Loving the Heartland

by Marjorie Jones

  With only regret for company, Kendra grabbed her boots from beneath the bed and a clean shirt from the closet and headed downstairs.

  Brad and Brent were in the kitchen with Casey who spoke to someone on the phone. Kendra sat at the kitchen table and pulled on her boots and shirt. “So? What’s going on?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Everything was just fine when I got home, about three. Sometime between three and six this morning, somebody tossed the barn. The combine, the tools. Everything is busted up and ripped apart.”

  “Mason.” Kendra snarled.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, but I’d have to say I agree with you.”

  Casey hung up the phone. “Mac is sending somebody out to take a report. He says not to touch anything until his people get here. He’s going to dust for prints or something.”

  Kendra ran a hand through her hair and scratched the nape of her neck. She needed to see a barber. She’d been so preoccupied with everything the past few weeks, the short hairs on the back of neck were starting to itch. She blew out a hard breath. “Like that’s going to do a damn bit of good.”

  “It can’t hurt,” Casey offered.

  “Well, might as well get this over with.” The last thing Kendra wanted to do was to see her barn in a wreck of damaged property. Her family had worked for years building this ranch and slowly, but surely, she watched it fall down around her ears. All because of one man with an evil streak so wide, God couldn’t see the other side.

  The larger barn housed the animals and a few pieces of equipment, but most of the heavy duty tools and supplies were stored in the smaller barn. The door practically fell off its hinges when Brent pulled on it.

  Inside, the normally neat rows of feed and tools lay scattered on the ground. Bags, sliced open, spilled their contents into useless piles of grain and oats. The exposed engine of her father’s combine had been smashed. All of the wiring had been pulled free or cut from their original positions. Cracks spider-webbed through the safety glass around the operator’s seat. They’d been smashed with, apparently, the crow bar that lay on the ground near the front wheel.

  “They must’ve used this.” Casey picked up the discarded crow bar with the tips of his thumb and forefinger dropping it back into place beside the remains of Brent’s four-wheeler.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  Kendra turned around when she heard Michelle’s voice. She wrapped Kendra’s old plaid bathrobe around her like a blanket and stepped inside the barn. “I thought you were in bed?” Kendra asked.

  “I couldn’t go back to sleep. What happened?”

  Brent shrugged. “I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.”

  “Mason?” she asked.

  “Mason,” he confirmed.

  “How do we know?”

  Kendra knelt beside the tractor and inspected several gashes in the tires. “This took a lot of effort. It sure as hell wasn’t just some freak looking for copper wire, or some kid pulling a prank. These tires are thick and hard. It took determination and strength to puncture them. One helluva long blade, too. And one other thing. A damn good reason to do it.”

  

  Michelle entered a room on the third floor of the old barn and found Lacey brushing several papers onto the floor and groaning her dismay. Michelle lifted an old, plastic three-ring binder and glanced through the pages. “What is all this stuff?”

  Lacey straightened her back and placed her hands on her hips. “This is what passes for my sister’s office. Enter at your own risk.”

  The small room had floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves along two walls and an antique desk that most dealers would kill to possess, although it was coated in a fine layer of dust. Hundreds of folders, binders, books and stacks of paper littered every available surface. How did anyone work in a mess of this magnitude? “What are you looking for?”

  “Insurance papers.” Lacey’s mouth spread into a wide grin. “Want to help?”

  Michelle laughed. “I think you’re going to need it,” she replied as she set to work on a shelf about shoulder level. A few minutes later, she’d cleared a small work surface on the shelf to help sift through decades of unorganized records.

  “Lacey, some of these papers are more than fifty years old. When was the last time anyone worked up here?”

  “Probably before mom and dad died. I mean, Kendra comes up here and files away the herd records. Branding and breeding and stuff like that. But most of this crap is totally obsolete.”

  “She needs a computer.”

  Lacey laughed and shoved a wooden crate into the center of the floor. She used it as a bench as she pulled open the bent and stubborn drawer of an old steel filing cabinet that reminded Michelle of something she might have seen in an Vietnam war movie. “Yeah, right,” she grunted, “I can just see Ms. Nineteenth-Century sitting down in front of a nice little workstation with a mocha-frappe. Please! She’d put a bullet in the damn thing within an hour.”

  Michelle wasn’t so sure. “You know, she really warmed up to the idea of a website and taking a more modern approach to everything, lately.”

  “Yeah. Whatever you say.” Lacey rolled her eyes.

  Michelle scoffed in return. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Mike. She didn’t warm up to the idea. She warmed up to you. Which is quite a feat, in and of itself, if you ask me. But honestly, I can’t see her caving so easily if you’d happened to be a balding, forty-year-old guy.”

  Michelle felt the heat of a blush creep up her neck and cheeks. “Well, I suppose that may have had something to do with it. But just the same, I think I’ll head into town later and pick up a starter computer for her.” She turned back to the shelves and straightened a row of heavy books with titles like Cattle Management and Breeding Techniques for the New Century along the dusty surface. “Nothing fancy. Just something she can keep her records on.”

