Over all these years, every quarter the detailed financial statements had arrived, no matter where they happened to be in the world. But since only the papers and never the man showed up, LuAnn’s anxiety finally had passed. The letter accompanying all the financial packets was from an investment company with a Swiss address. She had no idea of Jackson’s ties to this firm, nor did she care to explore that area further. She had seen enough of him to be respectful of his volatility; and more disturbingly, of the extreme consequences which he was capable of causing. She also remembered how he had been prepared to kill her if she had rejected his offer. There was something not quite natural about him. The powers he seemed to possess could hardly be of this world.
She stopped at a large oak. From one of its branches a long knotted rope dangled. LuAnn gripped the rope and lifted herself off the saddle, while Joy, already quite familiar with this ritual, waited patiently. Her arms moving like wonderfully calibrated pistons, LuAnn swiftly climbed to the other end of the rope, which was tied around a thick branch almost thirty feet off the ground, and then made her way back down. She repeated the process twice more. She had a fully equipped gymnasium in her home where she worked out diligently. It wasn’t vanity; she had little interest in how it made her look. She was naturally strong, and that physical strength had carried her through many a crisis. It was one of the few constant things in her life and she was loath to let it disappear.
Growing up in Georgia, she had climbed many trees, run through miles of countryside, and jumped many ravines. She had just been having fun; the concept of exercise hadn’t come into the equation. And so, in addition to pumping the iron, she had built a more natural exercise course across her extensive grounds. She pulled herself up the rope one more time, the muscle cords in her arms and back tight as rebar.
Breathing hard, she settled lightly back into the saddle and made her way back to the horse barn, her heart lightened and her spirits raised by the invigorating ride through the countryside and the strenuous rope climb.
In the large storage building next to the horse barn, one of the groundspeople, a beefy man in his early thirties, had just started splitting logs with a sledgehammer and wedge. LuAnn glanced at him through the open doorway as she rode by. She quickly unsaddled Joy and returned the horse to its stall. She walked over to the doorway of the outbuilding. The man briefly nodded to her and then continued his work. He knew she lived in the mansion. Other than that, he knew nothing about her. She watched the man for a minute and then took off her coat, lifted a second sledgehammer off the wall, squeezed a spare wedge between her fingers, testing its weight, set a log up on the block, tapped the wedge into its rough surface, stepped back, and swung cleanly. The wedge bit deep, but didn’t cleave the log in two. She hit it again, dead center, and then again. The log broke clean. The man glanced at her in surprise, then shrugged and kept splitting. They both pounded away, barely ten feet from each other. The man could split a log with one swing of the hammer, while it continued to take LuAnn two and sometimes three blows. He smiled over at her, the sweat showing on his brow. She kept pounding away, though, her arms and shoulders working in precise unity, and within five minutes she was cracking a log with one blow, and before he knew it she was doing it faster than he.
The man picked up his pace, the sweat falling faster across his brow, his grin gone as his breaths became more painful. After twenty minutes, he was taking two and three strikes to crack a log as his big arms and shoulders started to tire rapidly, his chest heaving and his legs rubbery. He watched in growing amazement as LuAnn continued, her pace steady, the strength of her blows against the wood totally undiminished. In fact, she seemed to be hitting the wedge harder and harder. The sound of metal on metal rang out louder and louder. Finally, the man dropped the sledgehammer and leaned back against the wall, his gut heaving, his arms dead, his shirt drenched in perspiration despite the chilly weather. LuAnn finished her pile of logs and, barely missing a stroke, finished off his stack as well. Her work complete, she wiped her forehead and replaced the sledgehammer on the wall hook before glancing over at the puffing man as she shook out her arms.