Snowbound with the Best Man

by Allie Pleiter

  “And Carly. I like her lots. We get along just like sisters, don’cha think?” Lulu crossed her hands over her chest as if that were a harmless observation instead of the relational bomb-drop it was.

  He tried to give her a serious parental look. They’d already had this conversation once, and he wasn’t in a hurry to repeat it. “Friends are always nice to have.”

  “Sure,” Lulu said, “friends are nice.” She gave the word all the loaded emphasis of someone four times her age.

  His double take was less subtle than he would have liked. “You’re eight, right?” Eight going on thirty, more like.

  She shrugged. “I know what you said, but I see how Mom looks at you. She spent more time on your boutonniere than she did on his.” She pointed to Darren. “And he’s the groom.”

  Bruce gave her the “you’re making that up” look that usually worked on Carly’s tall tales.

  “It’s true,” she defended. “And not just Mom. You should see how fast Miss Hailey said yes when I asked her to sit us all together at the afterward party.” Wait, now Kelly and Lulu would be at the wedding reception? When had that happened? Perhaps when half the invited guests became in danger of not showing up, he reminded himself.

  “The wedding party sits at a head table. And it’s the bride who decides who gets to sit where,” he argued, feeling like things were spiraling out of his control. Yvonne the baker’s insinuations were bad enough, but now they were joined by Hailey the innkeeper?

  “I know that,” Lulu replied. “That’s why I asked Miss Hailey when Miss Tina was right there.”

  Tina was in on this? Was this a wedding of grown-ups or sixth-grade recess? “I’m sure Carly will be happy to sit next to you at the reception,” he said as matter-of-factly as his shock would allow.

  She grinned. “That, too.”

  “But I will be at the head table like the best man ought to be and not sitting with your mother.” He pulled her to the nearest couch and had her sit down. “Lulu, this has to stop right now. The valentines were bad enough, but it’s starting to get out of hand. I know what you think you see, but your mom and I are not getting together. Not now, and not likely ever. And that doesn’t mean you and Carly can’t be friends, but it does mean you have to stop what you’re doing here.”

  Her lower lip quivered, and he felt bad about having to word it so harshly. Only he didn’t know how else to squelch this childish effort at “match ’em up” before somebody got hurt.

  Against his better judgment, he gave her a hug. “You’re a sweet girl, Lulu, and I like you. I’m really glad you and Carly are friends, and I promise we’ll come back and visit sometime. But that’s all. So go find your mom and enjoy the party, okay?” He regretted putting such a sag in Lulu’s shoulders as she crossed the room, but there seemed to be no helping it.

  * * *

  Carly came up to Kelly at the s’mores table with a wide smile. The two girls had been inseparable at the event tonight, and it made Kelly’s heart glad to see the friendship becoming so strong. It would be hard when the time came for Carly and Bruce to return to Kinston, but she chose to focus on the present moment. After all, the rehearsal dinner had managed to come off far better than she’d hoped. Maybe she could stand to worry a little less about how everything could go wrong.

  “I’m having fun.” A telltale smear of chocolate graced the little girl’s smile.

  “Had a s’more, did you?” Kelly teased, wiping Carly’s cheek with a napkin.

  “Three.” Bruce would have a hard time pulling his daughter down off that sugar high, to be sure. “Daddy said you made Mr. Darren and Miss Tina happy.”

  Kelly smiled. “Well, I’m very glad to hear that.”

  “You make Daddy happy, too.”

  Kelly hoped the rush of warmth she felt in her cheeks didn’t show. “That’s a nice thing to say, Carly.”

  “He likes you. Lulu said so, too. We both think that’s nice. Do you think it’s nice?”

  Kelly leaned down to the little girl’s height. “Carly, I thought we talked about this already. Your daddy and I are friends, just like you and Lulu are friends.” She didn’t like how the words had the sour taste of untruth. She did feel a strong pull of attraction to Bruce. Still, now was hardly the time to explain the complexities of adult relationships to a five-year-old. “How about we just concentrate on the wedding right now, sweetie?”

  “But I like you. And Lulu. I told Daddy last night I wanted to move here and go to school with Lulu and grow up to run Mr. Marvin’s ice-cream shop.”

  Kelly looked around the room for Bruce, but couldn’t find him. “You are always welcome to visit the valley anytime you want. Lulu will always want to play with you while you’re here.”

  “Lulu said the same thing,” Carly went on. “She said she’d love to be my big sister.”

  “Honey, you and Lulu need to stop this. Go find your father and he’ll tell you the same thing. This isn’t something that can...”

  At that moment, the lights flickered on, bringing a cry of relief from everyone in the room. Thank You, Lord. Kelly sent a prayer of gratitude heavenward as she leaned back against the wall. “Aren’t you glad the lights came back on, Carly?”

  She looked down to find Carly gone, back to her father for what she hoped was the final explanation why her ideas about matchmaking were way off course.

  “I’ve never been so grateful to see electric lights in my life!” Hailey exclaimed. “It was going to get frosty in here without power tonight.”

  “The lights are on,” Tina said, hugging Darren. “That must mean the storm is over. Our guests can arrive. We can get married!”

  Kelly leaned back against the wall. We just might make it. Everyone was hugging each other—guest and valley resident alike—and a chaotic happy celebration filled the room. Thank You, Lord, she repeated. I’m beyond grateful.

  As soon as the commotion died down, Kelly walked over to where Bruce was plugging the power strip that used to run from the generator outside into a wall outlet inside. “Did you see where they went?”

  “Who?” he said as he straightened.

  “The girls. I had a conversation with Carly about them matching us up again, and I told her to go find you.”

  Bruce stood up. “I just had the same talk with Lulu and told her to go find you.” He ran a hand down his face. “She didn’t take it too well. Lulu’s not with you?”

  “No. Carly’s not with you?”

  “No.”

  The alarm in Bruce’s voice hit her like ice water. She spun around and they both scanned the room again. “They’re not here.” She grabbed Bruce’s hand as he looked around with the same growing fear that gripped her throat. “Bruce, they’re not here.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “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 cr
y 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.