“They have to be here,” Bruce said. “There isn’t anywhere else to be. We just can’t see them.” He paused for a second before calling out “Carly?”
There was still too much noise in the room to be heard. “Carly!” Bruce called out louder as Kelly called, “Lulu!”
Bill Williams walked by with Ruth. “Everything okay?”
“We can’t see the girls,” Kelly said with as much calm as she could muster with her heart going off like a fire alarm.
“Oh, they’ve got to be here,” Bill said. “Sneaking into the kitchen for more chocolate, perhaps? Or up to Bruce’s room?”
“I left it unlocked,” Bruce said, heading for the stairs. Kelly started dashing around the room, asking everyone if they’d seen Lulu or Carly. No one had—not in the past few minutes anyway.
Bruce came back down the stairs, taking them three at a time. “Not up there.”
Panic made the air go thin. “Where could they have gone?”
She tried to think how long it had been since she’d been talking with Carly. Not long, but things had gone a little haywire when the lights came back on. She’d been so caught up in relief that she hadn’t paid attention. How could she not pay attention?
Bruce was fighting to stay calm. “It’s still nasty outside. They’ve got to be somewhere in the inn.”
Bill stood up on an ottoman near the front of the room. “Does anyone know where Lulu and Carly are?”
One hand clutched at Kelly’s chest while the other reached out to Bruce. Heads turned all around the room and murmured questions buzzed through the crowd. She waited for someone to call out, “Here they are!” but no one did.
They wouldn’t get the crazy notion to leave the party, would they? She and Bruce had just explained to them—again—that their valentine “wish” wasn’t going to happen. Perhaps they were confused and upset enough to want to get away from the celebration.
“Lulu’s coat,” Kelly said, getting an idea. “Let’s go see if it’s gone.” Together she and Bruce made for the inn’s coatroom at a run.
“Not here.” Kelly could barely get the words out as she saw the empty hanger next to hers. She turned to Bruce. “Was Carly’s gone from your room?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think to look. But they have to be together.”
“Why on earth would they go outside?”
Bruce stared at her. “To your house. They must have gone to your house.”
“That’s four blocks from here,” Kelly exclaimed. “Why would they go there in this weather?”
“Why do kids do anything?” he barked, grabbing her coat from the hanger and thrusting it at her. “Let’s go.”
“But your coat...”
He was already heading for the door, grabbing one of the flashlights that Hailey had set out on the lobby table. She ran to keep up with him as he headed straight for his truck parked out front, pulling his keys from his pocket and hitting the fob to unlock the doors. “What are those two thinking?” he said as he gunned the engine and roared out of the parking space, snow flying off the truck as it turned.
“What they’ve been telling us the whole time—that they want to be together.”
He didn’t reply but took the corner to her house a bit faster than he should have on the ice. “Slow down, Bruce.”
“My five-year-old daughter is out in a snowstorm God knows where and you want me to be patient?” he said as he wrestled the truck back under control. “We should have been watching. We should have been paying attention.”
His words lit fire to the panic she was trying to keep in check. She should have been paying more attention, keeping an eye on Lulu rather than getting caught up in how the party had wondrously come together. “It’s my fault,” she said as they reached her house. “I should have been more gentle to Carly when she told me I make you happy.”
She regretted not watching her words more carefully, noticing the momentary pause before he shut off the engine. He didn’t reply, confirming her suspicion that Lulu had made a similar comment to Bruce. Apparently the girls had planned this. No doubt they were upset it hadn’t panned out again. Her heart twisted at the girls’ bittersweet, insistent optimism, while her brain ran through a dozen treacherous scenes of snowdrifts, frozen creeks and lost little girls. “Oh, Bruce, what have they done?”
“Hopefully just gone to hide in your house,” Bruce said, leaving the truck’s headlamps on to illuminate the front yard. “There, look.” The wind had whipped the snow, but not so much that she couldn’t see the remnants of two recent sets of small footprints leading to the side door where Lulu knew a spare key was hidden under the railing.
“This is my fault,” Bruce said as they dashed toward the door, snow gathering on the sweater he wore and in his dark hair. “I should never have...”
“Don’t,” she said as she pushed open the door, relieved to see it unlocked—further evidence they’d found the girls.
Except they hadn’t. The first floor was empty. “Lulu!” she shouted as she ran up the stairs to the dark second floor. Below her she heard Bruce rushing through the house shouting the girls’ names. They weren’t here. Kelly grabbed at the stair railing, nearly dizzy from panic. The weather could not take someone else she loved. “Father God,” she moaned, “don’t let them come to harm. Protect them until we find them.”
“Where are they?” Bruce yelled into the empty rooms, his eyes lit with fear. “Where’d they go?”
“I don’t know,” she cried, the mounting panic making it hard to think. “I don’t know. This can’t be happening.”
“It is,” he growled, turning in a circle like an angry bear. “C’mon, Kelly, you know Lulu, you know the town. Where would she go? Where would she take Carly to hide?”
