Sometimes, things get misplaced when you move. It happens, and generally, you just have to move on.

But one family is desperately looking for a toy that disappeared in a move last Saturday.

The toy, a plastic model of a kitchen, complete with little appliances, was strapped, along with other items, on the trailer of a friend who was helping a family move from an apartment on Ardmore Avenue to another part of town.

The friend had left the old apartment, driven down Ardmore to Engle Road, then to Bluffton Road and along Broadway. It wasn’t until the driver turned onto Jefferson Boulevard that he noticed the toy kitchen, tied down with all kinds of ropes and knots, was gone.

Since then, the family has retraced the trailer’s route, looking for the plaything, but they haven’t spotted a trace of it.

Maybe, said Sharon Brinkman, the mother of the woman who was moving, someone found it on the side of the road and picked it up, believing it had been discarded.

It sounds a little odd that a family would go to such trouble to locate a lost toy, but it has special meaning to the family.

The little toy kitchen had been handed down through the family from one girl to another, and finally to Laura VanNiekerk.

It was her favorite toy.

Laura, who was 3, died May 1, 2009. Her father, angry at his mother, who he said had ruined his life, and angry at his wife, saying their children loved her more than him, abducted his mother and daughter Laura. He drove them to Marshall, Mich., where he checked into a motel and fed his daughter and mother overdoses of drugs.

The father, Johan, eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree premeditated murder in Laura’s death and was sentenced to life without parole in Michigan. He claimed he had only assisted his mother in committing suicide and received a light sentence for that.

In Fort Wayne, what was left of the VanNiekerk family tried to find stability. They remained in the apartment where VanNiekerk had almost killed his wife the night before he killed his mother and daughter, and Laura’s room remained untouched.

But one of Laura’s sisters had nightmares that her father would escape from prison and come back and kill the rest of the family, so they moved.

As remembrances, the family had kept some of Laura’s toys, especially that little toy kitchen, where Laura would prepare make-believe meals from scribbled make-believe menus and give them to family members.

Their lives are full of good and bad memories, Laura’s mother said, but that toy kitchen was special to the whole family.

“I’d give anything to have that back,” Laura’s mother said of the kitchen.

How that little kitchen, tied down so carefully, came loose and disappeared is hard to understand. Maybe it was bad luck, or maybe, Laura’s mother said, “God and Laura thought another little girl needed it more.”

“Everything happens for a reason,” she said.