The Winners Circle Read Online Free PDF

charms. He couldn’t possibly have had anything else to give up, but he continued to empty his pockets and tremble. If the oak wasn’t as thick as a Roman column, the tree might have been shaking as well.
    “ You know I mean business.” Jerry eyeballed the reporters. “Get the hell off my farm.”
    Nothing created a better threat than a big man with a huge dog and a sharpened pitchfork. The reporters stumbled for their car and turned over the ignition. They evacuated with such urgency that their car seemed to start before they reached it.
    Jerry watched the flopping car tires hit the road. They thumped, spitting an occasional spark as the rims scraped the pavement, but the car plodded along. He waited for it to stumble out of sight.
    The soothing sound of the rustling trees resumed. Cortez panted near his feet. Jerry looked toward the porch. Chelsea stood in a towel, hair dripping wet, one arm clutching her robe to her waist. Her free hand was in Haskell Cogdon’s hand. She giggled in a girlish way. It reminded Jerry of a scene in a Jane Austen novel, too formal, overdone.
    Jerry planted the pitchfork in the cold spring soil. His big toe pushed through the tip of his sneaker. He felt a chill in the air. He ought to run Cogdon off his property too, but he was sliding down the backside of a bad booze high, and the man in the suit appeared harmless. He vowed not to get physical, at least not until sunrise.
    Chelsea giggled again. She didn’t mind the fresh company, and Jerry refused to argue. That was the biggest thing. With all that money, they didn’t need to argue ever again.

 
     
     
CHAPTER 4
     
A New Face
     
     
     
    The money settled in for a few weeks before Jerry and Chelsea drove to a noted plastic surgeon outside of Trenton. Chelsea twisted the Ford’s rearview mirror toward the passenger’s seat. For days, Jerry found her gazing into anything that caught her reflection.
    “ It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Maybe he can do something.”
    She spun her eyes toward him, without really seeing. “I know he can.”
    He patted her thigh, tempering her lofty expectations. She’d run this collision course with fate before. As a teenager, she crash-landed a dozen times, drunk on fancy talk from bargain-rate plastic surgeons.
    She returned to the mirror. She put her fingers to her face and stretched her cheeks. He watched her create a sleeker mouth—one without the upturn that he adored.
    He’d gotten his first glimpse of Chelsea, when they were both six years of age. She was seated in a convertible car. It flew past his house, as he was wandering through the woods, peeling the bark from the birch trees, daydreaming about life before his mother died. The sound of a stock 350 engine roared closer. Jerry stirred from his thoughts and saw Chelsea tearing down the road in that big black car.
    Her father drove a convertible Cadillac, like the one in which Kennedy was shot. It had a large open passenger compartment—a rolling upholstered living room. Mr. Adams was an airline pilot, who’d fought in Korea. He arrived home at odd hours and took his only child for wild country spins. Chelsea knelt on the seat, grabbing the air rushing above the windshield. Her hair trailed behind like a golden scarf. Jerry thought he heard her laughing.
    The Grolling Egg Farm separated his house from hers. He sometimes glimpsed her from a distance but never up close. She didn’t wander away from home. She didn’t appear in the supermarket or visit the park. She never came to school, not the first year or the second. Jerry wondered if she wasn’t just a girl flying through his imagination, yet she stuck in his mind, like a catchy song lyric, hard to release, hard to keep from playing over and over.
    In third grade, Chelsea Adams showed up at Chesterfield Elementary. Jerry heard her name being called, and as she turned to face the class, her future with the kids was doomed at first sight. She’d just finished the last