Unbreak my Heart (10 page)

At the first exploding clap of thunder, Clare peeked nervously through the window at the worsening storm. By now the heavens had opened up and the rain was pouring down almost horizontally in the driving wind, making a deafening racket as it pelted against the shingled roof and glass windows of the cabin.

“Mama I’m scared,” Willow cried, grabbing hold of
her mother’s arm. “Why is the thunder so loud?”

Clare bent down and gave her daughter a reassuring hug. “I think that lightning may have struck a tree down by the lake,
honey, but don’t worry we’ll be safe inside the cabin.”

Willow wasn’t entirely convinced.
She looked up at her mother wide-eyed with fright. “Mama,” she whimpered, “can the lightning and thunder get us inside our cabin?”

Clare, too, was feeling a little frightened, but put on a brave face for her daughter’s sake. “I don’t think so,
sweetheart, but if you like I can shut the blinds?”

Willow nodded her head. “Yes please,
Mama, then we won’t have to see the scary flashes.”

Within thirty minutes the bulk of the thunder and lightning were gone, but the sky remained dark and ominous and the rain continued to
pelt down heavier than ever.

Willow was now
much calmer and was sitting on the sofa watching cartoons while Clare sat at the dining table reading a magazine.

“Sweetheart,
” Clare said soothingly, “Mama’s just gonna take a quick shower before starting dinner. If there’s any more rumbles of thunder I want you to go get Mr Truffles out of your room to keep you company, but I’m pretty sure that the thunder is all gone now. Do you think you’ll be alright for ten minutes?”

Willow nodded her head without taking her eyes off of the television. “It’s okay Mama,
I’m not frightened anymore, you go shower. I’ll keep watching the cartoons until you get back.”

***

When the cartoons finished a few minutes later and the news came on, Willow soon grew bored and decided to go get Mr Truffles from her room to play with him. “Mr Truffles,” she called, as she entered her bedroom, “It’s time for us to … Oh no! Mr Truffles, where are you?”

With tears streaming down her face
, Willow raced out into the hall and pounded on the bathroom door. “Mama, Mama, we left Mr Truffles down at the lake in the boat. He’s all alone and he’s going to be all wet. Is it okay if I put my raincoat on and go get him? I remember the way.” Willow waited for her mother to answer, but the only noise she could hear was the sound of the noisy exhaust fan and the running water so, in frustration, she opened the door a crack and poked her head inside the bathroom. “Mama,” she yelled even louder, “you didn’t answer me, is it okay if I go get Mr Truffles?”

Clare poked her head around the shower curtain. “Of course sweetheart, Mama is almost finished. You go get Mr Truffles and Mama will see you soon, okay?”

“Okay Mama.”

The landline phone on the end of the kitchen counter rang suddenly, startling Crank just as he was reaching into the fridge for a cool, refreshing beer. He had been feeling nervous all afternoon since telling Clare about his six year prison sentence and he was pretty sure that it would either be her calling or his sister, Macey, ringing to update him and the boys on Eli’s condition. Hastily, he yanked a cold beer from the plastic packaging and snatched up the receiver.

“Hello!”
he said nervously as he waited to hear which one of them it would be.

“Crank
; it’s Clare. Is Willow there with you?” Crank could hear the panic in her voice and was instantly alarmed.

“No, I don’t think so
,” he replied, trying to sound calm. “Just let me go check with the boys though. She may have slipped in unnoticed.” He popped a hand loosely over the mouthpiece. “MICHAEL, EDWARD, IS WILLOW WITH YOU GUYS?”

Edward popped his head around the corner of the
hall. “No, Uncle Crank, Michael is lying on his bed reading and I am on my computer. Is everything alright?”

Crank kept his hand over the mouthpiece. “I’m not sure, but stay close by, okay?”

Edward nodded. “Sure.”

He released his hand from the receiver.
“Clare, are you there? Edward says she’s not with them. What’s happened?”

Clare
was now almost hysterical. “Crank, please, I need your help. Clare is missing and I think she may have gone back down to the lake. Did you have Mr Truffles with you when you packed up earlier?”

Crank thought for a minute. “No,
but now that you mention it, I don’t recall Willow having him with her either when she came back up from the lake with the boys. I think she might have left him in the dinghy by accident.”

Clare’s heart was pounding in her chest. “Crank,
when I got out of the shower a few minutes ago, she was gone. I checked absolutely everywhere. She must have realised that she left Mr Truffles in the boat and went back to get him. I’m really worried. I’m gonna grab a raincoat and go find her before she gets herself into trouble. Can you please come with me and help me find her? It’s still raining quite heavily and it will be dark soon.”

