BOOK ONE

Prologue
In a big city, a little girl was born to a single mother. She was put up for adoption young. She never knew her parents. She had no friends and lived her life lonely, until one day she was adopted.
She was shipped out to Wyoming all wide eyed and bushy tailed. She spent hours on the plane wondering, wondering, wondering, if her “new” parents would like her.

Chapter One- Get off the Bus and Move your Butt
“Come on young lady!” a country accent yelled. JoAnne woke with a start. She quickly grabbed her things and wandered out of the bus. It was nighttime and dark. She was still in a big city, but not as big as Philly.

The plump bus driver showed her to a big ol’ pickup and gently knocked on the cracked window. The man inside was asleep. Once he awoke, he jumped out of the truck and grabbed JoAnne’s bag. His hands were rough and cracked, cut, and had signs of infections. JoAnne walked over to the passenger side and tried to open the door. Creakily and rusty, the door opened and JoAnne put her foot on the edge of the truck. As much as she tried she could not get herself in the truck. So, reluctantly, she went and tapped the tall, rough-handed man’s leg.

“Uh, um, sir?” She pulled on his pant leg. He didn’t notice. He was too emerged in the conversation between him and the bus driver. They were talking in a foreign language. JoAnne tugged at the pant leg again, this time harder.

“Sir!” “Hello!” “Mister!” “Hola!” JoAnne stopped tugging at the pant leg. The tall man had turned around to face her, or better said- look down at her. He picked her up and gently put her into the truck, which was dusty and made her sneeze.

“Hola,” he said to her. Then, very shakily and thoughtfully, he said, “My name is Sharvez.” His voice was very low and gruff. JoAnne acknowledged that he was Mexican.

“My name is Jo.” JoAnne said thoughtfully back. Sharvez nodded and started the truck. The ride was dark and boring. JoAnne fell asleep.

Chapter Two- Trip and Fall, Meet us All
JoAnne awoke with a start. She didn’t know where she was. She ran out of the outdated room, and tripped on a tattered braided rug. Sitting on the painted, wooden, floor, crying, a plump woman whose hands smelled like garlic picked JoAnne up and carried her down the creaky wooden stairs into a large country kitchen with big windows.

JoAnne starred out the large windows towards the endless green fields, dotted with green hay bales. Out another window a large ol’ fallen down barn was being repaired and painted red by a few teenagers. Horses nickered in a white circular pen as a man with a cowboy hat made them prance around and do tricks.

“Alright you little daydreamin’ girl” an accented voice preached. It shattered JoAnne’s daydream.

“Now, get your head out of the clouds and eat some breakfast. What do you want?” the plump woman told her sternly. “Oh. I’m Ida.” She added.

“Oh, hi, I’m JoAnne. Or Jo.” Jo smiled at Ida waiting for an answer.

“And…. What do you want to eat?” Ida asked after waiting few moments.

“Oh, um I don’t know whatever you have.” Jo said politely.

“How ‘bout some farm fresh eggs?” Ida asked.

“That sounds great!” Jo replied.

As Ida fried up the eggs, JoAnne thought about her foster parents, and then asked Ida “Where are my parents?”

Ida turned and looked at her sadly. “Oh, sweetie. Your Mother was killed in a car accident two weeks ago, coming home from town.” JoAnne was shocked.

“What about my Father?” she stuttered.

“He’s in his office.” Ida pointed to a stained wooden door in the corner of the room. Jo starred at it for a while before she opened it.

Chapter Three- Meet Daddy AND his Friends
A dark faced man with his head in his hands starred down at a pile of papers. JoAnne stood in the doorway shaking. She was so worried that her new father wouldn’t like her. Since her new mother was dead, her father was her only chance.

“Hello sir, my name is JoAnne.”

The man looked up at her and smiled “Oh, my angel has come.” He said in a deep voice. “Now come here and give me a hug.” JoAnne gasped and ran into his arms.

