This morning, during my devotions, I returned to my discernment practice shaped by the five guiding “fingers”—five ways of tracing Scripture into lived faith.
As I opened the Bible, what struck me first was a reassurance about systems—that governing structures and authorities are not, in themselves, the enemy. There is something unfolding within the system that is not meant for harm but for good.
Secondly came the caution that there will be deception, falsehoods, and half-truths woven through it all. This is why discernment is essential. We must learn to recognize what is true and what is not, even when both appear side by side.
The third call that followed was simple and uncompromising: obey God. Not complexity. Not strategy. Not fear. Just obedience.
Fourthly came a heart felt prayer that difficult times lie ahead— the image was that of a whirlwind. Yet this was not given as a warning meant to frighten, but as a promise meant to steady: God will be with us. God is not distant from what is unfolding. God sees. God knows. God remains present and in control.
The fifth message emphasized the thread that wove through everything was this: discern the truth, obey the truth, and do not be led astray by lies. When the way forward feels unclear, obedience becomes the clearest form of faith.
​
I closed my devotions with a quiet confidence—not because everything makes sense, but because God is with me. God is with us. And that is enough.

PN - The image of  whirlwind was so comforting. We are in the middle of a whirlwind - with the arrest and everything else that happened yesterday.  The message is clear -- obey - and do not be afraid.

Is this the closure we were waiting for?

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I received a call from the media asking whether I had heard the news: Mark Edward Grant—the man accused of murdering our daughter—was being held in custody in Vancouver.

Apparently on January 8, Grant had been arrested for taking a young woman against her will - and was now being charged with unlawful confinement, sexual assault, and uttering threats. It was the phrase “unlawful confinement” that undid me. Those words carried me back forty-one years, to the moment we were told that our daughter had died while being held against her will. “Unlawful confinement.” And if a person dies - it is considered first degree murder,

I remind myself that an arrest is not a conviction. The case has not been proven. Nothing is certain; these are allegations. And yet, for the first time in many years, there is a quiet, cautious hope that we may be closer to the truth. Truth—though it must always be discerned carefully—is beautiful, and it has the power to heal.

And then the tears came.
​
Those words--unlawful confinement—opened the door to memory. I felt again the loneliness Candace must have endured that night so many years ago. The isolation. The terror of being threatened. Grief, it seems, does not fade with time; it waits, and when named, it speaks.

Now another girl had experienced the same. I ache for her - I ache for her family.... I just ache,

​

Just when we thought it was over and that we could lay Candace’s murder and search to rest, something would come up holding our attention. Cliff called animated suspension – I called it a never-ending story.

In early February, two detectives came to our door to deliver the final autopsy report. 

We invited them into our living room. They spoke slowly, carefully setting the scene.

Apparently, Candace had died of exposure—hypothermia – they said. The toxicology tests showed that she had not been drugged or poisoned. Her hands and feet had been tied, and she had been abandoned in the shack to die in the freezing cold. The crime scene was disorganized. Some of her belongings appeared to have been partially buried which made no sense because the body had been left in plain view.

Then they offered some details—how they had found her belongings hidden, yet the body had lain in full view.

Candace’s vocal cords had not been swollen. She hadn’t tried to scream. "In fact, it doesn't look as if she was alone. We feel because of this evidence that she was with someone she knew, In fact. it looks now as though someone had spent some time with her.”

I was shocked. No struggle and no screaming spelled terror to me, I remembered the other times she had been threatened. There was the storm on Lake Winnipeg when we had faced waves that could have capsized our boat. She had slept. When she didn’t know how to stop the bike, she just continued peddling. When she was skiing and didn’t know how to glide into shore, she just hung on with admirable resolve.

I wondered who had terrorized her so completely? Was it a knife or a gun or the face of a deranged man that had immobilized her so completely that she hadn’t even cried out for help? My heart twisted painfully, as my mind examined all possibilities.

Or had she been remembering our conversation about murder and accepted her fate? I wasn’t sure what would be worse – her shutting down because of fear – or her focussing on God– waiting for God to leave heaven’s doors wide open.  All I knew was that I was feeling her pain.

The officers continued their report. “Because we believe it was someone she knew we are starting to question people who she knew.” they said.

They had arrived at a different conclusion than I had.    — a perspective probably based on the difference between being a woman or being a tall, well-built male.

Then one of them dropped another bomb shell. "And she was a virgin," he said. The top button of her “tight” jeans – which had been reinforced with a safety pin was still in tact. It had not been tampered with….:.

I remembered those jeans – she had other jeans , newer jeans, but she liked this old pair the best.

“She wasn’t sexually assaulted?” I asked tentatively.
“No.”
“Was she hurt in any way?”
“No.”
“What could the motive have been?”

They shrugged, watching our faces as if waiting for something to surface.

Their whole presentation that evening had been distant, polite, professional – just the cold hard facts with that slight edge of – something.  I couldn't put my finger on. Suspicion? Perhaps? Totally understandable - we pay them to be suspicious. We need them to search for truth.

Then they assured us again that they would be doing their utmost to find the guilty party and that they were positive that they would find him.  I wasn't so sure.  The police didn't always find their man.  The police in Edmonton had never found Jake Plett's wife's murderer.  How could they be so sure they would find this one? 

As they shut their notebooks, we thanked them for their hard work.

But then after shutting the door behind them, Cliff and I both looked at each other. “She was a virgin?” This meant she not been raped. I had prayed she wouldn’t be violated. Could I consider this an answer to prayer?

It also laid to rest another question. We had heard about another fellow who had insinuated that he had “been with her.”

I didn’t believe him. But do we really know everything about another person. maybe – she had experimented?  I didn’t know – but now I knew, she was a virgin.  She really had been an innocent little girl— half woman, half child— who had been forced off the street that night and terrorized. 

But those stark words, "She was a virgin," also drove home another reality Candace had died before she could even begin to live.  Instead of a beautiful white wedding dress, we had been forced to buy a cold, white coffin.  Would I ever be able to accept the injustice of that?

I looked at Cliff; he looked drawn, torn...and old.  Both of us must have aged ten years in a space of two months.  I had lost fifteen pounds.  Cliff had grayed.

*****
And then there was the Search Committee.  We thought they had done their work – Candace was found

When the Search Committee met four days after the funeral, we thought it was to say good bye.

Cliff and I were dreading it…this remarkable group of people had supported us so faithfully. No amount of money could ever have purchased what they had given us at the moment of our greatest need. We could never have hired others who would have acted so quickly, so intuitively—anticipating our needs, knowing what mattered, and finding the energy to do what had to be done without being asked.

Perhaps the greatest gift they gave us was the assurance that, together, we had done everything possible to find Candace. We were told that the city of Winnipeg had never before seen such an extensive search. Knowing that we had not left one stone unturned, made Candace’s death easier to live with. Nothing had been left undone.

But now was it over? Now that the search had ended, was their mandate finished?

They decided there was still work to do. There were loose ends that required coordination. MBCI still needed help navigating its relationship with the police. Crime Stoppers wanted to reenact scenes for broadcasts planned for late February and early March. There were business and financial matters remaining from both the funeral and the search. And many organizations—Glen Eden, Klassen's Funeral Home, River East Mennonite Brethren Church, and Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—had donated generously and needed to be thanked, both informally and formally. We were overwhelmed by their generosity.

I did a quick calculation, comparing the funeral expenses with the gifts and donations. We had broken even. We hadn’t benefited a single penny from Candace’s death—but, miraculously, we also hadn’t lost.

Len DeFehr reported that approximately six thousand dollars had been received for the memorial fund designated for a swimming pool, and that there were still four thousand dollars remaining from the search committee’s funds. We also learned that the man who had found Candace’s body had declined the two-thousand-dollar reward, and that the police were deciding where that money should go—most likely into the memorial fund.

The final line in the meeting minutes was the most revealing: “The perpetrators are not a priority project for us at present.” We had chosen other goals.

Then the February 11 meeting was supposed to be the last one—but it wasn’t either.

We met in the Christian Press boardroom. I looked around the table at Harold Jantz, Henry Wedel, Dave Teigrob, Dave Loewen, and Len DeFehr. Len reported that the memorial fund had grown to ten thousand dollars. None of us had expected it to increase after the funeral, yet weeks later, cards and letters were still arriving at our home and at the Camp Arnes office—some with large donations, others with only a few dollars, all marked for the pool.

The committee also expressed concern that the police investigation had begun to focus on David Wiebe. He had been asked to take a lie detector test. We were baffled. David had been in a driver’s education lesson at the time Candace disappeared; there was no possible way he could have abducted her. Other friends had also been questioned. We decided we needed to meet again.

Our final meeting was held on March 5. By then, the memorial fund had reached $16,200. One young girl had donated her entire piggy bank—2,887 pennies. There was a growing sense that the giving had, in some way, only begun.
“When the public gives this much,” someone said, “the business community will want to get involved too.”

The swimming pool had received a quiet but unmistakable vote of confidence from the community.

With gratitude, we disbanded.

But that was not the end. The money kept coming. People who had donated began visiting the camp, asking where the pool would be built. Dave Loewen suggested that it might be helpful to create something people could see—a memorial of some kind. He wondered if a plaque might serve as an interim marker and asked whether we would help design it.

We agreed, but a plaque felt cold. Candace already had a gravestone. We wanted something worth looking at—something that would tell her story. So we asked Dave whether, instead of a plaque, we could design a permanent storyboard: a collection of newspaper articles and photographs, arranged in a durable, historical-style display. That way the camp visitors- who might not even had never heard of Candace could understand why this place existed. It was the story that mattered.

Dave agreed. We designed it and stationed it near the Lodge where the pool might be built.

Maybe the plaque was enough. I remembered again the conversation I had with Candace—when I had told her that committing her life to God meant trusting Him with its impact. Was God going to honor that commitment now? Was a swimming pool going to be part of it? Would there really be a pool at Camp Arnes someday?

The Candace Derksen Memorial Pool was built at Camp Arnes a little more than a year after Candace went missing. On October 26, 1986, we cut the ribbon.
 
*****
Then there was Child Find.

I remember how at the very first search meeting, I met Ester DeFehr. Dave had invited her to be part of the committee because we would need someone to represent the “mother.”

She had reported to the committee that she had contacted Child Find, as well as the Tania Murrell Missing Children's Society in Edmonton. She had also been in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and we were given the necessary forms to register with them. At that point, the research and contacts Ester was making was exactly what the committee needed.

It was the only meeting I attended and having her there gave me full confidence in this committee. I could let it go and tend to the house functioning which had become the headquarters for the search in other ways.
 
Soon the search committee were meeting daily and Ester was in constant contact with provincial Child Find offices, coordinating the distribution of Candace’s photograph to be aired across Canada through Child Find publicity programs.

When the public response was not garnering the response the committee was looking for, the director of Child Find Alberta told Ester that she believed that a direct appeal from a mother would be powerful. People, she said, respond to the pain of a mother and her plea for help.

Because of that advice, I became involved. I became the “mother.”

And it never really ended.

As I stepped into that role, I began to sense how vital this Child Find organization was to the search…  and was surprised that we didn’t have something like this in Manitoba—and how necessary it was for Manitoba to have its own provincial branch. I began working closely with Ester to help establish one.

On January 29, we met with other community members—who were also interested in this cause and formally organized an interim board to begin the work of creating a Manitoba-based Child Find. We decided that the most logical first step would be to attend the annual Child Find conference in Calgary, Alberta. Five people were chosen to go.

We worked steadily. By April 16, the organization was officially incorporated. By June, we had assembled a full publicity package. By summer, we were beginning to hear from distraught parents—families who were suddenly walking the same terrible road we had walked.

In time, Child Find evolved into what is now the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Candace was credited with its beginning— “All that we are able to do today for children in Canada, and around the world, is part of her legacy,” said director Christy Dzikowicz in April 2015, when a plaque honouring Candace was unveiled to mark the Centre’s 30th anniversary.

As Cliff and I watched these two projects grow—the Child Find organization and the swimming pool—we would look at each other and smile. Anything that carried Candace’s name, anything touched by her imprint, seemed to take on an otherworldly momentum and flourish far beyond what we had imagined.

I remember meeting with the director and staff of Child Find to offer our emotional support if nothing else, and then apologized for not being more involved.

That was when one of the staff paused to assure me that even though we hadn’t been involved all along – Candace’s presence had been with them and guided them.  “It’s as if Candace has an active role in our organization,” she said. “We call her our pixie dust.”

They all laughed—and then started to describe this “pixie dust.”

Apparently, pixie dust is a magical, glittery powder from folklore stories that grants flight or other magical effects. In modern usage, it means unexpected magic, kindness, or special moments often through random acts of goodwill like gifts or treats. Metaphorically, it can also describe anything that magically solves problems or adds wonder.

When they described the role of this pixie dust, it did sound like Candace.

Who would have thought – that our little baby would have such an impact,

She entered our world with eyes already sparkling, and by six months had become a walking marvel—alert, radiant, unmistakably alive. Even then, she seemed awake to joy, as if joy had been expecting her.

By grade one, an uncanny gift revealed itself. She was a bully-whisperer, able to disarm cruelty not through confrontation, but through the quiet authority of innocence and goodness. Meanness simply lost its footing around her.

A few years later, she blossomed into a friend-magnet extraordinaire—the kind of buoyant spirit whose laughter lifted a room without effort, whose presence felt like an open door. Joy followed her naturally, as though it recognized its own.

As a young teenager, she surprised us yet again. She carried an uncommon social awareness, lingering in deep conversations, offering insights that felt far beyond her years. She spoke of God with a rare intimacy—personal, thoughtful, unforced—a faith not handed to her, but something she had quietly discovered and chosen.

