From the Desk of Mrs. Sandra Deets

April 5, 2005

Dear Mr. Dupré,

I don’t know if you remember me, but I most certainly remember you. I remember a kind, sweet, loving boy who rarely strayed from his grandfather’s side in those last few months before he passed away. I remember how dear your grandfather was – in all of my many years as a hospice nurse, I don’t believe I ever encountered a more wonderful person than Francis Dupré. That is where you and I met each other before. I was there with you, your parents, your grandmother, on the night your grandfather died.

I know it must be rather startling to you to hear from me so suddenly, after so many years, but I assure you, I would not be disrupting your life in such a fashion without good reason. Something extraordinary happened to me a few months ago, Mr. Dupré, something that concerns you, and I have seen searching for you for some time. I had no money to hire an investigator, you understand, and while I now realize you could have been located in a matter of minutes on the Internet, a silly old woman like me didn’t even think to look there until a chance conversation with our local librarian, who helped me with the computer. I was quite astonished at all you’ve accomplished in your young life. If I may say so, I’m sure your grandfather would have been very proud of you.

The story I have to tell you actually begins many years ago, before your grandfather passed on. Oh, he was so proud and good and strong, and it broke my heart to watch him in those last few days, when his mind finally left him and he didn’t know where he was anymore. I was tending to him one afternoon, just two days before he died, and I noticed that he had somehow found the strength to pull his hands together on top of his stomach. With the fingers of his left hand, he was squeezing the third finger of his right, twisting the base of it, like there was something missing there. As he gripped his finger, his eyes rolled back, like he wasn’t quite there, and for a moment I thought we had finally reached the end. Then he began to mumble your name.

“Curtis? Where my Curtis?” he moaned in that think Cajun accent he never quite shook. “Gotta give it to him. He gon’ need me. Gotta give it to him.” He went on like this for some time, mumbling and calling for you, before he finally fell into a troubled sleep.

Not long afterwards, your grandmother returned. (In those final weeks, it seemed she only left his side to attend Mass and light candles for him) and I asked her if she knew what your grandfather could have been calling for.

“Was it his ring finger?” she asked. “On his right hand.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Oh, oh dear. He was looking for his ring.”

“What ring?”

“When Curtis was very little, Francis won him a goldfish at the Church fair. Curtis was all excited and brought it home and showed it to his momma and daddy just as pleased as punch. But Curtis was just four years old, he didn’t know how to take care of a goldfish, and he found it floatin’ belly-up in just two days.

“Well, Curtis was all upset, but Francis thought this would be a good time to teach him about life an’ death an’ that some day we’d all be gone. Now Curtis asked the usual questions – what would happen to you when you died an’ all that – but the big thing he kept askin’ was, ‘Even you, Paw-Paw?’ That was the part that really had him upset, that his Paw-Paw was gonna be gone one day.”

“Oh, that sweet boy.”

“Yeah, he was. Well, Francis tol’ him that even when he was gone, he would still be watchin’ over him. Francis had this big signet ring – made of gold with an amethyst setting, and his initials, F.D.D., Francis Douglas Dupré, stamped into it. And he held that ring up to Curtis an’ said, ‘You see this? Once I’m gone, Curtis, I’m gonna give you this ring, so whenever you look at it, you can remember that I’m still with you, and I’m still watchin’ you. That’s a promise, Curtis. This ring is gonna be the symbol of my promise that I’ll always be there when you need me’.”

“Well where is the ring now?”

When I asked the question, tears swelled in your grandmother’s eyes. It was a look I was growing accustomed to.

“He lost it,” she said. “Slid right off his finger about a year ago, on his last hunting trip. He loved to hunt, and he liked bringing Curtis, even though the boy never developed a knack for it. Him and his buddies searched those woods for a day and a half, but they never found it. Just about broke Francis’ heart.”

“Oh that poor, sweet man.”

Then your grandmother smiled, and she gently put her warm hand on my arm. “I’ll take the ‘sweet,’ sugah, but my Francis would never hear of no one callin’ him ‘poor.’ He always considered himself the richest man in town.”

“He liked It’s a Wonderful Life, did he?”

“You know it.”

Over the next few days, whenever he was awake, your grandfather would periodically whisper your name or something about the ring, but more than anything else, he kept saying the word “promise” over and over. Then, just before the end, he reached out and held your grandmother’s hand, and he talked nice and clear, as clear as the first day I ever met him. But he wasn’t talking to any of us in the room. He looked straight up and said, “Please, Lord. He gonna need me someday, I know it. Please, let me be there for him.”