Nothing had ever felt better than to be hugged by her father… until a tall man in a snazzy suit barged in on their hug.

“Oh, I’m sorry Edward. I should have knocked.”

“It’s ok Duke. Come on in! Have a seat!”

JoAnne looked at her father with a, “Who is that?” look. He realized he didn’t introduce her. “Oh, Duke. This is my daughter, Jo.”

Duke took a good look at JoAnne. Jo felt like his eyes were burning into her soul. “You know how to ride?” Duke asked her. Jo looked at him confused. “You don’t know how to ride a horse!” he chuckled.

“No sir, I don’t. I have never seen a horse up close in real life.” JoAnne said back to him feeling stupid.
“Well we ought to fix that….”

“No!” Jo exclaimed.

“Yes.” Both her father and Duke said. “Now go grab some jeans and meet me by the barn.” He paused.
“You do know what that is?” he kidded.

“Yes sir. I do know what that is. I’m not that mindless!”

Chapter Four- No Jeans but Lots of Dreams
“Uh, Ida?” Jo said shakily peering around the corner of the staircase.

“Yes dear?” Ida turned away from the stove.

“I don’t own a pair of jeans. I need some for riding.”

“Oh, dear don’t be embarrassed. I’ve got a few pairs upstairs in the spare room.”

“Thank you Ida!” Jo yelled as she ran up the stairs.

A few moments later, Jo ran down the stairs and out the door toward the big red barn and the white circle pen filled with horses. Ida yelled behind her “What about your breakfast!?” But Jo had already run too far away to hear her.

Three men- one her father, the second, Duke, and third, Sharvez, stood leaning on the fence watching the horses prance around and fight with each other.

“I’m ready” Jo said to no one. The three men were still watching the horses. It wasn’t until Jo jumped on the fence and shook it that the men turned to look at her. “Man you guys must like these horses!”

“We do very much.” Her father said. He lifted her up and put her on the fence. “Now, you see that pretty young little mare over there?” Jo searched the pen; she didn’t see the horse described. “The little black and beautiful one in the corner- all by itself.” The words sifted through JoAnne and her eyes moved and set upon the most beautiful horse in the pen.

“What is her name?” JoAnne asked.

Sharvez looked at her and said “Horse has no name. Very lonely horse. I call lone rider.”

“Lone rider,” Jo whispered. The name made her lips tingle. “Is she my horse?” JoAnne asked hopefully.

“No, she is just the horse we are going to sell.” Her father ruined her dreams.

“Why are you getting rid of her!?” JoAnne asked with surprise.

“She is very uneasy and doesn’t like anything except herself. While her father was talking JoAnne had walked up to Lone Rider and started petting her. She nickered with delight. The three men were speechless and surprised by the horse’s attitude around the young girl.
“Well isn’t that right.” Duke said. “I try to train that horse for three months and a little girl from the city walks right up to the horse and pets it like it’s an old dog.”

The other two men laughed and continued to stare at JoAnne and Lone Rider.

Chapter Five- Pretty Little Eyes, Lone Rider’s Eyes
JoAnne looked into the strong little mare’s eyes. The little mare looked back. They connected and starred at each other for a while. Then after a while, her father walked up to her and asked her if she wanted to ride. “Oh, yes! But can I ride her?” JoAnne turned to Lone Rider and looked into her eyes again. It was like another world. Her father answered, and broke the connection.

“I’m sorry honey, but she’s not trained and I can’t risk losing you.” Thoughtfully, JoAnne kissed Lone Rider and walked over to where Sharvez and Duke were standing.

“Let’s start you out with Big Boy.” Duke said.

“Big Boy?” Jo asked reluctantly.

After a few hours on Big Boy, Jo could get on a horse and ride around the pen. She was no rodeo star, but she could ride.

“How was your ride?” Ida asked her when she got back.

“Perfect.” Jo answered, walking with her knees turned out, or, as most people call it, “saddle butt”.

