The words rolled over Ciana like the freight train sound of the tornado.
Angela glanced at the silent Ciana. “Good to meet Bill Pickins last night, though. Jon liked Bill and Essie a lot, plus Bill knew Wade from when he was growing up.”
“Wade once lived in Windemere?” Ciana struggled to keep her tone even, her voice steady.
“Roy Soder, Wade’s daddy, was adopted and grew up here, but he hated this place. Apparently he left here under a cloud. He always said someone had stolen his family’s land, but I never knew if it was true or not.” Every word pierced Ciana like hammer-driven nails. She almost staggered. Olivia had bought the Soder land for back taxes. And, now she realized, as an act of revenge.
“Roy was married to Dovey, a girl he’d gotten pregnant and was forced to marry in an old-fashioned shotgun wedding. I never knew her, but I always felt sorry for her. She died from cervical cancer when Wade was just a child. By then the three of them lived in Texas and Roy worked in the oil fields. Once Dovey died Roy couldn’t care for Wade, so he was shipped back to her relatives.”
Angela’s voice droned on, telling a story that was dismantling Ciana’s world, brick by brick. At least the storm’s damage had been swift.
“Then one day Roy got hurt on the job and got a settlement from the oil company. Right about that time Dovey’s family—they lived back in the hills somewhere—decided to move east and Wade went back to Texas to live with Roy. He was fifteen, and Roy was a poor excuse for a father, an alcoholic, too, but Wade lived with him because he had no place else to go. He found work on a ranch near Dallas working with horses.” She smiled. “That’s where we met. I took a summer job at the ranch when we were both in our twenties.” Angela smiled wistfully. “He had the prettiest green eyes, and I fell for him like a rock hitting rock.”
Ciana had fallen under such a spell herself over Jon.
“We lived with Roy for a while, but Roy didn’t like me and I didn’t like Roy. Wade was caught between us. I felt sorry about that, but Roy was a mean old cuss and after Jon was born, I didn’t want Jon around the old man.
“Once we moved out, Roy went back to working in the fields. He died in an explosion when Jon was seven, but you know that part.” Angela pushed her thick hair away from her neck in the rising morning heat, quietly said, “Wade would have been far better off growing up here. Roy was bitter and hateful, not fit to raise a son. He hung on to a grudge like a tick to a dog. Good thing he never had another child.”
Ciana’s topsy-turvy world became a nightmare landscape. Olivia’s handwritten words sprang to life: This is my punishment. This is divine retribution. Oh God, what have I done? Olivia’s nights spent with Roy and a pregnancy now overshadowed two generations of Beauchamp women born years apart, her mother and herself. On a summer night the past and the present had collided when Ciana had met a man she called cowboy, and fallen in love with him. Fate had made a full circle.
Just hang on, she told herself. Right now, in this moment, composure meant everything. Breathe in, breathe out. “How sad for Jon,” she managed to say.
“My papa was there for Jon growing up. A good man.” Angela beamed Ciana a smile, oblivious to the wreckage her story had brought. “I think Jon’s turned out pretty good in spite of Wade and Roy. And you’re willing to marry him, so you must think so too.”
“You know I do,” Ciana whispered, unable to keep her voice from cracking.
Angela squeezed Ciana’s hand. “You and Jon are different people from me and Wade, so don’t think bad stuff is going to happen to the two of you. The two of you are going to make a good life for yourselves.”
She forced herself to return Angela’s smile, knowing there was no way to tell Angela Mercer that “bad stuff” had already happened many years before, long before Ciana and Jon were ever born.
Ciana kept her silence for days after Angela was gone, but the weight of the discovery was suffocating. Sooner or later she had to tell Jon and her mother what she knew. Once the genie was out of the bottle, once she shared the information and Olivia’s speculation, there would be no turning back. And as for her and Jon, decisions would have to be made. Still, for just a while she could shield them from what was going to hurt them far worse than any violent storm had.