Then he let go of your grandmother’s hand and closed his eyes. A few minutes later, he was gone.

I pray I’m not upsetting you, Mr. Dupré, by recounting your grandfather’s final moments this way. The last thing I wanted to do in this letter was upset you at all, and I promise you, I would not even mention it in such detail if it weren’t vital to the story I have to tell you.

I had many, many patients over the years, but few of them stayed with me the way Francis Dupré did. Even when I retired, two years ago, I was still haunted by the memory of his promise to you. So simple, so sweet, and so terrible to me that he was never given a proper opportunity to fulfill it. I was angry with myself that I failed to ask you grandmother where, precisely, he had been hunting when he lost the ring. As ridiculous as it sounds, I found myself half-searching for it whenever I was in an area it may have been. Any time I went on a nature hike or a swamp tour (I’ve always loved the outdoors, so these trips were no sacrifice on my part) I kept one eye open on the off-chance that I would locate a small ring of gold with an amethyst setting and F.D.D. stamped into the metal. It’s interesting what one finds over time when one looks. I’ve found many a wallet, a watch, a long-lost trinket. I’ve even found a ring or two over time, and each time my heart leapt just for a moment, but it was never the one I was searching for. It was never the one that was special. After a few years of looking, though, I started to feel just plain foolish about the whole thing. It had been so many years and I didn’t even know where to start looking. Surely it had been found by now, or was hidden so well that my poor eyes would never be up to the search.

So I put it aside and went on with my own life, but I never did forget your grandfather, or how deeply he regretted not being able to fulfill his promise to you.

I lived a happy life, mostly, and while I certainly did not become wealthy working at a hospice, my husband’s job gave him some nice benefits and, by the time we both retired we managed to put together a pretty sizeable nest egg. Since we were never blessed with children, we decided to use as much of our remaining time enjoying ourselves and each other, for as long as the good Lord would allow us. We’ve traveled, I must say, even before I retired myself. We’ve seen the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower and Niagara Falls, and frankly, I got tuckered out. So last Thanksgiving, when my husband Hal suggested we take a trip at Christmastime, I asked if maybe we couldn’t do something a little closer to home. He thought that was a fine idea, and so instead of celebrating Christ’s birth at the Vatican or in Tokyo or whatever crazy place he would have had in mind, he rented us a quiet little cabin in the woods upstate.

We rented the cabin for three weeks, beginning on Monday the 20th of December, but we hadn’t gone two miles when Hal started hearing a clunking noise in the car’s engine. My husband can be something of a worrywart, but he does have good intuition when it comes to his automobile, so instead of driving up to the cabin we wound up pulling in to a service station. The attendant seemed a nice enough young man, and promised to have the car roadworthy by the next day. Sure, we would lose Monday, but we had three weeks.

On Tuesday afternoon, though, the car still wasn’t working. They were “backed up,” he said. Then on Wednesday, things were delayed “because of the holidays.” When we finally got our car back it was so late on Thursday afternoon that Hal, already steamed at our mechanic, decided we should just wait and drive up the next morning, on Christmas Eve. Oh, I do love Christmas Eve. All of the lights and music and holly and tinsel just seem more real that day, don’t they? More powerful, somehow. Maybe that’s why all of those great Christmas movies seem to have their climaxes on December 24 instead of 25.

Anyway, for all his griping and moaning about the delay, Hal was genuinely excited as we loaded the car back up and set out for our little cabin in the woods. We were still about an hour out from it, though, when something odd happened. Hal was nervous about finding a tree. “It’s Christmas Eve, Sandy, there aren’t gonna be any left at any of the tree lots.”

“Well, why don’t we try to chop one down ourselves?”

“It’s not that kind of forest, sugar. We won’t find any Christmas trees out there.”

I reached over and touched his hand with my own. It may have had a few more spots and wrinkles than when I married him, but it still drew a warm smile. “Don’t you worry, m’love. We’ll muddle through somehow.”

Putting my hand over his may have been the mistake. He looked down at it, just for a moment, and when he looked back up he shouted a profanity and jerked the wheel hard to the right. We raced off the road and jammed to a stop only inches away from the edge of the forest, and it took me several seconds to realize we were only shaken up, not hurt.

“Hal, what was that all about?”

“There’s some damn fool standing in the middle of the road! Look!”

