Page 16 of Orphan Girl's Mountain Men

I detest Tammy's Fashion Parlor with the same amount of passion as Grace's love for it. I hate it for its cutesy mock saloon door entrance, for its racks of clothes not a single item of which looks even slightly practical or hard-wearing to me, for the mirrors that pervade every surface that's not holding a clothes rack, for the bright pink décor that makes me feel like I'm trapped inside the stomach of a whale or something, and most of all for the glances I get from staff and clientele alike. Not outright stares—oh no, that would be rude. These are all sideways glances when they think I'm not looking. Half of them have me down as a pervert, the other half who saw me come in with my four-year old daughter and the light of my life have me pegged as something worse. It's a cross I have had to bear ever since Georgia died, leaving me to bring our daughter up alone as best I can.

But I'm not here for my health, I'm here for Grace, and if my baby wants a new dress for her best friend's fifth birthday party then she can have one, whatever the personal cost to me. Apparently, it's a princess-themed birthday party. Unfortunately, I have zero experience with those, but hopefully this place will have something suitable.

So here I am, surrounded by frippery, and doing my best not to stare at the young store assistant's bare thighs in her ridiculously tiny miniskirt as she leads my delighted and highly excited daughter to the rack where they keep their young girl's party frocks, lifting out various dresses for Grace to choose from and then heading with her to the changing cubicles for her to try them on. Whatever she chooses will almost certainly be pink. She's cottoned on to pink as a "girl's color" and she'd insisted that the last three outfits we'd gotten her all had to be pink. I sigh inwardly as I watch them head to the dressing rooms. Georgia, how I do miss you.

I turn back to my phone and get distracted by another one of Reed's impossible-to-understand texts, when I hear footsteps behind me and look up to see a worried-looking store assistant approaching me.

"I am so sorry, sir, but I… I think your daughter might be missing."

Her voice seems to come from far away, so that I barely hear her the first time. Or perhaps I hear her but suspect that my paranoid mind twisted her words into something resembling my worst nightmare.

Is it some kind of joke?

But she's not laughing.

She's standing there, looking as nervous as Hell, whilst a ringing starts up in my ears that has nothing to do with the intermittent tinnitus I sustained from my military days.

"What do you mean?" My voice is quiet, steady, the calm before the storm. Yet she flinches like I slapped her.

"I'm so sorry, sir," she says. "I was helping your daughter try on dresses and then I got a phone call for me to check something in the back, and I'm the only one in the store right now, so I had to do it. I thought it would only take thirty seconds maximum, but it ended up being more like three minutes and… and whenI got back she was… gone..." Her trembling voice tails to a stop, and she simply looks at me, her eyes round and wide with fear and concern.

A bolt of energy hits me and launches me to my feet as if a hundred million volts of lightning has struck my chair. Adrenaline surges through my body and I can feel the pounding of my heart in my chest, my veins standing out as the blood pumps its way to my muscles. I know I am breathing hard, and I probably look like the Incredible Hulk in one of his worst moods, but there's little I can do about it.

This time the woman squeaks and jumps back. I ignore her glancing around the store, my SEAL training boosting my perceptiveness so I can take in and process information rapidly, assess the situation, determine my options, select the best alternative. No one came in here to take her, at least no one came in or out through the front door since I've been sitting here. I can vouch for that. So what does that leave?

"Is there a back door?" I manage to croak in a voice that sounds too rough to truly be mine.

"Um yes. It's next to the bathroom. But you don't think she?—"

"What was she wearing?" I cut her off.

"Wearing?"

"Yes. Wearing. Was she in her jeans, or was she trying on one of your dresses?" I do my best to be patient with this girl, but time is ticking. Still, I need to be able to describe her, so I wait for her response.

"Oh, I see… err.. I think she had one of our dresses on… a pink one. Yes… yes I am sure of it, because?—"

I ignore the rest of her sentence and stride across the room in the direction the woman had glanced towards. She follows me, still apologizing and wringing her hands in worry, but I tune her out because I am only interested in paying attention to the signsin the environment. I don't think anyone came in this way. The walls are thin and although there's pop music playing it isn't as loud as they have it in some stores, so I am confident I would have heard a struggle. Which means she left on her own, of her own free will.

I have trained Grace extensively on stranger danger, and she knows to scream loud and long if a stranger ever even touched her, let alone tried to take her away, and she’s been trained to deliver her foot or knee to the man’s groin, as hard as she can. That's one of the first things I taught her. I’d even got her to practice on Reed, with his jockstrap on and a pillow stuffed down his pants for added protection. Fun times, watching Reed writhing on the floor after a slightly mis-aimed kick from Grace caught him mid-thigh. Right now, however, is serious. About as serious as it gets.

It would be easy to give in to full-blown panic, but my SEAL training cuts in, takes control, puts me into automatic mode. Panic won't help me right now, and fear or anger will only have me making poor decisions, leading to bad mistakes. I need to stay cool, stay calm, keep my wits about me.

I'll find her. It doesn't matter what or who I have to go through. I need to find her, or I'll raze the world to the ground looking. And if anything happens to her… well there goes my last reason to live, and the last reason to maintain any semblance of sanity.

As for the store assistant — I don't give a damn how she’s feeling. I put my daughter in her care, my four-year-old daughter, and she thought it was a bright idea to leave her alone to check on stock. I glare at her, and she practically shrinks into herself, moisture glistening in her eyeballs. She's crying? My fucking daughter is missing and she's the one crying?

I hold back my angry words. There are a lot of things I could say to her, and plenty more I would enjoy saying to her, but atthe end of the day, it doesn't make any difference whether they get said or not. What's done is done, and right now my time and energy is better spent looking for Grace than talking to a store girl.

The back door leads out onto an alleyway, with garbage bags lined neatly to the side of a couple of dumpsters. I walk down the alley towards the main road and look both right and left. She can't have gone far. The store attendant had said she was on the phone and then in the stockroom for about three minutes. Three or four minutes would mean that she would have only had time to walk to either end of Old German Street.

That is unless someone took her away in a vehicle, but I refuse to let my mind go there because that would lead me down a whirlpool of terror. No time for those emotions. Not yet. I'm only too conscious of the fact that the more time I spend without finding her, the farther she is from me.

Heading left is a row of clothing stores and business offices. To the right, there's a bakery and cake store and an old-fashioned hardware store that sells building materials to both trade and the general public.

I take a second to consider where Grace would go first, then decide to check the bakery and cake store first because she likes cakes and it's her lunchtime. She might have gotten hungry and instead of coming to ask me, decided to sneak off and find treats on her own.

I enter the store and hear, "Good afternoon, sir. How may I—" Then the sentence cuts off abruptly and the attendant's smile disappears as she sees my face, the rage and anger barely contained within me.

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