The Wolves of Midwinter (31 page)

“There’s someone here who must speak to you,” Elthram said.

“Gladly, only tell me who,” said Reuben.

“Look there,” he said, gesturing towards the great front room. “By the fire. The little girl with the woman beside her.”

Reuben turned, fully expecting to see the woman and the young girl who’d been crying. But these were different people, indeed.

At once Reuben realized he was looking at little Susie Blakely, at her grave little face with her eyes fixed on him. And the woman beside her was Pastor Corrie George, with whom Reuben had left her at the church. Susie wore a lovely old-fashioned smock dress with short puffed sleeves and her hair was beautifully combed. There was a gold chain around her neck with a cross on it. Pastor George wore a black pantsuit with a lot of pretty white lace at the neck, and she too was staring fixedly at Reuben.

“You must be wise,” Elthram whispered. “But she needs to talk to you.”

Reuben’s face was burning. There was a throbbing in his palms. But he went directly towards them.

He bent down as he smoothed the top of Susie’s blond head.

“You’re Susie Blakely,” he said. “I’ve seen your picture in the paper. I’m Reuben Golding, I’m a reporter. You’re much much prettier than your picture, Susie.” It was true. She looked fresh, radiant, undamaged. “And your pink dress is beautiful. You look like a little girl in a storybook.”

She smiled.

His heart was racing, and he marveled at the calm sound of his voice.

“Are you having a good time?” He smiled at Pastor George. “What about you? Can I get anything for you?”

“Can I talk to you, Mr. Golding?” asked Susie. Same clear crisp little voice. “Just for a minute, if I could. It’s really really important.”

“Of course you can,” said Reuben.

“She does need to talk to you, Mr. Golding,” said Pastor George. “You must forgive us for asking you like this, but we’ve come a long way tonight, just to see you, and I promise this won’t take but a few minutes.”

Where could he visit with them in quiet? The party was as crowded as ever.

Quickly, he drew them out of the great room and down the hallway and up the oak stairs.

His room was open to all the guests, but fortunately only a couple were having some eggnog at the round table and they quickly yielded when he brought the little girl and the woman in with him.

He shut the door and locked it, and made sure the bathroom was empty.

“Sit down, please,” he said. “What can I do for you?” He gestured for them to sit at the round table.

Susie’s scalp looked as pink as her dress, and she blushed suddenly as she sat down on the straight-backed chair. Pastor George took her right hand and held it in both of hers as she sat near the child.

“Mr. Golding, I have to tell you a secret,” said Susie. “A secret I can’t tell anybody else.”

“You can tell me,” said Reuben, nodding. “I promise you, I can keep a secret. Some reporters can’t but I can.”

“I know you saw the Man Wolf,” said Susie. “You saw him in this house. And the time before that, he bit you. I heard all about it.” Her face puckered as if she was about to cry.

“Yes, Susie,” said Reuben. “I did see him. All that was true.” He wondered if he was blushing as she was blushing. His face was hot. He was hot all over. His heart went out to her. He would have done anything at this moment to make her comfortable, to help her, protect her.

“I saw the Man Wolf, too,” said Susie. “I really did. My mom and dad don’t believe me.” There was a flash of anger in her small face, and she glanced uneasily at Pastor George who nodded to her.

“Ah, that’s how you were rescued,” said Reuben. “That’s how you got away from the man.”

“Yes, that’s what happened, Mr. Golding,” said Pastor George. She dropped her voice, glancing anxiously at the door. “It was the Man Wolf who rescued her. I saw him too. I spoke to him. Both of us did.”

“I see,” said Reuben. “But there wasn’t anything about it in the papers. I didn’t see anything on television.”

“That’s because we didn’t want anybody to know,” said Susie. “We
didn’t want anybody to capture him and put him in a cage and hurt him.”

“Yes, right, I see. I understand,” said Reuben.

“We wanted to give him time to get away,” said Pastor George. “To clear out of this part of California. We wanted to figure some way not to ever tell anybody. But Susie needs to tell people, Mr. Golding. She needs to talk about what happened to her. And when we tried to tell her parents, well, they didn’t believe us! Either of us!”