How could she answer that? Lulu had never run away, never hidden anywhere except under her blankets, even in the darkest days right after Mark was gone. She strained to make her brain work, to solve this desperate riddle before something terrible happened.
Bruce began hitting every light switch he could find. “Your outside lights—which switch?”
She reached for the switch just as his hand found it, and she wanted to grab that hand and hang on to it. Instead, she pulled away and pointed to the backyard now lit up by the floodlights above the back door. The yard was a swirl of snow and light, but there were no little girls to be seen.
* * *
Carly was out there in the snow. Carly was out there in the dark. The only thing keeping him from utter panic was the knowledge that she wasn’t alone. She was with Lulu. Don’t You dare take her from me, his furious soul yelled to heaven. Don’t You dare let her come to harm. It wasn’t the first time he’d lobbed threats at the Almighty, and the last time hadn’t done him any good, had it?
“The key!” Kelly was calling out, picking up everything on her kitchen counter in search of something. “The rental cabin key. It’s not here.”
“What?”
“The rental cabin. Out by where the woodpile is. I was cleaning it out and I had the key on the counter. It’s gone.”
Bruce ran to the back door and threw it open. “Footprints!” he called back to Kelly as he spied two sets of quickly disappearing tracks trailing toward the cabin behind the garage. He left the door open and yelled, “Carly! Lulu!” into the darkness as he began trudging across the illuminated drifts. “Girls!”
The wind through the branches overhead sent a blast of snow on top of him as he ran, wetting his hair with a cold trickle slipping down the back of his neck. Kelly caught up to him, slipping on the snow.
As he rounded the corner of the garage, three small squares of light glowed through the tangle of bare branches at the end of the property. Sure enough, the line of footprints crossed the clearing, as well. At the sight of the occupied cabin, he grabbed Kelly’s hand and began to run. In seconds they’d be hugging the girls in relief, followed by a good scolding for this reckless stunt.
As they reached the far side of the clearing, Bruce sent his flashlight scanning across the structure. “Where’s the door?”
“Right there.” Kelly pointed, but only to the enormous pile of snow now coating the front of the cabin. “That’s where the door is.” She let go of his hand and veered off toward the lit window on the side of the cabin.
Bruce looked up at the jagged margin of snow on the roof and worked it out in seconds. Something had jarred the building—maybe one of the girls slamming the door—and the wet and heavy snow must have slid off the roof and piled up against the entrance.
“They’re in there!” she yelled to Bruce, who had begun clawing the mound of snow away with his bare hands.
“Mom!” Bruce heard Lulu’s muffled voice from inside. His chest filled with relief as he doubled his efforts to scrape the snow away with his stinging bare hands.
“Lulu!” came Kelly’s desperate reply. “Are you okay?”
Bruce held it together until he heard the soft cry of “Daddy?” from behind the door. Then he lost it, clawing away the snow with fury.
“Bruce is at the door, girls,” he heard Kelly yell. “It’s covered in snow and he’s digging you out. Just hold on, we’ll be right there. I’m going to go help Bruce and we’ll be right in.”
She came around the side of the cabin. “Where’s your shovel?” he called as he kept up the digging. It seemed like a mile of white stood between him and that doorknob. If he could just uncover it, he’d yank that door open no matter how much snow tried to hold it shut.
“It’s all the way up by the front door. Here, use these.”
She came back with two cedar shingles, tossing one to Bruce. They were cumbersome shovels, but he and Kelly worked side by side to let the planks bite into the drift and uncover most of the door. With a determined growl, Bruce pulled the door open against the last of the snow, sending a narrow wedge of light out into the night. He pushed into the cabin and pulled Kelly in behind him.
They were immediately each hit by a pair of tiny clutching arms and a wave of cries. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lulu kept saying to Kelly, while Carly simply sobbed into Bruce’s chest as he lifted her up.
“You’re okay, it’s okay,” he murmured into the top of Carly’s hair, holding his daughter so tight it was hard to breathe.
“Thank God you’re not hurt,” Kelly cried.
Bruce put Carly down and knelt in front of her, holding her shoulders in his red chapped hands. Surely there wasn’t anything in any parenting book anywhere covering a moment like this. “Sweetheart, why?”
“Because Miss Kelly said we couldn’t stay. You said so, too.”
“This is a vacation, Carly. We can’t stay here all the time.”
“Like the unicorns?”
“Your unicorns?” Bruce asked, thoroughly confused. Wasn’t this about him and Kelly? “What did that have to do with what happened tonight?”
“They went away. Today,” Carly said in a serious tone.
The unicorns went away now? At the reindeer wedding? How was he supposed to interpret that? “I don’t understand, sweetheart.” He couldn’t fathom what her imaginary unicorns had to do with the crisis they’d just gone through, but her face was so intent. The detail clearly had a great significance to her.