When she disappeared, she ignited the largest missing-person search the city of Winnipeg had ever known.

After her death, we watched as she became a story—told aloud for the first time to an audience of two thousand, broadcast live across the city. Her life, once intimate and ordinary, now carried weight in the public imagination.

Then mysteriously the vivid memory of her victimisation inspired Child Find Manitoba and a swimming pool at Camp Arnes. Both program’s maon purpose is to help children.

She lived only thirteen years—yet her love was vast and uncontainable, reaching beyond time, beyond circumstance, far beyond herself.

I watched… and now they were calling it her pixie dust.
​
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.  Robert Fulghum  

Having experienced such a strong circle of care at the funeral, I didn’t want life to resume right away. I knew the real emotional pain of grief was waiting just around the corner—the moment when I would have to learn how to live without Candace, to accept that she wasn’t coming back.

But then I learned something unexpected.

She wasn’t about to leave.

It was almost as if Candace was standing in the wings of our lives, continuing to orchestrate a circle of care for us.
For one thing, my sisters, Luella and Pat, decided to stay a few days longer. As they settled in, they asked what they could do to help.

I didn’t want them to clean for me—mainly because I didn’t want them to see my mess—so instead I brought up the first large box of unanswered mail that had taken up residence in the basement. Letters, cards, and notes from strangers and friends alike. I set it on the table.

They groaned.

“What do you want to do with these?” my oldest sister, Luella, asked.

“Answer the whole lot of them,” I said, smiling.

Always ready for a challenge, Luella immediately began sorting the pile into cards and letters. “I can answer the cards,” she said.

I handed her the memorial thank-you cards we had prepared.

A few minutes later, she held up the first one she’d written. “Here,” she said. “Is this how you want them?”
I recognized the name on the envelope and paused.

“It’s great,” I said slowly, then hesitated. “But you can also thank that family for the casserole they sent over… and the letter… and the phone call… and—well, I don’t even know what else.”

“You mean—”

I nodded.

Some people had first responded to Candace’s disappearance seven weeks earlier with a note. Then, a few weeks later, they checked in again—with a casserole. Some had sent a Christmas card, and then another card when the news of Candace’s death reached them, often enclosing a cheque for the memorial fund.

Even though the money itself was being handled by Camp Arnes, the office forwarded the accompanying notes to us so we could respond, if we wished. As I explained this to Luella, I realized that unless we coordinated the process carefully—unless we somehow tracked each gesture—responding to every piece of mail individually, every gift and kindness, would mean that some people might receive five thank-you notes.

“Is this the only box?” Luella asked.

I shook my head.

“We’ll never be able to sort them out by memory,” she said.

“I know,” I agreed.

Meanwhile, my younger sister, Pat, who had been quietly reading some of the letters, let out a soft sigh. “This good friend of yours has written you a beautiful letter,” she said gently. “This one only you can answer.” She handed it to me.

I glanced at the name and shook my head. “I know—but she’s not really anyone I know. I don’t know her any more than you do. It honestly won’t make much difference who answers it.”

Pat looked up, surprised. “You mean you don’t know who these people are?” She gestured toward the boxes brimming with notes.

“Some I do,” I said. “Some I’ve never met. Sometimes we may have only had one kind conversation over the telephone.”

So we pulled out a stack of index cards and began to organize—carefully tracking names, gestures, letters, meals, calls—trying, in our small human way, to honor the vast and tender web of care that had gathered around us.

Many of the letters began with the same quiet theme—connection without acquaintance. One, from southern Manitoba, opened with the words: “Although our paths have never crossed, we feel that we have known you people for some time.”

Someone else enclosed a quotation from Elisabeth Elliot:

“Only by acceptance lies peace—not in forgetting, not in resignation, nor in busyness.”


There were many who spoke of being amazed at our stand, at what they called our courage.
“My deepest condolences to you and your whole family,” one wrote. “I must commend you for your bravery.”

A girl a few years older than Candace wrote honestly and without polish:
“During the time Candace was missing, and after she was found, I seemed to be fighting with God. I couldn’t see why He took her life away—why it had to be Candace. She was a Christian, and a darn good one. How could He let this happen to her—and to us? But you just can’t stay angry at God forever. He’s God, and He’s forgiving. Still, I wonder why.”

Her words echoed questions we ourselves had not yet found language for.

A boy who had never met Candace—or any of us—wrote:
“At first I wasn’t sure exactly what this feeling was, and maybe I still’m not. But you see, I believe that I love Candace. I love her as a fellow human being, and I would like to aspire to be more like her—to be able to love and care as much as she did. I’ve cried a lot over this.”

It was hard to understand how people could be so deeply affected by a tragedy in which they had played no part. And yet, I held onto one sentence with particular tenderness: “I aspire to be more like her.”

Inmates at Stony Mountain Institution—a federal maximum- and medium-security penitentiary—wrote to us as well. One letter began, “My greatest and deepest apology for your dear daughter. I am a prisoner convicted of murder.”

Others, in their efforts to comfort us, sometimes said things in ways I don’t think they intended:
“I thank the Lord that He did not test me the way He has tested you. No evil will befall those who trust the Lord. My heart reaches out to you.”

There were homemade cards from children. One showed a child’s idea of heaven, complete with “sun tables and umbrellas”—so close to Candace’s own descriptions that it made me smile through tears. Entire classrooms sent envelopes filled with small notes, telling us they were thinking of us, sharing our loss, remembering.

Some letters told stories of unbearable pain: “Our only son, three and a half years old, was run over by a half-ton truck and instantly killed. Our second daughter was killed when she was fifteen.”

Another wrote: “Our fourth son was stillborn, and our four-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted by a young relative.”
And another: “I have a daughter who has struggled with drugs and alcohol for the past four years. She has been through many treatment centers, all without success. Somehow, through our experiences with our daughter, I could almost associate with your heartache.”

At first, these stories felt overwhelming—too much suffering piled upon suffering. But in time, we comforted ourselves by remembering why people had sent them in the first place: not to burden us, but to comfort us.

And as I shared the letters with my sisters, something unexpected happened. They, too, were encouraged. We were all comforted—immeasurably—simply by reading them aloud to one another.

It took the entire day just to sort the mail.

There could not have been a better way to spend the day after.

Only then did I truly understand why we send cards at all.

They are not for the day of the tragedy.

They are for the day after.
 
*****
It didn’t stop after my sisters left.

Around Valentine’s Day, a poster-sized valentine arrived at our door from the Ridgeland Hutterite Colony. About the same time, a very official letter came from Brian Mulroney and his wife, Mila Mulroney. Another followed from the federal health minister, Jake Epp, and his wife.

By the end of February, the flood had slowed to about ten pieces of mail a day. I kept filling out index cards, coding the gifts and gestures, trying to keep track. Once or twice I attempted to answer letters.

The official letters of thanks were the easiest. I could sign them simply: Cliff and Wilma Derksen.
But the personal letters—the casual, heartfelt ones I would normally have signed with all our names—stopped me cold. For thirteen years, I had written Cliff, Wilma, Candace… and there was no way to break that deeply ingrained habit.

Was it that I wasn’t ready?

Or that I didn’t want to be?

I honestly didn’t know.

There was also a strong response to our public statement about forgiveness, which had appeared in the newspaper. One letter put the confusion bluntly: I am unsure of your feelings exactly, because I have not experienced the death of someone very close to me (knock on wood). All I can do is send you and your family my deepest sympathies. I hope, in time, your hurting stops.
I still do not understand how you can send out precious love for the killer of Candace. He—or she—has stolen something very precious from you, and you send out love? In the Bible doesn’t it say, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth”? I feel much hatred for that person and cannot forgive what he has done to a sweet, innocent thirteen-year-old girl. I do not understand your feelings…

I could feel the pain in those words.

I understood the anger.

An article in The Toronto Star on February 16, 1985, also explored our response. A sociologist was quoted as saying that “the ‘turn the other cheek’ belief is more deeply embedded in those whose religious convictions are strong—especially in the case of Mennonites.”

“I understand the Mennonite religion quite well,” he added, “and I would expect this reaction from them. But I wouldn’t expect it from anyone else without those beliefs.”

I was quietly horrified.

I did not believe forgiveness came more easily to us because we were Mennonite. I didn’t believe it was easier for anyone. Forgiveness is not a cultural reflex; it is a universal human alternative.

We chose forgiveness because we wanted to survive our tragedy. It wasn’t for public approval. It wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit.

We knew—deep down—that forgiveness was a way toward healing.

At the same time, we began to see how the attention and publicity were affecting Candace’s friends. After the initial shock and terror, something unexpected happened: Candace had become almost a heroine—a symbol, even a kind of celebrity.

One of her friends, Kiersten Loewen, wrote a poem that was published in The Free Press:

“I knew her,”
I claim.
But did I really?
Candace, always smiling, laughing,
Giving of herself,
To strangers and friends alike.
Candace, the one who didn’t seem to need anything.
No one thought that anything would happen to her.
“Not to Candace,”
They say.
“She’s so sweet, kind and giving.
Not to her.”
Well, they were wrong.
Something did happen to her.
No more to see the sun again,
The rain again,
Feel pain again…
No more to cheer me up again…

They continued to send us poems.
They continued to send cards.
They continued to visit.
​
And somehow, in all of it, Candace’s life—her kindness, her faith, her presence—kept reaching outward, still gathering people, still shaping hearts, even after she was gone.
*****

It didn’t stop there.

One evening, I received a call from Michael W. Smith himself. He had heard our story and wanted to give our family complimentary tickets to his upcoming concert. He also invited us to meet him backstage afterward.
We could hardly believe it. Michael W. Smith—the singer of Candace’s favorite song, Friends Are Friends Forever—was scheduled to perform on March 3, and he had personally invited us.

It felt like a spectacular moment—a gift from heaven—with Candace written all over it.

We learned that Michael and his wife had written the song when a close friend, Bill Jackson, from a small Bible study group they belonged to, was preparing to leave town. As plans were being made for a farewell gathering, Debbie suggested they write him a song.

“That’s great,” Michael said. “We’ll write one and send it to him.”

“But what if we wrote it today?” she pressed.

Michael brushed off the idea, thinking, That’s just not possible.

Less than half an hour later, Debbie came outside to the backyard where he was resting and handed him a page of freshly written lyrics.

“I just looked at it and thought, Wow,” he later said. “We walked straight into the house. I sat down at the piano and started writing the music. Three minutes later—it was there. We just looked at each other and said, Wow.”

He sang the song for their friend that very evening, and its impact was immediate and profound.

“It just connects people,” Michael said. “I see it every night. I’ll be singing, and someone over there is crying. Three people over here are holding each other. It’s crazy.”

And friends are friends forever
If the Lord’s the Lord of them…

The lyrics affirm that shared faith in God makes friendships eternal—stronger than distance, stronger even than loss. The song speaks directly to the pain of goodbye, whether caused by moving away, by death, or by the irreversible changes of life. It roots friendship in something larger than time, offering comfort through the belief that even when friends part, the bond remains—held together by God.

But my reaction to the invitation was complicated.

I was thrilled for everyone else—for their excitement, their delight—but I dreaded it.

I was traumatized by the song.

It always made me cry.

How could I possibly sit through hearing her song live, when I couldn’t even listen to a scratchy, faded recording without falling apart?

There was only one way to survive it.

The morning of the concert, I put the tape on and forced myself to listen to Friends Are Friends Forever.

The song had lost none of its power to resurrect Candace’s presence. I could feel her swaying into the room in time with the music, that bright, unmistakable smile on her face—the same smile she wore every time she listened to her song.

I played it again.

And again.

And again.

I tried to replace her memories with my own—memories of my friends—hoping that if I made the song mine, her absence wouldn’t hurt so much. But I couldn’t. It was her song. She had loved it too deeply, played it too often.
The pain in that music would reach out, wrench my heart from its place, and crush it like wet clay.

Then I tried to work through it while doing something ordinary. I dusted the house. But every time the chorus began, the room blurred and I started sobbing.

When Cliff came home, he took one look at me, walked into the living room, and turned the tape off. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m listening to it until I don’t cry anymore.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t you know that song will always make us cry? You’ll never get over it. Doing this will make you sick—and you have to go tonight. You can’t make yourself sick.”

With that last sentence, he uncovered my secret hope.

I didn’t want to go.

But then Cliff said something that stilled me. He said Candace would be there—that one way of keeping her close was not to resist, but to enter in, to let ourselves be gathered into the circles of care she kept weaving around us, even now.

The concert was beautiful.

And when Michael W. Smith sang Friends Are Friends Forever, it became more than music.
It was art—true and luminous.

A celebration of agape love.

It felt like greatness meeting greatness: love meeting loss,
heaven brushing earth,
God present among us, gently unraveling what we had tied too tightly in our grief.

I cried—and so did everyone else. But it was dark. There were no cameras, no eyes upon us. And it was good to cry.
Candace was there with us all--not as absence, but as comfort--moving quietly through our tears.

The funeral home’s limousine pulled up in front of the house precisely on time. Cliff, Odia, and I rode in the first car with our parents; the rest of the family followed in another. The sun was brilliant, almost defiant, and a fine haze of snow drifted through the air as we pulled away from the house.

As we neared the church, traffic thickened. For a moment I wondered if we might get stuck in traffic jam—and then, almost ceremonially, the cars parted to let us through. As we approached the parking lot—already overflowing—I understood. It was the funeral itself that had created the congestion.

Inside the church, we were guided first to a private room, then into the foyer. Finally, we began the slow walk down the aisle, following Candace’s white coffin. It was covered in red roses, and draped across the front was a banner that read: Friends Are Friends Forever. Faces along the aisle blurred together—drawn, pale, silent. We took our seats on the front bench, and the service began.

