Free Talk by Laura van Wormer Page B

horses in Alexandra's stable. They also maintained the access road and riding trails, plowed the driveway in the winter, in summer allowed Alexandra to pick fresh vegetables and fruits and gave her a year-round pass to the dairy down the road where she could pick up dairy products made from the milk of the cows and goats that grazed on her land.
    Still, as a financial investment, the farm was a fiasco. Fortunately for the community, Alexandra was in a financial position that meant she could afford the losses. The area was swarming with developers dying to get their hands on any part of her land, but Alexandra was going to do her best, at least in her lifetime, to preserve the tract.
    It wasn't a case of not wanting people to have a nice place to live, it was a case of her wanting northern New Jersey to rehab the masses of existing housing they had already abandoned for easier schemes. The state, too, was not particularly thrilled with the prospect of seeing Bonner Farm falling anytime soon; they didn't want to see condos thrown up there, with sewage leakage spilling into the park reserve and bulldozers tearing down the trees and eroding the banks of an already fragile flood zone.
    No, the developers were going to have to take Alexandra off Bonner Farm feet first and until that time, she seemed quite content to spend whatever fortune it would take to preserve this little part of God's green earth in the New York City metropolitan area.
    Jessica had been at the farm since day one. In fact, she had seen it before Alexandra had, doing her friend a favor by scouting it out while Alexandra had been covering a presidential visit to Helsinki.
    And then there had been all the time she'd spent there, helping Alexandra paint and wallpaper in the earliest days (which happened to be, not coincidentally, the days when Jessica had desperately needed something to do on weekends to keep her out of trouble).
    Jessica had spent so much time there, in fact, that when Alexandra renovated the house, the anchorwoman had added a one-bedroom suite on the far side expressly for Jessica. It had a full bath, kitchenette and a small sitting room. In return, Jessica had insisted on paying the bill for a gorgeously large and beautifully landscaped pool in the back. If the truth be known, Alexandra was not much of a swimmer, and so it was not a big surprise who used the pool the most.
    At any rate, when Alexandra had fallen in love a few years before--in a match engineered by Jessica--and the anchorwoman no longer slept alone at the farm, Jessica had known that Alexandra had meant it when she'd said nothing should change, that there was plenty of privacy in the house and Jessica's rooms were always waiting for her.
    The access road to Bonner Farm was three-quarters of a mile long. It bounced past split-rail fences holding in cattle, past bean and strawberry fields already in full offering past apple and pear and plum orchards, and past the fields that would bear sweet corn and cattle corn, clover, tomatoes, cucumbers, cauliflower, snow peas, eggplant, acorn and butternut squash, cantaloupes and pumpkins. And then suddenly the drive swung into a wood of tall oaks, and when the car emerged on the other side, the house magically appeared in full view, there on the rise, with the lush green lawn spreading down below it. In the daytime, one could see, down behind the house, the barn, the stable, the potting shed and other outbuildings.
    It seemed that just about every light of the big old farmhouse was on tonight. The car drove up and around the circular driveway and stopped at the stairs of the massive front porch. Slim, in the Crown Victoria, pulled up behind them. Alexandra's studio driver popped the trunk and brought their bags up onto the porch. Wendy left them, to show Slim to his quarters in the barn. Alexandra unlocked the front door, thanked the driver and then went inside to turn off the alarm.
    They brought their bags in. The house was quiet. But then