logs piled on the edge of the gravel pit with satisfaction. He'd always liked work he could see getting done. Finish one job, move on to the next. Hard, physical work suited him. He squinted up at the hazy August sky, the humidity on the rise, seeping in from the south. He had a lot of work to get done before the first killing frost. Maybe keeping himself busy would put in check his anger and frustration—his sense of loss since Allyson had stepped up to the governorship.

Stupid to fall in love with her in the first place. He'd known it years ago, when he'd see her and Lawrence up at the Stockwell place, around town. She was a few years older than Pete, but that never mattered to him. After Lawrence died, Allyson was so overwhelmed and quiet, and Pete realized what he felt wasn't just an infatuation. He was truly in love with her.

But Madeleine Stockwell had recognized it before Allyson did—maybe even before he did—and that was his undoing.

He started back to his truck, knowing there was no point in trying to blame Madeleine for his current predicament. Even without the prison record, he suspected Allyson would want to keep their relationship secret. He was the blue-collar guy down the road. He lived on the family homestead and worked with his father chopping wood. The Jericho family had been working their land for seven generations. They used to dairy farm, but now they scraped together a living cutting wood, growing Christmas trees, leasing hay fields to the few dairy farmers left in the area, raising chickens and sheep. Bea Jericho, Pete's mother, handled the chickens and sheep. She was talking about getting some goats and making her own goat cheese, something Pete's father wasn't too keen on.

But these days they earned the bulk of their money managing other people's property, the trophy country houses rich part-time residents built on ten-acre mini-estates carved out of land once owned by people like Charlie and Bea Jericho.

Pete knew his parents didn't know about him and Allyson. Otherwise they'd have said something. Just as well, because it looked as if he'd been dumped; she didn't even plan to call and tell him. He was supposed to figure it out. An affair with Allyson Lourdes Stock-well, lieutenant governor, was difficult enough. Now that she was governor, it was impossible.

Six months in prison eight years ago for a stupid barroom brawl would end up costing him the woman he loved.

He hadn't been involved with Allyson then. Madeleine Stockwell had done her job and made sure he knew her son's widow deserved better than a Jericho. She nipped any romantic intentions on his part in the bud. He remembered that bright, cold afternoon when Madeleine stood out on the patio of the only home she'd known since marrying Edward Stockwell and told Pete he had no ambition, no real prospects. "You'll make a living. You're a Jericho. That's what you do. But it's all that you do."

She knew he had a "crush" on Allyson, a choice of words designed to further diminish him. And if he loved her, he would understand it was in her best interests that he never act on his feelings.

Furious, humiliated, he hadn't gone home and hit the heavy bag or chopped wood. Instead, he'd headed to O'Reilly's Pub in town and intervened when an idiot he'd known from high school harassed a woman. Words were exchanged. Fists flew. A couple of beer bottles. He ended up with torn knuckles and a broken nose, the idiot a cut on his jaw that required five stitches. Pete figured the score was even. O'Reilly went along. He wasn't looking to see an account of a brawl in his pub in the local papers, and he hated cops and lawyers.

Walter Harrison thought otherwise. He was an off-duty cop who happened to witness the brawl. He made a wimpish attempt to break it up, then pushed to have Pete arrested on felony assault charges.

Stories changed. The woman, who was from out of town, said she wasn't really being harassed and begged Pete not to get involved. Not true. The former classmate said Pete threw the first punch and smashed the first beer bottle and was generally out of control. Walter corroborated their versions. O'Reilly stayed out of it. Pete was convinced, then and now, and so was his father, that Madeleine Stockwell had her hand in it. A few greased palms, a little intimidation. A criminal record would make any romantic relationship between him and her daughter-in-law that much more unlikely.

He knew he was screwed, but Mike Parisi, a man who understood barroom brawls and the ways of Madeleine Stockwell, recommended Kara Galway, said she was a hell of a lawyer. Big Mike spent a lot of time in Bluefield even after Lawrence's death, wooing Allyson into state politics; he'd always gotten along with the Jerichos.

Recommending Kara hadn't worked out, at least in Pete's estimation. He'd expected her to find a way to bring out the truth. Instead, she suggested he take a plea bargain when it was offered. The odds were against him if he went to trial, she explained. If he was convicted of felonious assault, he could count on spending three years in a nasty state prison. Plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and he was in and out of the local jail in six months.

Pete took the deal. He didn't like it, but he took it. He supposed it was unfair of him to blame Kara, but he knew he'd lost any hope of having Allyson in his life the minute he heard the jailhouse doors shut behind him. It was as if Madeleine Stockwell had planned it that way.

Then last fall, he ran into Allyson when he was delivering wood up to the barn she and Lawrence had converted. She was alone, the kids off for the weekend with friends, and it was like two old friends suddenly seeing each other for the first time, that old cliché. Since then, they met each other when they could, content to watch television together when she was at the barn alone on weekends. Pete would sneak through the woods so Madeleine and Hatch wouldn't find out. That was no longer possible now with round-the-clock security.

And a secret affair wasn't what he wanted. It couldn't last. He didn't want it to. He wanted to tell everyone—the whole world—that he was in love with Allyson Lourdes Stockwell. But it was different for her with her high-profile life, her responsibilities, the commitments she'd made.