During her time of silence, she watched Jon, freed from the odious cast, again ride his horse, practice turning and cutting and roping, all the things he’d once done with ease. The doctor had warned Jon to resume normal activity slowly, rebuild the muscle with care. It had been like asking water to flow uphill. He wasn’t careful, and only Alice Faye’s badgering slowed him down. But he was happy. Ciana grieved, knowing she was going to be the person that shattered his happiness, and her mother’s peace.
She poured herself into hard work, but late one sweltering afternoon as Ciana left the shed housing her farm equipment, Eden stood with crossed arms barring her path to the trailer.
“Talk to me,” Eden said, without preamble. “Something’s wrong. Something’s going on with you. I can see it in your eyes. Tell me.”
Ciana was hot, sweaty, and tired, but seeing the determined look on Eden’s face, she realized that Eden wouldn’t be put off. She needed to tell someone. Why not Eden, who’d helped her read the diaries? “After I clean up,” she said. “Meet me in the loft.”
“If you try and run, I’ll send the dog after you.”
Eden waited patiently for Ciana, riffling through a laundry list of what the problem might be. Crop blight? Broken equipment that she had no money to repair? A break between her and Jon? Eden discarded the last one quickly. They’d acted so happy the night of the party. It was just lately that Ciana had fallen prey to some dark power.
Ciana climbed the ladder and found Eden waiting for her on the quilt with a bottle of wine. A fan had been brought up weeks before, but the loft was hot and the fan’s work futile. Eden held up the bottle, but Ciana shook her head. “This must be serious if wine won’t help,” Eden said. “You’re scaring me.” She set the bottle aside.
Ciana wrapped her arms around her scrunched-up knees. “Just listen,” she said. “Don’t interrupt. I have to get it out in one piece.”
Eden listened with escalating shock to what Angela had told Ciana in all innocence. “Holy crap,” was all she said when the story was over.
Ciana cried helplessly. “I’ve been over this in my head a hundred times, Eden. If Roy fathered Mom, then she and Wade are half siblings. And that makes Jon and me”—she swiped the back of her hand across her eyes—“cousins, I think. So I have to tell them. They need to know that we may all be related by blood.”
Eden had been the one who’d urged Ciana to keep Olivia’s secret suspicion about her baby’s father quiet. Now there was no way that it could be held back. “May be.” Eden stressed the words. “But even if it’s true, yes, it will hurt your mother, but I don’t think it will matter to Jon. Question is, does it matter to you if you marry one of your kin?”
Ciana straightened. Just like that, Eden had fingered the one thing Ciana had not verbalized, even to herself. Did it matter to her? She bit her lower lip hard. She’d thought out every implication, every ramification of marrying Jon. “If we’re related, then getting married would be unnatural, Eden. You know what I mean.”
“If he’s kin. We don’t know if Olivia was right. She never knew for certain either, and it colored her whole life.” Another sickening thought slammed Eden.… Marrying each other might even be illegal, but she wouldn’t say that aloud. Ciana was broken enough.
Ciana’s chin trembled, and a tear trickled down one cheek. “Why is this happening to us, Eden? I love Jon so much. It isn’t fair.”
Eden scooted closer, put her arms around her friend, her own heart ripped in half. “You’ll get through this just like you got through all the bad things that have happened. You’re a Beauchamp, remember?”
Ciana hung her head. She felt worn down, not one bit like her Beauchamp forerunners, women who overcame all obstacl
es. “I need to go for a ride and clear my head.” She stood, her knees the consistency of jelly. “Will you keep my secret? Just until I figure out what to say to Jon and Mom?”
“I may not be able to keep it from Garret. He’ll know something’s wrong the second he looks at me. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”
Ciana cringed, but she understood. She didn’t want to drive a wedge between Eden and Garret. Life was full of too many wedges as it stood. “If you must,” she whispered.
“Garret will help,” Eden called as Ciana clambered down the ladder. Eden stayed put in the loft listening to Ciana’s movements as she readied her horse, but once they rode off, Eden dragged the incriminating diaries out of the trunk to reread. Every entry about Olivia’s nights with Roy and the aftermath made perfect sense. Every passage about a baby she refused to love was clarion clear.