The MBCI choir filled the loft above us. We tried to smile at the students we recognized. David was there, seated in the very last row, at the far end. To our left, much closer than I had expected, the media had already taken their places. I felt a flicker of unease and wondered why we hadn’t asked them to sit farther back.

Keith Poysti, our assistant pastor, stepped forward and led the congregation in the opening hymn, “We Praise Thee, O God.” I mouthed the words, uncertain whether my voice would hold.

Keith then introduced Dave Loewen. Dave had been asked to speak on behalf of the search committee—to thank the public, the police, and the media for their tireless efforts.

“By God’s hand, Candace has become a sacrificial lamb,” he said. “This event has brought into sharp focus both the worst and the best of Winnipeg. While evil has run its course, good has triumphed.”

The choir, directed by Peter Braun, rose to sing.

I was acutely aware that nearly two thousand people filled the building. Later, I would be told that many more had been turned away at the doors. I was surrounded by a vast crowd that had come to hold us up in our grief—and yet, in that moment, I felt utterly alone. It was the loneliest moment of my life.

Ruth Balzer interrupted my thoughts as she stood and began to tell Candace’s story.

We had chosen Ruth carefully. She had known Candace through the Camp Arnes Follow-up Program—a winter ministry designed to offer spiritual support to young people between camp seasons. Every Tuesday, Ruth picked Candace up and brought her home again.

Candace always returned from those evenings visibly renewed, lighter somehow, more herself. We knew that much of that transformation had to do with Ruth. I don’t think Ruth ever fully understood what a model she was for Candace—but we did. And it mattered deeply to us that those who had shaped Candace’s inner life, those she loved and trusted, were given a place in this service.

We hadn’t wanted an obituary or a eulogy. Candace was too young for something so staid, so final. Besides, she didn’t have a list of accomplishments—at least not the kind that fit neatly into formal language. What she had was a way of being.

We wanted Ruth Balzer to offer something simpler: a living description of who Candace was, what she was like, and how it had felt to know her.

“To know Candace was to love her,” Ruth began, “not because she was more special than anyone else, but because she knew how to love.”

She spoke about Candace’s joy in swimming, running, playing basketball, riding horses. She told how Candace instinctively drew out the shy, how she noticed the newcomer and made space for them. “I often saw her make people feel welcome,” Ruth said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She described Candace as a gentle spirit—cheerful, enthusiastic, unpretentious—and as someone with a generous, giving faith. One of her stories sparked a ripple of laughter through the sanctuary, and I smiled through my tears. Candace would have loved that.

A conversation drifted back to me—one I had once had with Candace about funerals.

Back in North Battleford, our church had been involved in two funerals held only days apart. The first was for a powerful man—well known, respected, influential. Yet we were all startled by how few people attended. The atmosphere was polite but detached, marked by courtesy rather than grief. There was little sense of loss.

The second funeral was for a woman who had lived on the lowest rung of life’s ladder. She had been divorced, then widowed—poor, uneducated, living on a pension, burdened with a struggling child. She spoke with a heavy accent, overweight and had no sense of style. By society’s standards, she had nothing. A widow with no mite,. And yet her funeral overflowed.

People packed the sanctuary, spilling into the hallways. Tears flowed freely. Story after story rose like incense—tender, funny, heartbreaking. They spoke of her warmth, her kindness, her quiet loyalty. they remembered the small, ordinary ways she had changed their lives. They mourned her deeply.

I remember sitting afterward with Cliff and Candace, puzzling over the contrast.

Candace listened closely, her questions gentle but probing.

“Why?” she had asked. “What did the she have that made her funeral so alive?”

I felt badly that we had been in that kind of discussion and that she was listening but then in hindsight it might have been important for her to hear.  I answered her with “She knew how to love,” I told her. “A love that truly sees another person for who they are—recognizes the beauty there and delights in it.” I think I even referred to that famous chapter on love: love is patient and kind, not self-seeking or easily angered, and how faith, hope, and even prophecy have their place, but will pass away, while love endures forever. Things like that –I really preached it.

Candace nodded then, her eyes wide and thoughtful. I could tell she understood, not just with her mind, but with her heart.

Then the choir rose to sing—and they sang beautifully.

So much care had gone into the music. Katie Epp, our pastor’s wife, had taken full responsibility for selecting and coordinating it. We had entrusted her completely, and now we felt the wisdom of that choice. The songs carried the room. Their words named what we could not quite say ourselves; their melodies held the weight of the moment without overwhelming it.

Then Cliff stood and announced the swimming pool fund.

It was, no doubt, highly unusual to introduce such a thing at a funeral. But this, too, belonged to the story. It was not an interruption—it was a continuation.

And then Candace's song...

Cliff introduced the song, Friends are Friends Forever, and told the congregation how Candace had played this song every night for the last year and a half, how the words were her gift to us now.

When that that song that had been so much a part of Candace floated through the loudspeakers, it was as if her presence walked softly down the aisle.  The tears began to slip. 

The chorus:
And friends are friends forever
If the Lord's the Lord of them
And a friend will not say "never"
'Cause the welcome will not end
Though it's hard to let you go...

I've been told that there wasn't a dry eye in the place.  Even though it was painful to cry, all of us needed to do it.

The song continued:
In the Father's hands we know
That a lifetime's not too long to live as friends

Pastor Epp stepped to the pulpit as the last notes of the song faded and began his meditation. "Whatever evil befell Candace, it will not have the last word in her life. God's peace is the last word," he began.

He was echoing our hope.

CBC radio was broadcasting the funeral live  -  so all of Winnipeg had access to that moment.

And then it was over, and we were following the white casket down the long aisle. Another of Candace's songs, "Great Is the Lord," accompanied our procession.

Candace had once told me, "Mom, my favorite song is 'Friends Are Friends Forever,' and I wanted to tape only that one, but I accidently taped 'Great Is the Lord' as well, and now I keep listening to it, too. I like it almost as much. 'Friends' makes me a little sad. 'Great Is the Lord' picks me up and leaves me with a good feeling." And it was doing that for us now….

We stepped outside. The sun had disappeared, and a blizzard swirled around us. Just as I was stepping into the car, a strange man broke through the crowd and grabbed me. He only wanted to give me a little Bible and to wish us well, but it reminded us again that this wasn't an ordinary funeral. The person who killed Candace could easily have come as a guest.

The funeral procession pulled out onto Portage Avenue. Three patrol cars led the way, though we could barely see them through the blizzard. I knew we were part of a sad parade, but for a few moments the storm mercifully curtained us from public scrutiny.

Once outside the city limits, the storm intensified. It was a whiteout again. We could see no more than a car length ahead. Just visible through the blanket of white, three police officers stood at the gate of Glen Eden Memorial Gardens, saluting as we entered, paying their last respects to Candace.

The force of the wind nearly swept us off our feet as we stepped from the cars. My brother Wes, who had come from B.C., wore only a light jacket and was visibly trembling with cold as he struggled with the coffin. He handled it as gently as possible, as if she could still feel pain.

I was grateful for the storm. It was a gift. It would have been so much harder on a beautiful day, with birds singing in the trees. Somehow this violent weather mirrored our inner turmoil: no one has the right to take another person’s life; the world is cruel and unfriendly; innocent children are forced to absorb unbearable pain; since creation itself, something has gone terribly wrong. We are spinning out of control. Candace was in the storm.

The director handed each of us a flower from the spray. I stepped forward to the coffin, suspended above the grave, and bent down to touch it. It was cold.

“’Bye, Candace. I love you,” I whispered.

Afterward, we returned to our church for lunch. The public guests had gone; only friends and family remained. Slowly, people began to tell us what Candace had meant to them.

One young man, who had been in Candace's class and about whom Candace had always talked so admiringly, told us what their friendship had meant to him.  I wish Candace could have been with us to hear all those wonderful things being said about her.  I was amazed that, young as she was, she had already left a legacy of love.

*****
After a light lunch, Dave Loewen invited everyone to gather around our table in one massive embrace. Someone offered a simple prayer. Then we went home—emotionally exhausted, yet somehow encouraged.

The officers who had been guarding the house were gone. On the dining room table sat a small cut-flower bouquet. A boy from down the street—another of Candace’s friends—had left it for us. A neighborhood store had also delivered large plates of cold cuts for those who would come and stay with us.

It wasn’t until that evening that we realized how much strain we had all been under. We were sitting together in the overflowing living room, finally able to relax. We had plunged into the depths of grief during the day, and now there was a strange sense of relief—almost a quiet celebration—that the event itself was over. It felt good. We had felt Candace collectively. She had been very much alive.

Once again, we went to bed and slept—another miracle.

Early the next morning, we got up to take my parents to the train station. Cliff stopped at a coin-operated newspaper box and bought the city’s papers.

We were stunned when the headlines leapt out at us—both front pages. “Peace Triumphs!” proclaimed Winnipeg Sun, devoting its first four pages to our story. The piece in the Winnipeg Free Press focused more closely on Candace herself. Both articles were thoughtful and generous. Both suggested that, somehow, within all this tragedy, good had triumphed.

My dad had been unusually quiet during the drive, and I wasn’t sure whether it was simply the exhaustion of the past days or something deeper. I watched him carefully as he read. When he finally laid the paper down, there was a new peace on his face.

“Now I understand,” he said quietly. “On the train trip here, I was so puzzled. I wondered where God was. But now I know.”

My father—who usually showed such remarkable restraint in most things—went back to the newspaper stand and bought every newspaper he could find.

Actually, it was my father who first recognized the transcendent power of Candace’s life.

He saw that she had stepped into a simple but profound truth: that God—who embodies goodness and love—created a perfect world for us, a beautiful toy meant to be held, explored, and delighted in. But in the Garden of Eden, we took that toy and broke it. What followed was not innocence but chaos, not play but violence—a world increasingly marked by cruelty and murder.

Yet God, who never withdrew His love, made a promise. If we would take our broken toy and give it back to Him, He would receive it with grace and transform it—making something beautiful again out of what had been shattered.. It is nothing short of a miracle when He does that.

As a child, Candace committed her life to God, and we watched the power of her love quietly grow. Then, as a young teenager, she went even further: she committed her murder to God. In doing so, she opened the door for God to work His miracle—to take what was meant to destroy her and turn it into good.
​
My father was overwhelmed as he witnessed that moment of transformation unfold before his watchful eyes—the unmistakable beauty of grace at work.
​

The next day, around noon, two officers came by to give us more details.

They told us that Candace’s body had been found in a shed only about four hundred and fifty metres—roughly five hundred yards—from our house. It was at the end of the railway tracks that branched off Talbot Avenue. They believed she had taken her usual route home and was forced off the road where Talbot intersects with the tracks.

The shed stood on private property, tucked into a desolate corner of a brick and lumber yard. It had been built nearly fifty years earlier to house machinery used for hauling sand, but it had long since fallen into disuse. No one from the company had entered the building for at least two years—until the day before, when a foreman went in searching for a missing machine part. He said he saw the body immediately.

The motive was unclear, but the case was being treated as first-degree murder. That stunned us. We had assumed that, since she had died of hypothermia, the charge would be kidnapping or abduction or unlawful confinement. The officers explained that when a death occurs while a victim is being unlawfully restrained or held against their will—it is classified as first-degree murder, even if the killing was not planned or deliberate. Their initial assessment of the crime scene suggested a street person. No car appeared to have been involved.

They assured us they would keep us informed.

After they left, I sat at the kitchen table.

The house was empty—strangely empty. There were no guests. Someone, anticipating we would be overwhelmed, had taken the children for the day. Cliff had gone out to take care of practical matters. I was left alone.

It was the first time I was truly alone. The last two days had been one trauma after another, going to the police station, identifying the body, late night visitor, funeral director at the funeral home, choosing a white coffin and then coming home to this report.

All I could think of was First-degree murder. It was first degree murder!

The phrase vibrated through my mind.

To my surprise, my first response was relief Not the answer we had hoped for, but after seven weeks of speculation and uncertainty, there was now a conclusion. Murder—finally, a definitive answer.

But the relief didn’t last long. It gave way to horror.

Candace had been murdered!

Who? Why?

The word itself was unbearable. Murder. It didn’t belong in our world. It wasn’t part of our experience. I had no framework for it—no grid by which to understand it. Or did I?

And then I remembered. Candace and I had talked about murder only a few months earlier.

She had gone to babysit at a neighbour’s house across the back alley. Then around ten o’clock  -  she had phoned me. “Mom, the kids are in bed. I’m playing video games. Can you come? I’m scared.”

So I went over. I sat beside her on the rug and let her beat me at a few video games while we munched on peanuts. Then I asked her why she was afraid. She wasn’t usually scared—at least not that I knew. Was there an actual threat?
No, she said. No threat.

Last night she had a nightmare. In the dream, someone had tried to murder her. She described it in detail. Because I believed dreams were the language of the unconscious, I listened carefully, asking gentle, practical questions. After examining every detail, I concluded it was nothing more than ordinary school anxieties—perhaps amplified by a recent horror movie she had watched against our wishes.

Still, I wanted to honour her fear as real. So I offered what I believed was wise counsel—how to live with fear without letting it rule you.

“Candace,” I said, “when you’re afraid, pray and ask God to protect you. Believe that He will, and then lay your fears aside. You can’t let fear control your life.”

I will never forget the way she looked at me—those expressive blue eyes, searching, intelligent.

“Mom,” she asked quietly, “can you honestly tell me that if I pray for God to protect me, nothing will ever hurt me again? That I will never be murdered?”

So much for Sunday school answers.

My daughter had grown up.

