Ollie Vance - Book One: Secrets and Sparks

Chapter One

        Willow is a town 6,000 strong—at least that’s what the town’s welcome sign says.

Most consider it a summer destination because of the great big lake between two minor rivers just right along the edge of town that attract tourists during the warmer seasons from all over the prairies.

It’s called Moon Cross Lake and across it, just right along the public beach, is the row of inns, restaurants and bars. Behind it is Kingston Avenue which is parallel to the main downtown area full of tiny shops and stores selling food, supplies, financial and travel services, gifts and souvenirs and all sorts of little businesses that strive on tourist dollar. 

Parallel to that is Carter Avenue where alongside of it stand what’s left of the commercial establishments and the local government offices like the town hall, registry, post office and the police station.

Right behind it is Sigler Avenue and after that would be blocks and blocks of houses for the residents of Willow. On a map, it looked like a multi-layered cake with a lake on top of it.

I used the cake analogy because I own a bakeshop just at the corner of Carter Avenue and Howard Street called Belle’s, well, Bakeshop.

My mother started it after she and my Dad moved to Willow about thirty-five years ago when the flour mill opened on the industrial section of the town just south of Keeping River where the lake trickled to.

My father was the head engineer and manned the operation for a over a decade. My mother had a business degree and a sweet tooth, thus the bakeshop.

My name is Olivia Vance. Ollie for short. 

My twin brother Jesse and I were born and raised in Willow. 

Dad died of a cardiac arrest when we were fifteen and Mom followed a couple of years after that. To be perfectly honest, Jesse and I were convinced she had died along with Dad and her body just took longer to deteriorate. They had been best friends more than they had been husband and wife. They went out on romantic walks after they put us to bed in the evening and we always walked in on them smiling or laughing and holding hands and they did not feel a bit embarrassed about it. We had not once heard them fight or talk to each other nastily. 

Orphaned at eighteen, Jesse decided to head out to California on a football scholarship with UCLA. My brother is an ambitious person and I grew up to him always talking about what was out there, beyond the rolling farmlands that surrounded Willow. He wanted me to go with him but unlike Jesse, my heart was in Willow, in the bakeshop, in our beautiful, two-story country house along the lake that Dad built for Mom two years after they settled in town.

He left and I started running the bakeshop while taking business courses and some culinary training in the community college two towns away on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Almost ten years later, the bakeshop still remains as a local and tourist favorite now offering brunch and lunch menus, I still live in the our country house, and Willow, now without the flour mill which closed two years after my father’s death, is still surviving mainly on tourism revenue. 

Life in the town was as it has always been until early spring when we heard some unexpected news.

“We sure have some challenging times ahead,” Kirk O’Riley was saying to Wilma and Martin Kellerman who were having brunch with him by the corner window of the bakeshop.

I put down a plate of fresh blueberry pancakes and pork sausages in front of Kirk, a plate of sliced bagel and cream cheese for Wilma and a red-potato-and-bacon skillet for Martin who looked like he’d been having too many of these skillets based on the heaping of belly over his waistline.