“The unicorns. They said goodbye today.”
Bruce’s heart twisted in two. Was this Carly giving up? Or growing up? He could barely bring himself to ask, “Mommy’s unicorns?” as he smoothed a curl back from her forehead.
Carly shook her head. “They’re not Mommy’s anymore.”
What was he supposed to do with that? He’d never really understood why Carly invented them in the first place, so he was at a loss to understand why she’d chosen—even on an unconscious level—for them to leave. Stumped, Bruce asked, “Are you sad?”
She took a moment to think about it. “No, I’m older than that now.”
He caught Kelly’s eyes over the top of Carly’s head, her smile bringing his own out of hiding. “Okay,” he said, not entirely sure what he was agreeing to, save for Carly’s apparent sense of closure. It was probably unwise to try to make sense of this now. After all, “this” was sitting in a frozen cabin, in the middle of a snowstorm, having dashed out of the rehearsal dinner of a nearly canceled wedding, discussing the departure of imaginary unicorns.
He looked from Carly to Kelly, and even to Lulu, who gave him a “sounds good to me” shrug.
Kelly said, “I still don’t understand why you ran out of the party like this.”
“You wouldn’t listen to us. You’re going to leave after the wedding. I don’t want Carly to leave. Carly doesn’t want to leave.”
“But we haven’t even had the wedding yet,” Bruce said. The moment the words were out, he realized the girls weren’t thinking in terms of logic. They were just unhappy little girls who wanted to be together. It didn’t occur to them that running away tonight would do absolutely nothing to fix their problems. They just knew they were sad that their wishes weren’t coming true.
“I don’t wanna go home,” Carly said, sniffling. “I wanna stay here.”
“Mom, I don’t think you want Carly’s dad to leave after the wedding, either. You’ve been so happy.”
“Happy?” Kelly questioned, sitting on the nearest chair. “Lulu, honey, this is the worst week I’ve had in years. I’ve been absolutely frantic.”
Lulu shrugged. “Maybe, but like I told Mr. Bruce, you’ve been anyway. Happy, I mean. You make each other happy, and Carly and I like that. A lot.”
“What I like is knowing my little girl is safe,” Kelly said as she pulled Lulu onto her lap. “I was really scared. We both were.”
“Why can’t we stay, Daddy? I like it here. You don’t get far away anymore.”
Bruce sighed. “It’s not as simple as all that. But I really have enjoyed our visit and I’m sure we can come back.”
Kelly tried to save him. “Everyone back at the party is very worried about you. People stopped everything to help us look for you. Don’t you think we should head back or at least call the inn?”
“You hugged her. You said you thought she was pretty,” Carly said with a frustrating persistence.
Kelly turned pink, and not from the cold. There didn’t seem much point in denying. “Well, yes, I did say that Lulu’s mother is pretty.”
“I don’t get it,” Lulu said, sliding off her mother’s lap. “You like him. He likes you. Carly and I like each other. This is Matrimony Valley, for crying out loud.”
“Lulu!” Kelly gasped.
“Well, it is. Everybody else gets married here, why can’t you?”
Kelly threw up her hands. “Don’t you think this is a discussion for another time?”
“Not really,” Lulu replied as Carly shook her head.
“May I remind you that Bruce and I just traipsed out here worried sick with fear without hats or gloves and after putting a damper on Tina and Darren’s rehearsal dinner?”
Bruce wanted to sit down and sink his head into his hands, but instead he gathered up Carly’s coat. “We’re done here, girls. Gather your things.”
“Dad...”
“I was gonna hang our red heart in our window and everything if you said yes,” Lulu pouted to her mother.
“Lulu told me,” Carly said, “whenever anyone...”
“Let’s just get back to the inn and let everyone know you’re okay.” He hadn’t even had a chance to call back there and let Darren, Tina and the others knew they’d found the girls, so he pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and texted a quick All’s well. Exhaustion surged as the adrenaline of his fear faded away, and Kelly looked like she was running on empty, as well. Neither one of them had had a decent night’s sleep in days, and tomorrow was the wedding.
He looked at Carly as he finished zipping up her jacket. “Running away like this didn’t solve anything did it?”
“Not really. It was scary.”
“You two are going to have to let Bruce and me work this out by ourselves,” Kelly said, catching Bruce’s eyes over her daughter’s head. Her cheeks were flushed and snow had wet her hair as tears wet her eyelashes. She is pretty. She’s beautiful. The thought came to him without any warning and refused to go away. Smart and pushy and stubborn and beautiful. It stunned him to realize he’d been digging through that mound of snow for her and Lulu as much as for Carly. There was a part of him that wanted to stay as much as Carly did.
“Daddy, where’s your coat?” Carly asked. “Don’t you know to wear a coat when it’s cold outside?”
He started to give her a long explanation of how daddies don’t think about cold and coats when they’re frightened for their precious little girls, but instead he just held her to his chest and managed to laugh.