“Now go take a bath, you smell like a horse… literally!” Ida yelled up the stairs after Jo.

Chapter Six - Mystery of the Bathtub
Jo walked into the aged bathroom. She tried to pull on the handle to turn the tub on. It was rusted closed. She walked into her bedroom and started walking down the stairs, until she heard the water rushing in the bathtub from upstairs. She stopped and ran back into the bathroom. The tub had a thin line of water in it. She tugged the handle again, but nothing came out.

Jo paced back and forth in the bathroom. She jammed her knee on the old toilet. Her eyes boiled over with tears, were red, and her vision was blurred, but she kept hearing water pouring and then splashing around over the sounds of her own tears. Jo thought it was her mind playing tricks on her, but after a while she knew what she was hearing was not her imagination. Jo stood up. The tub was now almost filled with nice warm water. Confused, she started to walk out of the room when she heard water splashing! She turned around just in time to see a pale-white bucket fly out of the open window and a filled one come back in…

The water didn’t work in the bathtub. It never did. So the system of buckets had developed. When you turned the nozzle on the tub, it triggered the buckets. Once the tub was filled by the buckets, you turned the nozzles off, and the buckets stopped coming.

Jo lay in the tub, relaxed. After a few hours, she got out and went through the closet that Ida had shown her. She slipped a plaid, button-down dress. She looked in the mirror and felt like a real country girl…

Chapter Seven- First Night on the Farm
Ida showed JoAnne to her bed, and pulled the blankets over her small, fragile body. Her father came in a few minutes later and kissed her on the head, whispering “Goodnight, my angel” in her ear. The words made her shiver with delight.

Once all human-made sounds were gone and the footsteps were silenced, voices sang. Crickets sang their harmonies high and pitchy. Jo couldn’t stand it. She slowly slipped out of her bed and staggered over to the window sill. She loved her new sky view. The stars were so unnaturally bright and the moon was like a spotted white egg. One star was typically intriguing to her. She didn’t know the name of it, but it was her star and she had it all to herself.
JoAnne obviously fell asleep in the window sill because when she woke up, she was laying in it. Her neck was all jammed up. She didn’t remember anything from last night except staring at her star. JoAnne stood up, and then sat down on the floor. Her back hurt so badly. She didn’t know if she could stand up. As she was wincing in pain, a small girl came into the room. She stood silently in the door frame, staring back at JoAnne.

Chapter Eight-
The little girl smiled and walked up to Joanne, taking her hand. The blushing little girl led Joanne into the closet, where they became stuck between two layers of coats and other clothing items. The little girl opened a hidden door at the back of the closet. It was an old door. Its’ teal paint was chipping, and the knob was dented and rusty. The little blond girl used a necklace that she found inside of a pocket of one of the coats in the closet to open the distorted knob. She stepped over the door frame into a bright room. Jo let her eyes focus. The room was all windows! She wondered if the room could be viewed from the outside. The little girl turned to JoAnne, handed her the necklace, and whispered quietly into her ear, “Dear little girl. You’ve come very late, but this room is yours now.”

JoAnne took the necklace reluctantly, starting to ask the pale little girl questions, but she was gone. She had vanished. Nothing was left inside the room except a stamped, addressed letter where the little girl had been.

JoAnne was freaked out! She didn’t know what was going on. “Maybe the house is haunted,” she thought, or “This room is filled with a poisonous gas or some kind of deadly bug!” Thoughts buzzed around in her head, until a buzzing alarm woke her.

Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe she was just having a bad, terrible dream. She believed this until she looked at the floor...

Chapter Nine- Was It Proof?
There, lying on the floor was the necklace the girl had gave to her in her dream. Did this mean this wasn’t a dream? JoAnne was so confused. She had no idea what was going on. She went to find Ida and seek some good advice and help.

She found Ida in the kitchen, as always. Ida didn’t notice her at first and Jo was nervous about everything that happened, so she stood quietly behind Ida waiting. When Ida turned around with the frying pan, she stopped dead in her tracks, and dropped it.