If only Ciana had never found the old journals. If only the tornado winds had blown these books with their shattering confessions to smithereens. If only those long-ago nights between Olivia and Roy had never happened. If only.
Rain fell in hard and unrelenting streams from a lead gray sky during the next two days. Fields and pastures became soggy pools of mud, bringing work at Bellmeade to a standstill. Ciana wondered if perhaps the rains were sympathetic tears from heaven shed on her behalf. The tornado had left destruction and devastation in its wake, but time and nature would heal the land. The devastation inside her heart, within her soul, was permanent.
By noon of the second day, tempers were short and patience worn thin. Garret whisked Eden off to Nashville with no promise of a quick return, Alice Faye baked batches of cookies between hands of solitaire and TV game shows, and while the horses fretted in their stalls from confinement, Ciana asked Jon to climb up into the loft with her.
Arriving early, she spread out the quilt from the old trunk away from the open window area and any blowing rain. She stuck Post-it notes inside selected pages of the diaries and stacked the old books in a pile. She turned on the fan to circulate the air and lit an old hurricane lamp to chase the gloom. She was ready, yet tensed when she heard Jon’s boots on the ladder. She thought of the last time they’d been up there together. It had been raining that day, too, the day he’d asked her to marry him before the winds of spring had wrecked her home. Today she would unleash another kind of wind that could wreck their lives and happiness.
“Hey,” he said, coming over the edge, his smile big and happy. It stabbed her like a knife. “Glad you thought of this.” He eased beside her on the quilt. “I don’t think I could have polished leather saddles one more time.” When she didn’t smile, he dipped his head and frowned. “You don’t look happy. What’s up?”
She managed a smile. “I’m happy to see you. But I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Remember when I told you about my grandmother’s diaries? The storm destroyed the ones in the house, but not these.” She pointed at the short stack, took a breath. “I need for you to read a few entries. Then we’ll talk.” She handed him the first book where she’d marked a passage about teen-aged Olivia’s infatuation with Roy. She watched his eyes skim the page, her heart hammering. When his gaze stopped dead still, she knew he’d realized who Roy had been.
He looked up. “Soder! This guy’s name was Roy Soder? Like my grandfather?”
“It is, or was, your grandfather, Jon. Your mother told me some of your family background before she left. And of how you both changed your last name after her divorce.”
He shrugged. “Okay. A weird coincidence. Are you mad because I didn’t tell you?”
“No. But … well, read these entries.” She handed him the most damning of the diaries.
He read, recoiled. “Is this for real? They had an affair and she got pregnant?”
“It’s for real.”
He reread the words, lingered over Olivia’s speculations about the father of her daughter, named Alice Faye. Ciana knew the passages by heart. He set the book aside, stared out at the rain for quite a while, and Ciana gave him plenty of time to absorb the implications of Olivia’s fears.
Finally he turned to Ciana. “So if she’s right, we’re related?”
“Looks that way. Some sort of cousin.” Her voice quavered.
“Who have you told?”
“Eden.”
“Your mother?”
“Not yet.”
He swore, raised himself up to his knees, raked a hand through his hair. “I hardly remember that crazy old man. He ruined my dad preaching his hate about something that happened long before I was born. Dad once told me that the Soders had been screwed out of their inheritance by someone.” Jon shrugged. “I was a kid. I lived in Texas and I didn’t care.”
“It was my grandmother who took the Soder farm over and rolled it over into Bellmeade. Remember the day we visited him in the Murfreesboro nursing home, and the reaction he had when he heard I was a Beauchamp? Now it makes sense.”
Ciana rested her hand on his arm. “It would have been your land, Jon. And your mother’s.” She watched his face as he weighed her words. “You could have built your horse-training business on that land.”
“I can build my business back in Texas, Ciana. I wanted to build it here to be near you.” He studied her. “I know what I want. Question is, what do you want?”
“You.” Her voice shook with the single word. “But … if we’re really kin …” She was scared and felt sick.
“You have me. Always have.”