In truth, Cliff and I had asked the same question ourselves years earlier, after Cliff had been held at knifepoint for hours while managing a trading post. Though a missionary in the village eventually rescued him, we could not bear the lingering trauma. We left the community carrying a deep sense of vulnerability—of failure—that we struggled to name, let alone resolve.

Later, we met a second cousin of Cliff’s who had also served in ministry up north and had faced comparable threats—perhaps even worse. Yet he was returning, and he seemed at peace, reconciled somehow to the constant danger. We asked him how he lived with the knowledge that his life was always at risk.

With an unusual peace in his eyes, he told us he had come to an understanding with God: that God had assured him that if his life were to end prematurely and violently, God would use his death to have a greater impact than the rest of his life ever could.

Cliff and I talked about it afterward. We loved his cousin’s understanding—and adopted it as our own.

So, I told Candace that story I said that committing our death to God—our murder—meant that if we were killed, our death would carry the weight of martyrdom; that God would bless our death even more than our life. I assured her that if she were to die violently as a young person, God would somehow use her death to have greater impact than if she had lived a long, full life.

The important part, I told her, was to commit – take off your shoe.

I was referring to the story of Moses: tending sheep in the wilderness, Moses comes across a bush burning in the desert that is not consumed. He stops. He examines it. The bush, ordinary and fragile, mirrors Moses himself. From within the fire, God calls Moses by name then instructs Moses to remove his sandals, for the ground is holy—not because the place itself is sacred, but because God is present there. By removing his shoes Moses signifies reverence, humility, repentance, and the recognition that he stands at a crossroads—between loyalty to heaven and allegiance to earth.

In other words, for God to transform a threat—or a fear—we must commit it to God. I then told her that even after the fact, that commitment had given us a new understanding of that moment

Oh, how glibly we speak.

She just sat there.

“Are you okay, Candace?” I finally asked.

She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”

I knew by her tears that she had taken my words seriously—her fears had been transformed from a nightmare to a sacred moment.

We had never talked about it after that. think we even played a few more video games before the parents came home. I assumed our conversation was a non-issue—irrelevant—because there was no threat on our lives.

However, I did notice that she no longer carried fear. She seemed to radiate a new confidence.

Now, in hindsight, I wondered….

What had I promised her?

“Oh God,” I whispered, “what have we done?”

Just then Cliff came home, I told him what I had remembered and we talked it through. He had the same questions. Again, we were out of our depth.

So we did the only thing we knew how to do. We prayed our way through it—just as we always had – then we let it go.
We had to.  Our own lives had a new agenda.

Yesterday, as our friends flooded into the house in response to the news, they noticed the steady pressure of the media gathering at our door. Quietly, throughout the evening, they signaled to us that this was far from over. What lay ahead would be public. We would need to organize a funeral worthy—so they implied—of this new, tragic hero in our family’s story. Expectations were already forming.

People wanted to know the date of the funerals. We had been told it might take up to five days before Candace’s body would be released. No one seemed to know how long it would take for a body to thaw.

When we had discussed this with the funeral director earlier that morning, he had promised he would contact us as soon as she arrived.  Then he added, gently, that didn’t mean we couldn’t begin planning.

He laid out a list of practical decisions.

A memorial card?

He showed us two samples. We chose one adorned with a simple shaft of wheat—humble, earthy, hopeful.
Bulletins for the program?

We agreed to pick them up on our way home.

Which coffin would we choose?

He led us into a room lined with them—a quiet, solemn gallery of final resting places. That was where we had our first major meltdown. The full reality of everything struck us all at once. Strangely, it was the perfect place to fall apart, with the perfect person standing beside us—someone who understood, someone who didn’t rush us, who simply let our tears come.

Eventually, we returned to his office.

Which church?

Our own, of course.

Whom would we invite?

“Anyone who wants to come,” we answered instinctively.

A flicker of concern crossed his face. Perhaps, he suggested gently, we might want to consider a larger church.
And then the final question.

Which organization would we like people to donate to in Candace’s memory?

Apparently, there is always a memorial gift—often given in lieu of flowers—a way for people to express grief through generosity. The funds usually go to a cause connected to the life or values of the one who has died, something meaningful, something that carries their name forward.

When he presented the idea to us, we hesitated. In our case, we wondered whether we should even have one. People had already given so much—meals, time, presence, care.

“No,” the director said firmly. “People need a way to express their sympathy.”

All we had to do, he explained, was choose a cause.

He told us the amount usually ranged anywhere from two thousand to seven thousand dollars—more if the person was well known. With Candace being so well known, he expected people would be generous.

He suggested Gideon Bibles.

Gideon Bibles at Candace’s funeral?

No. That didn’t fit. She needed something more alive. More playful. More her.

What would Candace have chosen?

Immediately, images surfaced— Candace diving into the deep water behind her father, then hovering near the bottom, beckoning for me to follow, fully aware that I couldn’t. The younger children had loved watching her do something I couldn’t do—so capable, so confident, so free.

Perhaps it should be something connected to her love of swimming.

Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in their future plans—I had seen it in the blueprints. Candace and I had even talked about it once, imagining how much a swimming pool would add to the winter family camp we hosted every year.
The thought lingered.

*****
When, Dave Loewen called from Three Hills, Alberta, to say he wouldn’t be able to return until the evening before the funeral.  He was so sorry…

We understood, but we had a question for him.

We knew that Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in its future plans for the motel lodge, could we raise the seed money for that pool in Candace’s memory?

Dave said it was a good idea, but he would need to talk to the board.

And then there was the media. We needed his advice. We had promised them we would speak to them the next day.  How should we handle this?

Dave took a long breath. He suggested that the search committee might be willing to help us with the funeral preparations – would we want that. We agreed immediately, and he said he would call them.

A meeting was arranged. When the committee learned that we intended to open the funeral service to the public, they hesitated. Gently but firmly, they warned us that the crowd could be enormous. The search had become a public event. People across the city had begun to identify with us. Strangers—people we had never met—had grown emotionally invested in our story. They felt they knew Candace.

Were we sure we were ready for that?

We thought about it carefully. But in the end, it only confirmed what we already would be the right thing to do. If the people of Winnipeg felt that close to Candace, then they also had the right to say good-bye.

The committee exchanged glances, then drew a collective breath. They suggested that the funeral be held at Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—the largest Mennonite church in the city. It could seat two thousand people. Our own church would host the lunch afterward.

Harold Jantz contacted the media and arranged a press conference for the next day.

Then they helped us think through the morning.

*****
The next day, Len DeFehr picked us up and drove us to the press conference. With Dave still out of town, Harold Jantz chaired the gathering, and Cliff read the prepared statement. He thanked the media for their sustained and careful coverage of the search, then thanked the public, invited them to the funeral, and finally announced that anyone wishing to express their sympathy could donate to the dream of building a swimming pool at Camp Arnes.

Their first question was – how did we feel. We told the reporters that we were tremendously relieved that Candace had been found—but that now we were trying to accept her death. We were still in shock but were already feeling the pain which we knew was probably current in all of those who had fallen in love with Candace during the search.

We talked about that for awhile in different ways.

Eventually, someone asked how we felt about the perpetrator.

Cliff and I paused. We didn’t even need to look at each other – we could feel the same tension. Should we be honest? Would they understand?

We had no choice. Our only strategy throughout the ordeal had been to be completely honest.

Cliff, always decisive, said that we were “going to forgive:—that he already had forgiven. For him, making the choice itself was somehow conclusive. It fit his nature.

I live in the past and the future, only dipping into the present occasionally. For me, forgiveness would take longer. I told the reporters that I had chosen to forgive. I wasn’t sure whether I actually had—yet. In hindsight, I can see how strange our answers must have sounded to them. They had no idea about the seven weeks of anticipatory grief we had already endured, nor the intense spiritual journey we had been on during the last two days.

When the lights went down, the reporters stayed seated and began asking questions informally. It felt less like an interview and more like curiosity—almost as if they wanted to understand what made us tick.
I would have loved to explain it to them. But I didn’t yet understand it myself.

We tried to describe our faith, but it was a pitiful attempt—halting, inadequate, incomplete.

As we talked, I forgot they were the press and felt instead that we were among friends – Candace’s friends. In some strange way, they had been with us for the last month, tracing the search alongside us, carrying Candace’s story into the city. It felt right that they should be allowed to walk with us to the end.
​
So, we invited the media to the funeral.

After seven weeks devoted to searching for Candace, our supporters were slowly beginning to return to their own lives, often apologizing to us for needing to do so.

We understood completely. I, too, was longing to regain some measure of control over our lives. We had two other children who needed our attention—who still needed a mother and a father present in the everyday rhythms of life.

There comes a point—usually around six weeks—when the mind and heart can no longer live in suspension. At some point, we are forced to acknowledge what we cannot change. We all knew the truth: some children disappear and are never found.

That Monday, I had begun trying to let go of the search mentality—but I couldn’t. And that’s when I realized why. There was still one thing left to do. One stone remained unturned. There was one person the police had not questioned to my satisfaction.

They had questioned everyone else relentlessly. So I needed to voice my suspicions one final time—place them squarely in the hands of the police, make it their responsibility—and then, finally, I could let go and move forward with my life.

But how to do that?

The officers were no longer coming to our house every day, and I didn’t have the patience to stand in line and wait for hours. Eventually, I persuaded Cliff that we needed to go downtown to the police station—Thursday morning—file our report, and get it over with. We could do it over our noon hour, I reasoned, and our weekend would be free.
He finally agreed. I promised him it wouldn’t take long.

We even brought Syras with us. He had just turned three—a tiny little thing—watchful and attentive, never any trouble at all.

But the moment we stepped inside the station, a strange, heavy awkwardness settled over us.

The receptionist looked startled when we introduced ourselves. She stumbled over her words, then hurried away to alert a supervisor. Within minutes, the two sergeants assigned to Candace’s case appeared. They, too, seemed unusually tense—nervous, even.

Had we done something wrong?

Weren’t we supposed to come?

Wasn’t this a public building?

We tried to explain that we had something simple to report, that it would only take a few minutes of their time. They wouldn’t listen.

“It can wait,” one of them said quietly. “We have something much more important to tell you.”

Then they asked if I would stay with Syras in the reception area while they spoke with Cliff alone. I didn’t like the thought of being left out.

“It won’t take long,” Cliff whispered, giving my arm a quick squeeze before following them into a large office.

I had no choice but to sit down and try to keep both myself and Syras calm. He was sensing my mood—restless as I was—squirming in my lap, little whimpers escaping while I distracted him with whatever I could find.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the two officers returned. They asked the receptionist to look after Syras and guided me into the same room where Cliff was waiting.

Then they left.

I sat down. Cliff was perched on the edge of the desk, his face pale, his posture rigid. I knew instantly—something was dreadfully wrong.

He took a long breath, letting the silence stretch between us. I could see him choosing his words carefully, aware that whatever he said next would change everything.

“They’ve found Candace,” he said at last, his voice low and strained. “They’ve found her body.”

He paused, swallowing hard.

“She’s dead.”

“Dead?” I whispered. The word barely formed. I couldn’t believe it. Was this some kind of sick mistake? The timing—why now?

Cliff explained that the police had been looking for us, that they were as surprised as we were that we had come to the station. He had to repeat himself several times before his words began to register.

“Where did they find her?” I asked finally.

“In a shack near the Nairn overpass.”

“When did they find her?”

“This morning.”

“Who knows?”

“Everyone, it seems. The media were holding the story until we were notified.”

I forced myself to ask the next question.

“How… how did she die?”

“They’re not sure yet,” he said. “Her hands and feet were tied.” His voice wavered. “It looks like she froze to death.”
Oh, my darling little girl. My sweet, precious daughter.

The tears came before I could stop them, and I turned away. That last fragile sliver of hope—the tiny percentage I had clung to—dissolved completely.

I could feel Cliff close beside me, yet a strange distance held us apart. If we had embraced in that moment, we would both have collapsed—and we couldn’t afford that. We were in a very public place. The office had windows. We felt the weight of unseen eyes.

So instead, we went over the sparse details again and again, as though repetition might somehow make them clearer—more bearable.

Cliff waited quietly while I tried to absorb what could not be absorbed. Finally, he spoke, gently.

“They want me to identify her.”

“I’m going with you,” I said at once. “Can I go with you?”

He nodded.

When we opened the office door, the officers immediately offered to drive Syras and me home while Cliff went to identify Candace. They were kind but firm, explaining that a car was already waiting downstairs and that it would be no trouble at all.

But we refused. We were capable of driving ourselves, and our car was parked just outside. Syras would stay with us. He clung to my hand, sensing the weight in the air even if he couldn’t understand it.

The officers told us we would be expected—that all we needed to do was walk through the front doors and someone would meet us.

Candace’s body was at Seven Oaks Hospital, northwest of our home.

Once at the hospital, we pushed through the heavy doors. A medical examiner was waiting and guided us into a private lounge. There, we were introduced to an officer from the homicide department.

“She doesn’t look pretty,” they warned us gently. “The blotches on her skin are from the cold. They aren’t bruises.”

They explained that the body would be allowed to thaw and that although she might have died the night she disappeared, her death certificate would record January 17, 1985, as the official date of death.

“How did she die?” I kept asking, as if repetition might somehow change the answer.

They handed us two Polaroid photographs.

“We thought the pictures might help prepare you,” the medical examiner said softly. “We can’t be sure until the autopsy. But her hands and feet were tied. Right now, it looks as though she may have frozen to death.”

I glanced at the photographs. They were ugly pictures of our beautiful child.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I whispered. “What motive would there be? Who would take her, tie her up, and leave her to die? She didn’t have enemies.”

“It could have been sexual,” he said slowly. “The tying… bondage… it can be sexual.”

Of course. I nodded, numb.