  Curious, she flipped open the worn binding of the second book and discovered that the new century in question was the turn of the twentieth. She shook her head in wonder.

  A computer was exactly what Kendra needed. She’d hit the Internet and find a few downloads that could help with the management of the ranch. Certainly, not all ranchers were as stuck in the past as Kendra Williams. There must be some kind of software available to help her manage the herd and the finances. It would make a nice good-bye present when it finally came time for her to go home.

  Her heart lurched in her chest. As much as Kendra had convinced her to stay for a while longer, someday she’d have to go home. The thought pushed a hole right through the center of her chest and made her fingers tremble. She shook them and squeezed her hands into tight fists, but the shudder seemed to come from within and would not be denied or ignored.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  Michelle forced a smile. “Of course. I’m fine.”

  Lacey pushed herself off the crate and moved to stand behind her. Michelle kept her eyes focused on the last shelf to be organized. She wasn’t ready to tell anyone how she felt about Kendra, and if she knew Lacey at all, that’s exactly what her friend wanted to know.

  Michelle refused to turn around. A slight tapping drew her attention to the floor where she caught Lacey’s cowboy boot-encased toes thumping a steady cadence on the old boards.

  When Lacey cleared her throat, Michelle cringed.

  “Oh, girl, you better start talking.”

  Michelle swallowed, but kept her eyes on the shelf. “Talk about what?”

  “How long have we known each other?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Three years. And do you think after three years, I can’t tell when something’s wrong?”

  Michelle didn’t answer. Lacey was more like a sister than a friend. Their ability to read each other had been one of the driving forces that made them so compatible; so infinitely close. She sighed and turned to face her friend. She’d never been able to keep her feelings fro
m Lacey. Why did she even try?

  The moment she looked into her friend’s green eyes, so very much like her sister’s, Michelle stiffened her resolve. She couldn’t put a voice to her feelings. Not after Kendra had been so vividly clear about her own feelings. She’d convinced Michelle to stay, but had not said those three little words that she so badly wanted to hear.

  “I’m fine, Lacey. Really.”

  “Liar. You’re in love.”

  

  Kendra felt like she’d been kicked in the gut by a rodeo bull. Some force she couldn’t recognize stole every ounce of air from her lungs until she thought her knees would fail to support her weight. She placed one hand on either side of the doorjamb outside the old ranch office and bowed her head.

  What the hell did Lacey think she was doing?

  Like someone watching a train wreck, she found herself rooted to the floor, unable to pull her attention from the carnage. She had to hear what Michelle would say.

  Eyes closed, she waited. Holding her breath, she waited. Fingers white-knuckled against the wood, she waited.

  “Of course, I’m not in love.” Michelle’s voice sounded firm and steady.

  No quiver. No hesitation.

  Unlike Kendra’s stomach. She took a deep breath to ease the queasy butterflies upsetting her normally iron-like constitution. Splinters from the rough wood beneath her fingers embedded her flesh.

  Michelle didn’t love her.

  Thank God, she hadn’t admitted her feelings yesterday! Rage replaced uneasiness. She’d been right all along. It was just a dalliance; an affair. A fling.

  “You’re lying to yourself, and you know it,” continued Lacey. “But worse, you’re lying to my sister. You promised you wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “Your sister doesn’t care about me, Lacey. At least, not like that.”

  Guilt swamped her. Kendra’s conscience screamed to tell Michelle how she really felt, but she just couldn’t do it. And she couldn’t stand there and listen to any more words about something that would never happen. She would never confess how she felt about Michelle to anyone, least of all Michelle, now that she knew for certain exactly how Michelle really felt.

  She crept away from the door. When she reached the staircase, she descended half-way down, and then turned and stomped back up to the landing.

  She raised her fist to knock on the door when it flew open. Lacey stood in the doorway, her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy – looking every bit as guilty as the time she’d stayed out all night with her best friend when she was supposed to be at a church sleep-over.

  “You gals find anything, yet?” she asked her sister.

  “No. How long have you been standing there?”

  Kendra forced a Chuckle. “What? You been talking behind my back again?”

  “How long?”

  “I just got here. Why?” She hated how easily the lie fell from her lips.

  Lacey grinned and shrugged. “No reason. Nope, we haven’t found anything yet.”

  Michelle held a file in the air. “Got it.”

  Kendra found Michelle’s eyes the instant she looked up.

  If she was talking about Kendra’s heart, she was absolutely right.

  Chapter Twelve

  James stroked the glistening coat on his horse’s neck and sucked in a deep breath of hot summer hair. In less than an hour, the great iron-horse would sound its lonesome cry and leave Dead Rock in a cloud of black smoke. Elizabeth would go with it, never to return to the rough community she so despised. Could he let her go? He should. His horse snickered and tossed its mane as if to disagree. “What do you know?” he whispered to his oldest, most loyal companion. “You’re just a dumb animal.”

  Michelle flipped the page in the old notebook and screamed, “No!”

