Carla Neggers - Stonebrook Cottage

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.

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