run the Waggin’ Tongue together for a hundred years, old friends, apparently without romantic involvement, though speculation in Elmwood ran high.
Harry pushed open the swinging door from his domain. “Charlie’s little one?”
“Have you seen her?” Charlie asked, real panic lacing his voice now and wrapping his throat tight. He purposefully swallowed the alarm and took a deep, measured breath to keep his thoughts rational.
“Haven’t seen anyone. Been in the back room countin’ supplies.”
Unconvinced until he saw for himself, Charlie pushed past Harry. A few cartons had been stacked here and there; a chain guard and bolt locked the rear door. He inspected the back room, where Harry’s grocery list lay on a stool.
“She has to be here somewhere,” he said to convince himself, pushing through the swinging door and hurrying to check places he’d obviously missed.
He peered under every table and booth, behind the potted plants. He straightened like a shot. Her puffy pink coat was gone. Turning and staring at the empty seat, his frazzled brain registered what the absence of Meredith’s coat meant. “She went outside.”
Without bothering to grab his own coat, he sprinted out the front door. She must have tired of waiting for him, or still pouting, had gone out to the Jeep to wait. Maybe she’d been impatient to get to the library.
Fully expecting—praying—to find her in the unlocked vehicle, he ran forward and yanked open the passenger side door. His gaze shot to the empty seat…the bare floor. No puffy pink coat. No angel book. No Meredith.
Leaving the door standing open, Charlie stared around the deserted parking lot, the frigid biting wind bringing tears to his eyes, his chest hurting as though someone was standing on it.
Running back toward the café, he studied the ground for footprints. Something caught his eye, and he bent to pick it up. A pink mitten.
Charlie held it while the pressure in his chest built to a painful crush. The area in front of the door was completely trampled, and his own boot prints were plainly visible, though quickly filling with blowing snow. The wind erased any evidence within precious minutes.
Shirley opened the door and called out. “Find her, Charlie?”
He shook his head, trying to make sense of Meredith’s disappearance, trying to keep his terror under control so he could think straight and find her.
Harry, bundled in a plaid wool coat, brought Charlie’s brown leather jacket out to him. Charlie pulled it on and stuffed the mitten into the pocket. Together they made a circular check of the building and the parking lot, checked the locked car that sat at the corner with a For Sale sign obliterated by snow. They searched beside the ice machine and the cold drink machines and inside the enormous trash container.
“I’d better call the sheriff,” Charlie said, his voice as calm as though someone else was speaking. Odd, because on the inside he was screaming his head off and crying like a baby. “And I need to check the library.”
Shirley wore a stricken look of concern when they returned and Charlie lunged toward the phone behind the counter. She grabbed Harry’s arm and the café owners watched Charlie with eyes round and wide. Nothing like this ever happened in Elmwood. No one had ever been—
Charlie stopped his thoughts dead and punched numbers on the phone. The deputy, Duane Quinn, answered. “This is Charlie McGraw,” he managed to say. “My daughter is missing.”
Chapter Two
Time had never passed so slowly. Charlie threw up his meal, followed later by the cup of coffee he drank to calm his nerves and wash the taste of fear out of his mouth. The sheriff, Bryce Olson, showed up and made the same search of the premises, coming to the same conclusion: Meredith was nowhere to be found. Bryce jotted notes on an incident report clamped to a clipboard.
“Who else has been in here?” he asked Shirley. The lawman showed genuine concern, which comforted Charlie at the same time it terrified him, because this was all too real.
“The Perrys were here,” Shirley told Bryce. “The Bradfords, too. And a lovely young woman trucker. That’s it. Weather’s keeping people home.”
At her mention of the weather, Charlie’s alarm intensified. Had Meredith run off into the cold alone? She wouldn’t. Would she? She was only five; she didn’t know all the dangers.
Had someone taken her out on the treacherous snow-drifted roads? Deliberately taken her?
“Let’s call the Perrys and the Bradfords,” Bryce said. “What about this woman you mentioned? Anything suspicious about her?”
Shirley shook her head. “Had some soup and bought coffee to go.”
Charlie knew there were plenty of demented people in the world. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the possibility of that beautiful young woman being a part of anything like that. But the television news relayed stories every week about abducted children. He’d heard all those horror stories about teenage girls being drugged and taken away from malls to be sold into prostitution. His stomach contracted again.
Meredith had to be all right, because Charlie didn’t know how he could deal with it if she wasn’t. If anything happened to his little girl…or if he never knew what became of her…
Stop. Get a grip on yourself. There’s a simple explanation. She would turn up and he’d have to decide whether to spank her or hug her first. Even if that woman was part of a kidnapping operation, how would she have known that she’d find a child in this particular out-of-the-way café in a storm? The hand he raised to his forehead was shaking, so he stuffed it into his jacket pocket…where his fingers found the soft material of her mitten.
Panic rose in his throat and he swallowed it down.
Bryce’s cell phone rang and he answered it quickly. “Olson. Yeah, Sharon.” Sharon was the sheriff’s dispatcher, and Bryce listened before he spoke. “Nothing, huh. Okay. Give me numbers for Forrest Perry and Kevin Bradford.” A moment later Bryce jotted phone numbers on the edge of his paper. “Okay. Stay put.” He disconnected the call.
“Clarey Fenton closed the library early,” he told Charlie. “Over an hour ago. Duane checked the streets between here and there. Nothing.”
Charlie absorbed the information.
The sheriff called both of the families who’d been in the café and learned nothing, then clipped the phone to his belt. “I’m gonna call the state boys.”
Charlie nodded, numbness setting in.
“We should probably even have ’em watch the road for that truck, since it’s our only other possibility.”
“It had an angel on the side,” Charlie said. “The cab was silver with blue detailing, and the logo on the door read Silver Angel.”
“Real good, Charlie. That’ll give ’em something to go on.”
“Maybe she tried to go home,” Charlie said suddenly.
“Would Meredith do that?”
“This whole thing doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what she’d do. I’d better drive along the road and look.”
“I’ll get my truck and we can check both sides,” Harry said.
It was two miles to Charlie’s log home. A long way for a little girl in a snowstorm. A little girl without snow boots or insulated pants. He’d carried her from the house to the Jeep and from the Jeep to the café.
If Meredith was trying to walk, she could easily veer off the road or fall into a ditch.
Charlie got out every fifty feet or so and surveyed the sides of the road and the wooded areas, even calling her name. If she was out here, she might hear him.
But he didn’t know.