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Prologue
The sweet soothing music still fills my ears as I remember the night my nanny, Christine Leroux (Christy for short), was taken from me so long ago. She sat at my bed-side while she played a hauntingly beautiful song on her penny whistle late one Christmas Eve. I was only eleven years old at the time, but I remember the melody very well. Ever since I was a baby Christy often played it on the penny whistle that usually hung around her neck by a thin green cord or sang it to me while she tried to lull me to sleep.
On this night in particular she was succeeding in doing just that. As I was dozing off her emerald green eyes shone with all the love that a mother would have for her child. She was the closest thing to a real mom I had ever known. With the fire behind her, her red-gold hair was aglow. I couldn’t see her freckles, so she appeared to be an angel sent from heaven to watch over me. On and on she played, further engraving the melody into my memory.
The music came to an abrupt stop as the windows flew open, allowing a freezing cold gale to snuff out the blaze in the fireplace as though it was a tiny flame burning on the wick of a candle. The moment the music stopped, my eyes had opened to see Christy rise from her chair. She hurried to the window and peered out into the starry darkness. What she was looking for I don’t know, and even if she could see anything it was probably nothing but shadows. After she completed her quick look-around of the grounds below, Christy closed the window and locked it. I sat up and asked her, “What do you think made the window fly open like that?”
She came to sit beside me once again. “I don’t know, love.” There was a bit of fear in her usually confident voice. We sat in silence for a moment before she rose again and declared, “I’ll go ask Sam to come and start the fire again.” With that she headed for my bedroom door as she tied the sash of her house-coat.
I reached over to turn on my lamp so that Sam, Grandfather’s butler, would have some light. I snuggled down into the warm blankets as I felt the cold night air prickling my skin. It was at times like this I wished that we had central heating. My grandfather’s old house had been built back in the Victorian era. Mrs. Angela Jenkins or Angie, my grandfather’s house-keeper, once told me that he had bought this old house for my grandmother. According to Angie, Grandmother had always had a love for old things. And she loved to preserve them just the way they had been at the time they were made. Unfortunately for us, this meant no heater except for the fire place. Luckily she agreed to let Grandfather keep the a/c.
After about ten minutes I started to wonder if Christy was stumbling over her words in asking Sam to restart the fire in my room. The quiet butler probably wasn’t doing much better. He had been in love with Christy for what seemed like forever and he always said that he wanted to wait for the perfect opportunity to tell her how he felt, and Christmas Eve had always seemed to be the perfect time to do it in his view. I guess that was because of the mistletoe. That Christmas we had a sprig of mistletoe hanging in the living room. To me and Angie it had always seemed that Christy felt the same way. Usually any comments or teasing from either of us was usually met by a down-cast gaze and flaming-red cheeks. If Sam was going to finally tell Christy his feelings for her, then I decided I had to be there to witness it for myself.
As I was about to reach for my house-coat that hung on a peg on the wall, I heard footsteps charging up the stairs. Christy flung open my bedroom door and slammed it shut. She didn’t move away from the door until she had locked it. Did Sam actually kiss her and she didn’t like it? Did he have that yucky garlic breath? For dinner earlier we all had eaten Angie’s angel hair pasta with marinara sauce and garlic bread. Even if that had been the case she wouldn’t have run to my bedroom. I was sure of it. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
Christy crossed the room faster than a gunshot. She grabbed me by the arm and ushered me into my closet, saying, “Keep quiet and don’t come out until I tell you to, Emily, no matter what you hear!”
With that the door shut behind me, enclosing the entire cramped space in darkness. What in the world was going on that was so terrible that she had to shut me up in my own closet? She was acting like there was a serial killer in the house! I was about to open the closet door and try asking her once again what was wrong when a shrill scream rang out from downstairs, followed by a loud thud against the wall. I froze as I strained to hear anything through the ear-shattering silence that followed that signified that everything was all right. For several minutes it felt like there was no sound in the world at all. It was as though we were starring in our own little suspense thriller movie and one of the viewers had pressed the mute button. When the sound came back, there was a sound of furniture in the living room being overturned downstairs in the living room, a struggle between two people. Sam’s voice rang out loud and strong, “Get back you filthy mutt! Go on! Get back outside!”
A loud sound of growling and snarling followed Sam’s shouts, confirming that he was indeed fighting a canine. Fear gripped my chest as the horrible thought came to me that the dog may have rabies. I silently prayed that the vicious animal wouldn’t bite, or worse, kill anyone. My heart thundered so loud in my chest that I almost believed that everyone downstairs could hear it. The struggle continued for several minutes with a lot growling and gnashing of teeth from the dog. How Sam was faring I couldn’t exactly tell until I once again heard the sound of a body slamming against the wall followed by a cry of pain that undoubtedly came from Sam.
