Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  “It’s not here,” Natalie said, barely thirty seconds after stepping inside the old outbuilding.

  “How can you be sure—I can’t believe anyone would discard an antique trunk,” Kelly tried.

  “They might’ve. It wasn’t in the best of shape. And it had old yellowed clothing inside. Damien—he loves Aunt Mary, but I’m not sure he would have seen moth-eaten clothes as something to preserve. He might not have realized the shawl was in there.”

  Kelly insisted on a more thorough search. But the deeper she and Natalie dug through the stacks, the more flashlights they employed, the more certain Natalie grew that Finley’s shawl was not in that shed.

  They tried calling Norma, the owner of the antique store on the square. But while she had paid for an old bull blind from the barn—and currently had it on display, looking, she admitted with a laugh, like some strange giant metal Renaissance-era brassiere—she’d not seen a trunk come in from the Powell property. “I’m buying pretty much anything and everything the family’s willing to part with,” Norma told Kelly. “I’ve got furniture and glassware—but no trunk. I would’ve remembered that. Especially if it still had items in it.”

  It was officially panic time. Both women sprinted for the old barn. Then raced through the contents of the downstairs bedrooms. The outdoor summer kitchen. Their heavy footsteps and frustrated sighs tugged Mary from her chair. “What’s going on?” she asked, her milky eyes now wide with concern.

  “When you said you had items to toss—did you mean you literally threw them away? Or there’s a pile of discarded items here? Or…” Kelly asked one of the hardhats heading upstairs with an armful of tarps.

  “Trash?” Mary echoed. She stood, hugging her knitting to her chest.

  “Sure, we threw them away,” the worker said with a shrug. “Hauled a whole bunch of stuff off just the other day. Along with those rotten boards from the roof. Straight to the dump.”

  Kelly placed a hand on her forehead. “No, no, no…”

  “Say, we didn’t take away something we shouldn’t?” the hardhat asked.

  “I think you might—” Kelly started.

  “What—what did you take?” Mary demanded.

  “I’m so sorry, Mary,” Natalie said, two long tears stretching down her cheeks. “I feel like this is my fault.”

  “What did you take?” Mary demanded.

  “Ma’am, I asked that fiancé of yours if anything needed to be double-checked. He said it was fine to haul—” The hardhat spoke to Natalie firmly, ridding himself of responsibility.

  “What?” Mary cried out. “What was fine to haul?”

  “The trunk,” Kelly sighed.

  “Which one?” Mary whispered.

  “From the attic,” Kelly said. “The one with Finley’s shawl.”

  Mary’s milky eyes rolled into the back of her head, and she fainted dead away.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The search for the missing trunk continued, even after Mary was revived and placed in her rocker. Actually, the search hit a new fevered height after Mary collapsed. Construction workers, it seemed, loved to spread gossip just as much as any woman under a hair dryer at the beauty shop. Before the afternoon was over, everyone in Finley knew the story of the missing trunk—which meant that everyone in Finley also flocked to the property to offer help. Miriam Holcomb and the men from the Corner Diner and even Damien, as soon as the last of his kindergarten students were picked up by their parents (who also then joined the search). Poor Damien, he wandered the property for hours with a tortured look on his face, wringing his hands and muttering, “I’m so sorry, Aunt Mary. So sorry…”

  Kelly squeezed his arm before leaving for the night, promising to come back, just as everyone else was promising to come back first thing in the morning. A few tried to reassure Damien by telling him they could think of another two or three stones out there still left unturned.

  Kelly’s phone rang early the next morning, screeching like a wounded bird. She was already awake—she hadn’t slept more than five minutes, and she purposefully waited to answer on the fourth ring. Four’s wealth, she recited to herself, because nothing would make her feel wealthier than finding a hundred-and-fifty-year-old piece of crochet work. Imagine. Norma at the antique store probably wouldn’t have even offered her a hundred dollars for it.

  “You’ve got to get out here,” Natalie ordered. “Damien and I—we got here early…wanted to look again before we had to go to work…You’ve got to see this.”

