“I’d love to come,” Eden interrupted, smiling but gritting her teeth.
“Good!” Alyssa said in a tone that didn’t sound one bit inviting. “I’ll call with details.” She went to the door, waggled her fingers at Eden, and left, leaving behind an awkward silence.
Garret said, “It’s not what it looks like, Eden. I can explain.”
“And I want to hear your explanation.” Eden scrambled to gather herself. The encounter had left her shaken, but he deserved to have a say. “Can we sit by the pool? I need the fresh air.”
Garret gave her a grateful look, grabbed their cups off the table, and ushered her poolside where they took up chairs and positions from the night before. Eden thought how different things looked and felt mere hours later in the clear light of day.
“Alyssa was my mate all through secondary school—”
“Your girlfriend,” Eden interjected, wanting to be certain she understood the true definition of his term. In Aussie talk a mate could be anyone from a lifelong friend to someone very special. Alyssa gave the impression she’d been more than a pal.
Garret nodded. “Yes, we were together.”
“Like Tom and Lorna are together.”
His blue eyes held hers. “Yes. That kind of together.”
Her stomach twisted and she swallowed her angst with a big gulp of coffee. “Go on.”
“We became friends at school. Then more. After we graduated and I got the chance to go on walkabout, I asked her to come with me. She wouldn’t do it. Said she had other plans and for me to have a good time.”
By the set of his jaw and look in his eyes, Eden saw that Alyssa’s rejection had hurt him deeply. “But you went anyway.”
“Like I told you back in Italy, my wish is to see the world. Every mile of it if I can. Plus, I had the writing job. Tom and Lorna were game to come along for a spell. So, yes, I went.”
The sun had climbed higher and Eden watched a bird flitter to the edge of the pool, then skitter away. She felt pummeled emotionally, telling herself that naturally he’d had a life before meeting her, just as she’d had one before meeting him. Still, coming face to face with a girl from his past, a girl he’d cared for, and who didn’t appear to be letting go, unsettled Eden. “What other plans kept her from going with you?”
“She’s a model. Successful too. That was all the catalogue talk in the kitchen. A walkabout didn’t fit in with her life’s plan.”
The implication was that neither had he. “But you’re home now,” Eden said.
He shrugged, offered a smile. “Couldn’t be helped. I was a sick bloke. Doctor popped me in hospital the minute I landed. For days I had tubes sticking out every which way. Mum and Dad were right upset. Word got around, and lots of my mates came to visit. Alyssa came every day, and when I came home, she brought me movies, video games, milk shakes. She canceled jobs and photo shoots to stay with me. She was good company, and it helped pass the time. I couldn’t hold a grudge.”
Eden read between the lines. Alyssa had wormed her way back into his life now that he was home. “And so now she’s your girlfriend again?” The words stuck in Eden’s throat, but she wanted the whole truth. If he was with Alyssa, Eden wasn’t going to hang around.
Garret reached over and took both her hands in his. “That might have happened if I’d never met you.” Again she met his eyes, wanting to believe he was being honest. “But I did meet you, Eden, and it changed everything. The way I feel inside. The things I want. All changed. I was a happy bloke in Italy when you said you’d come along with us.”
“We didn’t have much time together, Garret. I thought I’d never see you again when I left Italy.”
“That’s true. But once I met you, it woke me up. It made me see I didn’t love Alyssa. I understand her now in ways I never could before. And I’ve told her as much.”
“News flash: I’m not sure she heard you.”
Garret leaned back in his chair. “She heard me. She just doesn’t believe me.”
Tony hadn’t believed Eden when she’d wanted to leave him either. What Garret didn’t know about her past nibbled at her conscience. She wanted him to know, but the timing wasn’t right. She changed the subject instead. “A beach party. Hard to keep remembering that it’s summer here.”
“School term ends in November and starts in February. We’ll hit the beach before fall term. I’ll teach you how to ride a surfboard.”
She’d only seen videos of professional surfers and massive waves devouring them. “I don’t know.…”
He laughed. “You’ll start small with a boogie board. We’ll practice over at Manly Beach first.”
She liked the idea of a party, and she wanted to meet his friends. She wanted to be a part of his world. She would ignore Alyssa. “Guess I shouldn’t miss this one.”
Garret relaxed, and his face softened into a smile. “We’ll have a blast. Lots of beer and food.”
“And your Aussie charm.”
His grin widened. “Never to be underestimated.”
She picked up her cup, but the coffee had grown cold and stale. Garret took the cup, set it down, stood, and pulled her up to face him. “Thank you for believing me. And for not heading off to the airport because of Alyssa.”
“Not my style. I didn’t come halfway round the world to be shooed away by an old girlfriend.”
He kissed her until her knees went weak, then said, “Come on. It’s almost lunchtime. Throw on some walking shoes and I’ll take you out for some bangers and mash.”
