Stonebrook Cottage. Carla Neggers
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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 Stockwell, 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