  Kelly dressed in the same slacks from the day before, and she locked her door behind her without brushing her teeth. She drove impatiently to Mary’s place, beneath a sky that was both mournful and angry—reflecting the two emotions that had flickered across Mary’s face before she’d fainted.

  Kelly pulled herself from her car and gazed out across the property, not sure what to expect. To find medical personnel administering emergency care to Mary? To discover the entire house had crumbled to bits?

  Nothing so dramatic had actually transpired. Not that she could tell, anyway. But Natalie was suddenly grabbing her arm and pointing. “Look,” she was saying. “Look.”

  Other Finley residents had arrived with the same idea as Natalie and Damien, apparently: get back to searching at first light. Miriam was here in jeans with dirty knees—the kind of outfit that promised she was here to climb into the oldest, dustiest, most unlikely cranny. And Michael, the musician who had composed new material for the reception—the first song that Natalie and Damien would dance to as husband and wife—was here, too, his eyes glued to the not-too-distant cave on Mary’s property, his face pasty, his mouth twisted into a grimace.

  “What it is?” Kelly asked him. “What’s going on?”

  “The river,” he said, pointing. “Look. It shifted. Damien says it’s called jumping beds.”

  “It couldn’t have,” Kelly said. “Overnight?”

  Michael shrugged. “Maybe it’s because of the drought. Looked for a minute like we might get rain yesterday, but we didn’t. Or maybe it’s because of the way the crews have been pumping water out of the river for pressure washing.”

  One thing was certain: there was absolutely no denying the river had, in fact, chosen a new route. The makeshift construction bridges now stretched over an empty riverbed, which looked like a long-dry indented scar in the earth. The river was still running in the same general direction as before, but several yards from the old path.

  “It’s changed course.”

  Kelly jumped at the voice that had suddenly exploded into her right ear. When she turned, she found herself staring into the dark eyes of the Native construction worker.

  “In just one night,” he continued with a nod. Hazy strips of October sun played a strange light show on his face. “Sometimes, something drastic has to happen to get our attention. The Finley River changed course. What could have caused that to happen?”

  Because the shawl turned up missing. This entire thing’s off course now, Kelly thought. That’s surely what everyone in Finley’s going to believe. Does that everyone include me?

  Mary had mentioned the river the day before. Had she been able to see something that no one else could, through those milky eyes of hers? “This is a sign, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “What’d you say?” But it wasn’t the construction worker’s voice. It was Michael’s.

  “I was talking to that construction worker. He was standing right beside me. Did you see…”

  Michael shrugged. “I thought it was just you and me,” he admitted.

  Kelly shivered. And not because the air was filled with minuscule pellets of brutally cold rain.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The rain didn’t last. A few harsh drops and then—nothing. Only more cold wind. More dank skies. Now, Kelly thought the skies were the color of despair.

  Kelly put aside her frenzied methods of the day before. She searched Mary’s property methodically, starting with the farthest outbuilding and working her wa
y toward Mary’s house. The closer she got, the more she felt her hope eroding. The closer she got, the more she dreaded having to tell Mary the inevitable, even though Mary surely already knew the inevitable: the shawl was gone forever.

  She left the property only once that day, to return to the statue of Amos in Founders Park.

  “Me again,” she told him. “I know I’m asking you for a lot lately but…Look, here’s the thing. I need that shawl. Not for me. I don’t…I would forget the whole idea of using it for the dress—even if that means being torn to shreds online. I’d gladly take that, if you could just ensure that Mary could get her shawl back. It means so much to her. It was Finley’s shawl. I didn’t tell you that yesterday. But that’s what I wanted. The one she never got to wear. The one she made—to bind your love forever. It’s gone now. It’s…

  “And poor Natalie and Damien,” Kelly went on, shivering as she crossed her arms and hugged herself. “If we don’t find it, the wedding just isn’t going to feel the same. They’ll know Mary’s hurt. Besides, who wants to get married in the midst of so many bad omens? The river, an important family heirloom carelessly lost…It doesn’t bode well.”

