A QUESTION OF CONSEQUENCE
Matthew Sterling is a man on the way up. As assistant city manager in the Wasatch Front community of Snowy Ridge, Utah, the 21st century looks promising for this recent Brigham Young University law school graduate. But a strange twist in the local government elections is going to impact Matt’s life profoundly—and it promises to turn affairs in Snowy Ridge upside-down.
Julia Wells is the new mayor of this predominantly Latter-day Saint community. As she assumes her mayoral duties, she realizes things there are not as they seem. Julia—a Lutheran—suspects corruption in City Hall.
Matt soon finds himself caught in the middle of the ensuing investigation. Initially, he has a naïve faith that everyone at City Hall wants to get the facts out. But he soon learns that those in power will become vicious when they feel threatened, and he is faced with a critical choice. Should he look the other way to protect himself and his job? Or should he risk losing his reputation and his career to make sure the truth is revealed? And will the woman in his life trust him, or will she believe the supposedly honorable people who have set their sights on destroying his credibility?
As Matt’s own life begins to unravel, he is struck by the similarity of his experiences to those of his ancestor, a Revolutionary War hero. After discovering Major Andrew McBride’s journal, Matt is drawn into the life of this true patriot who, despite his acts of courage, was terribly misjudged by his contemporaries. The stories of Matt and Andrew are deftly woven together to an astonishing climax.
Chapter One
Hyde Park, New York
October 2004
Whipped by a brisk northerly wind rushing down the river gorge, white caps danced on the surface of the Hudson River, lifting a fine spray and misting the morning air on both banks of the great waterway. From where he stood on an east shore promontory, roughly a hundred miles upriver from New York City, Matthew Sterling could just make out the gray cliffs that formed the western edge of the river gorge, nearly a half-mile across the dark, roiling water.
Despite three centuries of increasing human habitation, thick forests still covered the bluffs above both sides of the river. A dense thicket of evergreen and leafless hardwood trees on the western shore was just barely visible in the thin, early morning light.
The previous evening, while standing in the same spot, Matt had listened to the singing of the Benedictine monks, carried on a gentle, westerly wind. The rich, male voices came drifting across the river from within the venerable stone walls of the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old-monastery atop the speckled granite cliffs. Their traditional Baroque music, so unlike the melodic hymns of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir yet equally soothing, calmed his melancholy and he found himself wondering if Grandmother Sterling, in her long, lonely years as a widow, had enjoyed the same pleasurable experience.
This morning, while waiting for his taxi in front of the open space left by the demolished house, he had walked across River Road for one final view of the magnificent river, knowing, somehow, it would be unlikely he would ever return. His luggage, consisting solely of a small suit bag, evidence of his rapid departure from Salt Lake City, stood mutely beside the colonial-era post box, the only remnant of the once proud estate.
He’d asked the hotel shuttle driver to take him to River Road, rather than to the Dutchess County Airport. At first reluctant, she relented when Matt produced a twenty-dollar bill. When she reached the address, she pulled into the driveway and stopped.
“I can’t wait, ya know,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Matt replied, exiting the vehicle. “Can you call a taxi for me?”
She nodded, picking up her radio mike. He set his suit bag on the ground and glanced at his watch. “Tell them about nine.”
The woman driver nodded again, shrugging her shoulders. She called for a taxi, backed the hotel van out of the drive, and disappeared in the mist.
At twenty-eight, standing just over six feet with black hair, dark blue eyes, and a quick smile, Matthew Andrew Sterling was on an errand not of his choosing. His trip to New York, to settle the estate and to witness the demolition of his widowed grandmother’s two-hundred and fifteen-year-old family home had unleashed a flood of nostalgia for the young lawyer. He found the prospect of watching the demolition of a favorite childhood retreat emotionally daunting, but under the probate induced supplication of his beloved grandmother, he had summoned the strength to carry out her final request to her only grandson.
Born in New York City, he had come here often as a boy, traveling from Staten Island with his parents to visit his grandmother, Elizabeth Winchester Sterling. The deep woods surrounding her home had been for him a foreboding yet magical playground. Rather than sit with the adults and listen to their grown-up talk, he preferred to roam the acres of thickly wooded hills surrounding the estate. He was fascinated by the stories told by his older cousins of soldiers, battles, ghosts, and long-forgotten heroes who had tramped these same grounds, and he developed an awe for the land and the river and the history they had witnessed. That the property was, and had been for most of the previous century, bordered by the estates of the Vanderbilt’s and Roosevelt’s only added to its mystique.
During his youthful, woodland romps with his cousins, he had envisioned the landscape as it had once been: absent the commuter railway carved into the rock between the river and the large, imposing homes; absent the power lines that ran the length of the road; absent the rising condos and commercial developments that were swallowing up the wilderness of his imagination. With the fantasy that only a young boy can muster, he had conjured up a frontier landscape providing concealment for the ghostly Redcoats as they marched through the woods, their bayonets flashing. In his mind he’d watched Jack Tars as they landed from small, black boats, set afloat from the British Man-O-War he mentally positioned in the river. He could see the gun ports drop open as the cannon prepared to enforce the demands of a distant and ever reproachful king—a king increasingly disdainful of the interest of his far-flung, mostly loyal subjects.
In his youthful flights of fantasy and imagination, it had never entered Matt Sterling’s mind that there might lay in these romantic settings a true tale of intrigue—a tale more complex and compelling than even the fertile mind of a young boy could create. He could not have known that deep within the foundation timbers of Riveroaks lay concealed a profound mystery involving one of his own revered ancestors.
Riveroaks! It was the name his sixth-great-grandfather, Andrew Sterling, had given to his estate—a home to which, in 1790, Sterling had taken his wife, the beautiful and socially prominent Laura Faye Delacorte of the Westchester County Delacorte's, and their young son, Josiah, born the summer after the American victory at Yorktown had ended the war.
