Radclyffe - Homestead

She’d survived, although the distant echo of pain and disillusionment still rang in the silence of a sleepless night, and she’d learned valuable lessons—that people were not always who or what they seemed, and the big wide world was no different than the small community in which she’d been raised, except maybe, on the whole, a little less honest.

The sound of a water bucket being kicked over caught her attention, and sighing, she strode into the barn. She walked down the double row of stalls, checking that the cows were safely bedded down. She left them chewing the feed her foreman, Tomas, had forked out for them and, satisfied that all was in order, turned the classical music on low and the lights out. The strains of Bach followed her across the fields for the quarter-mile hike back to the house. Maybe the soothing music didn’t calm the cows and help them make more milk the way some scientific studies suggested, but they seemed to like it, and so did she.

Once inside, she put the kettle on the stove for tea and sat down at the long, scarred oak table and powered up her laptop. For once, the satellite Internet connection was strong. She searched for gas fracturing in New York and scanned a dozen articles. Finally she found a name—NorthAm Fuels. A few more searches and she pulled up the corporate home page. She got up, made tea, and sat back down with the remains of the sandwich she’d picked up at the café in the village earlier. She nibbled and sipped and clicked through pages.

Suddenly a name jumped out at her, and she set her mug down with a thud that vibrated through the tabletop. Vice President of Operations, NorthAm Fuels: R. Clayton Sutter.

Tess stared at the name, a knot of dread sitting heavy beneath her breast. Clay. She’d wondered—tried not to—where she was, who she had become. She laughed to herself, the pain as bright and fresh as it had been a lifetime ago, before she ruthlessly quelled the memories. What did it matter who Clay had become, she had never even known who Clay was.

She forced herself to keep scanning through the public pages, recognizing most of the information for the slick marketing ploy it was. But she found what she needed on a multicolored map of the US, highlighting various deep-underground gas and oil deposits. Red stars marked drilling sites. NorthAm’s New York operation was about to get under way, and her farm was right in the middle of it all.

Rising swiftly, she sorted through the cabinets in the mudroom for the regional telephone book. She wasn’t sure exactly what she would say after all these years even if she found her, but she needed advice, and she didn’t want to confide in anyone local. In this tight-knit community, nothing was ever a secret, and for this, she needed privacy.

Clay didn’t know how nearly fifteen years could vanish without leaving a trace of something—anything—that truly mattered, as if those years and all she’d accomplished amounted to nothing, but as the jet circled the Albany airport, she felt like she was eighteen again, on her way to her last summer of freedom before starting down the path her father had designed for her. She hadn’t flown to upstate New York that summer, though. She’d gotten a new Land Rover Defender soft top for graduation and insisted on driving up from the Hamptons with her motorcycle in a trailer on the back. She’d also had a bodyguard in the front seat next to her, the one point her father had not been willing to concede. She could spend the summer at the family vacation home on Lake George, but she wasn’t going to go unprotected. He seemed to think kidnappers lurked around every corner, and she knew she could only push him so far. Besides, she’d figured she could lose Manny at will, and she’d been right. Her father hadn’t wanted her to have a female guard after she’d had a not-so-private tryst with one of his aides the night of her high school graduation, and that had been a strategic error of the kind her father rarely made. Manny couldn’t follow her into the bathroom—and bathrooms always had windows. After the first few times she’d left Manny stranded, he’d given up and decided to enjoy the vacation. And so had she.

Those few weeks had been a beautiful lie, a summer idyll when she’d let herself believe she could be anyone she’d wanted.

Clay squinted against the slanting rays of the sun sifting through the clouds and looked north out the window as the jet banked, as if she might see the sprawling thirty-six-mile lake nestled in the heart of the Adirondacks, but she couldn’t pierce the distance any more than she could rewrite the past. She hadn’t been back to the lake since that summer, but she hadn’t forgotten the place, or the people. Sometimes when she thought of it, and she tried hard to keep busy enough not to look back, she thought perhaps that had been the last honest time in her life—even though she’d spun a web of deception with everyone that mattered. In her heart, at least, she had been honest.

The intercom hissed and the voice of Ron Arnold, the pilot, filled the cabin. “We’ll be on the ground in just a few minutes, Ms. Sutter. Local time is three twenty. Sunny and eighty-nine degrees.”

Clay pressed the intercom button on her seat arm, said, “Thank you,” and buckled her seat belt.

Across the aisle from her, Ella Sorenson, a tall, leggy blonde who might have been a postcard model of the voluptuous Swede, buckled hers and said, “A car is waiting. We’ll be ready to leave as soon as the luggage is off-loaded.”

A former Secret Service agent, Ella was a vast improvement over Manny in terms of security, although much harder to ditch, and she was also the best assistant Clay had ever had. Ella should have been running a division at Sutter Industries, and Clay had told her father that a dozen times in the last five years, but Ella chose to stay on as Clay’s right hand. Ella was the closest thing she had to a friend, other than Millie. They’d never slept together. Ella had a strict rule about not sleeping with colleagues, and Clay had never pushed. Ella was just about the perfect assistant and bodyguard, other than her annoying habit of insisting that Clay keep her phone on at all times. GPS tracking. At least it didn’t have video.

“I’ll need field clothes,” Clay said. “Can you have—”

“Doris is sending up another suitcase and your gear today. Should arrive in the morning.”

“Your efficiency is scary.”

Ella smiled. “I should think by now you’d be immune to my greatness.”

“Nope. Still impressed.”

Ella laughed softly and Clay turned to the view out the window. The rolling hills of eastern New York, an artist’s palette of green splashed across a canvas of brilliant blue sky and rich dark fields, rose to the distant mountains of Vermont. From the air, not much appeared to have changed. Albany crouched along the Hudson across the river from Rensselaer and Troy, its capital complex towering over older neighborhoods of brownstones. Tracts of urban sprawl—developments divided into one- to two-acre lots with McMansions squatting beside unnaturally blue swimming pools and serpentine drives—ringed the city. A few miles farther out, the countryside emerged relatively unscathed. Clusters of small villages that hadn’t changed much in two hundred fifty years lay scattered amidst acres of farmland.

Gazing over some of the richest soil in the Northeast with her engineer’s second sight, Clay imagined the layers of shale and compressed rock deep beneath the surface, containing the pockets of natural gas that waited to be liberated by her drills. Nearly five hundred trillion cubic feet of natural fuel waiting to be harvested—enough to meet the nation’s gas needs for three thousand years at the current rate. Fuel, an essential commodity for an industrialized nation, was as powerful as military might in redistributing the international balance of power. That wasn’t a fact that carried much weight with the people who were opposed to the concept of fracking, or who just wanted to keep industrialization from infringing on the rural landscape, but Clay didn’t plan on making some vague political arguments as to why the locals should welcome NorthAm and her drills. Creating independence from foreign fuel sources would bolster not only the national economy but the local one as well. The influx of money and new jobs was something most people could get behind.