  She leaned forward, rubbed the shiny space above Amos’s heart. And flinched, quickly drawing her hand away. She stared at her fingers. What had that sensation been? A sting? A burn? A shock?

  She tried to shake off the incident, telling herself it was only static, and quickly returned to the old farm. As silly and implausible as it was, she found herself anxious to find out if Amos would grant her request.

  Damien joined her search late in the afternoon; Natalie arrived even later, saying she was only on dinner break and would have to get back to the TV station where she worked. “I’m not sure what help I’ll be now that it’s gotten dark,” she confessed.

  Kelly noticed for the first time that the sun had already set for the day, holding tight to its winter hours.

  “Mary—” Kelly said, gesturing toward the house.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Damien muttered. “I just hope she’ll eat dinner tonight.”

  Kelly nodded, feeling his words like a blow to her jaw, her eyes filling with tears.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The night sky and the bare limbs of trees all seemed to curl around Kelly’s car as she drove. Wrapping her into a dark, smothering blanket.

  Her eyes tingled. Her mouth was dry. The shawl was gone. She wished Natalie’d never brought up the idea of incorporating the item. Because then, the shawl’s disappearance might not have ever been discovered. At least, not in such a public way. They could have lied to Mary. As terrible as that was, they could have gotten away with it. Her eyesight was failing, after all. They could have gone to Norma’s antique store and purchased any old piece of aging crocheted lace and told her it was Finley’s. The loss of the old artifact wouldn’t have bothered the rest of the town; Mary was the reason they’d all come out to search, not the piece itself. The town had stronger ties to the story, to the idea that someday, they might see the spirits of Amos and Finley reunited, find proof that love really did conquer all. The shawl was a symbol, maybe, but to the town at large, it was really just a thing, no more important than the Hargrove homestead, which had, unlike Finley’s house, crumbled long ago. As she turned onto the main thoroughfare, Kelly tried to convince herself that the legend would continue on without it. But she was not entirely successful.

  Kelly bit her lip, continuing to scold herself. What was she thinking, promising to make use of Mary’s heirloom? What was wrong with her? Things usually got placed into safekeeping for a reason. She’d been too rough, too insistent with something that didn’t belong to her. Why couldn’t she just have used her own pretty fabric to—

  She gasped, her tears drying up instantly. Her fabric. She did still have it, didn’t she? In the midst of their frantic search, she’d stopped thinking about it completely, and she’d dropped a small fortune on the silk. If she was forced to repurchase, not only would she face another time crunch, but she would run the risk of losing money on Natalie’s dress to boot.

  Her front passenger seat was empty. Had she placed the storage container in the trunk? That didn’t seem right, either.

  The backseat. She was sure of it.

  Kelly adjusted her rearview mirror to get a look at the bench. And sighed with relief. The container was there. She still had that, at least.

  But as she adjusted the rearview a second time, a new fear gripped her far tighter than the darkness surrounding her.

  Something else was in her car.

  Holding her breath, she turned her rearview mirror down once more—and clearly saw a man lying on the floorboard, in front of the backseat.

  Kelly gripped the steering wheel. Clenched her jaw. Stared at the empty road in front of her. Her headlights looked too harsh. She was alone. And also not alone. She tried to control her breathing, so as not to sound panicked. And raised her eyes to look in the rearview again. The figure made no attempt to move or grab her from behind.

  What did he want? To rob her? Assault her? How could she fight him off if she didn’t know for sure? The intruder remained bathed in shadow. A solid black mass.

  Kelly stopped breathing. Her car swayed slightly, as if being pushed by the wind. She fought to maintain control.

  This isn’t like Miriam’s story, she told herself. This is a flesh-and-blood man in my car. Somehow, for the tiniest slice of a moment, that seemed less terrifying than the thought of a ghost being behind her.

