The Year of Chasing Dreams (8 page)

Eden leaned into the side of the bed after reading the entry. “I don’t think she hated him at all. I think she was all hot and turned on for him.”

“Farm kids grow up watching animals doing the deed. Sooner or later, it occurs to you that people must do it the same way,” Ciana said.

Eden grinned. “Did it make you want to try it?”

“Not for a long time. First time I saw horses doing it, I was traumatized! Got over it, though,” she added with a sly look.

“You do it with Jon yet?”

“No! Not that I don’t want to,” Ciana confessed. “But timing’s never been right for us. Not yet, anyway.”

They both must have thought of Arie at the same time, because Eden quickly switched gears. “Do you know what I think?” she asked. “I think Olivia really liked Roy. You know that bad-boy attraction thingy we girls get over guys who don’t deserve us.” She spoke from experience having faced up to her almost fatal attraction to Tony.

“Well, now I’m curious. Was raised to believe she only loved Grandpa Charles. Who knew such a villain was lurking in her past?” Ciana dragged a hank of hair across her upper lip to imitate a mustache. “Yes, this bad boy needs to be investigated
further. Detective Ciana on the job!” And so began her research for any mention of bad boy Roy Soder in the diaries.

Ciana woke one night to the sound of engines revving and racing in the distance. Sleepily, she got up, wrapped a quilt around her shoulders, slipped on wool boot slippers, and went out onto the veranda. The sound was louder, with a consistent whine, but not close. She could see nothing unusual on the lawn or at the barn. The night was cold, and she shivered. Yet she didn’t sleep well the rest of the night, and very early the next morning she saddled up her horse and rode out across her pastures toward where she’d heard the noise.

Just as night darkness faded to morning gray, she came up to her best alfalfa pastures and reined in Firecracker. The horse stamped and snorted away ice crystals forming on her nose. Ciana stared at her fields, dumbfounded. The fences lay broken in several places, and the earth had been gouged full of wide grooves. ATVs. Her best acreage had been vandalized, run over every which way by all-terrain vehicles. Ciana urged her horse forward over the downed fence and rode onto the scarred ground to survey the damage, which looked extensive. She shook angrily, cursed the riders, rode home, and called the police.

“What did the sheriff say?” Alice Faye poured Ciana another cup of coffee and set the pot on the table.

The sun was high now, but Ciana had spent the whole morning with Sheriff Frazier, walking her land and filing a report. “He says it’s just bored kids. Not much he can do unless I catch them red-handed. Like that’s going to happen.” She fumed. “What am I supposed to do? Sit out by my fields all night with my shotgun?”

“Look, the ground can be plowed out once it thaws. As
for the fences, you’ll have to repair them. When’s Jon coming back? He’ll help.”

“I don’t need Jon to fix a fence,” Ciana growled. “I’m not some helpless twit!”

“My, my. Testy, aren’t you? Frankly, I like having Jon around. Don’t you?”

Ciana grabbed her coat from the back of her kitchen chair, refusing to engage in her mother’s baited question. “I’ll get started. Need to go into town for materials, though. If Willis will sell the stuff, what with me being a mere girl and all.”

“No need to be crabby. You know I’ll lend a hand if you need it. And, Ciana, there’s no shame in taking help.”

Ciana felt a twinge of guilt. She didn’t really want Alice Faye outside in the cold stringing fence line and handling barbed wire. “You want anything while I’m in town?” she asked, her tone subdued.

“Not today. But thanks for asking.”

Ciana stomped outside and into the brittle cold, muttering under her breath all the way to her old truck.

From the moment she stepped inside Willis’s Lumber and Feed Store on Main Street, Ciana felt as if she were on display. It wasn’t her imagination either. She heard people whisper, noticed them avoiding eye contact with her. Ciana set about gathering the wire and new metal posts she’d need to repair her fences, working quickly in order to get away from the glances and stares. At the cash register, as the clerk rang her up, Ted Sawyer Jr. came up alongside her. He was a few years older than her, but everyone called him Junior. One advantage of living in a small town was that everybody knew everybody and their business, and what she knew about Junior was that he was lazy and a bully.

“Howdy, Miz Beauchamp.”

His greeting surprised her. He’d always called her Ciana. When had she turned into Miz Beauchamp?

“’Lo, Junior.”

“Heard you had a bit of trouble with them ATV machines.”

“You heard right.” News traveled fast. Especially bad news. She paid the cashier, turned toward Junior. “Know anything about who might have done it?”

“Not a thing,” Junior said, rocking back on his heels. “Real shame, though.”