Madeleine was right, after all. He and Allyson just weren't meant to be. He was a goddamn jailbird. It stuck to him like rot.

He hadn't heard from Allyson since Big Mike drowned. Now that she was governor, she was probably wishing she'd never gotten involved with him in the first place. She tried to pretend she wasn't ambitious, but she was—he liked that about her. She sometimes ranked on her abilities, her self-doubt always a surprise to him, because he believed in her to his core.

Charlie Jericho drove up on his old tractor, and Pete waved at his father, a bandy-legged man in his early sixties. He and Madeleine Stockwell had been feuding for as long as Pete could remember. Lately she was mad at him about the gravel pit, accusing him of having dug it on the border of Jericho-Stockwell property just to goad her. Charlie said he wouldn't go to such trouble, it just happened to be where the gravel was located. The gravel pit would play out in three years and the land would be restored. She'd just have to live with it.

Charlie climbed off the tractor, wearing his habitual navy work pants and pocket T-shirt. "Madeleine wants us to deliver her cordwood early this year. Says to make sure it's super-dry. Like we've ever given her green wood. The old bat." He coughed, pulling out a pack of cigarettes as unconsciously as someone else might grab a handkerchief. "We should charge her double for being such a pain in the ass. Call it combat pay."

Pete laughed. "Why not? She keeps saying she gets screwed by the locals. It'd give her something real to bitch about."

His father tapped out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth, fished out his lighter. He had a bad, wet cough, but he had no intention of quitting. He liked to smoke, he'd say, and you have to die of something. When Big Mike drowned, Charlie Jericho had said, "See, would it have made a damn bit of difference if he'd had a two-pack-a-day habit?"

The cordwood was still drying in the August sun. They'd cut the trees over the winter, trimmed them in early spring, before the leaves sprouted, then dragged the logs out here with a tractor and cut them into eight-foot lengths, setting them up on wooden platforms, off the wet ground, to dry. When the weather cooled off after Labor Day, they'd cut them into cordwood, mostly sixteen-inch lengths. It used to be they could sell four-foot lengths and people would cut them down themselves, but that wasn't the case anymore. Some people even had Pete stack it for them. Hauling it to the wood box was enough of a chore, he guessed.

"Madeleine pays on time, I'll say that for her." Charlie puffed on his cigarette and grinned. "And her checks never bounce. Listen, I was out talking to the gravel guys this morning and noticed somebody's been up on the ridge above the pit. Hunters, kids. Looks like they've built some kind of platform in an oak. If it's kids, it's dangerous up there. One wrong slip, and they're in the pit. That sand and rock is unstable."

"I'll check it out and dismantle whatever's there," Pete said.

"Good. I don't want anyone getting hurt."

Pete nodded. "It's a long way to get help."

"A short way to the nearest lawyer. People get hurt, they start thinking lawsuits."

"Pop," Pete admonished.

Charlie waved a hand and climbed back on his tractor, his cigarette hanging from his lower lip. He could have walked out here, Pete thought. The exercise would have done his father good, but Charlie Jericho's attitude toward exercise was similar to his attitude toward quitting smoking—not for him.

After he finally puttered off on his tractor, Pete headed across the barren landscape of the gravel pit. No one was working it today. They'd finish taking out the last load of sand and rock this fall, then restore the land in the spring. Right now it looked awful, a gaping hole dug out of the hillside, a desolate stretch of stripped ground, with huge piles of sand and rock, the dump truck, backhoe, rock-crusher and sifter all idle today. Pete could picture what it would look like in a few years, when nature had reclaimed the land.

He made his way into the light, untouched woods on the edge of the pit and walked up the hill, the steep, unstable descent into the gravel pit to his right. He pushed through ferns and ducked under the low branches of pine and hemlock, staying in the shade of small maple and oaks. This was the northernmost corner of Jericho land. Their house was back in the other direction, past the gravel pit, through the fields to the main road. The endless acres of Stockwell land stretched out over the rolling hills to the north.

Straight down the hill, to the south and west, the mini-estates started. Charlie had fits every time he saw evidence that the estate owners had been through the backwoods with their horses. He kept talking about putting up No Trespassing signs, a bother and an expense he'd never considered before and probably wouldn't at all if the worst offenders hadn't plastered their own property with them. "What's mine is theirs, and what's theirs is theirs," Charlie would grumble.

Pete came to an old oak, the tallest tree on top of the hill, so close to the near-vertical edge of the gravel pit, some of its massive roots were exposed to the sand and erosion. A crude ladder of skinny, split cordwood led up the trunk on the safer side, above a cushion of fallen leaves. Saplings of maple, beech and ash grew densely on the south side of the hill, which led down to the mini-estate Mike Parisi had rented for the summer.

High in the tree, Pete spotted a platform tree house, a half-finished mishmash of old boards.

Kids. Had to be.

He climbed up the crude ladder, which barely held his weight, and at the top, grabbed hold of a branch above his head and swung onto the platform. It was sturdier than he'd expected, built across two branches above a V in the tree, maybe four feet by four. Someone had left behind a rusted hammer, a few nails, a water bottle and an old pair of binoculars.