Stowaway Angel

by Cheryl St. John

  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 fished his phone from his pocket. 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 his 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. 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 scold 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. 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 the Notting Hill CD she still loved even though she’d heard it a million times, 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 ye
ars 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. 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 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 being. “I’m just a person.”

  Meredith shook her head. “Says you’re a angel right on the door of this truck, don’t it?”

  “That’s just the name of the truck. Men are silly like that. They name things. Like trucks. My dad calls his truck Silver Angel.”

  “You’re the angel,” the child insisted, pointing. “This one.” She opened the book and turned pages until she came to a picture of the woman sprinkling sparkly dust. There was a smear that appeared to be ketchup across the corner of the page. “See right here?” Meredith turned enormous blue eyes on her. “My daddy needs some of your miracle dust. Please say you’ll help him.”

  “That’s just a story,” Starla told her. “It’s pretend. If I was an angel, what would I be doing driving a truck across Iowa in a snowstorm?”

  Not to be dissuaded from her cause, Meredith ignored the denials and used five-year-old logic to explain, “Aunt Edna who lives at the nursey home said she was in a car crash once, and a beautiful angel in a white robe sat right on the seat beside her and kept her from going off a bridge.”

  “Your aunt Edna is in a nursing home?”

  “She’s not my aunt. That’s just her name. She’s prob’ly somebody’s aunt, though.”

  “Well, as you can see,” Starla replied, gesturing to her cashmere V-neck sweater and jeans, “I don’t have a white robe.”

  “Uh-huh.” Meredith nodded and pointed to where Starla’s white satin dressing gown and pajamas hung on a plastic hook.

  “Those are my pajamas.” Starla shook her head in negation. Or was it confusion? “How did you get in here?”

  “I watched when Miss Rumford carried dishes to the back. When you got your coat, I followed. I was behind the gas pumper and saw you take your papers from inside and walk around, looking at the tires and the lights and stuff. You left the door open.”

  She certainly had. After all Dad’s warnings.

  Meredith scooted toward the edge of the bed. “I have to go potty.”

  Starla held her forehead in her hands, her mind thrown into overdrive. She would have to take this child back to her parents. To her father. To that café. She was going to lose...her gaze shot to her watch...nearly three hours, even if she made good time!

  The child’s family would be frantic by now.

  “Meredith,” she said suddenly. “We have to let somebody know that you’re okay.”

  “Daddy’s going to be mad. Really mad.”

  “I’m sure he’s more worried than mad.”

  “I really have to go potty.”

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER, after showing Meredith the camper-size toilet, digging a bag of popcorn from a supply cupboard, then buckling her into the seat belt on the passenger side, Starla asked. “Do you know your phone number?”

  Meredith nodded and reeled off the number. Starla jotted it on the edge of a log sheet on her clipboard and unplugged her phone to dial. She got an answering machine. “He’s not there.”

  Of course he wasn’t there. He was either at the café or at the sheriff’s department, reporting a missing child.

  “He gots a cell phone, too,” Meredith told her.

  “Oh! Do you know that number?”

  Meredith shook her head.

&nbs
p; “That’s okay. I’ll call information for the café. What’s it called?”

  “Miss Rumford’s restaurant?”

  “Yes, what’s the name of it? ”

  “Miss Rumford’s restaurant.”

  “Of course.” Starla called long distance information and asked for the café in Elmwood, Iowa. She jotted another number down and called it.

  “Waggin’ Tongue,” a male voice said.

  “Oh, hi. Um, is there a man there who is looking for his daughter?”

  “Charlie! It’s for you!”

  At the man’s shout, Starla jerked the phone away from her ear, then returned it tentatively. “Hello?”

  “Hello!” a man said into the phone. “This is Charlie McGraw.”

  “I don’t quite know how to say this,” she began. “I have your daughter with me—”

  “Oh please,” he said. “What do you want? Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine, she’s just fine. I...I don’t want anything.”

  “Please don’t hurt her. Let me talk to her!”

  Starla held out the phone. “Meredith, tell your father that you’re all right.”

  Meredith sank back against the seat and shook her head, her chin lowered to her chest.

  “Just say you’re okay, so he knows. He’s worried about you.”

  Meredith shook her head, and her lower lip protruded enough to park a truck on it.

  “She’s afraid,” Starla began to explain, talking into the receiver.

  “What’s wrong? What have you done with her? Where are you?”

  “I haven’t done anything! She thinks you’re mad at her. We’re on I-80, almost to Rock Island. I just discovered her in my sleeper about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Discovered her? What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s a...a stowaway.”

  “You’re telling me she got into your truck all by herself?”

  “Apparently. She keeps calling me the angel lady and asking me to sprinkle you with miracle dust.”

  An audible groan came from the other end of the line.