After much deliberation, Luke and Chad decided that the dining room wall, behind the chaise, was the most logical place for a doorway to what they assumed was a small bathroom. Measurement wise, Luke was sure it was a full sized bathroom, but Willow disagreed. Compared to the upstairs room, it wasn’t possible to fit everything in what looked like too small of a space.
While Luke measured, tapped on walls, and made an educated guess as to the original doorframe, Willow ran her hands over the wall and pointed out the hand painted “paper stripes and flowers” that she and her mother had painted so many years earlier to her son. “See, Liam? Those flowers were the first things I painted in this house. Mother painted the stripes, and I painted the vines. Then, when she had all those little dots painted, I came back and did the flowers.”
“We’ll be careful, Lass. We will. Luke won’t tear up anything he doesn’t have to.”
“Chad’s right. Your mother walled this up correctly, but I can still find where the studs are off. Look.” Luke tapped the wall from the smaller end of the staircase over to where he thought the door was, making note of each solid thud where he thought a stud would be. “The studs are exactly sixteen inches apart until here. Then there are these four in a row and they’re much closer together. I think that’s the door frame and two studs to fill in the hole—a bit of overkill, but it’s my guess.”
“I know,” Willow assured them. “I just can’t watch. Liam and I are going to go see if Ryder has picked out the heirloom house.” She glanced back. “Just don’t let Lucas get whacked in the head.”
Luke gave Chad an amused smile and started to cut a hole in the wall. “She is so matter-of-fact about everything, isn’t she?”
“That’s Willow. I always think I’ll get used to her quirks, but I never do.”
“That’s probably half of her charm, eh?” Luke pulled an eight by eight chunk of drywall out of the wall. Reaching in, he began cutting on the other side of the wall. “What is the heirloom house?”
“Ryder has done such a good job propagating heirloom seeds, that Willow is letting him built a new greenhouse so that they aren’t mixing pollination or whatever it is that plants do.”
“Aaah. That makes sense. Are you going to have separate gardens too?” Luke popped another section out from the other side of the wall and withdrew his hand. After peeking through the holes, he looked at Chad with a grin. “This is it. I see a sink and where a window used to be. It’s just sided right over without moving the window or anything.”
“Well, cut out the rest of that section. Can we get through there?”
Luke shook his head. “There’s only maybe 10 inches. It’d be a rough squeeze. Let’s see what we find at the top.”
While Chad blew raspberries on his son’s belly, Luke sawed the entire section from the wall. “Hey, grab me that Phillip’s screwdriver, will ya?”
Chad grabbed it from his cousin’s tool belt on the floor. “If you had that thing on—”
“Then I’d certainly be unable to squeeze through. It looks like Kari Finley added these boards with L-brackets.”
“Makes sense.”
“That woman,” Luke began as he removed the screws that held the board in place, “was obviously a very sensible woman. Aggie has helped with all kinds of renovations, but I doubt she’d think of L-brackets.” He started to push on the board, but then realized there were screws in the stud holding the drywall to it. Taking his knife, he cut the drywall across the stud and then used his saw to go back down the other side of it. “Here goes nothing.” Luke kicked and the stud jerked out of place.
“Yay! Look, Lucas! Uncle Luke did it!”
“Do you think we’re going to confuse our kids by using uncle when we’re not brothers?”
“That is exactly what Willow asked,” Chad said, shaking his head. “But what else do we do? First names seem a bit too casual, ‘Cousin Luke’ seems too formal, and what else is there?”
“That’s what Mom says, but it still seems weird. Maybe we’re over thinking things.” With a final jerk, Luke pulled the board from the opening and carried it out to the front porch. While he was gone, Luke peeked in the hole, unsure what kind of critters he’d find. Willow would happily pulverize him if he took her son in a vermin or critter infested room.
“Looks like you were right. Willow owes you cherry almond bars. I see a tub, sink, toilet, and even a small cupboard.”
“Aren’t you going in?” Luke stopped next to Chad expectantly.
Chad passed his son over to Luke and stepped inside the room. A layer of dirt covered everything. Mold grew around the window, and the musty stench was revolting. The toilet had no water, the sink faucet, when he turned the handle, didn’t work. He pushed the shower curtain aside, coughing at the dust it stirred, and frowned. “Hey, Luke. Can you put Lucas in the playpen and come look at this?”
As he stepped through the door, Luke frowned. “Why is there concrete in the tub?”
“That’s what I wondered. I didn’t know if it really was or not.”
He ran his hand lightly over the rough surface of unsmoothed concrete. “I don’t understand. It isn’t even smoothed.”