She couldn’t look him in the eye. “I just never thought us falling in love could become the punch line for a redneck joke.”
“I’m not laughing.”
Emotion filled her throat. She wiped her eyes. “I have to tell Mom.”
“So tell her. We can’t let some long-dead man and woman and what they did together destroy us. If you don’t want to marry me, you tell me. You dump me because you don’t love me, not because of this. I don’t give a damn where either of us came from. Or who we came from. This mess is not our fault.”
But blame wasn’t an issue. If they shared bloodlines their marriage could be considered incestuous. The very word made her shudder. The fury in Jon’s voice made her pull back.
When she didn’t respond, he asked, “Is this being-related business going to matter to you, Ciana? To us? You need to tell me now.”
But words stuck in her throat. She felt like she was drowning, like she couldn’t find the surface. The depths of the problem transcended the two of them. It reached to the unborn.
When she didn’t answer, he stood, stared down at her. She desperately wanted to speak to him, say something, but no words made it through her throat. “I guess you’re already telling me how you feel.”
“No, Jon! Wait.” She struggled to her feet.
But he was already down the ladder, and minutes later, she heard the barn door open and the truck start and drive away. She began to cry, shivering and alone, shell-shocked. A future without Jon was no future at all. She bent, gathered up the books with shaking hands. The nightmare wasn’t over. She still had to face Alice Faye Beauchamp.
Eden sat in the coffee shop with Garret, staring out the window and watching the rain turn a sidewalk into a mini-stream. Together they’d gone to a movie and walked a busy mall, but neither had improved her mood.
“You going to tell me what’s got you snarled up?” Garret asked, following a sip of his coffee.
“It shows, huh?”
“The tornado was more subtle, love.”
Eden sighed. “Trouble for Ciana and Jon.”
“How so? Jon’s happy.”
“He won’t be after today.”
“Talk to me. Hard to be sympathetic when we’re talking in riddles. Besides, my editor’s getting a bit bothered that I’ve been here for months and still haven’t delivered one story about traveling round America with my girl. We need to get on the road. Is this wedding of Ciana’s ever going to happen?”
&n
bsp; Eden sighed. “Don’t know.” He looked confused. “It’s a long story.”
He glanced out at the pouring rain. “Looks like we have all afternoon. I’ll buy more coffee.”
When he resettled with the fresh cups of coffee and a pastry, Eden launched into the story of what was now facing Ciana and Jon. She started in the past, with Olivia, Charles, and Roy and finished with her and Ciana’s discussion about telling Jon and Alice Faye. Garret listened, never interrupted, his features changing from curious interest to a frown to disbelief and shake of his head when she wound down the narrative.
Silence fell between them at the end, held, until Garret said, “I’m gobsmacked!”
Eden hadn’t heard the word before, but its meaning was obvious. “It’s put Ciana in a tailspin too.”
“It’s a pisser, all right. What now?”
“Don’t know. I don’t think Jon will care, but Alice Faye … well, that’s the tough one. She and Olivia were always at odds. Now it makes sense.”
“Poor Mum Alice.”
Eden struggled to hold back tears. “They’re my family, Garret. Ciana and Arie were like sisters. When I was younger, I wanted Olivia to adopt me. Yes, Alice Faye drank, but never in public. She was never hateful to us girls. It was the family’s little secret, hard for Ciana growing up, but in spite of it they were a tight family. I wanted to belong to them. Arie’s family was too big and noisy, but the Beauchamps—well, that was where I wanted to be. After we came home from Italy and my mother left town, when I didn’t have anyone, Ciana took me in and Alice Faye ‘adopted’ me. She’s made me feel I’m as good as her own. Ciana didn’t mind one bit. I think it took some of that being-a-Beauchamp pressure off her. Alice Faye has taught me about planting and gardening and preserving food and baking … all the things Gwen couldn’t manage with her bipolar devils. Mum Alice’s life is simple and now that she’s sober, she talks all the time about being happy. This stuff about Olivia and Roy …” She looked into Garret’s eyes. “What if it destroys her?”