Past Forward- A Serial Novel: Volume 2

by Chautona Havig

  “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting to see how long it’d take you to notice me. Hop in; I’ll give you a lift home.”

  She shook her head. “No, thank you. I really do just need the walk.”

  Chad smiled and waved before he rolled up the window and accelerated. Half a mile down the road, he whipped the car around and came back. “Are you ok? Last night still bothering you?”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. “I’m just enjoying the day. Thanks.”

  As Chad zipped down the highway back toward Fairbury, he realized that for once, he didn’t doubt someone when they said they were fine. Willow hadn’t yet learned to say what she didn’t fully mean. He prayed she never would.

  The man on her porch made Willow feel uncomfortable. She’d granted the interview, although she only vaguely remembered agreeing to it. Now that Robert Belier sat on her porch swing, asking her questions that seemed completely unrelated to her work as a designer for Boho Deux, she wished she hadn’t agreed.

  “My mother bought our farm twenty-four years ago.”

  A truck barreled up the driveway and Chad raced from it looking for something seriously wrong. Willow sat on the porch swing with a strange man, but she didn’t seem agitated or upset. Taking the porch steps two at a time, he leaned against the railing and manufactured a smile.

  “Chad, this is Robert Belier from the Rockland Chronicle. He’s here to do an interview for something with the store.”

  Chad nodded at the reporter, commented on a nice day for an interview, and pointed at the door. “Willow, I need to talk to you for a minute if you don’t mind?” He glanced once more at Robert. “Please forgive the interruption. It’s urgent.”

  Robert stood and waved her into the house. “Mind if I take a walk around? Take a few pictures?”

  “That’s fine,” Willow agreed.

  Inside, Chad backed her against the door and hissed, “What’s wrong! I broke nearly every law there is getting here. I expected wild dogs, broken bones, or at least a nice healthy barn fire, and you’re sitting out there sipping coffee—”

  “Tea. Don’t drink coffee.”

  “—tea with some reporter!”

  “He made me uncomfortable.” The vulnerability in her tone almost hit home, but Chad’s adrenaline still controlled him.

  “So you dial 9-1-1?”

  “I didn’t!” she protested hotly. “I dialed 1. For Chad. I texted 9-1-1. See. I have this phone thing down to an exact science!”

  “I didn’t even know you knew how to text!”

  Looking quite pleased with herself, Willow admitted, “Lee taught me how while we waited for the lawyers the other day.”

  “But why 9-1-1? I thought you were injured. You scared me half to death.”

  Her wicked grin told him what she’d say before she uttered a word. “Then you’re not even mostly dead yet. You’re fine.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  The innocent look on Willow’s face was priceless. “For what?”

  “For the 4-1-1 on the 9-1-1.”

  “Well, I don’t know about 4-1-1. You only taught me 9-1-1, but I needed help and couldn’t let him see me calling you, so I called with my phone in my pocket. 9-1-1 was all I could be sure I’d get right.”

  “You did that sight unseen? Impressive. So why am I here?”

  Willow’s green eyes turned grey. Chad watched as her face crumpled before him and tears threatened. “I just felt—” She swallowed hard brushing the dampness from her eyes impatiently. “I feel so stupid and ridiculous, but he makes me uncomfortable. I don’t trust him; I was afraid to tell him to go away.”

  “Aww, Willow, why? He would have gone.”

  She swallowed again, forcing a lump back down her throat. “I wasn’t sure I could get to the gun in time if he didn’t.”

  Amazed to see such a strong woman reduced to such fragility, Chad wrapped his arms around her protectively. The trembling her heavy jacket had hidden was more than evident now that he was so near. “Shh… it’s ok. He’s not going to hurt you. I’ll get rid of him.”

  She jumped back, shaking her head. “I need to do this interview now that I agreed to it, but if you could stay…”

  “I’ll stay on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “You start keeping coffee in the house. It’s too cold for water, and hot tea and I don’t mix.”

  “Deal.”

  Chad reached for the knob, but Willow stopped him. “I’m sorry, Chad. I feel so silly. I don’t know what is wrong with me, but I don’t like this man.”

  Her eyes, red with suppressed tears and from rubbing, pleaded with him making her seem more vulnerable than ever. Chad, fighting to reconcile this woman with the one who had put Chuck in his place and who butchered chickens without mercy, sent her upstairs. “I’ll go find him. You go wash your face or whatever you do to get rid of red eyes. What do I tell him?”

  “Anything you like. I trust you.”

  Outside, Chad saw Robert Belier wandering around the yard and speaking into a hand-held recorder. “Hey, Willow will be out in a minute. She had some things to do first.”

  “She’s fascinating. What can you tell me about her life here? Why did they choose such a remote existence?”

  “Willow lives five miles from town—I’d hardly call that remote.”

  “She lives at the end of an incredibly long driveway, it’s well known around Fairbury that until her mother died, no one knew anything about them except to stay off of their property, and even now, she turned down a lucrative job in Rockland to stay here. Why?”

  Chad began to understand Willow’s dislike. “Well, I’d hardly call managing a children’s clothing store ‘lucrative.’ It isn’t chump change but—”

  “Compared to her income here selling a few vegetables—” Robert insisted argumentatively.