Confused, Chad glanced around the room again, trying to find some reason that Kari would have a tub filled with concrete. He lifted the lid of the toilet tank, opened the cupboards, and pried open the medicine cabinet. An envelope sat on the middle shelf. Dread filled his heart as he lifted the flap. The glue, deteriorated by age, gave no resistance. After reading the first few words, Chad looked up at Luke.
“Oh, no. Oh, oh, no.”
***
“You need to read this, Lass. I’m so sorry. There’s no way to prepare you for it—”
Willow unfolded the paper and read the note, penned in her mother’s familiar handwriting, and dated the summer she’d turned two.
August 4, 1985(6),
To Whom It May Concern,
I, Kari Anne Finley, confess to the murder of Jason Rosser a man with physical characteristics that are remarkably similar to Steven Solari Jr.
The man appeared at my door, tried to get me to talk to him, and when I saw who it was, I reacted on instinct out of fear for my life and the life of my daughter, grabbed my shotgun, and killed him. When I went to move the dead man, I realized that I’d shot the wrong person. For this, I an deeply sorry.
I would have confessed my actions to the police, but my daughter’s safety depends on no one knowing she’s alive. This would certainly have made the news. I cannot risk that. The man’s driver’s license, credit cards, and vehicle registration are all in the envelope with this confession to help you notify the man’s family. Please extend my apologies for what I’ve done. I know I can’t be forgiven, but I am so deeply sorry.
If it is not clearly evident, you’ll find the Mr. Rosser’s body in my bathtub of this bathroom. I foolishly thought I could cover him with the concrete to prevent the stench of decay and then transport him out with a dolley, but I wasn’t strong enough to move it. I will wall up the room, and I assume I’ll be dead before this is found.
Mr. Rosser’s vehicle is buried at the back corner of the east pasture just inside the tree line. There were no trees there when I rented the backhoe and dug it out, but I planted a row of birch diagonally across that section to make it easy to find.
Kari Anne Finley
Tears poured down Willow’s face as she read the letter. Things that had seemed extreme in the light of her life of the past few years made a little more sense to her now. Why strangers were met with a shotgun before they could even come close to the house, why Kari always refused to allow the animals in that east corner of the pasture, and a few ambiguous journal entries suddenly made perfect sense.
“Now I know why she didn’t write about the hassles of climbing the stairs while pregnant with me. She didn’t.”
Of all the things Willow could say, that was the last thing Chad and Luke expected if the looks on their faces could be trusted. Chad knelt beside her, trying to grasp whatever was going through her mind. “I have to call the chief, Lass. He’ll probably have to call the sheriff.”
“Why? Can’t you take this letter and the papers and use your Internet thing and find the family that way?”
“Willow,” he tried again as gently as he could, “our bathroom is technically a crime scene.”
“No, that would be our porch. Mother shot him on the porch, remember?”
“She put the body in the bathroom. It is also part of the crime scene as is the east pasture. They’re going to have to dig up that car.”
“Why? It won’t run anymore, it can’t tell them anything Mother didn’t… why ruin our pasture—”
“It’s the law, Lass.” He knew, even as he spoke, exactly what her response would be.
“It’s a stupid law that infringes on my rights as a property owner. It benefits no one and damages my property. I understand the bathtub. They should get to take that and bury it properly, but to tear up a field for something worthless is ridiculous.” A new thought came to her, one Chad couldn’t have anticipated. “What if I offer to purchase the car from the family? I could pay whatever is reasonable, they could sign over the deed—”
“Title,” he corrected automatically.
“Yes, title, and then my field isn’t destroyed by machinery and a gaping hole.”
He shook his head even as she spoke. “It can’t be done, Willow. We’ll fix it. This isn’t your fault, but the family deserves that closure.”
“Can we keep the newspapers and television people out of here?”
“You can keep them off the property, but not away from the road.”
Willow’s head snapped up. “They’re going to say terrible things about Mother, aren’t they?”
Luke’s pained eyes answered her before Chad ever raised his head again. “Yes.”
“And me too, I suppose.” She took a deep breath. “I want you to arrest anyone who sets foot on this property, touches our fences—anything. It’s trespassing and I won’t have it.”
Shoulders slumped, Chad turned and walked toward the house, flipping open his phone. Luke stared down at Willow seated on the swing with a sleeping Liam in her arms. “Willow?”
“Yes?” She hardly glanced at him, still fighting the overwhelming desire to sob.
“Think of Chad a little as you deal with this. I know it’s hard on you, but politically speaking, this might just be the death of his dream of becoming sheriff around here.”
“Why? He did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. Why should this hurt him?” The idea seemed preposterous.
“Because people don’t think in terms of a person’s actions. They think in terms of what that person is associated with. They’re going to remember Chad’s name, body in his house, and recoil. It’s what people do.”