She simmered inside. Everything about him announced that he knew who’d done it. Ciana told the clerk she’d drive around to the loading dock for her purchases and load it up. “If you hear anything, you let me know. All right, now?”

“I’ll tell you,” Junior Sawyer said with a smirk. “Problem is once those things start happening to a place, they can happen again. Don’t know why worse luck follows bad. But it does.”

She leveled a cold stare at him. “Who you working for these days?”

“Oh, I just hire on with anybody who needs me.”

Like Gerald Hastings?
she thought. “I’m not going to be selling my land, Junior. Might want to pass that around to anyone who asks.” She turned toward the door.

“Disappointing a lot of people,” he said more loudly than necessary. “Some folks want to move on, and the town needs to grow.”

She knew someone else had put the words into Junior’s mouth. He hadn’t had an original thought since grade school. “And some folks need to mind their own business. Person can get shot trespassing.” Ciana left the store feeling Junior’s steely stare stabbing into her back.

Ciana faced the difficult chore of resetting broken and damaged fence posts into frozen ground, then stringing wire fencing. She was angry about the vandalism, but resolute. No one was going to drive her off Bellmeade. She started the job on hands and knees with a spade to chip away the crust of ice and dig below the freeze mark. Next she switched to a post hole digger to go down roughly three more feet to set the pole securely. The work was tedious and strenuous, and that night she soaked in a tub of warm water laced heavily with Epsom salts to soothe her sore muscles.

Jon returned three days after the ATV incident. He came into the kitchen, where Ciana was standing by the coffeepot and Alice Faye was baking bread. “Heard you had some trouble.”

Alice Faye welcomed him warmly, while Ciana stiffened and refused to meet Jon’s gaze, remembering his warnings about possible trouble that she’d brushed off.

“We called the sheriff,” Alice Faye said.

“You have any thoughts about who might have done this?” He looked at Ciana.

“No good to speculate. It happened. Best to just fix things and move on. I’m working on it.”

The air went thick with silence. He was angry and it showed. “I’ll finish up.”

Ciana’s recent display of self-sufficiency was greatly impaired by both the slow pace of her repair work and Jon’s thunderous expression daring her to object. “I’ll help you,” she said, granting him permission without saying so.

“Suit yourself, but I’d prefer to work alone.”

Ciana’s temper went hot, but she held her tongue.

“I’ll have a meal on the table for you every day,” Alice Faye said cheerily, her tone meant to ease the tension in the air between Ciana and Jon.

“That will be nice,” Jon told her, and pulling on his heavy work gloves, he stomped out of the kitchen.

Recent snowfall had kept the boarding horses’ owners from coming to care for them until the country roads were plowed; Ciana used that as an excuse to keep to the barn for the next few days and work with the horses while Jon finished the fencing. Each evening the three of them ate together with little conversation before Jon returned to Bill Pickins’s bunkhouse. The fence was intact less than a week after the ATV incident.

Days later, Ciana saw Fred Brewster, the techie from Murfreesboro, talking to Jon out by the barn. The next day she was in the front parlor, scraping off what was left of old wallpaper around the front windows, when she saw Fred pull up with a horse trailer behind his truck and proceed to load his horse. She dropped the scraper, grabbed a jacket, and ran out the front door calling, “Fred! What are you doing?”

The man looked nervous as she skidded to a stop in front of him. “Oh, hi, Ciana. Didn’t expect to see you.”

“Where you going? Why are you taking your horse away?”

“Moving him to a place in Murfreesboro.” His horse balked at the foot of the trailer.

She didn’t like the news. Losing Fred meant losing a paying boarder. “I had no idea you were considering this. Are you unhappy here?”

“No, no. Your place has been great. You’re great.” Fred’s gaze darted side to side. “I’m thinking of selling him. I mean, owning a horse is a lot of work and expense, more than I can give right now. Plus the man said the horse needs more attention than—”

“What man?”

“That Jon fellow. Your helper.”

Shock, then anger twisted inside Ciana. “Well, he was wrong. It’s winter. I give your horse plenty of attention.”

“I know, Ciana, and you’ve been really good, but Jon … well, seemed like he really wanted me to go, and after thinking it over, I decided he’s right. I never was a real horse person.”

She was so angry she was afraid to open her mouth, certain that flames would shoot out. She took the horse’s lead line and urged him into the trailer, where she tied him off, settled him, then exited and shut the gate behind her. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she said, “Well, you’ve paid for the month and it’s only half gone, so I’ll refund the difference.”

“No need,” Fred said, climbing into his truck. “Really. Just keep the money.”

She stepped aside and watched Fred pull away with his horse, along with his steady payments.