  Patience thin, Chad chose to answer the original question. “Kari Finley moved here when she decided she wanted a more deliberate lifestyle. Her journals speak of living life similarly to Thoreau’s ‘sucking the marrow out of life.’”

  “So it didn’t have anything to do with being single, pregnant, and from a middle class evangelical family in the eighties?”

  “Her decision for this life was, I am sure, influenced by what she wanted for her child, but she left the city because of what she hoped to find here.”

  Robert nodded and continued. “How did she learn all of this?”

  “Forgive me if I’m rude, but what does this have to do with Willow designing for Boho?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “So why are you asking these questions?” Chad queried pointedly.

  “This article isn’t about her designs or Boho Deux. This article is about Willow Finley the designer. It’s part of a three part series we’re doing for the opening of the children’s annex of Boho. We’re doing one on the original store and their success, one on Willow Finley—who she is and how it will reflect in her clothing—and one on the new store and what it has to offer the discerning shopper in Rockland.”

  Chad’s bubble deflated. Willow obviously didn’t know why he’d come. “I see. I’m not sure Willow was aware of that when she agreed to the interview.”

  “Well, today’s reader doesn’t want to know what school someone went to or how they are just like everyone else but different. Today’s reader wants to know who someone is at their core. They want to understand who and what they are—and do.”

  Shaking his head, Chad stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know exactly what that means, but I do know that living here with her mother, and the way they lived, definitely had a huge impact on why Willow is such an excellent designer.”

  When Willow joined them several minutes later, she invited Robert into the house. “Come on in. I’ll show you around the house.”

  For the next hour, Robert toured the Finley home, heard stories of her childhood, watched the interaction between Chad and Willow, and filled h
is digital recorder with almost enough information for a book outline. The craft room held several mannequins with partially completed samples hanging on them. Even Chad, who had no eye for photography, could see that the picture would be incredible.

  Robert Belier stopped at the end of the driveway and took a picture of the Finley farm. The house and barn, barely visible behind richly colored trees with leaves that rained down at regular intervals, sat nestled in the fields. A tree to his right caught his attention, and he climbed over the fence for a closer look.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chad grabbed an armful of wood before he entered Willow’s kitchen. “Hey, need this in here or in there?”

  “Here’s fine. Then you can get out.” There was no humor in Willow’s voice.

  “Um, is something wrong?”

  “And take that article with you,” she added without elaboration.

  Chad stacked the wood next to the stove and picked up the Style magazine that came in Sunday’s papers. Open to a picture of Willow’s farm, the title caught his eye, and just as he realized that she stared at him with swords in her eyes, he sank into a chair to read the article.

  On Walden Farm

  Just outside the quaint town of Fairbury, with its weekly Farmer’s Market, old-fashioned town square, and uniformed cops walking a beat, sits a small farm nestled among rambling hills and fields. A dog greeted me at the end of a long driveway, barking and bouncing as most overgrown puppies do. Meet Saige, the latest member of the Finley family. Willow Finley met me on the porch with a tray of tea and homemade almond-cherry bars. A taste of heaven on earth, I assure you.

  Some twenty-odd years ago, Willow’s mother, Kari Anne Finley, disappeared from Rockland, leaving her family worried and concerned for her safety, and moved to the farm, pregnant with Willow. After several years of no contact, and when all leads to her whereabouts failed, they assumed the worst had happened and tried to pick up the pieces of their lives without her. This spring, however, news arrived that Kari had been living within an hour’s drive of their front door for nearly twenty-four years.

  Instead, hidden away from society, Kari and Willow grew their food, raised animals for food, and when not engaged in backbreaking labor for survival, spent hours creating beauty in every corner of their lives. I saw hand hooked rugs, quilts, candles, soap, and every scrap of paper in their home embellished in some unique way. The hand painted “wallpaper” in the old-fashioned parlor is just slightly more stunning than the hand-carved door and window trimming. Willow describes her life as a tribute to Thoreau’s “… liv[ing] life deliberately… sucking the marrow out of life.”

  While we sat around a woodstove that heated the water for our tea, Willow described her education, the skills she developed over the years, and the beautiful life they lived. Some have compared their life to the Amish, but Willow is quick to remind us that her mother rejected the Amish because of their theology and the limits set in how one can live their lives. I found a much stronger parallel to the life of famous author and illustrator, Tasha Tudor.

  You may wonder; what does all of this have to do with Rockland Metro Style? How does a life so far removed from the streets of our city affect us in any way? We don’t look to New Cheltenham for lifestyle choices or fashion sense, why a small farm outside of the modern equivalent of the fictional Mayberry, North Carolina?

  Since the death of her mother, Willow has expanded the scope of her farm. She now sells her produce in Fairbury’s weekly Farmer’s Market, and soon, her children’s clothing designs will be available in Boho Deux. This trendy store, catty-cornered from Boho Chic on Boutique Row, will feature all the style we’ve come to expect from the highly successful garment center but designed for younger fashion connoisseurs.