  There has to be more. She flipped another page but only another blank page greeted her. For the last ninety minutes, she’d read the most wonderful story of love and adventure she’d seen in a very, very long time.

  Dozens of hand-written sheets that nearly filled an old, spiral three subject notebook had taken her on a journey into the old west and it couldn’t end now. Frantic, she picked up the notebook and leafed through the remaining pages. All blank.

  “Well, that just sucks!” She tossed the notebook onto the desk and rested her chin in her hands.

  According to the cover, Kendra had written that story in the twelfth grade. Well, she’d started to, anyway. Apparently, she’d never finished it. She’d have to wonder for the rest of her life if James ever went after Elizabeth, or if he just let her leave him. Both of them regretting it forever.

  She sighed and glanced at the clock. She should get back to work.

  Michelle closed the file of information she’d finished entering into the program she’d downloaded for Kendra’s new computer. The desk-top system perched on the old desk in the barn office like the Holy Grail in the middle of the Tupperware party.

  At least the room was neat and clean. Once she’d boxed up the really ancient records and stored them in the back of an unused closet in Brent’s apartment next door, she’d found plenty of space for the old books and more current files. Unable to resist, she’d purchased a small oriental rug and placed it over most of the floor. She’d scrubbed the only window until the glass sparkled and she’d replaced the shade. The room would never be elegant. The rising scent of nature from the ground floor where the animals were housed took care of that. But it held a certain old-west charm that matched Kendra perfectly.

  That’s when she’d found Kendra’s manuscript, hidden behind a stack of engine manuals. She’d been unable to keep herself from reading the yellowed pages written in clean, strong strokes. At first, she’d felt guilty, but soon the words had taken her away. She glanced at the notebook again and ran her fingers over the cover. Kendra had talent. Anyone who read her words could see that.

  But it wasn’t up to her. Kendra must have had a very good reason to have stopped writing. Who was she to mourn the loss?

  She arched her back and pulled open the next file.

  Taxes. She made a sour face.

  Yuck.

  She’d discovered that most of the files were labeled correctly and anything older than three years she’d stored with the other papers. It shouldn’t take long to input a few years worth of completed records. A small checkbook and dollar sign icon let her into the correct program.

  She picked up the most recent return and scanned through the pages. The more she read, the wider her eyes grew.

  She pushed the chair away from the desk and stared out the window. Kendra stood on the bumper of the old truck and worked on the engine. Every time she pulled on something-or-other under the hood, her backside swayed from side to side. Kendra was truly beautiful, and Michelle was fairly certain she didn’t have a clue. The whisper of a curse made its way to her position on the third floor, dispelling the romantic notion, but endearing her not one iota less.

  Why in the world would Kendra put herself through all of this? The unreliable truck, the threat of losing the ranch because of Harold Mason’s money and influence.

  She returned to the desk and found the numbers that had made her so curious. According to the taxes filed by the Heartland Cattle Company and Ranch less than one year ago... Kendra Williams was worth millions.

  

  “You had no right!”

  “I was trying to help you!”

  Kendra paced from one end of the unfinished kitchen of the old ranch house to the other. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at Michelle. Not right now. Her heart hammered in her ribcage and she thought her head might actually explode. Michelle had no business going through her things. She had no right to know that much about her. Cleaning the office was one thing. Insurance records? Fine. But to snoop through her tax records? Not fine.

  “Listen,” Michelle whispered, and then sucked in a long breath as she stood upright and rubbed her bum leg. She’d been refinishing the original cabin
ets with lots of elbow grease and a belt-sander. They looked good. They looked really, really good.

  “I’m sorry,” she continued, bringing Kendra’s thoughts back to the matter at hand. “I just wanted to make things easier for you, that’s all.”

  Kendra’s shoulders ached. She was so tired. She had been this tired for so long she couldn’t remember the last time she felt strong. Before Michelle came she’d been able to deal with the pressure. Every morning, she lied to herself. A part of her wished she’d never met Michelle. Then she wouldn’t feel so weak. But another part of her didn’t know what she’d do without her. That part of her felt stronger with someone to lean on.

  Of course, Michelle hadn’t meant any harm. Of course, she hadn’t meant to pry or assume. Kendra closed her eyes and tilted her head back in an attempt to relieve the ache in her neck.

  “Why don’t you fight fire with fire? Find out who Mason is paying off. Then you can—”

  “Then I can what? Pay them off more? I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Kendra shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. Lacey, Case and Brent had been after her to do that very thing for more than a year. She just couldn’t do it, and it upset her to think that she’d raised them to think she could. It was wrong. Even if that was exactly what Mason was doing, it was wrong. “I don’t know... Honor? Pride?”

  Michelle snorted and Kendra opened her eyes. “You sound like some goddamn knight or something. Kendra, he isn’t fighting fair. Why should you?”

  “Because that’s how I’m built.”

  “You always do the right thing?”

  “Yes. I always do the right thing.”

  “And you’re always in charge? And you always have all the answers? Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe it, sister. That’s the way it is.” Maybe if Kendra told Michelle enough times, she could start to believe it herself.