The loud clattering came to a halt and JoAnne’s daddy came out of his office, with a concerned face. He when he realized all that happened was that Ida dropped the pan, he looked at Jo. His face changed from concerned to amazed and dazed. At first he blinked a couple times and then he walked slowly up to Jo. He grabbed her arm and slid his hand down until it stopped at her wrist. He opened her palm and starred at what was concealed inside. It was his wife’s necklace.

She had lost it, one day cleaning out the spare room, and she never could find it again.
“It was hers, and now it’s yours.” Her father dabbled at the words, almost as if it were a dream.

“Where did you find this?!” he asked, demandingly.

Jo stuttered the words “On the floor, this morning.” Ida put her hand on her forehead and shook her head.

JoAnne didn’t know what she had gotten herself into. Her mind raced back and forth between her different theories. She didn’t know who held the necklace or how she found it on the floor. She was tremendously confused. She didn’t know how to fix it or how she had done this. She didn’t know what she did.

JoAnne sat at the table, in silence, watching her father and Ida whisper back and forth. Every few minutes they would turn their heads and look at Joanne. Staring at her, intensely, JoAnne felt like they were studying her, like some science experiment.

Then after a while her father came over and sat next to her, put his arm around her shoulder, and whispered in her ear, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry you even came.”

“What do you mean?” JoAnne stuttered, her father sighed, “Your mother, my wife for ten years, was killed two weeks ago.” Ida, across the room, looked down at the floor, and let a deep breath sift through her.

Her father continued, “She was not killed in a car accident, but was found dead, inside her car at the supermarket.”He looked like he was going to die at that moment.

But then he continued some more, “She she was healthier than anyone I have ever seen, but when the police came they said she had no wounds and was in perfect health so she just must’ve died, maybe from a panic attack, stress, or some other natural reason.” He paused, “But I didn’t believe them. I knew something happened to her.”

Chapter Ten- Do You Have Something to do With This?
The mood now in the house was very intense. Everyone was silent and no one would speak to each other. Then finally to break the silence, JoAnne spoke, “What do you really think happened to her?”

Her father looked over at her and starred for a while. “I think it had something to do with her studies, and whatever she was doing in that spare room all day long.” He quietly said, as if something would hear him.

JoAnne gasped, unaware of what had happened to her. “Dad, I’m going to tell you what happened in my dream last night.”

Her father’s eyes widened and Ida stopped doing the dishes. “I was staring at my star, and then all of a sudden I woke up. It felt so real. I thought I feel asleep in the window sill, and I had a headache and my neck hurt immensely.

I was sitting on the floor trying to get my neck to crack, when the little blond girl, with unbrushed hair, in a little pink dress, came into the room.
She sounded like a grown woman the way she spoke,” With every word Ida’s face got more fascinated, and her father’s more awestruck. “Do you want me to keep going?” she asked in a questioning voice.

“Yes!” They both replied. JoAnne continued the story of her dream and the closet and the window room and the letter. Her Father was in tears, and Ida was hiding her face. When she finally showed her face, she said, “Let’s go see if your dream is true.”

Chapter Eleven- Was It True?
The three of them, walked up the stairs silently, and into the spare room. Ida tore out the coats, to reveal, a knob.

Her father tugged on it, but it didn’t open. JoAnne tried to remember her dream, and then realized she needed her necklace to open the small door. She took the necklace from her neck, and slid it inside the key hole. It turned and the door pushed open. JoAnne cautiously stepped over the door frame and into the bright room. On the floor was the letter, just where it had been in her dream.

Jo couldn’t believe it. It was real, what had happened was real. She picked up the letter slowly and studied it carefully, and then started to peel away its seal. The letter was for someone.

It said, JoAnne, perfectly written a few inches under the stamp. JoAnne dropped the letter and ran. She didn’t want to know what was written inside.

She burst through her father and Ida, who were now peering into the secret room, curiously. They tried to stop her but she just kept running.