  When I spoke to the manager of the upcoming store, Lee Wu, I asked how someone so far removed from society, and with no fashion exposure, much less experience, was considered for such an important position, Lee was animated in her defense of their decision. In fact, according to Ms. Wu, without Willow’s assistance, Lee wouldn’t have the job she now holds as general manager of Boho Deux.

  “The owners of Boho wanted a complete package—designer and manager. Willow said no. As much as she loved the design aspect of the job, she wasn’t willing to move from her farm, so she suggested the current set-up.”

  It’s hard to imagine a completely un-socialized farmgirl without even a high school diploma as the sole designer for an exclusive children’s boutique, but it’s true. The reaction to her designs has been overwhelmingly positive. I am far from a fashion expert, but the pieces I saw in the little craft room in the second floor bedroom of Willow’s farmhouse were far nicer than anything I’ve seen on my nieces and all were definitely unique. Far from the crafty bumpkinesque pieces one would expect, they’re hip, cool, and yet hold a trace of the whimsy that seems to be missing from most modern children’s wear.

  As I drove away from what I have affectionately dubbed Walden Farm, a lone tree in a pasture next to the driveway captured my attention. Had it been a willow tree, it would have been poetic in its eloquence. Instead, a hearty oak, sprawling yet protective, spreads its branches over a relatively new grave. The hand carved headstone nearly tore my heart. There was no mention of the family left behind, the epitaph simply reads, “Mother, Friend, Mentor.”

  Since returning to Rockland, I think I have a better idea of what happened to tear Kari so abruptly from her family. It wasn’t the heartless tantrum of an angry daughter, or a cult-like rejection of modernity. Kari Finley was horribly damaged that autumn. Those close to Willow insist that after a brutal rape, the family of her attacker paid her handsomely to leave town. Such a strong woman is unlikely to accept a threat like that, but we all have our Achilles heel. For Kari Finley, the safety of the baby conceived in rage and violence was more important than anything else.

  Such a hard beginning. Does Willow ever wonder how her mother could stand to look at her? Did she ever feel the rejection that Kari surely must have felt? If she did, just as her mother before her, Willow Finley has risen above it. She’s a strong, beautiful young woman with an immensely successful career ahead of her. I wish her well—and I’d love the recipe for those almond-cherry bars.

  The paper dropped from his hands. Before Chad could choke out a response, Willow’s voice, low and terrible, pierced his consciousness. “My name is Willow Anne Finley. You killed my reputation. Get out of my life.”

  The slight attempt at humor didn’t cover her pain as much as she’d hoped. She felt betrayed by the one person she thought she could trust. Choking back the tears she had fought all morning, Willow tried again. “Chad, go. I am serious. This is just too much.”

  “You blame me?” he murmured in disbelief.

  “You gave most of the interview out there. I told you to tell him anything. I take responsibility for that and the fact that I trusted you when my mother taught me better. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “He asked me why your mother bought this farm,” Chad began. When she looked ready to flee, he rose, holding her arm to keep her from leaving. “I told him your mother wanted to live a quieter life out of the city. I never mentioned her attack, her family, or the rich guy.”

  Willow wrenched away glaring at him. “How else—”

  Chad shoved his hands into his pockets as he paced. “I don’t know! I can’t believe you think I would do this!”

  “Well I don’t want to think that, but the facts are that you talked to him, and he wrote it. Lee is thrilled, and I am terrified.”

  That was unexpected. He understood anger at the breach of privacy, but fear... He led her to the couch and gave her a gentle nudge. “Sit. Let’s talk.”

  Times like this reminded Chad of why he hadn’t wanted to make a friend of Willow in the first place. He didn’t have the patience for problems. His work was problem prevention and resolution. The last thing he needed was more conflict on his days off. He’d predicted that she’d be time c
onsuming, frustrating, and irritating. He’d been right.

  His words from the previous week echoed through his conscience. He couldn’t let her down, and if he was honest with himself, most of the time, he didn’t want to. “Why are you afraid?”

  “Mother left to protect me. She thought if that man knew I existed that I’d be in danger. The idea of someone like that reading this article seems crazy but—”

  Chad sat at her feet and took her hands in his. “I think your mother misunderstood what that man meant when he gave her that money.”

  “She said he told her—”

  Very patiently, Chad tried to explain the situation as he saw it. “She could have had the guy arrested. He’d have done time, I’m sure.”

  “Done time?”

  “Gone to prison. Probably for three to five years. If the man was willing to pay her off, I’m thinking he knew other people would come forward with similar stories.”

  “Ok.” She clearly didn’t understand what Chad was trying to explain.

  “The more people who accused him of rape, the longer his jail sentence. If she pressed charges, it would make the paper, and that starts the snowball. Guys like that don’t write checks that big for a single situation. They have high-priced lawyers to take care of things like that. But multiple problems—”

  “So you’re saying you think this man hurt more women than just my mother!”

  Chad stared at the white knuckles on Willow’s hands. His fingers were slowly growing numb as she squeezed the blood from them. “I’m saying that no man pays out a million dollars because his son drank too much and attacked a woman. He pays off someone who has the ability to beat his lawyers in court.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”