  The wind whipped the sides of her car—but wasn’t quite loud enough to erase the sounds of a flock of birds crying out, “Cah! Cah!” Crows were both unseen and everywhere, their calls bleeding through the glass of her rolled-up windows, squawking incessant warnings.

  She glanced again into her mirror. The crouching figure’s back reflected strange green and purple streaks. Just like crows’ feathers.

  Kelly began to shake visibly. Her eyes darted about the front of her car, landing for the briefest moment on her glove compartment. Miriam at least had a metal pipe to protect herself. What did Kelly have? She’d once carried pepper spray when she was in San Francisco. But she’d stopped carrying it once she’d returned home. That silly compartment had nothing in it, other than her proof of insurance.

  Her throat closed up, keeping a terrified scream from spilling out and letting the man know just how frightened she was.

  She pressed the gas pedal down slightly. She needed to get out of this situation—quickly.

  But where should she go? Somehow the streetlamps seemed to sneer rather than glow. And the pointed tips of wrought-iron fences signaled “Keep Out.” Everything looked dangerous. Menacing. She had the feeling that no matter where she turned, she’d only run into a dead end.

  An odd puttering sound invaded her ears.

  “Cah! Cah!” the crows screamed. She glanced at the mirror near the driver-side door. Goose bumps tightened until her skin felt like a garment that had shrunk in the wash. Cah, indeed. There it was—the source of the putter: A car following close enough to kiss her back bumper. A Model T. Solid black.

  Just like the one Miriam described.

  No, no, that couldn’t be right. The men at the counter of the Corner Diner had explained away the entirety of Miriam’s tale. None of it had happened; it had all been the wild exaggerations of a woman who liked to tell whoppers during the lunch rush. A man had been arrested and booked. A real man, not a ghost. That Model T stuff—it was just made-up hogwash. Why, Miriam would probably be back at the diner tomorrow, telling the same story all over again, only this time, it’d be three men, and truck instead of a car—or a tank!

  Kelly glanced into the side mirror again. There it was again: a Model T. Driven by a silhouette. She glanced into the rearview. There he was again: the figure. On the floorboards.

  Her mouth was dry. Her arms weak. Her chest burned with fear.

  She needed help. But the road was empty—it was only Kelly and the vehicle behind h
er. The one she still felt she needed to escape.

  If the road’s empty, Kelly somehow managed to reason, you can’t hurt anyone. It won’t matter if you drive a little recklessly.

  She took a deep breath and floored it. Flexed her entire right leg as she pressed the gas down. But the Model T kept up. How was that possible? Those old cars were built to go—what? Thirty, maybe?

  Kelly’s eyes drifted, just for a moment, to the center of her steering wheel. Miriam said a noise startled them.

  She pursed her lips and smashed the heel of her right hand into the center of the steering wheel.

  The crouching figure behind her began to stir. What was he going to do—pop up to throw an arm around her throat, cutting off her air?

  Kelly blared her horn again. Blared it repeatedly, hoping someone would hear her. Hoping, too, that it would scare the man behind her so much, he would simply open the back door and jump.

  She glanced into the bottom corner of her rearview mirror, hoping to see him reaching for the door handle. But he only curled himself up tightly, as though trying to hide.

  An animal on the hunt crouched, too. Just before they finally decided to strike.

  Kelly smashed her hand into her horn over and over. People, she thought. I need to get someplace with lots of people.

  She lifted her foot from the gas as she approached the turnoff to the town square. But her car refused to slow. And her steering wheel felt locked, just like it did when the engine wasn’t running.

  Had she broken or jammed something by flooring it like she had? She knew nothing about cars—could a person do damage by merely slamming her foot against the gas? Would the brakes even work now? Would she have to crash the car to get it to stop?

  Just as she considered yanking the parking brake, the steering wheel began to move on its own, sliding through her left hand.

  Kelly shuddered. Her car was speeding away from the town square.

  The Model T was still behind her—but it was no longer merely following. The two cars were touching; the Model T was pushing her, steering her. Guiding her as easily as a child’s hand could guide his toy car.