Crank drew in a deep breath.
“Clare, wait! You need to let us go find her for you. What if she gets back to the cabin and you’re not there?” he asked. “You need to stay where you are in case she does come home and I will take the boys and go find her.”

“
What happens if she goes to your cabin? It’s closer to the lake path than ours,” she said worriedly. “She may get scared and try to go there instead.”

Crank ran a
trembling hand through his hair. “You’re right, if it starts getting dark and Willow gets frightened she might try to come here instead. I’ll take Edward with me to look for her and get Michael to wait here in case she comes here to my cabin, okay?”

Hot tears rolled down Clare’s cheeks. “
Crank, I’m so sorry I doubted you. Please just find her and bring her back safely. I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to my baby girl.”

“
Nothing will …,” he assured her. “Edward and I will go find her and bring her back safely. You just sit tight and wait. I’ll take my cell phone with us and call you the second we find her.”

***

As soon as Crank had filled Michael and Edward in on the situation, he and Edward grabbed a waterproof jacket and torch each from the laundry and headed out into the driving rain toward the lake.

Progress was quite slow as they made their way along the
waterlogged path to the lake. The strong wind driving the heavy droplets of rain so hard into their exposed face and hands that each one felt like tiny sharp needles. A couple of hundred yards down the path Crank and Edward came across a massive Cypress, at least sixty foot in length, which had been struck and felled by the lightning and was now lying directly across their path.

“
Uncle Crank, she was here!” Edward yelled excitedly over the roar of the wind, bending down to check out the path directly in front of the fallen tree. “I can see her fresh footprints in the mud.” He pointed toward the jagged stump of the tree. “Come on. They lead this way. She must have walked around it.”

Once they had
safely navigated a path through the thick ferns to get around the fallen tree and back onto the path, Crank was relieved when they saw that Willow’s footprints resumed in the mud on the other side.
At least, Willow had managed to stick to the designated path
, he thought,
and that meant they still had a real chance of finding her. If she hadn’t … well…, he didn’t even want to think about the otherwise.

“It will be completely dark in about twenty minutes,”
he told Edward worriedly, checking his watch. “Hopefully Willow has stuck to the path all the way to the lake and is on her way back with Mr Truffles. If she has we should meet up with her any minute.”

Edward bit down on his lower lip as he looked across at Crank. “And if she didn’t?”

Crank avoided making eye-contact with his nephew. “Then I guess we just keep on looking for her until we find her,” he said adamantly. “We can’t just leave her out here cold and frightened and alone.”

Crank’s heart sank when they reached the edge of the lake. With all the rain the shoreline had advanced more than
six foot up the bank and was now lapping at the edge of the wooden boardwalk that wound around the lake’s edge.

Protecting
his eyes from the rain with his right hand, he peered ahead through the rain; shocked to discover that the dinghy bearing Willow’s name was now so full of rainwater that it was barely managing to stay afloat.

“Hey, where’s the
jetty that it was tied to?” Edward asked, following his gaze.

“
It’s still there,” Crank assured him, “but completely submerged, by the looks of things.” He beckoned to Edward. “Hurry, we need to get to the dinghy as soon as we can before it sinks, but be careful, these boards are very slippery. The last thing I need is to have you fall into the lake.”

“So what do we do now?” Edward asked
, peering at the marooned boat and shrugging his shoulders as they reached the spot beside the boardwalk where they had laid out the picnic blanket earlier that day. “You can’t even see the jetty anymore.”

“I’m going to feel my way out along the
jetty to the dinghy,” Crank announced, “to see if Mr Truffles is still in it. That way we will at least know if Willow has been here or not.”

“Be careful Uncle Crank.” Edward cautioned as Crank slowly edged his way
out to the dinghy along the submerged, wooden jetty, stopping several times to balance himself after almost falling off the edge.

When
he finally reached the taut length of rope attached to the nose of the dinghy, Crank carefully bent down and pulled it slowly toward him to take a look inside.

“Well?” Edward called out. “Is Mr Truffles
in there?”

Crank’s eyes scanned every inch of the inside of the
waterlogged dinghy, but apart from the
more than six inches
of rainwater it was completely empty except for the weathered oars. “Willow has definitely been here,” he called back to Edward. “Mr Truffles is gone.”

After
feeling his way back along the submerged jetty to the boardwalk, and now completely drenched to his waist, Crank cupped his hands to his mouth and called into the wind. “WILLOW, CAN YOU HEAR ME SWEETHEART? IT’S ME, CRANK, PLEASE CALL OUT IF YOU CAN HEAR ME!”

Edward instantly chimed in. “WILLOW, CAN YOU HEAR US? IT’S EDWARD, WHERE ARE YOU?”

Despite the driving rain and wind, the pair retraced their steps along the slippery boardwalk all the way back to the path and back again, calling her name on and off and listening for a reply without success.