The men had been noticing her—that terrible, dangerous combination: a child in a woman’s body.

They led us down an endless corridor. As we entered a small white room, someone gently lifted Syras from my arms.
A tiny figure lay on a gurney, covered by a white sheet, on what looked like an operating table.

I forced myself to look.

Yes—it was Candace.

And yet—it wasn’t Candace.

Frozen, she looked almost like a grotesque, dust-covered mannequin, and I instinctively recoiled. I felt no connection to the still form before me. Candace without her personality—without movement, without presence—was heartbreakingly small, an empty shell.

They asked whether she looked the same as on the day she disappeared—her hair, her clothes. They needed to determine how long she had been in the shack.

Yes, the clothes were the same.

Yes, her hair was the same.

Everything we saw confirmed what we already feared: she had died that first night.

We left the room.

“Are you going to be all right?” the medical examiner asked gently. “When you get home…?” Her voice trailed off, inviting reassurance.

“We have friends,” I said quickly.

“Yes,” she replied. “I know. You have a wonderful community.”

All the way home, we swung wildly between a strange relief—we had found Candace—and a crushing grief at the realization that she was gone forever, that our family would never again be whole. The emotions came in violent succession, rising and falling so quickly there was no time to brace for the next wave.

We had barely stepped through the back door when the front doorbell rang.

It was a reporter.

We owed so much to the media, and we had never once declined an opportunity to tell our story—until now. Now I couldn’t. I had no voice left to offer, no face to turn toward a camera.

“Not today,” I said softly. “Please—give us a little time.”

She nodded, and I closed the door.

I had always imagined that when Candace was found, we would be the ones to call people—starting with the search committee—to tell them the news. But now I realized we wouldn’t need to. The media was already carrying the message for us.

What followed was a spontaneous open house.

Friends drifted in and out—red-nosed, hollow-eyed, disheveled—but none of that mattered. The kitchen began to fill with food again, and the women quietly organized it as if by instinct, creating order around our chaos.

There was one visitor that day who was particularly active—Percy, the stray cat Candace had loved so dearly.

During the search for Candace, Percy had noticed that our door was opening and closing constantly. With so many guests coming and going, the door became a kind of invitation. Every time it opened, Percy would leap onto the steps, slip expertly between legs, and make one wild dash through the house—up the stairs or down stairs. We didn’t care. She had full run of the place. I had even started buying food for her.

Most guests never noticed her at all. Those who did wore the strangest expressions as they felt a tiny thundercloud swirl between their legs and vanish into the house.

“What was that?” someone would ask, half amused, half alarmed.

Usually there were more pressing things to attend to than Percy, so we would just shrug. She was difficult to explain.
But that evening, I think she sensed something. She came slinking down the stairs and stopped conspicuously in the hallway, surveying the guests gathered in the living room. She seemed to be calculating—expertly—what was going on…Sensing the mood…..

One guest gasped when he spotted her.

“That has got to be the ugliest cat I have ever seen.”

With her arched back, long legs, stubby body, batlike face, and matted, scraggly fur, she was the ugliest cat. Silhouetted against a full moon, she would have made a perfect Halloween cat. Our guest wasn’t wrong, and I nodded in agreement.

But I looked away, hoping he wouldn’t see the pain in my eyes.

I realized then that I loved Percy. Somehow, impossibly, she had come to represent Candace to us.

*****
By ten o’clock that evening, the house began to empty. Dave, Fran, and Heidi had come from Camp Arnes the moment they heard, and everyone agreed it would be good for them to stay the night.

Then the doorbell rang.

I got up, assuming someone had returned for forgotten mittens or boots. But when I opened the door, a man stood there—dressed in black, or perhaps it only appeared that way in the darkness. He looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place him.

I invited him inside.

He introduced himself.

“I’m the father of the girl who was murdered at the donut shop.”

My heart stopped. I felt the blood drain from my face. I remembered the case—the arrest, the charges, the trial that had surfaced in the news again and again over the past two years.

I stood frozen, horrified. He was the parent of a murdered child. And he had come to us because now we belonged to the same circle. This was our new people group.

I shuddered.

What a dreadful, unwanted identity.

I brought him into the kitchen and introduced him to the friends gathered around the table. Someone offered him a slice of cherry pie, and he accepted, sitting down among us as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

“I’ve come to tell you what to expect,” he said. “I know all about it.”

And he did.

His memory held every graphic detail of the past two years. He began with the moment he first heard the news of his daughter’s murder and moved steadily through the long history of the man accused. He was convinced of the man’s guilt and spoke with mounting frustration about the agony of being unable to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. He told us he still took meticulous notes at every court appearance.

We had all stopped eating. Forks lay idle on plates as he continued—delicately nibbling at his pie while describing the pain, the anguish, and the hopelessness that had overtaken his life.

He told us how the murder had shattered everything—his health, his work, his ability to concentrate. He listed the medications he was taking and even lined up a row of pill bottles on the table. I wondered how his body could endure them all. I glanced at Cliff and saw the same thought mirrored in his eyes: What if he has a heart attack right here at our kitchen table? He looked so pale. So worn.

“I’m telling you this so you’ll know what lies ahead,” he said again and again, like a prophet of doom.

Two hours later, well past midnight, he finally finished his piece of pie and took his leave.

We were exhausted.

We settled our friends as comfortably as we could in the downstairs room, and Heidi curled up to sleep in Odia’s bed.
Cliff and I climbed the stairs to our bedroom.

“Cliff… do you think we’re going to lose everything?” I whispered. The statistics about marriages collapsing after the death of a child pressed against the edges of my mind like an unwelcome prophecy. He tried to reassure me – but the dread did not go away;.

In the washroom, brushing my teeth, the same thought circled relentlessly When I stepped back into the bedroom, I stopped.

Cliff stood motionless beside the bed, staring.

And then I saw it too.

Something was on our bed.

A dark presence—dense, watching—like the embodiment of everything our late-night visitor had warned us about.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. We each saw something different, and yet we knew—without question—that we were seeing the same thing.

Later, Cliff would describe a reptilian shape. I saw a wolf-like dog—voracious, otherworldly, dragged up from the deepest well of my fear. Rationally, we knew it wasn’t real—only a hallucination born of shock and exhaustion.
And yet it was real enough to chill the room.

Real enough to make the air feel heavy, hostile.

Real enough to watch us.

The warning echoed in my mind: The impact of murder is more deadly than the murder itself.

And here it was—proof made visible.

We stood on opposite sides of the bed, united by a single, instinctive understanding.

We remembered the wisdom handed down through generations, perhaps best captured by Friedrich Nietzsche: He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

This--this—was the abyss.

“We will forgive…” Cliff and I said together.

We were speaking to each other.

To the fear.

To the room itself.

The presence recoiled.

It shrank.

Withered.

Then disappeared.

We waited—barely breathing—until we were certain it was gone. Only then did we climb into bed, utterly exhausted.
But it wasn’t over.

When we closed our eyes, we saw Candace’s tiny body on the gurney—her frozen face etched with the terrible final moments of her life, blotched with the hideous marks of that night’s cold.

Cliff lay very still beside me.

“Do you see her too?” I whispered. “…just lying there?”

“Yes,” he said softly.

We lay in silence, spent beyond words. Dawn was only hours away, and with it the funeral home. But our minds refused rest, circling endlessly around grief.

We had no sleeping pills in the house. I hadn’t taken drugs when my children were born; I had chosen natural childbirth. Now I realized I had made the same unconscious decision about death. I would experience this without anesthesia.

The physical pain of bringing Candace into the world had been nothing compared to the pain of losing her.
Then a thought surfaced.

“Let’s remember pictures of Candace when she was a baby,” I whispered. Maybe warmth could soften the bitter images.

“I remember her in a yellow snowsuit,” I began, “just learning to walk.”

“Candace in a dark navy pantsuit,” Cliff said, “playing in the autumn leaves.”

“The birthday picture—when she put the spoon in her mouth and wouldn’t take a bite because the movie camera was running.”

“The one with the black cats,” he added.

A slideshow unfurled between us—living moments filled with laughter, sunlight, small triumphs, innocence. The final image still hovered at the edges, but within this current of life it began to lose its paralyzing power.
“With Tracy and their bikes…” I murmured.

“As a flower girl…”

“Suntanning… swimming… playing with Syras… playing with Odia…”

Memory after memory glowed until our minds grew too tired to summon more. Slowly, deliberately, we filled the room with her warmth—still alive, still luminous.

Then I remembered that first night after she went missing—the sudden stillness of the wind, the sense of her presence, the voice I had heard saying, “Yes, Mom.” Reassuring me she was all right.

I had doubted myself then. But now, with the pieces finally fitting together, I understood.

Candace had likely died the first night—perhaps in the least painful way possible—slipping into sleep, into cold, into stillness. One passes through the shadow of death… but she had made it through to the other side. Her love had not stopped at the boundary of life.

I also understood something else.

I had already been grieving her for seven weeks. And I would grieve her for the rest of my life.

Throughout the search we had lived on ten percent hope—just enough to keep moving—but deep down we had known the truth. Finding her body was not the beginning of grief; it was confirmation. That early, intuitive knowing had allowed us—without realizing it—to begin the work of mourning long before the facts arrived.

There were still terrifying moments ahead: the press conference, the funeral, the long emotional journey. But we were so completely exhausted that, at last, our minds loosened their grip.

On that swaying train of our lives, we finally slept.

And we slept because forgiveness had already begun.
​
Our first forgiveness miracle.
.

Cliff had an idea. His first call that morning was to Dave Loewen, the director of Camp Arnes and his employer.
Cliff briefly explained what had been happening. Dave asked a few questions—much like the police had—but his tone was different. There was steadiness in his voice, a weight of genuine concern behind every word.

Then Cliff told him that Candace was expecting Heidi to come for the weekend—and that we believed nothing would have kept Candace from coming home.

The line went quiet for a moment. And then we felt it—Dave’s concern rising to meet ours.

Of course he understood. He had witnessed their friendship himself: the way those two teens moved through the summer like a pair of bright birds, inseparable. For two months at camp they had played and laughed, attended wigwam together each evening—two hearts wide open to the world.

Candace had always worn her heart on her sleeve.

Dave finally spoke, his voice firm and immediate.

“You need a search party. You need a lawyer. I’ll make some calls.”

We didn’t know the full scope of what he intended to do, but it didn’t matter. He believed us. Someone—finally—was taking this seriously. Something was being set in motion.

“Anything you can do would be appreciated,” Cliff said, though even as he spoke, I knew it was the understatement of the year.

I watched him as he hung up the phone. His shoulders lifted slightly, the grey heaviness around him easing. For the first time since the night before, I could see it.

Cliff’s mood had shifted.

Hope—faint, fragile, but unmistakable—had re-entered the room.

Dave Teigrob checked in that morning, expecting Candace to be home—or at the very least, to have called.

People we had reached out to the night before were now calling us back, each voice carrying the same hopeful question, each one bracing for good news. But there was none. Instead, a current of urgency began to ripple outward. Things were moving quickly now, though not in any direction we wanted.

After breakfast, the same police officers who had visited the night before returned. We all sat around the dining room table. Candace’s pictures were still scattered across it, exactly where we had left them in our frantic sorting.

Together we went over every detail again.

Nothing had changed—not the facts, and certainly not their opinion. If anything, they seemed even more convinced that Candace had run away.

“There are over fifty runaways reported every weekend,” they reminded us.

“What makes your case different?”

But something in us had changed.

We were still desperate, yes—but the raw edge of panic was no longer guiding our words. When the officers dismissed our fears, we didn’t crumble the way we had before. As I listened, I realized quietly—and with a faint sense of betrayal—that our loyalties had shifted.

We were cooperating with the police.

But our hope—our trust—had already moved elsewhere.

It rested with Dave Loewen, the one person who had believed us without hesitation.

The officers asked for a list of Candace’s friends and then left.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Cliff said he wanted to walk the route again.

I checked the thermometer outside the kitchen window. It hovered around minus twenty degrees Celsius—minus four Fahrenheit—and was still dropping.

We began calling family—one set in British Columbia, the other in Saskatchewan. And as we spoke the words out loud--Candace is missing—the weight of the morning settled in around us, making everything even more real.

Then the back doorbell rang.

Who would use the back door?

I ran through a mental list of every possible person it could be, and even before I reached the door, I knew. We had forgotten to call Heidi—Candace’s friend. I had planned to phone her first thing that morning, but I’d decided to wait until a more reasonable hour. Then, with the police arriving and everything unraveling, it had slipped completely from my mind.

I opened the door.

There she stood—impatient, bright-eyed, full of anticipation. It should have been a beautiful moment: the beginning of a long-awaited weekend between two inseparable friends. She looked past me immediately, searching for Candace, not understanding why she hadn’t been the one to answer.

Behind her, I saw her father sitting in the car. I waved him in. He looked puzzled, gestured that he would park first, and stepped out slowly.

“Heidi, come in,” I said quietly. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call. Candace isn’t home.”

“Isn’t home?” she repeated, her voice tightening. “What do you mean, she isn’t home?”

I groped for the right words. I should have prepared—should have thought about how to tell her gently.

“Candace didn’t come home from school yesterday,” I said. “We don’t know where she is.”

They both stared at me, stunned, disbelief registering instantly.

“She knew I was coming,” Heidi said, her voice suddenly flat. For a moment, I could see what she was thinking—that Candace was avoiding her. That she had been rejected.

“Heidi,” I said softly, “I don’t think she had a choice. She was looking forward to your visit so much. Nothing would have kept her from coming home. That’s why we believe something terrible must have happened on the way from school. But the police…” I hesitated. “They think she ran away. We’re struggling to convince them otherwise. You know she wouldn’t do that.”