I felt my heart catch in my throat as I heard the foot fall of what sounded like the animal’s paws on the old steps. That bad dog had hurt Sam and was coming up to my bedroom to get Christy and me! For a few minutes I tried to convince myself I was being silly, but once I heard the animal’s footsteps cease right outside my bedroom door, my heart stopped and dropped down into my stomach. I clearly was not being silly! The dog growled and slammed its body into my door, not once but three times. On the final time I heard my wooden door come right off the hinges. I could hear Christy gasp as the dog padded into the room. I heard Christy’s footsteps draw near my closet door. For a few seconds as far as I could tell the two of them remained rooted where they stood. I knelt by the door breathing heavily as I debated on whether or not to open the door and peek to see what was going on.
I quietly turned the knob and cracked the closet door open to see Christy’s back to me and a giant black and silver wolf standing on all fours towering over my nanny. I couldn’t tell if she was scared. She wasn’t visibly trembling even though the wolf’s golden hungry eyes were gleaming at her. All she did for a few moments was stand there defensively armed with only an old wooden cane in her hand ready to strike if the wild beast dared to attack. The wolf then lunged at Christy, throwing both of them against the closet door closing it so hard that I fell back on the closet floor. Christy cried out in pain as she struggled with the wolf. It didn’t sound like she had hit it. I heard something fall to the floor as Christy shouted, “Get out of here! Go!”
The struggle continued for a few more minutes before Christy’s voice was silent. I trembled with fear as I assumed the worst. I heard the wolf’s footsteps move away from my closet as though it was heading towards the window or towards the door. I couldn’t tell precisely which. All I knew was that the wolf left the room, but I never heard footsteps on the stairs. I timidly crawled back to the closet door and cracked it open. I couldn’t see Christy or the wolf so I opened my door slowly to find no one present in my room. All I found was my bed torn apart, my night stand overturned, my dresser smashed, my cracked bedroom door lying on floor, and my window wide open. I rushed to the open window and peered out into the darkness as a loud wolf’s howl echoed through the forest that surrounded my grandfather’s property. I called out in a choked whisper, “Christy?”
There was no reply, so I called her name once again even louder. I remember waking up from a nightmare once when I was real little, and Christy had been the one to rock me and wipe away my tears. Every time I had called for her she had always come. After I called her name a few more times fear that I had lost her forever was squeezing my little fragile heart so tightly that I could have sworn that I felt it cracking as though it was made of thin hand-blown glass. Tears started to trail down my cheeks as I realized that Christy wasn’t coming.
I shook my head. “No, Grandfather! I want to help find Christy!”
“I told you, Sam, that you were setting a bad example for the child!” He scowled at me. “You can help out better by going with Angie and helping her take of Sam.”
I narrowed my gaze at him and he in turn narrowed his at me. When that didn’t work he crossed his arms and sharply commanded, “Young lady, do as you’re told or else you’ll get a one-way trip to a boarding school in England after the first of the year instead of attending school here!”
That did it of course. The last thing I ever wanted was to be sent off to another country to go school. My sour-expression quickly changed to one of defeat as I softly replied, “Yes, Grandfather.”
With that Angie gently took me by the hand and led me to the car so we could follow the ambulance back into town.
It was about 3:00 in the morning when we arrived at the hospital. The nurse at the front desk instructed Angie to fill out a few forms while she and I sat patiently in the waiting room to hear about how Sam was doing. I was still a bit shaken by what had occurred in my room earlier. Up until that night I had never seen a canine of that size before in my life ever! I had seen what it had done to Sam before we had left the house. The front of his white night-shirt was torn and stained with blood on the front in his left shoulder area. Clearly the creature had tried to take a bite out of Sam. His right cheek had been visibly scratched by the wolf’s claws. Sam had claimed earlier that his mother’s cat had scratched him once and it had not hurt near as much. The only other injuries that I knew that he had were his sprained ankle he had acquired during his struggle with the animal and big gnashes across his chest indicating the wolf’s claws had also been there.
At that point in my life Sam in my eyes was Hercules. I had seen him chop large logs he found in the woods into small pieces of firewood that I could carry into the house easily. Every year at Christmas he and I would go out to find a Christmas tree, usually a six to eight foot-tall tree. He would cut it down and haul it back using my old sled, him pulling it while I carefully carried the ax. To see Sam in his current condition made me tremble at the thought of what the wolf could have done to Christy. True, she wasn’t at all weak, but in my view then if she had been a character in a book or a movie she would have been the willful princess that used her smarts to save her people from the villain rather than by fighting.
“Still worried about Christy, honey? Or are you frettin’ about Sam?”