“What now?” Edward asked
his uncle when they arrived back at the picnic sight.

Crank put a soaked hand to his brow to block the rain and looked ahead along the as yet unsearched boardwalk.
“I think we should follow this boardwalk up around the next bend for a while just in case Willow got disoriented in the rain and couldn’t find the path back to the cabins.”

After they had gone about a hundred yards, Crank
’s heart suddenly froze and his blood turned to ice in his veins as he spotted something yellow, about the size of a child, lying in the mud under about three feet of murky water at the edge of the lake. “Oh no, Willow. Dear God, don’t let it be her!” Hastily he handed Edward his torch and took a deep breath before jumping in and submerging his entire body to retrieve whatever it was laying on the bottom.

Edward too was feeling numb
and fought back tears as he waited for his uncle to break the surface, praying silently with everything that he had that it would not be Willow that was retrieved from the bottom of the lake. He had seen his uncle go through the tragic death of a child before; his own daughter, Ellie, and he did not want him or anyone else to have to go through that ever again. Besides, Willow was such a sweet kid, kind of like the little sister that he sometimes wished he had, especially when he and Michael were having one of their occasional feuds.

Crank gasped for a breath of air as soon as his head came out of the water. “It’s not Willow!” he
blurted, extremely relieved, lifting up the bright yellow, plastic object for Edward to see. “It’s a raincoat, and I think it might belong to Willow. I’ve scoured the bottom as best I could and there’s no sign of anything else down there.”

Edward breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Thank God.”

When Crank had crawled back up onto the boardwalk he retrieved his flashlight from Edward and examined the raincoat more closely. “There’s a small tear along the bottom on one side,” he said, holding it out in front so that Edward could see it. “But I don’t know whether it has only recently been ripped or whether the rip was already in it before Willow put it on this afternoon?”

“You could give Clare a ring and ask,” Edward suggested.

Suddenly, Crank remembered that his cell phone was still in the pocket of his inner jacket. “Damn,” he muttered, reaching in to retrieve the wet, lifeless phone from his pocket. “I was so worried that it might have been Willow lying on the bottom of the lake that I forgot to take my cell out of my pocket before I jumped in.”

“Edward, do you have your cell with you?” he asked,
feeling annoyed with himself for being so careless.

Edward shook his head. “No
, sorry, I had it with me at the lake all day and it was almost flat so I put it on to charge before we left to search for Willow. What do we do now?”

Crank folded up the small raincoat and shoved it in
to one of his oversized jacket pockets. “We need to keep following the boardwalk. It’s more likely that Willow would have stuck to a solid path rather than head into the cypress forest alone.”

“Michael and I walked
along here this morning,” Edward explained as they continued along the boardwalk. “It ends at the Ferry Lake Road tourist entrance to the lake. There’s a row of four or five hire cabins near the shoreline about half a mile up ahead and then not much further along there’s a floating pontoon where tourists can catch the paddle steamer.”

Crank felt a fresh glimmer of hope. “Hopefully Willow has made it safely to the cabins
and found help,” he said with renewed determination. “We should try to pick up our pace a bit though; the water is getting higher by the minute.”

As soon as they reached the row of five hire cabins
, Crank and Edward left the boardwalk and began furiously knocking on the cabin doors and calling out for help, but all of them were in darkness and nobody answered their desperate knocks. As they moved from door to door, Crank also searched the exterior of each cabin checking any outbuildings and even the wood boxes in case Willow had climbed inside one of them to get out of the driving rain, but each one came up empty.

“How far away is the floating pontoon?” Crank yelled over the driving wind and rain.

“It’s just around the next bend,” Edward assured him, “and then the boardwalk ends at Ferry Lake Road.”

“
We need to make sure we don’t miss anything,” Crank told Edward. “You keep your eyes peeled for any sign of her on the forest side and I’ll keep my eyes focused on the lake side. If we don’t find her by the time we get to Ferry Lake Road then I’m going to get you to follow the road back to the cabins in case she went that way and I will double back along the boardwalk in case we missed something.”

Edward
had a worried look on his face. “Uncle Crank is that a good idea? The water was already lapping the boardwalk in parts on our way through so by the time you head back parts of it are likely to be completely under water.”

Crank futilely wiped the rain from his eyes. “Then let’s just hope that Willow has made it all the way to the pontoon.”

As soon as they had made it around the bend, Crank spotted the huge, double-story paddle steamer, about fifty yards ahead, moored safely to the floating pontoon and his mind went into overdrive.
Hopefully Willow had managed to make it to the pontoon and had boarded the paddle steamer to get out of the rain. If she had it would have offered her both safety and protection from the weather.