“Candace wouldn’t run away,” Heidi whispered. “I just know she wouldn’t.”

Then her voice broke. “We were going to have so much fun…”

She collapsed into sobs—frantic, disbelieving, undone.

They didn’t stay long.

And the way Heidi walked back to the car—shoulders slumped, head bowed—tore at me. I stood in the doorway and understood, with painful clarity, that Candace’s absence was no longer ours Her loss had begun to spread.

The telephone rang.

This time it was Dave Loewen. His voice carried a new kind of energy—firm, organized, purposeful. He told us that he had assembled a search party. People would be meeting at Candace’s school at one o’clock, in the band room.

Dave had already contacted the president of the Camp Arnes board, Dave DeFehr, a member of the well-known DeFehr family of Palliser Furniture. DeFehr had immediately offered his help. From there, Dave reached out to two lawyers, seeking legal advice and clarifying the boundaries for a private search. He had even contacted the police to request their cooperation and ask that they brief the volunteers. Remarkably, they agreed.

He didn’t stop there. Dave called the rest of the Camp Arnes board, teachers at MBCI, and anyone else he thought might be able to help. He asked Cliff to come and to bring as many photographs of Candace as possible.
Cliff didn’t hesitate. He needed to be doing something.

Fortunately, we had plenty of photos. Candace’s sixth-grade pictures had been retaken, but her package had arrived too late for school picture trading, so we still had every copy.

Between twenty-five and thirty people gathered at the school that afternoon. A police representative briefed them first. The instructions were precise: volunteers could search back alleys and inspect trash cans—public property—but they were to be extremely cautious around private homes. Permission was required to enter any yard. If an abandoned shed or garage needed to be checked, the owner had to accompany them. Under no circumstances were they to wander onto private property or peer through windows. Anything suspicious was to be written down and reported directly to the police.

The volunteers were divided into small teams of two or three. Each team received a map, a photograph of Candace, and a specific area to search, along with a time to return and report.

What struck us most—what humbled me to the core—was that they believed us.

No one questioned our certainty that Candace had not run away. Between the firsthand knowledge of her relationship with Heidi and their understanding of who Candace was, they trusted our instincts completely.

That belief steadied us in a way nothing else had. For the first time since the nightmare began, we were surrounded—not by doubt, but by people willing to search for our daughter simply because they cared.

At the end of the day, Dave called again. He told us they had also contacted churches across the city, asking them to pray—some even dedicating an entire Sunday to Candace. And they had notified one of the city’s news outlets.
Candace’s disappearance was no longer private.

The city was beginning to listen.

The next morning, the minute the Sunday church services ended, our phone began to ring.

News was sweeping through the community like wind through dry leaves, scattering faster than we could gather it. I no longer knew where people were hearing things. Candace’s picture had appeared in The Winnipeg Sun that morning—some callers mentioned it in hushed, trembling voices. Others said her name had been spoken in church, lifted aloud as a prayer.

It was impossible to tell which current was stronger that day: the ancient, intimate network of the church community, or the wide, impersonal reach of the media.

By mid-afternoon, Dave Loewen phoned again, his voice steady, purposeful—something solid to hold on to. He told us he knew a constable in the juvenile division, a man with four days off who wanted to spend them helping search for Candace. Dave also urged us to contact Crime Stoppers, that persistent voice over the airwaves calling the public to attention.

People around him, he said, were encouraging the formation of a citizens’ search committee—a group that could organize the community effort and, perhaps, stand between us and the police in a way we could not. Already it was clear that the police spoke more freely with Dave than with us.

He envisioned another coordinated search, one that stretched far beyond our own frantic footsteps. Students from MBCI could comb the outskirts of the city—the weary railway tracks, the shadowed back alleys, the riverbanks where the light thinned, the empty fields that seemed to breathe loneliness. All of it, of course, would require police approval.

What did we think?

We could hardly find words for the gratitude rising in us.

Later that day, two city newspapers called, each wanting more details, more pieces of Candace. Beneath their questions I heard the real ones: Who are you? Who is this girl? What kind of light did she carry? I answered as best I could.

Again and again, in a thousand small ways, we were being asked to name ourselves—to define ourselves—and to define our daughter.

Describing us was easy; we had lived long enough to know who we were.

But introducing Candace to the world—that was the part that caught in my throat.

Mom and Dad arrived Sunday evening. They felt our panic—our aloneness—and they came simply to be with us.

Once Odia and Syras were finally asleep, we sat down together and began, for the first time, to truly process what was happening. I noticed my parents kept asking questions about Candace—tentative questions, almost as if she were a stranger to them.

“What was she like?”

“What was she interested in?”

Finally, I stopped the conversation.

“Mom—why all these questions? You know Candace. She stayed with you for almost two months. Of all our children, you know her the best.”

“Yes,” Mom said softly. “We knew Candace as a child. But she must have grown so much in these last years. Children change—especially between ten and thirteen. I don’t feel I know Candace as a young lady.”

I understood. And I tried to describe her. But my words were the words of a mother—too close, too tender, too full. How could I possibly describe Candace?

I had been reaching for that answer for two days, and I hadn’t found it. What I needed was something recent. Something she did every day. Something she loved without thinking. Something that would reveal her heart.
I went upstairs to look.

Since she shared her room with Odia, the room itself wouldn’t say much. The decorations scattered through every corner spoke of her creativity, but not of her essence—not her quiet philosophy of life, her way of being in the world.
Then it came to me.

Of course.

Her music.

Her love of music.

Her choice of music.

I remembered the first time she had played that particular song for me. She had put the tape on, and the melody drifted through the room. I had tried to catch the words. Most escaped me, but the theme was unmistakable—friendship.

I knew that if Mom heard it, she would know Candace too.

The tape still sat beside Candace’s bed, tucked into my old battered tape recorder—the one she had claimed as her own. I carried it downstairs and introduced the song to my family.

When the familiar beat began, it felt as if Candace herself had stepped into the room—swaying gently, a dreamy smile on her lips, that faraway, peaceful look in her eyes, completely absorbed in the music she loved.

The words floated out around us.

The pain was so sharp I thought it might tear Cliff and me apart.

I had never truly listened to the lyrics—not like this.

Now it was as though she were singing them directly to us.

Packing up the dreams God planted
In the fertile soil of you
Can't believe the hopes He's granted
Means a chapter in your life is through
But we'll keep you close as always
It won't even seem you've gone
'Cause our hearts in big and small ways
Will keep the love that keeps us strong
 
It was a good-bye song!  She had chosen a good-bye song!  Had she known?  Had she in some way chosen this song for us because she knew she was going?
 
Then the chorus:
And friends are friends forever
If the Lord's the Lord of them
And a friend will not say "never"
'Cause the welcome will not end
Thought it's hard to let you know
In the Father's hands we know
That a lifetime's not too long to live as friends

We sat stunned, the tears streaming down our faces.

Mom broke the silence.

“She listened to those words every night?”

“Yes,” I answered quietly.

Mom nodded, and I knew I had found the right way to portray Candace to them. They understood the importance of music. They understood the power of words. They knew that a person’s choice of music often reveals the inner workings of the soul.

They had just become reacquainted with Candace.

I also realized then that the song had been Candace’s parting gift to us—her final message. And I knew I would never be able to listen to it again without being torn apart. It would both comfort us and destroy us.

At eleven o’clock that night, two detectives came by. They told us there was nothing new. They would call again in the morning—Monday—and a new team would meet with us then. They asked us to inform the staff at MBCI that they would be at the school early. They were still confident that Candace would show up there.

I could see they genuinely believed it.

I wished I could share their confidence. It would have been so much easier to sleep holding onto their hope rather than the knowledge I carried inside me.

With that, they left.

As on the day before, they had been our first visitors in the morning and our last visitors at night. Our days were beginning to take shape inside the parentheses of police visits. It felt foreign to everything we were—our values, our rhythms, our quiet life.

I felt sorry that my parents had been pulled into this strange new world with us. And yet, I was deeply grateful for their presence. In the swirl of fear, disbelief, and grief, they remained a steady reminder of the tradition we came from—honesty, truth, steadfastness. If we could hold onto those values, perhaps we could survive what lay ahead.

Winnipeg is a city of about 650,000 people, set squarely in the middle of Canada. It is known for its extremes—hot, dry summers and frigid winters. At the time of Candace’s disappearance, there were nineteen thousand Mennonites worshipping in forty-seven churches across the city.

Ordinarily, that would have been an irrelevant statistic.

But now—now that our daughter was missing—we were searching instinctively for the largest support base we could find.

As I looked around at the growing search committee, I began to understand what was forming around us. At least one Mennonite conference had mobilized. We had representatives from the largest camp in Manitoba, the largest private school, a powerful Winnipeg church, the Mennonite paper, and one of Western Canada’s major furniture businesses.
This was not a small or insignificant group.

And for the first time since Candace disappeared, I understood that we were no longer standing alone.

On Monday afternoon, the police finally conducted an aerial search of the area—at last convinced. I suppose we could have claimed a kind of victory. Public pressure seemed to be pushing the police to act on our case.

The radio stations had picked up the story. Calls were coming in. More food arrived. The kitchen began to overflow with dainties.

The Search Committee had another idea: to distribute posters throughout the entire city, rather than only in the area where Candace had disappeared. They realized that by now she could be anywhere. Because the photos on the first set of posters had been taken in sixth grade—and Candace had changed so much in just one year—the committee contacted the company that had taken this year’s school pictures and asked them to rush the order and double it.

The police delivered the photographs at noon on Thursday for our approval. We kept one picture and gave the rest back to the police and the committee to distribute all over Winnipeg.

Once the picture was released, the school organized another search. This time, almost the entire student body—nearly four hundred students—fanned out across the city, distributing more than three thousand posters to local businesses, sparking one of Winnipeg’s largest searches for a missing person.

But I couldn’t keep my eyes off the photograph the police left with us.

I was shocked. It captured her very essence. There she was—so recent, so alive—her eyes shining. But it wasn’t only her eyes. It was her necklace.

It was unmistakable. She was wearing her tarnished locket—the one she loved so much.

There was a story behind that necklace.

Before moving to Winnipeg, we had lived in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, for almost five years. During that time, Candace had formed a special bond with a girl named Tracy Vickers, who lived just across the street, two houses down. The two girls were inseparable. They were the same size, shared the same interests, and even their differences—Tracy quieter, Candace more outgoing—fit together perfectly. They could lose entire afternoons together, content simply to be in each other’s company.

When we moved to Manitoba, it was heartbreaking to watch Candace mourn the loss of her best friend. As a going-away gift, Tracy gave her a gold-tone locket. Candace treasured it and wore it constantly. Even after it tarnished, she refused to take it off.

That worried me a little. I wondered whether she was adjusting to the move, or whether she still needed Tracy emotionally. I assumed that once she met Heidi at Camp Arnes and the two of them became close, the necklace would eventually come off.

But it didn’t.

Once, while traveling through Saskatoon, we made a point of detouring to North Battleford so Candace could see Tracy again. I assumed that life, as it usually does, would have moved on—that both girls, now nearly young women, would have changed enough for the bond to loosen. I expected the memories to fade naturally and the locket to find its way into a drawer.

I was secretly a bit relieved when we arrived at Tracy’s house and discovered she had another friend visiting. Just as I suspected, Tracy had changed. I felt a twinge of sympathy watching the two girls—once inseparable—stand awkwardly apart, quietly evaluating each other.

We spent the afternoon together, and by the time we left, the girls were enjoying themselves again. Still, something had shifted. The goodbyes were warm, but not tearful.

Driving back, I gently prodded her.

“Tracy has changed?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve changed?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not quite the same?”

Cliff shot me a warning look—leave the girl alone—but the question was already hanging in the air.
Her voice was quiet, but steady.

“No. It wasn’t the same.”

I glanced back at her. She was looking out the window, her fingers tracing the familiar shape of her necklace.
“It doesn’t matter how much we change,” she said. Then she turned toward me, her eyes clear. “When we walked to the store—when we were alone—I saw the old Tracy. She’ll always be my friend.”

And she kept wearing that necklace.

She was wearing that locket on the day she disappeared.

I knew then—convinced—that Candace wasn’t only a sanguine personality. Her love for her friends went very deep. She had the gift of deep, long-lasting connection with many—and she held it close.

*****
At the time Candace went missing, seventy-six other juveniles were reported missing: twenty-nine boys and forty-seven girls. In the previous year alone, the police had opened 4,455 missing children’s cases. Juvenile Division Staff Inspector Bill Heintz admitted to a reporter, “To a certain extent, we’re hearing from parents of other missing children asking for similar attention.”

So our campaign had to show why Candace’s situation was different. We had to establish—clearly and convincingly—that she was not a runaway. We simply told her story.

In the week following her disappearance, without any planning or conscious strategy, we gathered five compelling stories—stories that became the backbone of the campaign to find Candace.

We told everyone about David—the last person to see her—how he had teased her with a playful, flirtatious snow wash, sending her off glowing with delight. We told them that her best friend Heidi was arriving the next day, and that Candace had saved her money so they could celebrate together for two days. We told them about the song she played every night before bed, “Friends Are Friends Forever”—and that her little sister Odia could verify it.

And then there was the tiny tarnished locket she wore in her school photo—the gift from another “best” friend two years earlier—still around her neck despite my gentle requests that she set it aside. That little locket made something unmistakably clear: Candace had many “best” friends, and she was unwaveringly loyal to all of them.

Finally, there was the collective testimony of the Camp Arnes community—the director and staff who had watched her for two summers. They verified everything we said about this thirteen-year-old girl who simply loved her friends. She lived her life of love so openly that anyone who had been a summer camper during those two years would have seen her and Heidi in the back of the wigwam—giggling, glowing, utterly at home with each other.