The imposing home had captured Matt’s imagination when, on his very first visit, at age eight or nine, his grandfather, Jonathan Sterling, had taken him into the basement and pointed out the enormous wooden beams that supported the house. Burned deeply into the center timber, a massive oak beam, was the inscription, “Riveroaks, 1790.” Grandfather Sterling had explained to the boy that at the time Andrew Sterling built the home, the United States had been a free nation for only nine years, and its first president, George Washington, had been in office less than a year.
Now, with twenty-first-century property values escalating astronomically, these historic estates had become the targets of developers, eager to gain control of the wooded, scenic landscapes overlooking the Hudson. So long as Matt’s ninety-six-year-old Grandmother Sterling was alive, Riveroaks had not been for sale. But with her death, all that changed. Matt was named as executor in Grandmother Sterling’s will, charged with settling her affairs, including overseeing the demolition of the ancient house.
Angered by the necessity of witnessing the destruction of the venerable old home, Matt had carefully watched for three days as workers dismantled the structure, floor by floor. Many of the neighbors had dropped by, seeking remnants of the historic home for their bric-a-brac collections. Nearly two hundred rose bushes, dormant in the winter frost, had been uprooted and transferred to the garden of a nearby hospital where Elizabeth Sterling had served on the board of directors. When the workers reached the first floor and basement the previous afternoon, Matt had instructed them to cut a four-foot section out of the central support beam—the section that included the carved inscription. A massive beam it was too, a beam whose internal rings would have confirmed a hundred and sixty-three year life before it had fallen to the woodsman’s axe in 1789.
After sawing through the great timber and lowering it to the dirt floor of the basement, they discovered a hollowed-out section in what had been the top of the beam—a hand-hewn niche approximately eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and eight inches deep. Surprised by the discovery, the workers stopped momentarily and Matt stepped forward. He reached into the crevice and lifted out a leather bundle, loosely bound with strands of rotting twine. Refraining from unwrapping the parcel in the presence of the workers, he placed the bundle in the trunk of his car and continued to observe as the remaining foundation timbers were dismantled.
That evening, in his room on the ninth floor of the Sheraton Poughkeepsie, Matt had gingerly opened the decomposing leather pouch. Camphor flakes fell onto a stack of yellowed, dog-eared pages, the top one of which was a brief, quill-penned letter. The letter had immediately intrigued him. Noting its date, the genealogist in Matt quickly realized that before surrendering to the inevitable condominium complex, complete with sailboats and four-man sculls at the new marina, the ghostly inhabitants of Riveroaks had found a way to preserve the secret of why, as a consequence of his role in helping to found a nation, Matt’s ancient ancestor had felt compelled to cloak his past in secrecy and change his identity.
In the comfort of his hotel room, Matt read the letter several times, savoring its content and style. Then, with gentle fingers, he lifted from the bundle a twine-bound journal of some length and what appeared to be a manuscript in the same handwriting, entitled A Light Reign.
Through the long night, the handwritten pages had fired his imagination, filling his mind with scenes of intrigue, treachery, family honor, courage, sacrifice, and, to his surprise, public shame. Only when gradually encroaching light began to filter through the eastern window of his hotel room did he set aside his reading to get ready to return to the life from which he had so recently and reluctantly departed for this unwanted family responsibility.
This morning, as he stood on the bank of the Hudson, thinking, remembering, waiting patiently to depart, Matt turned his collar up against the rising breeze and the drifting mist. In silent wonder he contemplated the startling discovery of the previous afternoon. As if to ensure its reality, he opened the slender, leather binder he always carried, to look again at a plastic document holder, a genealogist’s foresight, into which he had placed the brittle parchment. Its contents were visibly weathered with age, yet protected from the elements for the first time in nearly two hundred years.
Standing perhaps for the final time amidst the family grounds, mesmerized by the unrelenting flow of Henry Hudson’s hoped-for Northwest Passage, he marveled at the circumstance that had put him in touch with a heretofore unknown tale. He read slowly, savoring once again the antique phrasing of the document.
The Honourable Josiah Sterling, Esq. 15 August 1821
New York State Senator
Albany, New York
Dear Senator Sterling,
We have the honour, Sir, of expressing our deepest respect and appreciation for the opportunity you have afforded us to review, with pleasure we might add, the contents of your recent submission, entitled “A Light Reign.” Indeed, as you have recounted the events of your father, Major Andrew McBride, and his exploits during the Great War, we have gained a deep measure of admiration for the story and deep respect for the man. Despite the scurrilous public humiliation to which Mr. McBride was ultimately subjected, your father, we are certain, was a man of his times, unjustly pilloried by public ignorance of his true stature. Without such men in service to their country, our fledging democracy would likely have faltered at birth, as so often it was thought to have been imperilled.
Regrettably, Sir, our timing is most inopportune. We are in process of publishing another work of similar content, by a resident of Scarsdale, New York, entitled “The Spy.” Notwithstanding his own guarded precautions, which array against the publication of a truly “American” novel, and his expressed fears of a lack of readership—fears which we do not share—Mr. James Fennimore Cooper has most graciously acceded to our publishing requirements. In consideration of the comparable intrigue replete within the two stories, we find it would be imprudent to place both before our readers simultaneously.
Given the proper interval, and the hoped-for success of Mr. Cooper’s suspenseful tale, we would be pleased to consider a resubmission of your father’s rendition of our nation’s struggle for independence. We look forward to such an occasion. In that regard, we remain,
Your most obedient servants,
Wiley & Halsted, Publishers
New York City
Jeff Needle, Association of Mormon Letters