Chapter Twelve- Running Away
JoAnne just kept running, past the barn, past the garden, the chicken coop, the corn field, until it was dark. She was completely lost. She was happy. She had escaped the dream, or so she thought.

A small cottage was on the top of a nearby hill, she could see the lights. All the way up the non-maintained drive way, and up the steps, she knocked twice, and a frail old woman came to the door.
Her eyes were a perfect pure blue; her skin was pale and wrinkled. “I’ve been expecting you.”
She waved her arm behind her, revealing her home with a wave of her arm, “Come in…” she whispered.

JoAnne felt like she should be worried and alert, but the tranquility of the woman’s home made her forget everything, and remember nothing.

The woman set two teacups on the small table in front of the large picture windows. The small mosaic table had pictures in it, scenes, and animals. It fascinated Jo. She starred at it until the woman started coaxing her to drink the tea. At first she refused, but after a few minutes of coaxing from the old woman she picked up the teacup and drank the warm heavenly liquid.

Chapter Thirteen- Where Am I?
Somehow, it felt like the woman was inside her mind. Putting memories in her mind, explaining things, and showing her what she should do.

It seemed like the tea numbed the real world and her true thoughts and put in the woman’s and the mysterious happenings of the last two days. She understood things now, and what she came to do. She had to solve her mother’s death.


A PREVEIW OF:
BOOK TWO

Chapter 14- What Happened?
JoAnne walked home slowly, over the hills and through the wheat field. It was almost daylight now. It was foggy. “A storm was brewin’” Ida would say. JoAnne missed her. She started to run. But her legs defied her, and she fell on the rough gravel.

She hated her clumsiness. She hated how she had been adopted. She hated this place. She just wanted to go back to the orphanage. Back to her small room, with the rusty fire escape, where she sat every night, wishing to her star that she would be adopted.


Over her blurred vision and tears, blood dripped from her knees and palms. Almost as fast as the tears from her eyes. She had to get something to stop the bleeding. She looked around. All that she could see was rolling hills of oats, wheat, and green. The gravel road rolled between the fields.

It was so quiet. She couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of her heartbeat and her now quiet sobs. Then, a contrasting thumping, off beat from her own heart was heard.It sounded like a horse running. JoAnne looked around, but saw nothing but fields. It had to be her imagination. Until a hoarse, heavy breathing was also heard close by. She knew it wasn’t her imagination.

Over the hill, came Lone Rider. Her sweat, shining in the morning sun. She was beautiful. Her breathing was still heavy. She pranced down the small slope in the road, her footing small and delicate.

She eased toward JoAnne slowly, almost as if not to scare her. She delicately nudged her, and nickered. JoAnne slowly eased up, careful not to frighten Lone Rider. Jo wondered how Lone Rider had found her, or how she had escaped the farm. Maybe some how she knew JoAnne had been in danger.

JoAnne carefully patted Lone Rider’s muzzle. Her legs were still very weak and shaky. She wondered what her chances were to be able to get on Lone Rider and stay on, with the condition of her legs. But she also considered the chances of her getting back to the ranch before night fall.

Soon enough, JoAnne climbed on to the mare’s bare back. The thin coarse hair on the horse back poked at her beaten legs. The blood had dried now, making her skin stiff like.

Lone Rider carefully maneuvered in a tight circle, being cautious, not to lose JoAnne. JoAnne grabbed a large chunk of shiny black, tangled, hair and held on tight. Lone Rider moved swiftly, but slowly. JoAnne could feel every muscle moving under the horse’s skin.

Lone Rider slowly headed toward the slowly setting sun. JoAnne stared blankly at the bright crimson red blending into the starburst yellow. As she daydreamed her heart thumped to the beat of Lone Rider’s hooves.
They traveled over the plains, until right before dark, they crested a hill, and there was the farm. It was light up like a Christmas tree.

Chapter 15- Home Again

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 10.04.2011

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