What we didn’t yet know were the countless other stories of Candace’s remarkable ability to connect. People kept showing up in small, touching ways—like the young lad from Star Lake Lodge, who showed up with a Christmas tree for our bare living room, knowing we probably wouldn’t have the energy to get one while Candace was missing. He understood our grief because he was feeling it too… and we saw it in his eyes.

Within one week of her disappearance, the questions Who was Candace? and What was her state of mind when she disappeared? had been convincingly answered. Even the police finally accepted that she was not just another runaway. Her poster, carrying the most recent photograph, now bore a simple, urgent question: “Have you seen Candace?”

The search was beginning to be called one of the largest efforts ever mounted in Winnipeg for a missing teenager.

This was a huge comfort for us—knowing that we, the city, and all of her friends had done the best we could to find her and create awareness.

But there was nothing—no clue, no hint of where she could be or what condition she was in.
​
This “nothing” became the answer we had to learn to live with.

We were in transition again. Candace had successfully completed Grade Six, and once more we faced a familiar decision: where should she go next?

Given her late start and the teachers’ ongoing concerns, she had done reasonably well in elementary school. Still, I wanted to take a fresh look at her abilities—to ensure an educational foundation that would restore her confidence, rekindle her excitement for learning, and launch her into the life she was destined to live. My solution was to send her to a private school just down the street: Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute (MBCI).

Candace was not convinced. The thought of leaving her old school was painful. She wanted to continue on with the friends she had already made, most of whom were heading to a public high school together. She held her friendships close to her heart, and the idea of parting from them felt like letting go of something precious and irreplaceable.

I’m afraid I was insistent—and persuasive. Reluctantly, she agreed to try MBCI for at least a year.

As part of her admission, we requested a professional assessment, and what we learned surprised us. She did not have a learning disability at all. Her challenge was concentration. The assessor even cautioned us gently not to “slot” her too quickly, suggesting that she might one day do very well at university, provided she received private tutoring along the way.

Cliff immediately offered to take on that role. He was patient and intuitive, able to understand her mind because he shared some of her idiosyncrasies. We came to see that her struggle wasn’t with comprehension, but with focus. Words on a page, numbers in a column—anything that required sitting still and staring at a book—simply couldn’t hold her attention long enough to take root.

But Cliff was gentle and consistent, and something in their shared wiring made his guidance feel like a lifeline to her. Little by little, she improved. She was also supported by a wise, steady school counsellor who finally gave her the kind of sustained attention and encouragement she had long needed.

*****
But around this time, I began to notice another profound change. She was becoming a woman—still a child, yet now inhabiting a woman’s body. I had to buy her first bra, that unmistakable rite of passage. She was thrilled—positively glowing with excitement—and I tried to mirror her joy, even as something inside me tightened.

She was beginning to be noticed. We would walk into a café, a shop, a restaurant, and I’d catch it—men, grown men, glancing twice. Not leering, not overtly inappropriate, just… noticing. Something subtle shifting in their eyes as they took her in. She was blissfully unaware, but I felt the unease ripple through me. Her bright, generous personality—so open, so warm—was now carried in a body that drew attention she did not yet understand. And I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.

Still, she was fitting in at school. By then, she had been at Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute for nearly three months, and I felt myself beginning—tentatively—to breathe again. She was finding her place. I was starting to freelance and earn money again. For the first time in a long while, I felt light, even optimistic.

And despite her academic struggles, she chattered endlessly about the girls she was befriending and the parties she was being invited to. She had begun talking about the boys in her class, too—one in particular who made her laugh in that delighted, bubbling way of hers, and a few others who drifted through her stories like bright sparks. They were no longer bullies; they were simply “friends.”

Her world was widening, and she stepped into it with the same shimmer of joy she carried everywhere.

*****
 
It was a comparatively warm Friday in November. In preparation for the weekend, I had just finished my latest freelance assignment—work I was picking up again now that I had completed my journalism course. I was able to apply for better projects, edging toward more financial stability. I was in a good mood.

Then the telephone rang.

“Mom?” It was Candace.

I glanced at my watch. It was almost four. “I thought you’d be on your way home by now,” I said.

“I know,” she answered breathlessly. There was a pause, then a giggle. “David just gave me a face wash with snow, Mom.”

“David?” I was hearing that boy’s name more and more. “Careful now.”

“Oh, Mom,” she groaned, playfully.

“Shouldn’t you be starting home?”

“Aw, Mom—it’s Friday. Can you pick me up?”

I often did pick her up. I paused, juggling the schedule in my mind. If I went now, it would mean packing up the little kids, wrestling them into snowsuits, and waiting in the car. I hesitated.

“Mom,” she said, “someone’s waiting for the phone.”

“Candace, this is bad timing. If you’d called sooner, maybe we could have gone shopping with the kids before picking up Daddy. But right now, I’m in the middle of cleaning the family room for you and Heidi, and the kids are cranky. If I pack them into the car, it means waiting there. Can you take the bus?”

“Sure. It’s okay.”

I could hear the disappointment she was trying to hide, even as she sounded understanding. I reconsidered.
“Look—if Dad can get off early, I’ll pick you up. I’ll call him. Call back in five minutes. And don’t flirt too much.”
She giggled and hung up.

I phoned Cliff. Sometimes on Fridays he could get off by four-thirty.

“No, I’m busy,” he said curtly. I could hear the pressure of a deadline in his voice. “Pick me up at five.”

I looked around the room. There was still so much to do. The kids were quarreling again. If I packed them up now and went to get Candace, it would mean sitting in the car with three hungry children for at least half an hour.

I didn’t need that—no one did, I decided.

It was a warm day, probably one of the last.

Candace could walk or take the bus while I finished cleaning the room, and then, as soon as she came home, the weekend would begin. We’d bundle up the kids, pick up Cliff, cash his cheque, eat at the kids’ favourite restaurant—McDonald's—and then Candace and I would drop the family off and go shopping. I had already promised her she could choose all her favourite party foods for herself and her guest.

I felt good about the plan.

Candace would understand.

With new energy, I folded the sheet and began filing some of the scripts from my projects. The telephone startled me when it rang again. Right—I had asked Candace to call back.

“Mom?”

“Candace, do you have money for the bus?”

“Yup.”

“I can’t pick you up now, but tonight we can go shopping—just the two of us. Is that okay?”
“Yup. See you.” The telephone clicked.

Good. She hadn’t sounded too disappointed.

In twenty minutes most of the tidying would be done, and there might even be time for her to help me arrange the room the way she wanted it before we went out. Knowing Candace, she would have her own ideas. The family room was already a perfect teen haven: a telephone, an old colour television, a soft bed, and a card table for the goodies. Best of all, it was far enough from our bedroom that they could play their music as loudly as they wanted without us hearing.

My biggest job this weekend would be keeping Odia and Syras occupied.

I went on vacuuming, folding laundry, worrying about nothing of consequence.

Then I stopped.

Something was wrong. I could feel it.

I dropped what I was doing and went upstairs. The kids were so absorbed in their television show they didn’t even notice me. I went into the kitchen and glanced at the clock.

Candace would be home any minute.

I looked out the window and froze.

A sudden whiteout.

The temperature was plunging—and Candace hadn’t dressed for this weather. If I remembered correctly, she had slipped on only a thin polyester blouse that morning. If she didn’t come home soon, she’d freeze. It was unusually dark, too, for that time of day.

Life suddenly slipped into slow motion.

I began pacing—from the front living room window to the kitchen window at the back of the house.
Which way would she come—up the street or down the back alley?

I looked at the clock again. Where was she? She wouldn’t stop anywhere, at least not for long. Soon it would be time to leave to pick up Cliff. I couldn’t wait much longer. If I drove the route Candace would be taking home, I might still catch her.

I walked into the living room. The kids were still mesmerized by the television screen. I switched it off.
“We have to pick up Candace and Daddy,” I said.

They got dressed quickly.

“Odia,” I said as we backed out into the alley, “you keep your eyes on your side of the road, and I’ll watch mine.”
She nodded. “I’ve got good eyes, Mom. Right?”

“Right.”

“Remember the last time we went to pick her up? I saw her first.”

I nodded.

We crawled along the back lane and then turned onto Talbot Avenue, moving as slowly as rush-hour traffic allowed. As we passed 7-Eleven—the neighbourhood hangout—I scanned the windows. She wasn’t there.

With every block, my heart pounded harder.

Where was she?

We reached Candace’s school.

She was nowhere to be seen.
I swung the car onto Henderson Highway. I needed Cliff. Saving time—or miles—didn’t matter anymore.

I ran into his office. “Cliff, Candace didn’t come home, and I’m worried.”

He took one look at me and grabbed his briefcase. As we walked to the car, I filled him in—her calls, the scheduling dilemma, the weather, the growing dread.

“Cliff, nothing would have kept Candace from coming straight home today,” I said. “Heidi is coming. She wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize this weekend.”
He nodded. I didn’t need to describe Candace’s frame of mind. We had all been aware of it for weeks.

At the car doors we paused, looking across the roof at one another. There is something to be said for fifteen years of marriage. Not every thought needs to be spoken to be understood. I could see my fears reflected in Cliff’s eyes. They were no longer just mine.
We were of the same mind.

Back in the car, I suggested we retrace the route along Talbot. This time Cliff watched the right side of the road; I watched the left. Odia tried to watch both.

There was no one out. It had grown very dark.

I had left the house door unlocked, just in case Candace had taken another route and arrived before we did. I ran inside.

“Candace,” I called.

Silence.

I opened the downstairs door. “Candace!” Nothing.

Upstairs, everything was exactly as we had left it.

By the time I came back down, Cliff was helping the kids out of their coats.

“Tell me again how she sounded on the phone,” he said. “Was she upset that you didn’t pick her up?”

I shook my head.

“Did she have money with her? Could she have met a friend on the way home?”

I ran upstairs and checked her drawer. All the money she had saved for the weekend was still there.

Cliff pulled on his coat again. “I’ll drive back to the school. We might have just missed her.”

“I’ll call her friends.”

Six months earlier, I had given every member of the family a piece of paper and asked them to write down the telephone numbers of their friends. Candace had taped hers beside the phone. But now, as I scanned the list, I saw how drastically her life had changed in such a short time. The leap from sixth grade to seventh, from elementary school to high school, from public school to private school, had given her an entirely new circle of friends.


The names on this list belonged to her old neighbourhood friends.
Her new friends’ numbers were probably in her phone book upstairs.

Who was I supposed to call first—her new friends or her old ones?

The worst part was that I couldn’t make myself believe she was with any of them. And yet I had to call someone. I had to begin somewhere. I had to do something.

The first name on the old list was Deanna. She had been Candace’s closest friend throughout elementary school, the kind of girl who naturally connected people. A quiet leader among the neighbourhood kids. If anyone would know where Candace was—or how to find out—it would be her.

I dialed the number.

No answer.

I moved to the next name on the list. A young voice picked up.

“Krissy? This is Candace’s mother. Have you seen Candace?”
“No, Mrs. Derksen.”

“Do you know where Deanna is?”

“She’s right here.”

“Could I speak to her?”
But Deanna hadn’t seen Candace either.

“I can call around for you,” she offered. I could hear the concern in her voice. Deanna was quick that way—always alert, always engaged.

“Thank you, Deanna,” I said, and hung up.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. Even if Candace had run into Deanna on the way home from school, she wouldn’t have been in the frame of mind to linger. Still, I felt a small measure of relief knowing Deanna was now watching, listening. She knew the community. If she heard anything, she would tell us.

There was one more name. Sabrina—my last hope. She hadn’t heard anything either.

Now I had to call her new friends.

I ran upstairs to Candace’s room and found the list from her new school. I didn’t know these girls nearly as well. Using the phone beside her bed, I began dialing.

As I waited for answers, I remembered how reluctant Candace had been to attend a private school when the rest of her friends from George V were planning to go to Elmwood High. That first week had been the real test. But on Friday, when I picked her up, she had smiled and said, “You were right, Mom. They’re my kind of people.”

This was only her third month at the school, and I still felt her friendship with Heidi was stronger than any she had yet formed there.

I reached one of her new friends.

“No, Mrs. Derksen. I left right after school.”

After that, I abandoned all order. I dialed any name that looked even remotely familiar, stabbing in the dark for some clue—any explanation at all. Candace had to have gone with someone. She wouldn’t do something like this alone. Who could she have met? Who would have been important enough to draw her away from coming straight home--today of all days?

As I spoke with her friends from MBCI, a picture slowly began to form.

Candace had lingered after school. She had been seen hovering near the telephone—probably waiting to call me back. One friend said they had met at their lockers and that Candace had stuffed her gym clothes into her burgundy duffel bag to take home to be washed.

“Because,” the girl quoted Candace, “it’s the polite thing to do.”

It sounded exactly like her. Most people washed their clothes because they wanted clean clothes. Candace washed hers for her friends.

Then she had gone outside, laughing, having face washes in the snow.

She was last seen walking down Talbot on her way home.

Alone.

Only minutes later, Cliff came through the door, his face pale, his coat dusted with snow.

“Is she home?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Any word?”

I shook my head again. I told him about the calls and the bits of information I had gathered. Then we looked at each other in silence. Neither of us could voice the fear that gripped us.

“Let’s call the police,” he said finally.

I was about to agree, but one thought nagged at me. “Not yet,” I said. “There’s one person I want to speak to first.”

“Who?”

“David.”

“Why? Do you think she’s with him?”

No. It was clear she had walked off alone. But I had never met David, and I knew that by seeing him, I would gain a better sense of Candace’s state of mind when she left the school parking lot.