“Of course she needs to talk about it,” said Reuben. “You both do. I understand. If anyone should understand, I should.”

“He’s real, isn’t he, Mr. Golding?” asked Susie. She swallowed and the tears came up in her eyes, and suddenly there was a listlessness in her face as if she’d lost the thread.

Reuben took her by her shoulders. “Yes, he’s real, darling,” he said. “I saw him and so did a lot of other people, downstairs in the big room. Many people have seen the Man Wolf. He’s real all right. You don’t ever have to doubt your senses.”

“They don’t believe anything I say,” she said in a small voice.

“They believe about the bad man who took you, don’t they?” he asked.

“Yes, they do,” said Pastor George. “His DNA was all over the trailer. They’ve connected him to other disappearances, too. The Man Wolf saved Susie’s life, that’s perfectly obvious. That man killed two other little girls.” She stopped suddenly and glanced at Susie with concern. “But you see, when her parents didn’t believe her about the Man Wolf, and others didn’t—. Well, she doesn’t want to talk anymore about any of it, not any of it at all.”

“He did save me, Mr. Golding,” said Susie.

“I know that he did,” said Reuben. “I mean I believe every single word you’re saying. Let me tell you something, Susie. Lots of people don’t believe in the Man Wolf. They don’t believe me. They don’t believe the people who were with me here, the other people who saw him. We have to live with that, that they don’t believe us. But we have to tell what we saw. We can’t let the secrets fester inside us. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes, I know what it means,” said Pastor George. “But you see, we don’t want to trumpet it to the media either. We don’t want people hunting him down, killing him.”

“No,” said Susie. “And they will. They’ll get him and kill him.”

“Well, listen, honey,” Reuben said. “I know you’re telling the truth, both of you. And don’t you ever forget that I saw him too. Look, Susie, I wish you were old enough for e-mail. I wish—.”

“I am old enough,” said Susie. “I can use my mom’s computer. I can write down my e-mail address for you right now.”

Pastor George took a pen out of her pocket. There was a writing pad already on the table.

Quickly Susie began to carve out the letters of her e-mail, her teeth biting into her lower lip as she wrote. Reuben watched, quickly entering the e-mail into his iPhone.

“I’m e-mailing you now, Susie,” he said, his thumbs working. “I won’t say anything that anybody else would understand.”

“It’s okay. My mom doesn’t know my e-mail address,” said Susie. “Only you do and Pastor George.”

Pastor George wrote out her e-mail and gave it to Reuben. At once he recorded it and fired an e-mail off to her address.

“Okay. We’re gonna e-mail, you and me. And any time you have to talk about what you saw, you e-mail me—and look.” He took the pen. “This is my phone number, the number of this phone here. I’ll e-mail this to you too. You call me. You understand? And you, too, Pastor George.” He tore off the sheet of paper and gave it to the woman. “Those of us who’ve seen these things have to stick together.”

“Thank you so much,” Susie said. “I told the priest in Confession and he didn’t believe me either. He said maybe I imagined it.”

Pastor George shook her head. “She just doesn’t want to talk anymore about any of it now, you see, and that’s no good. That’s just no good.”

“Really. Well, I know a priest who’ll believe you,” said Reuben. He was still holding his iPhone in his left hand. Quickly, he texted Jim. “My bedroom upstairs now, Confession.” But what if Jim couldn’t hear
his phone over the music downstairs? What if his phone was shut off? He was four hours away from his parish. He might have shut it off.

“She needs to be believed,” said Pastor George. “I can live with people’s skepticism. The last thing I want is the press on my doorstep anyway. But she does need to talk about all of what happened to her, and a lot—and that’s going to be true for a long time.”

“You’re right,” he said. “And when you’re Catholic, you want to talk to your priest about the things that matter most to you. Well, some of us do.”

Pastor George gave a little shrug and an offhand gesture of acceptance.

There was a knock at the door. It couldn’t be Jim, he thought, not this quickly.

But when he opened the door, Jim was there all right, and behind him Elthram stood leaning against the wall of the corridor.

“They said you wanted to see me,” said Jim.

Reuben gave a grateful nod to Elthram and let Jim into the room.

“This little girl needs to talk to you. Can this woman stay with her while she goes to Confession?”