I turned in my seat and saw a thin, gaunt man in a yellow coat. It was cold up here, colder than I was used to at Christmas, and the trench coat this man was wearing couldn’t have been enough to shield him from the chill. I got out and ran around the car to see if he was hurt. We obviously didn’t hit him, he was still standing in the middle of the road, wavering back and forth on his spindly legs. His hair was a deep brown, and his face was wan and pale – almost blue. His cheekbones stood out and his eyes, his poor eyes, were sunken deep into black sockets.

“Hal – Hal look at him.”

Hal was out of the car himself now, approaching the man in the road. “Hey! Hey, buddy, are you hurt?”

He turned then, the man in the road, and looked right at me with his dark, shimmering eyes. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t hear what. I wanted to run out to him and pull the poor thing off the street. On Christmas Eve, it was only a matter of time before another car, or a chain of cars, came racing down the narrow ribbon of concrete and flattened him.

Before I had a chance, though, he spun around and ran off the road himself. With a twirl of his yellow coat, he disappeared into the trees that lined the road. The woods were not deep here, but the skies were dark early. The weather report on the radio said there might even be a chance of snow. Within moments he had vanished beneath a blanket of trees, and except for the skid marks that followed our car off the road onto the shoulder, there was no evidence he had ever been there at all.

“Hal… where did he go?”

“I don’t know.” He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me back to the car. “Don’t let him fret you, darlin’. Probably some loon wandering through the woods. We’ve got a nice, long Christmas ahead of us, and there’s no sense letting him ruin it.”

I didn’t say anything to Hal, although I’m not sure why, but what really disarmed me about the experience was the certainty I had that I’d seen the young man before. The previous Christmas Eve, in fact. I had been out doing last-minute shopping (silly, I know, as I have no one to shop for but Hal and a few close friends, yet I always seem to leave things until the last minute). As I was coming out of a department store, I fished into my purse for a dollar to give to the Salvation Army’s bell-ringer. Like many people I know, I had promised on my way in that I would donate on my way out. Unlike many people, I intended to deliver on that promise. The bell-ringer was a young woman with dark hair and eyes and olive skin. I had noticed as I walked in that she was quite pretty, just as I would have wanted my daughter to look had I ever been so blessed. As I reached over to drop the dollar in the bucket, though, I saw someone else. That young man with the hollow, hungry eyes, looking even hungrier than he would that day Hal nearly hit him on the road. He looked up at me then, moaned, and rolled over, wrapping himself in his coat.

I donated my dollar and hurried off, chilled by the look on his face, and tried to push the episode from my mind. As it turned out, I succeeded for an entire year.

“Sandy? Are you okay?”

Hal snapped me out of my reverie and I realized I was standing in the middle of the road, peering into the woods. If any car had come by just then, I would have been flatter than a pancake.

“I’m fine, Hal,” I whispered, lying a little. “Come on, you’re right. Let’s get up to the cabin.”

The road was clear and smooth the rest of the way to the cabin, and we were there in about 45 minutes. Hal had spared no expense, as usual. It was a nice, cozy cabin, with a bedroom, bathroom, living room/kitchenette and, most importantly, a heater. The whole thing was wood-paneled on the inside, with a steel gas range and sink. There was a small refrigerator and a comfortable love seat in front of the fireplace. “So, you like?” Hal asked.

“Oh, I like. I like very much.” I kissed his lips and gave his hand a firm squeeze. “This is just the perfect place to spend Christmas.”

“Tell you what, why don’t you do a little unpacking while I head out to get us a Christmas tree?” He picked up an axe and slung it over his shoulder like a lumberjack.

“With that? Oh, you big strong man,” I teased. “But I thought you said there weren’t any trees in these woods.”

“There aren’t. I thought I saw a lot down the road. But the axe sure looked good, didn’t it?”

I smiled very wide for that. If he was making such jokes, his mood had improved considerably. This was well on the way to being a very Merry Christmas indeed.

With Hal gone, I set to my own work, putting our clothes away in the closet and chest of drawers, and setting my jewelry box on the counter. That done, I went to the ice-packed Igloo cooler we’d toted with us, not loaded with sodas and snacks for the drive, but with a small turkey for our Christmas dinner. I set it in a deep pan and put it on the counter to thaw overnight.

The turkey taken care of, I went to the kitchen sink to wash my hands. Over the sink was a large window with the shades drawn, looking out into the woods. I lathered my hands and began to rinse them all the while peering through the window. I expected to see nothing more than some birds or squirrels – perhaps a deer passing by in the woods if I were particularly lucky. I did not expect to see a flash of a yellow coat passing through the trees.

