“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. He just didn’t know where she might be and that was the worst. A patrol car paused beside him. Duane Quinn rolled down the window. “I’ll check up ahead, Charlie. We’ll take turns and that way, we’ll have the entire road covered. Bryce has organized a search in town.”
Charlie nodded, grateful, but desperation and self-reproach were clamping down hard on his control. She’d been bored and lonely, and he’d been putting in long hours at his shop. He could have taken time to go pick out a tree and decorate it—should have, but work dulled the edges of his pain like a narcotic.
He hadn’t been there for his child. He’d wasted all those precious hours he should have been spending with her. What would any of that matter if something happened to her?
Duane drove the cruiser on ahead, and Charlie watched the tire tracks fill with snow. His gaze traveled to the bleak, barren trees and white-covered undergrowth. He reached into his pocket and fingered the soft mitten.
Meredith could be anywhere. He pictured her dark hair curling against her neck and the shoulders of her pink coat; remembered those blue eyes, eyes of innocence. His child, so full of life and questions that she bubbled over with energy, could be in serious danger, and he was helpless.
With the thick snow falling around him, blanketing the road and the countryside with silence, Charlie gazed heavenward…and prayed.
“‘You’ve got a way with me. Somehow you got me to believe…in everything that I could be….’” Starla Richards sang along with her Notting Hill CD, the coffee she’d been nursing giving her the energy she’d needed. She glanced at the digital clock on the dash. About another six hours to Nashville, unless the storm got worse. Hopefully, the farther south she went, she’d drive out of it.
The windshield wipers kept the snow out of her line of vision, but packed it at the bottom of the windshield and occasionally stuck to the wipers in a squeaky blob that ricocheted to and fro before finally knocking itself loose.
“‘I gotta say, you really got a way…’”
Not exactly how she’d planned to spend the week before Christmas. She should be trying out her lobster gumbo recipe and watering the Christmas tree in her apartment back home in Maine. The grand opening of her restaurant was scheduled two weeks from now and she had plenty of preparations left. But as luck would have it, her dad had broken his leg and landed himself in traction just when this load needed delivery in time for a juicy bonus.
It had been nearly three years since she’d driven a load, two and a half of those years spent in culinary arts school, finishing her degree. Starla hadn’t wanted any part of the road again. Not for any reason.
But this was different. Her dad needed help with the only other thing besides her that meant anything to him, the only thing he’d wanted since her mother had died—this rig. And she hadn’t been able to refuse running the load. She’d grown up on the road, eaten in greasy-spoon restaurants and showered in concrete-block stalls since she was thirteen. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what to do, how to drive, keep the log sheets, make the safety checks. She’d fallen right back into the routine as though she’d never been away.
This truck was much nicer than the one they’d shared all those years. The Silver Angel was her dad’s dream rig.
She would call him in another half hour, just before his neighbor brought him supper, because he would be watching the weather channel and charting her progress. Humming, she plugged her cell phone into the charger and made sure the green light came on.
A soft sound distracted her and she turned down the stereo volume to listen. Nothing coming from the engine. She checked the side mirrors and the road behind her and, once satisfied that it had been nothing, she turned the music back up.
A sound came again. Louder this time, and unmistakably from the sleeper area behind her. Heart lurching, she cautiously leaned to the glove box and pulled out her dad’s revolver. It could be an animal. A cat or a raccoon might have slipped in while she’d been doing her log check. How many times had her dad cautioned her to close the door after grabbing the clipboard?
Starla scanned the white-blanketed vista ahead and behind, then guided the rig off to the side of the road and put the transmission in Park, at the same time unfastening her seat belt.
Jabbing the power button on the stereo, she plunged the cab into silence and turned sideways in the seat to get up. Crouched beneath the head liner, she stepped to the doorway and flipped on the overhead light. There was room to stand straight in the sleeper and she moved forward.
A bundle of bunched covers in the corner of the bed rustled. The hump was bigger than a cat or a raccoon. Heart hammering, she swallowed hard and pointed the gun. “What are you doing back here?”
The covers moved again. Not really a big enough lump to be a person—unless it was a very small person. Keeping the revolver at the steady in her right hand, she leaned forward and, with her left, jerked the blankets away.
She saw a tumble of dark hair first, followed by a small white face and blue eyes. A child!
Quickly Starla jammed the revolver into a storage cabinet overhead and bent to the little girl. “What are you doing here? How did you get in? Who are you?”
The child’s lower lip quivered, and her gaze moved to the cabinet above and back to Starla. “I’m Meredith.”
Completely confused, but relieved that her intruder was harmless, Starla sat on the edge of the bunk. “What are you doing in my truck?”
The girl sat up swiftly, all signs of worry erased, and crossed her stockinged legs. She wore a red jumper with a Sesame Street character on the bib. Grover, maybe. No, Elmo, that was the red one. “You have to help my daddy.”
Knowing full well there was no one else hiding in this cramped space, Starla looked around, anyway. “Where’s your daddy? What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s at home. And he’s sad. That’s why you have to help. If you sprinkle some of your miracle dust on him so he can be happy again, I know he’ll find me a new mommy.”
Starla rubbed her brow in confusion. “Where is home?”
Meredith shrugged.
Starla pressed, “Where do you live?”
“In a brown house.”
Oh, my goodness. Placing her hands on her knees and biting her lip, Starla concentrated. Couldn’t be too hard to figure out where the kid had come from. The last place she’d stopped had been that café back on the highway a while back.
Of course. The pieces of mental puzzle slipped into place. This child had been seated at a booth with her father. Everyone in the place had stared at the stranger, the lady truck driver, but this little girl had waved and looked happy to see her. “Do I look like somebody you know?”
Meredith nodded happily.
“Who? Your mommy?”
The child frowned then and shook her head.
“Who do I look like?”
“You’re the angel, like the one in my book.” She pointed to the colorful cover. “See?”
“I’m not an angel,” Starla denied, glancing at the picture of the platinum-haired celestial