“Some what?”
He laughed. “Sausage and mashed potatoes. A real treat.”
She wasn’t sure about that, but she was determined to go wherever he would lead her. Discovering Garret, all of him, was the reason she’d come so far from the world she knew.
Ciana missed Eden. Eden had become the sister she’d never had, and although she heard from her friend via email, it did nothing to lessen her case of wintertime blues. Eden’s chatty stories of Garret and sunny Australia only reminded Ciana of their carefree days in Italy, long gone in the snow flurries and sleet storms of January. On top of that, with Jon going off to Texas to visit his family for a few weeks, Ciana found herself cold, lonely, and at loose ends. She kept caring for the horses and projects in the old house, repainting the parlor, moving furniture, and cleaning out the attic. Because the shorter days meant longer nights, she spent most evenings in her room reading through her grandmother’s diaries.
For the most part, they were full of schoolgirl drama and day-to-day minutiae. Ciana saw that her life at Bellmeade might hold hard work, but without modern conveniences, farm life had been tough and uncompromising. Water for washing dishes and taking baths had to be pumped by hand and heated on a wood stove. There had been no electricity at the house until the 1930s. Cows had to be milked rain or shine, hot or cold, in sickness and health. Hogs needed slopping—which made Ciana glad she only had horses and chickens to tend—and history from the forties and fifties wasn’t nearly as interesting as she’d thought it would be. She quickly grew weary of reading about penny candy and ribbon buys at the general store—in those days the store and church were the centers of Windemere’s social activity. The church still stood, but the store had been replaced by a supermarket in the seventies.
The one thing that did hold Ciana’s interest was the thread of Roy Soder that Olivia wove throughout the pages from book to book and year to year. As they both grew up, she continued to be fascinated with him. And since Olivia had a habit of pouring her heart along with every detail of her life into the diaries, Ciana’s fascination with him grew too. From the earliest entries, he was in constant trouble, branded a loner and a troublemaker by teachers and neighbors alike. He’d even been kicked out of Sunday school when he’d said he didn’t believe in God. At age eleven Olivia had been mortified, but as time passed, she wrote of him with an interest that Ciana recognized as a crush.
However, it had been Eden who’d discovered the first entry
about Roy that had sent Ciana on the hunt for others about him. Before she’d left for Australia, she and Eden skimmed the diaries together. One evening Eden had sat up straight and said, “Whoa. You need to read this one.”
“Read it to me.” They were sitting on the floor, books and papers written in longhand stacked neatly, ordered by dates as much as possible.
Eden grinned, waggled her eyebrows. “It’s naughty. Sure you want to hear it?”
“I don’t think Grandmother’s idea of naughty translates to our idea of naughty. Read it.”
“Dated August 7, 1942,” Eden said. “She was what? Fourteen?”
“Sounds right.”
Eden cleared her throat. “ ‘I sneaked off to the swimming hole in Johnson Creek this afternoon. Hot day, school was out and I wanted a cool dip before I had to go home and face chores. No bathing suit—I hate them anyway, and so I stripped down to my undies and jumped right in. If Grandpa Jacob saw me like that he’d tan my hide with a willow switch. Don’t care. Heard yesterday that Joel Bufford got killed in the war, in the Pacific, far away from home. Miz Bufford’s put the gold star decal from the government in her window that tells everyone Joel’s gone. Really sad. Just goes to show you life can be real short, so swimming in my undies didn’t seem too awful.
“ ‘I was having a fine time in the water when Roy showed up. He announced himself and sat down on the water’s edge and said all kinds of suggestive things to me. (Grandpa calls Roy white trash.) I ignored him best I could, but then he started saying he’d like to come in for a cool dip too.
“ ‘Then, with no mind or manners to move on, he took my dry clothes, which I’d left on the banks, and said, “If you want them, you have to come take them from me.” I was scared, but I was mad too. Roy knew I couldn’t go home wearing only my panties, so I did the only thing I could do. I crawled right out of that swimming hole and walked right up to him. His eyes were all over me and I bet I turned a hundred shades of red. But … I will only admit this to you, dear diary. Even though I hate him, it excited me to see this look that I can only call hungry on his face. It was like he wanted to lay me down right there on the ground. I felt this queer fire flare up inside me; scary, but it made me feel alive and strong, like I held some power over him. But I grabbed my clothes and covered myself as best I could and told him to go away! And then he said, “Next time,” and walked off whistling.
“ ‘Soon as he was gone, I dressed and hightailed it out of there. I got to our barn and dried off with horse blankets. That night at supper, Mama told me I smelled like a horse and to wash up good before bed. I scrubbed every spot Roy’s eyes had traveled on me with lye soap that burned my skin raw. I hate Roy Soder!’ ”
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 wi
th 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.”