It couldn’t be. We had only arrived about a half-hour ago, and driven away nearly an hour before that. No one could have made it so far on foot that quickly. But impossible or not, there he was. The same young man we had almost hit in the road, the same one who glared up at me from a Salvation Army bucket a year ago. He was staring back at me, even now.

But he looked different, somehow. He looked stronger, healthier. His cheeks were fuller and the darkness around his eyes wasn’t so severe. I could even imagine, although it was hard to tell with the coat wrapped so completely around him, that his arms and legs had more muscle and definition than they had when we encountered him earlier in the day.

I ran for the back door and, just as I stepped outside, I saw him turn to flee like a scared rabbit. “Wait!” I shouted. “Come back! Let me help you!”

“You tried,” I heard him say. “I know you tried.”

“What do you mean?”

“You will, won’t you?” he asked. His voice was soft, tired, and although I was frightened, it was not for myself but for him.

“Yes, of course I will,” I said. “I promise!”

When I said that, when I said that word, I saw a smile spread across his thin lips. “I gon’ hold you to that, sugah,” he said. Then he turned back to the trees and, with a flip of the coat, he was gone.

I don’t know why I didn’t tell Hal I saw the young man again, scurrying in the woods outside our cabin, but when he returned with a handsome five-foot fir tree, I helped him set it up then together we went about decorating it. We’d brought along a box of lights, tinsel and ornaments, as well as an angel for the top I had discovered that summer at a craft sale – a body made from a dishwashing soap bottle with the bottom cut out, but covered in a lovely dress with a sweet, wholesome rag face. You’d never have suspected its origin if you didn’t lift up the dress.

We decorated the tree in record time, and while my mind was almost exclusively on the strange man I’d encountered twice that day (three times total), I never thought of telling my husband about the encounter. Somehow I felt this was something just for me.

We had a lovely dinner of cold chicken salad – also packed in the cooler with the turkey for the drive north – and retired to bed early. Although my mind was very much occupied, I fell asleep so quickly and so soundly that when I awoke to the sound of the bells, I was almost certain it was a dream.

“Hal…” I whispered. “Hal, do you hear that?”

Hal grunted, his usual sound upon waking. “Hear what?”

“Those bells. Don’t you hear them?”

“S’just the wind chimes, hon.”

“Wind chimes? Yes, right.” I pulled up the covers close to my face and tried to return to sleep, but a thought started to nag at me. I didn’t think this cabin had any wind chimes.

I rose out of bed and slid my feet into the pair of soft, fur-lined slippers Hal gave me for Christmas two years before. They had quickly become my favorite pair, so warm and comfortable. Sometimes if I had nowhere to go, I would wear them all day. I pulled on a robe and padded out into the living room. The tree was dark and the drapes were drawn, it was pitch-black, and I was afraid of crashing into things. Somehow, though, I didn’t want to turn on the lights either.

I crept slowly to the wall and felt my way down to the nearest window. Another few moments of groping and the string to pull the shades open was in my hand. I drew them and the small living room was flooded with blue starlight. There was quite an expanse of grass – maybe twenty yards – before the woods began, and the black sky was filled with more dazzling starlight than I had ever seen in my life. The light fell across my face and onto the hands of a clock, and I was stunned to see it was only 11 o’clock. Somehow it felt much later, as though I had been roused out of a much deeper sleep.

I looked out the windows towards the treeline, not sure what I expected to see; Bambi, perhaps, stepping out under the moonlight to gaze at me with downy deer eyes. Perhaps, incredible as it sounds, maybe even a reindeer pulling along a sled, even though the cruel skeptic in me stopped believing in such things many a year ago. What I saw, instead, was perhaps even more astonishing. It was my friend, the strange man in the yellow coat, leaning against a tree and watching the house as though he were waiting for something. So I pulled my robe tight around me, and I stepped outside.

You must think me mad, of course. A woman of my age stepping out of a warm, safe cabin into the freezing night to approach a strange man with a penchant for appearing and vanishing at will. I’m not foolish, Mr. Dupré, I’m well aware of how terribly insane someone would have to be to do such a thing. I was aware of it then. All I can tell you is that I felt no sense of danger from him, no dread, no flicker that I could even be in such jeopardy that I would catch the sniffles from the cold night air. I was safe. I knew that.

I was right.

“’Bout time you got here, Nurse Sandy,” he said, grinning like a child at play. “Man in my position is on a tight schedule.”

