The Year of Chasing Dreams by Lurlene McDaniel Page B

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