A few weeks ago, when the whole school had been encouraged to attend the Terry Winter crusade at the Winnipeg Convention Center, Candace had come home walking on air. “Mom, he’s crazy,” she had said over and over, her highest compliment.

After that, I had asked Cliff to casually check him out with Lily Loewen, the outdoor education director at Camp Arnes. They went to the same church as the Wiebes. We learned that David was in eleventh grade—a good kid, although we wondered what an eleventh-grade boy was doing noticing a seventh-grade girl. But Candace had always related easily to people older than herself.

Cliff didn’t quite understand what I hoped to learn by meeting him now. We probably already had everything we needed to go to the police. But he handed me the keys. “I’ll feed the kids,” he said.

I drove slowly to the school, scanning each side of the street. I remembered Candace telling me about the time David had sat with her at a basketball game and how he had caught her arm during volleyball, making her so nervous she missed her next two serves. But when I asked if she was in love with him, she had laughed. “Mom, don’t be silly. He’s in eleventh grade.”

The school doors were still open. Evening activities buzzed through the hallways. Harry Wall, the principal, looked tired as he supervised the students. I asked if he knew where David was, and he pointed to a boy fumbling with his locker.

“You must be David,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’m Candace’s mother. She hasn’t come home from school today. She mentioned you were with her after school. Do you know where she is?”

His face tightened with concern. “I thought she was going home.”

“Was it after the face wash?” I asked. “She told me on the phone that you gave her a face wash with snow.”

He flushed. “Actually, I gave her two. One before she called you, and another as she was leaving.”

Two face washes. Candace would have been walking home practically floating.

Quick to read the seriousness on my face, he said quietly, “Mrs. Derksen, the last time I saw her, she was walking down Talbot toward your home. I had driver’s training after that, so I didn’t hang around.” He watched me closely. “This is serious, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I’m so sorry.” He touched my shoulder gently, a sensitivity beyond his years. Barely able to hold back my emotions, I turned and walked to the car.

It was seven o’clock. I had my answer.

The night seemed blacker than I had ever seen as I slid behind the wheel.

I slammed my fist on the steering wheel.

“No, God! No! Not my Candace!”

Frantically, I turned on the ignition. We had to call the police. They would know what to do. It was about seven-thirty when we finally did.

“Are you sure she isn’t with friends?” the desk officer asked.

“Yes, we’re very sure. We’ve checked with all her friends,” Cliff answered, projecting a calm he didn’t feel. “We are absolutely certain she isn’t with friends. We’ve checked everyone and everything. Something is wrong.”

“Was she upset?”

“No. She was looking forward to having her best friend come over tomorrow morning. They were going to spend the weekend together.”

The questions were precise, systematic, all fashioned to assume every missing thirteen-year-old is a runaway. Cliff answered patiently. “Her best friend lives in Arnes, fifty miles away. She won’t be there until tomorrow. They haven’t seen each other for weeks. I know she wouldn’t have run away today.”

After a long pause, the officer said, “If she isn’t home in half an hour, we’ll put this out to the Transcona fleet of police cars. Can you give me a description?”

Cliff described her. “Petite, about five-one, slim—around a hundred to a hundred and five pounds. Light brown hair, blue eyes. What was she wearing?”

I mouthed the words to him. “Black wool jacket with burgundy raglan sleeves, tight blue jeans, runners that are never tied. She was carrying a burgundy duffel bag—and black gloves.”

The description felt hopelessly inadequate. Half a dozen teenagers in the city could fit it. How would anyone recognize her?

After the call, I went downstairs to look through photographs of Candace, in case the police needed them. Time dragged and raced at once.

Cliff came down to the basement to tell me the police had put out a citywide missing person alert and that they’d be stopping by around eleven to pick up a picture. We went back upstairs together. Relief washed over us, but it was tempered by fear. It was ten o’clock.

“There’s still time for me to walk to the school once more,” Cliff said, pulling his winter jacket from the closet.

I checked the thermometer outside the kitchen window. “Cliff, the temperature is still dropping. What if she’s outside? She wasn’t dressed for this weather.” It was falling below twenty—dangerous.

“She won’t be,” he said.

“Then what are you looking for?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know—tracks, anything that looks suspicious. I’ll check the stores. I don’t even know what to look for. I just have to go.”

I nodded. I wanted to go with him, but someone needed to be by the phone and with the kids. I shut the door behind him, shivering as the cold air swirled through the house, and returned to the living room window to watch for Candace.

At approximately eleven o’clock, two uniformed police officers knocked on our door. We assumed, having convinced the desk clerk—twice—that Candace hadn’t run away, that the officers would already be briefed and take our concerns seriously. Surely they’d understand this was urgent. Perhaps they would even question why we hadn’t called sooner.

Time was of the essence. All we expected was to brief them quickly, hand over Candace’s picture and description, and have them mobilize a full-scale search of Winnipeg—perhaps even with dogs.

We had scattered the photographs across the dining room table and invited the officers to sit with us. We spoke quickly, urgently, shoving pictures toward them.

But instead of taking a photo and rushing out, they leaned back, watching us. They wanted to know what kind of parents we were. What our relationship with Candace was like. Had we argued with her? Was she upset I hadn’t picked her up?

They interrogated us—the only word that fits.

Our hearts sank. We tried again to answer as clearly as possible, but how do you convince someone you are a capable parent in such a situation? Every explanation seemed to work against us. The harder we tried, the more skeptical they became.

In desperation, I picked up a photo of Candace and Heidi sitting under a tree. “Look at them. Even from this picture, you can see they are kindred spirits. They only spend the summers together, yet their friendship survives the long winters apart.”

Finally, still watching us with measured skepticism, the officers took the photograph. They promised to put it on the citywide computer system and to patrol the community.

At that moment, we were grateful for crumbs.

After they left, I realized their questions had drained me. But Cliff seemed energized. The officers’ scrutiny had sparked new ideas in him. Now it was his turn to verify her state of mind and pursue leads. He began calling a whole new set of people, and one of them mentioned that Candace had spoken to the school counselor that day. So he called Dave Teigrob.

“I’m sorry if he’s sleeping, but this is an emergency,” I heard Cliff say over the phone.

I was surprised it was so late. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were dark.

Cliff joined me at the window. “Teigrob didn’t say much,” he reported. “Candace seemed in good spirits, and he’s as puzzled as we are.”

Once again, we were at a loss. We stood together, staring into the darkness, reviewing the steps we had taken, replaying every thought, every possibility, trying to think of something else. Our options were dwindling. Soon everyone—like Teigrob—would be asleep, and there would be nothing more to do.

It was a strange place for us to be. Cliff was creative—he had a natural artistic ability—and I had spent the last two years studying communications. We were people of ideas. Usually we had too many. Now, we had none.

We wandered around the house, tried watching television, but we couldn’t focus.

When the front doorbell rang around midnight, we both rushed to the door. Hope! But it was only Dave Teigrob, the school counselor and vice president of MBCI.

“I couldn’t go back to sleep,” he explained simply. After the initial disappointment, we were amazed he had come all the way from his home on the outskirts of Winnipeg just to sit with us.

He had nothing new to offer, he said, other than to stay with us. So we sat in the living room and went over every detail of the day again. I can’t remember everything we talked about, but his presence was like an anchor in a storm—a solid rock to hold onto. He reassured us repeatedly that his last encounter with Candace had given no reason for alarm. She had seemed pleased with herself and confident her problems could be managed.

There was little else we could do but wait together, convincing ourselves that by now she must be inside a building, that whatever situation she had been in was resolved, that the police were looking for her, that cars were everywhere in the city and someone would surely notice.

By two o’clock, there was nothing left to say. Dave urged us to try to sleep. We reassured each other again that in the morning we could call around, refreshed and ready with new ideas. By then, Candace might have called.
We thanked Dave for coming. We were truly grateful.

I think Cliff was probably more comforted than I was. He seemed confident that Candace was safe by now, that the police would find her soon. I tried to believe it. I really did.

But after Cliff fell asleep, I slipped out of bed and took up my vigil by the living room window.

Candace wasn’t safe. She needed me. I could feel her struggling.

I turned on the porch lights, left the door unlocked in case she needed to run into the house, and switched off all the interior lights so I could see outside without being seen. I watched every movement in the community.

Then a police car raced over the Nairn overpass, its red lights flashing. I jumped up from the sofa.
Candace! Had they found Candace? Was she hurt?

I rushed to the phone and waited, pacing tight circles in the kitchen.
It didn’t ring.

I pulled up a chair and sat staring at the telephone—terrified it would ring with bad news, terrified it wouldn’t ring at all. I was trembling. I don’t know how long I waited. Time had lost all meaning.

Eventually I realized there would be no call. The emergency had been for someone else.
I returned to the sofa and resumed my lonely vigil.

That’s when I remembered something I had once observed: people often throw their faith away at the very moment they need it most. This was not the time to question or abandon my faith. I needed God. More than at any other time in my life, I needed the direction, comfort, wisdom, and strength my faith could give me.

So I prayed.

I prayed that God would be with Candace. I told Him that it didn’t matter what happened to Cliff or to me—the important person was Candace. I said that more than anything in the world, I wanted my daughter safe at home. But if that was not to be, then I asked that He would protect her from pain.
She couldn’t bear pain.

As the implications of what I was praying sank in—as the possibility that she might die pressed in on me—I was terrified. It was entirely possible that she was already dead.

And then, for the first time, I felt that God was crying too.

It seemed as if the whole universe was crying with me. I realized that God knew exactly what I was feeling. He had sacrificed His child. He was a parent of a murdered child too.

I sat for a long time. Though I could only hold Candace in spirit, I wanted to stay awake with her. I grew colder and colder. I turned up the thermostat and wrapped myself in blankets, but nothing stopped the shivering.

Finally, I thought of Cliff—warm in bed. Maybe he could warm me. I could still be with Candace if I lay beside him, pressed close. I didn’t plan to fall asleep. I wasn’t tired—just cold.

Before going upstairs, I glanced at the kitchen clock. Five-thirty. Almost morning.

I lay beside Cliff in the darkness, his warmth beside me, but it didn’t help. Just as I was about to get up and return to the window, I noticed that the wind had stopped.

I hadn’t even realized there had been a wind. Had it been inside the house? Had there been a sound?
Now, in its absence, the silence—the stillness—was deafening and horrific.

The struggle had stopped.
I sat up in bed.

It could mean only one thing.

“Candace!” my soul shrieked. “Are you in heaven? Are you OK?”

I heard a tiny voice.

“Yes, Mom.”

Somehow the heavens were still open, and her presence filled the room. She was close, yet impossibly far—just out of reach. I wanted to step fully into that other dimension, but a soft black velvet curtain fell between us, shutting me out.
Then she was gone.

I tried desperately to penetrate the wall again, but I couldn’t.

My comfort was this: she was safe.
I told myself again and again. Whatever had happened was over.
I closed my exhausted eyes, and the room went black.

The next thing I knew, the alarm went off at six o’clock.
It felt as if I had been in limbo for hours, but it could only have been ten or fifteen minutes.

Cliff woke up, and we lay there in silence.

“She’s not home?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“She could be at a friend’s place,” he said quietly.

I broke into sobs.

Should I tell him?

What was there to say?

Had it been real?

Or had I been hallucinating?

When I finally regained control, I told Cliff about my all‑night vigil at the window—my struggle to accept the situation, my exhaustion, and how, in the final moments of the night, I had felt the struggle come to an end.

I told him that the wind had stopped. That I had felt Candace’s presence—but that she had slipped away somewhere I could not follow. I told him what that meant to me.

She had probably died during the night.
She wasn’t coming home again.
“Then it’s all over?” he asked.
“I can’t say for certain,” I said. “It’s just a feeling.”

But the energy drained from his face, and tears began to ooze from the corners of his eyes. Candace had always been her father’s daughter. Maybe that was why I had found it so easy to love her and get along with her. She was so much like Cliff—athletic, fun‑loving, outgoing.

There was nothing else we could do but cry together.
“What do we do now?” I asked. “Do we continue to look for Candace?”

“How certain are you?” he asked. “Do you have any doubts?”

It was hard to explain. Yes, I was certain—and yet I wasn’t.

I didn’t doubt that God could perform miracles. I could believe that this kind of experience might happen, especially in those critical moments when a soul hovers between heaven and earth. But the one thing I wasn’t certain about was myself.

I had been overwrought—exhausted, terrified, frantic. I had been nearly out of my mind. Maybe I had been out of my mind. Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe I had created the whole experience because I needed answers—something solid I could hold onto.

I didn’t know.

“Can you tell me without a doubt that you didn’t hear her?” Cliff asked quietly.

I shook my head.
Even though I knew I would never be able to prove the reality of the experience to myself, I couldn’t deny it either. I turned the question back to him.

“Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “You obviously experienced something.”

I was stunned. He believed me. It was the most beautiful gift he could have given me.

“But what do we do now?” I asked again.
We sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Cliff spoke.

“We carry on. We look for Candace. We aren’t one hundred percent sure that she’s dead, so we can’t ignore the possibility that she might still be alive and need us. But we can hold the knowledge that she is probably safe in heaven as an inner comfort. Maybe we’ll need it. Maybe God knows we will.”

We reached for each other.

Perhaps Candace’s struggle was over—but ours was only beginning. I could see the terror of my own heart reflected in Cliff’s eyes, but he was the one who found words for it.

“I wonder what must lie ahead of us,” he said, “that would make the knowledge of her death a comfort.”

It was a question that would haunt us for weeks.
​
Only in hindsight did I understand: we needed that inner knowledge—that peace. It was the first gesture of Candace’s transcending love, a love strong enough to reach through even the veil between heaven and earth.