“I think people should start thinking in terms of wise decisions instead of irrational emotions. I would think they would want a man who found a body and did all the proper legal things to take care of it, even at the expense and inconvenience of his own property.”
She stood, shifted Liam over one shoulder, and gave Luke a one-armed hug. “Thank you for telling me, Luke. I would never have imagined. We’ll find a way to fight it when that time comes. Chad always says that public opinion follows whatever those in power spin it to be. We’ll have to find a way to be the spinners that time.” Willow shook her head. “I can’t believe how fickle people are sometimes.
***
At two o’clock, Chad dragged himself up the steps and into the kitchen. Chili and cornbread waited for him on the warming shelf of the kitchen stove. It had been a very long and exhausting week. Between normal farm work, his job, and the excavation of the vehicle from their field, he’d barely had a moment to relax. He’d stumbled home from work each day, collapsed in bed, and then got up and did it all over without any time to unwind.
The sheriff’s department was through with their excavation, but the Tesdall’s nightmare had just begun. Once the media grabbed the story, their name, life, and history was dragged through more muck than even he’d imagined. Thankfully, after the first day, Willow hadn’t asked anymore and had been too busy to go into town. He planned to do everything possible to avoid her going for the next month. Hopefully by then, a new sensation would grab the inhabitants of Rockland.
He felt jittery—too mentally keyed up to sleep and too physically exhausted to do anything but sleep. As he passed through the living room, Chad noticed Willow’s journal half-covered by a stack of fabrics that had obviously come from Boho. A few minutes lost in his wife’s latest thoughts and activities seemed like the perfect end to a horrible week.
March—
It’s been one of the worst weeks of my life. Mother’s death was obviously one of those, and then there was the time when I kept Chad away from me. Those were horrible weeks, but this is just a whole new level of awfulness. My mother murdered a man to protect me. A man’s family suffered for over two decades wondering where he went, why he didn’t come home, if he’d abandoned them or had some horrible thing happen.
Fear is a terrible thing, I’ve decided. Mother used fear to protect us. I understand how and why, but I don’t want to use fear with my boys and with the new child I pray we still get to have. I can’t help but wonder if Chelsea and her family will refuse to let their child enter such a tainted home. It’s strange how people think. I never can understand it. Somehow I have to learn a new way to teach my children caution and yet ensure they learn to trust the Lord rather than listen to their fear. It’s strange, I always saw Mother as a very strong and courageous woman. She seemed the epitome of reliant faith and trust, but I see now that along with all of that was the kind of mind-numbing fear that can destroy faith. In many ways, Mother trusted herself more than her Lord. Do I do that? I’d like to ask Chad, but I’m not ready for the answer.
Chad is weary. I see him flexing his hand, which is usually an indicator of physical overwork, but he won’t rest. He seems eager to be away from us right now. I can’t decide if it’s to protect us or if the sting of what this all could mean just hurts more when he’s near me. I refuse to believe that there is not a way to use this to help him in his career rather than allow it to damage it. I am afraid there is more of my grandfather in me than I like to admit.
Granddad and Grandmom Finley are devastated by this. Some of their friends have shunned them, and Granddad has stepped down as an elder in their church. I understand why, but I hate it. It kills me that Mother’s mistake is damaging so many lives and so long after it happened. She used to say, “Willow, every action you take has far-reaching consequences— both good and bad. Make sure you choose actions that you can live with the resulting consequences.” I now know a little bit of what she meant.
On a brighter note, Lucas walked today. He saw me in the kitchen doorway, stood in the middle of the floor and toddled right up to me as if he’d been doing it for years. Oh, his little feet were unsteady and he stumbled twice, but he just got up and kept coming as if it was normal. Liam seems quite disgusted. He has tried to follow in his brother’s footsteps but every time he lifts that foot without his hand steadying him on furniture, down he goes. The wails are of absolute fury and frustration, not because he injures himself on the twelve inches from bum to floor.
The greenhouse plans were put on hold during the excavation, but now that there are no more sheriff cars coming and going
Chad smiled at the abrupt stop. Had Liam fallen in another attempt and hurt himself that time? Did she get a phone call, have to change a diaper, or realize how late it was and stopped mid sentence?
He hadn’t realized how personally she’d take the potential damage to his career. He also hadn’t realized that he’d been aloof. His attempts to protect her from media garbage had done little more than make her feel alienated. He’d have to remedy that.
“Lord, I had no idea when I wanted to open that bathroom that we’d be dealing with this kind of thing. Now what do I do with it?”
I was so excited about this, and then on the day I planned to draw, I got caught up in editing my new book, 