I gazed up to at see Angie looking down at me with her own concern for our loved ones evident on her face. I nodded. “I’m probably more worried about Christy than Sam. He has always been real strong.”
“Christy has always been strong too, baby. Maybe not physically, but if she has to hold her own in a fight, then she’ll pull through.”
She squeezed my hand reassuringly and tried her best to smile. Her hazel eyes were a bit misty as she looked away for a few seconds. When she turned her face back towards me, I asked, “Do you think Christy is alright?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. I do know that there is no place in the world she can’t go and the Lord won’t be there. Whatever happens, baby, He’s gonna take care of her. It’s hard in times like these trust Him, but one thing you can be sure of is that He’s faithful even when we are not.”
Christy had read the book of Psalms to me once at bed-time. One of the psalms that David had written echoed the same message about how that there was no place in the world that he could (or any us for that matter) go that God wouldn’t be there too. I silently prayed right then and there that God would take care of Christy wherever she was and He would heal Sam. Before I ended my prayer I remembered what Angie had said that during the hard times it’s hard to believe that God will do as He promises. I prayed that He would help me, Angie, Sam, and even Grandfather to trust Him now to take care of Christy.
He turned to me to answer, but it seemed as though he wasn’t looking at me but through me. “No.”
With that he rose from his seat and brushed past me and made his way upstairs to his room. I felt like the flame of hope that I had been harboring deep inside had been extinguished by a cold tidal wave of disappointment. I felt a strong hand reach out and gently stroke my shoulder as the caring baritone voice asked, “Why don’t we go upstairs? We could all use a little rest.”
That evening after we had all taken a nap and had dinner, Sam and I spent a little time watching TV in his room. The two of us were huddled close under the covers while we did a little channel surfing. All that was on was Christmas specials or the news. Finally we gave up and turned it off. Sam solemnly said, “It doesn’t seem like Christmas with her gone, does it?”
I shook my head. I tried to keep myself from crying, but it was no use. I started to sob as I buried my face in my hands. Sam drew me close to him allowing me to lay my head against his chest. When I looked up into his face I could see a few tears of his own sliding down his face. I wiped my eyes as I asked, “Did you get to tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“That you loved her.”
He silently shook his head. “But I was planning to tell her this very night.”
Sam pointed to a small black box on his dresser as he asked me to bring it to him. I obeyed quickly and crawled back under the covers once I reached the bed. He opened the box to reveal a beautiful gold heart-shaped pendant with “I love you” spelled out with tiny twinkling diamonds nestled inside. “Oh, Sam, she would have loved it!”
He smiled sadly as he declared, “Would you listen to us! We’re talking about her as if she’s dead. We don’t know that for sure.”
I couldn’t disagree with him. He had a perfectly valid point.
A few moments later a knock came at the door. After Sam bid our visitor to enter the door opened to reveal Angie bearing medication for our dear invalid. He groaned in protest, but “Dr. Jenkins” would not heed this protest as she reminded him that it was “doctor’s orders.”
“I’m assuming that this one those times where you’re going to either let me take it willingly or slip it into my food when I’m not looking,” he teased.
Angie feigned offense as she replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sam and I both laughed at her response. Angie was notorious for slipping a vitamin in our food when she thought we weren’t getting the nutrients we needed. When I was sick and I refused to take my anti-histamine, she would slip it in a biscuit or a roll. There was one time she was tempted to slip my cough medicine in my tea, but luckily Christy had intervened and coaxed me into taking it.
After Sam had swallowed the pills that would knock him out for the entire night, Angie turned to me and inquired about where I was going to sleep. My room was still a mess and I didn’t want to set foot in there since I was afraid that the wolf would be there waiting to finish me off. Sam asked, “Do you want to stay in here with me tonight?”
I eagerly nodded. Angie smiled as she bid the two of us a good night, making sure to give me a kiss as she added, “I’m leaving you take to care of him for the night then. Okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Alright then. Good night, you two.”
After she had left, the two of us snuggled under the covers and turned out the lamp on Sam’s nightstand. Before we drifted off to sleep, my thoughts returned to Christy. I asked sleepily, “Sam, do you think we’ll find Christy soon?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
“Angie said that God’s going to take care of her wherever she is.”
“Well, Angie’s right, sweetheart.”
“So no matter what happens she’s going to be okay?”
Sam replied sleepily, “That’s right. Now go on to sleep.”
I laid there for a few minutes thanking God for Sam, Angie, and all his other blessings. I prayed once again that He would keep Christy safe and that we would find her soon.
Shortly after that the police gave up the case and claimed that Christy was more than likely dead. Grandfather and Angie believed they were right. Sam and I had mixed beliefs and opinions. There was a part of us that believed they were wrong, but as the years went by it became easier to believe that she was indeed gone.