“If this little girl wants the woman to stay, certainly,” said Jim. He focused intently on the little girl, and then nodded to the woman with a soft formal smile. He seemed so gentle, so capable, so effortlessly reassuring.

Susie stood up out of respect for Jim. “Thank you, Father,” she said.

“Susie, you can tell Father Jim Golding anything,” said Reuben. “And I promise you, he will believe you. And he’ll keep your secrets too, and you can talk to him anytime you want, just as you can talk to me.”

Jim took the chair opposite her, gesturing for Susie to sit down.

“I’m going to leave you now,” said Reuben. “And Susie, you e-mail me any time you want, honey, or you call me. If it goes to voice mail, I promise, I’ll get back to you.”

“I knew you’d believe me,” said Susie. “I knew you would.”

“And you can talk to Father Jim about all of it, Susie, whatever happened
out there in the woods with that bad man. And anything about the Man Wolf. Honey, you can trust him. He’s a priest and he’s a good priest. I know because he’s my big brother.”

She beamed at Reuben. What a beautiful and radiant creature she was. And when he thought of her crying in that trailer that night, when he thought of her small dirt-streaked face as she’d cried and begged him not to leave her, he was silently overcome.

She turned and looked eagerly and innocently at Jim.

And Reuben said, without thinking,

“I love you, darling dear.”

Susie’s head turned as if jerked by a chain. Pastor George turned too. They were both staring at him.

And it came back to him, that moment in the forest outside the church, when he’d left Susie with Pastor George and he had said in that very same tone of voice, “I love you, darling dear.”

His face reddened. He stood there silently looking at Susie. Her face seemed ageless suddenly, like the face of a spirit, stamped with something profound and at the same time simple. She was gazing at him, without shock or confusion or recognition.

“Good-bye, honey,” he said and he went out closing the door behind him.

At the foot of the stairs, Reuben’s editor, Billie, accosted him. Wasn’t that Susie Blakely? Had he gotten an exclusive with Susie Blakely? Did Reuben realize what that meant? No reporter had been able to talk to that little girl since she’d been returned to her parents. This was huge.

“No, Billie, and no, and no,” Reuben said lowering his voice to soften his outrage. “She’s a guest in this house, and I do not have any right or any intention of interviewing that child. Now, listen, I want to get back to the pavilion and hear some of the music before the party’s over. Come with me, come on.”

They plunged into the thick of the crowd in the dining room and mercifully he could no longer hear Billie or anyone else. Billie drifted away. He shook hands here, nodded to thanks there, but steadily moved towards the music coming through the front door. Only now did he
think about Jim hating so much to be around children, hating to see them, but surely he’d had to call Jim for Susie. Jim would understand. Jim was a priest first and foremost, no matter what personal pain he might feel.

The pavilion was no less crowded. But it was easier to make his way through the tables, exchanging greetings, acknowledging thanks, merely nodding at those he didn’t know, and who didn’t know him, until he came near to the solemn artfully lighted crèche.

The chain of medieval mummers was passing through, handing out their golden commemorative coins. Waitresses and waiters everywhere were replenishing plates or collecting them, offering fresh glasses of wine, or cups of coffee. But all of this faded as he moved into the soft dreamy light of the manger. This had been his destination all along. He smelled the wax of candles; the voices of the choir were blended and heartbreaking yet faintly shrill.

He lost track of time as he stood there, the music close and beautiful and engulfing. The boys’ choir began a mournful hymn now to the accompaniment of the whole orchestra:

Reuben closed his eyes for a long moment, and when he opened them he looked down on the smiling face of the Christ Child, and he prayed. “Please show me how to be good,” he whispered. “Please, no matter what I am, show me how to be good.”

A sadness overwhelmed him, a terrible discouragement—a fear of all the challenges that lay ahead. He loved Susie Blakely. He loved her. And he wanted only all that was good for her forever and always. He wanted good for every single person he’d ever known. And he could not think now of the cruelty he’d visited on those whom he’d judged as evil, those whom he’d taken out of this world with a beast’s thoughtless
cruelty. Silently with his eyes closed he repeated the prayer in a profound and wordless way.