Her pulse thumped off the charts.
“Do you have another flashlight?” he demanded.
She shook—fear, or something else, she had no idea. Her brain had up and quit. Flashlight. He asked for a flashlight. He was going to help her find Birdie. And she was going to force herself to let him, because Birdie was more important than her pride or her self-sufficiency or even this house.
“I—yes.” She ran to the kitchen, flung the drawer open so hard it fell on the floor. She dropped to her knees, using the flashlight to find the flashlight, scattering fallen kitchen tools and notepads and nonsense out of her way.
She bounded back to her feet and nearly barreled right into Penn. He took the other flashlight out of her trembling hand. She felt the warmth of his fingers brush hers, electric.
Scary.
She felt tears on her cheeks again.
“Willa.” His voice, searingly soft now, froze her to the worn, hardwood floor. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find her.”
She swallowed hard, nodded. “Of course.” She had to find Birdie. Had to. And would. No other outcome was tolerable.
But she didn’t believe everything was going to be okay. Not so long as he stayed.
Chapter 3
They were both already soaked to the skin, and going back out into this wild storm was only going to make things worse. But there was no other choice. A dog bounded up behind her, barking.
“Get a jacket, Willa.”
She looked at him blankly, then turned, told the dog to hush and opened a closet near the front door to grab a rain slicker. She put it on, pulling the hood over her head, and moved past him to the door that was still standing open wide, the dog trotting right after her. She avoided meeting Penn’s eyes. She looked small in the oversize slicker. The short, wispy cut of her hair revealed every delicate line of her features, features that looked fragile now, like glass ready to shatter.
But she was tougher than she looked, he knew that.
He followed her out onto the wide, covered farmhouse porch. Old rocking chairs with peeling paint lined up in front of the house, the way they always had. A porch swing’s chains rattled in the wind at the far end.
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s four.”
Four. God. This wild night was no place for a four-year-old child. No wonder Willa looked like she was about to go crazy.
“You’re positive she’s not in the house?”
“Of course I’m positive she’s not in the house!”
“Where’s the other one?” The other one that should be almost fourteen now.
“What other one?” she asked impatiently. Then…She now met his eyes. “There is no other one.”
She walked away from him.
“Birdie!” she shouted, her voice hopelessly lost in the wind and rain.
There is no other one. He shouldn’t even want to explore that, and now wasn’t the time to find out what had happened to the baby Willa had been carrying the day he’d walked away. It hadn’t been his baby, anyway. And this wasn’t the time to think about that betrayal, either.
He hurried after Willa and the stumpy-legged mutt that kept pace with her. She’d asked for his help, but he was damn sure she didn’t really want it. She loved her daughter—that was clear, too.
Loved her enough to ask him for help.
He caught up with her at the bottom of the porch steps, reached for her arm to stop her.
“It’s important right now not to race off in a hundred directions,” he said grimly. “Does she have any favorite places on the farm? Hiding spots? We’ll search there and the barn, then we go back and call the police if we don’t find her.”
“The phones are out already.”
“Then we go for help in your truck. Or one of us goes for help while the other one stays here,” he added, seeing the resistance on her face before she even opened her mouth. She didn’t want to leave Birdie alone, even if they didn’t know where the child was.
But it was just as obvious that they couldn’t search four hundred acres by themselves. The farm was massive and partly wild. Otto had abandoned any real farming years ago, and much of the land had grown up over time, turned back into woods. In the old days, Otto’s father before him had had all kinds of money, but not from farming. There was oil and gas under this farm, and at the turn of the last century, there’d been drilling everywhere. Most of those wells had been abandoned decades ago, leaving nothing but rusted well sheds and crumbling derricks, not to mention pipes running everywhere, some of them sticking out of the ground or jaggedly cut off.
There were plenty of ways for a child to run into trouble or to get hurt rambling around in the dark while panicked. Plenty of ways for Willa to get hurt, too.
He wondered what kind of name Birdie was, but he didn’t ask. Willa charged off and he kept up with her. In the bouncing flashlight beam, he spied the old herb garden to the side of the house, with its paving stone paths and geometric design, the huge stone sundial in the center. And he saw something new in the shadows beyond it.
Wooden playground equipment. What the hell?
Maybe she had been living at Limberlost for a year, after all. Eighty-two-year-old Otto Ramsey hadn’t put in a slide and swings for himself.
There was a barn on the hill and another below, in the meadow. As far as he was concerned, if they didn’t find her up here, there was no sense heading farther afield before getting help. But he’d have to convince Willa of that.
The wind ripped back Willa’s hood, baring her head as she ran toward the barn. He chased after her, helped her with the heavy wooden latch on the barn door. Inside, their flashlights swerved and crossed. She called Birdie’s name. The barn smelled earthy and like home, and he was stunned for a harsh instant. There were horse stalls up and down the barn, but only one horse poked its ebony head over a stall door.
Willa raced between the stalls, looking into every one. She whirled at the end of the barn, faced him. Raw emotion hit him again, this time with the appalling urge to take her into arms and promise her he’d find Birdie.
He shoved the thought away as he saw the steel under her painful fear.
“Where now?” he asked.
“She has a treehouse. That’s all I can think.”
“Let’s go.”
They left the barn. He latched the door while she tore ahead. He followed the erratic bounce of her flashlight beam in the wind and rain.
Willa climbed the wooden steps nailed to a huge cherry tree before he even got there, and nearly fell down into