“Your position? Who are you? What do you want?”

“I jus’ want you to keep your promise.”

“Promise?”

“To help me. You gave it more than once.”

And he was so sure, so all-fired certain when he said it. I couldn’t have argued with him if I wanted to. “How do I help you?” I asked. “What do I do?”

He smiled again. “Follow me.”

He turned and again vanished into the trees, but this time I hurried after him. After I had taken a few steps into the thicket, he reappeared, looking back over his shoulder to see if I was keeping up. I was afraid I’d lose him – he was so young and strong… earlier he had been withering away, but in the moonlight his cheeks were full, his arms and legs strong, his eyes danced like fireflies. I, on the other hand, was a silly old woman jogging along in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, which were already growing stained and shabby marching through the dirt. I did not have to march through dirt for long, though. As we passed beneath a gap in the trees, a single crystal flake of the purest silver filtered down through the branches and lit on the tip of my nose. It melted almost instantly, but it was followed soon by brothers and sisters. Hundreds, thousands of them. I’m nearly 70 years old, Mr. Dupré, but I have lived in southern Louisiana my entire life. This was, in fact, my very first White Christmas.

“Are you a ghost?” I asked the man before me.

“I don’ look like Casper, do I?”

“Are you an angel, then?”

“Not that high on the totem pole, Nurse Sandy. But we on the same side.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I got the distinct impression that was all he intended to say about the subject. We walked some more in silence, past cold trees and hooting owls, my soiled slippers beginning to grow damp from the snow underfoot. He looked back at me again. “I was startin’ to think I’d never get a hold of you on one of these nights.”

“What nights?”

“When the window is open. I’m a busy man, Nurse Sandy, got lots to do, but there’s only certain times I got enough strength here to do a little something on my own.”

“Is that what we’re doing? Something for you?”

“Directly, maybe. But the end result about someone needs it a lot more than I do.” He spoke with a heavy Accadian accent, one I knew quite well from my years at the hospice, and even though he said that wasn’t what he was I found myself thinking, “How quaint. A Cajun angel.” As if he knew what was on my mind, he turned around, walking backwards now, and laughed without losing a step.

“Oh, look out!” I said, but it was too late. He collided with a low-hanging branch…

…and passed right through it as if he were nothing more than vapor. I stood agape, no knowing what I could possibly say. He glanced around, puzzled, then realized: the branch. “Oh, that,” he said. “Well, sug, now you understan’ why I need your help tonight, don’t you?”

I lost track of how long we walked, although when I later regained my sense of time I realized it could not have been as long as I supposed. My spectral guide made an effort, on my behalf, to walk around trees and other obstacles rather than through them, although I was unnerved already. My calm slowly returned on the march, and I even grew accustomed to watching snowflakes drift down through his body – those he couldn’t avoid.

He came up beneath an old tree stand, finally, the kind deer hunters use, and there he knelt down in the snow. “Here,” he said. “Somewhere around here.”

“What’s somewhere around here?” I asked, even though I knew.

“This is where I need you, Nurse Sandy. My hands ain’t no good for this kind of work.”

I knelt down beside him and sank my hands into the snow. It was cold, but the layer was thin, and I quickly hit the frozen dirt beneath. I raked my hands around, touching, feeling, hoping to come up with what we both so desperately wanted to find.

“How did you lose it?” I asked.

“Damndest thing,” he said. “I’m sittin’ up in the deer stand and I see a beaut. A 10-point buck, proud as a peacock, just standin’ there. So I lift up my rifle and he starts moving. Slow-like. I follow him, I’m trying to draw a bead. He’s goin’ in circles for some reason, and I start to get nervous, my palms start to sweat.”

“Oh no.”

“Yep. Damn ring slid right off my finger. Fell all the way to the ground. When it hit, the thud frightened off the deer, but I didn’t care, I was already climbin’ down the tree lookin’ for it. Even called in my buddies from their stands. They weren’t took happy I cost ‘em all a possible kill, neither. We looked and look, but we never found nothin’.”

“What makes you think we’ll find it tonight?”

He looked at me with cool certainty.

“We’ve got to, Nurse Sandy. It’s my last chance.”

We ran our hands through the snow – literally, in his case – and I found rocks, twigs, lumps of dirt… but I never saw what we were looking for. “I don’t know where to look,” I said.

He sighed. His shoulders fell, and although I could not be certain in the dark, I think his face fell with them. “Me neither,” he admitted.

He stood up, pulling his eyes from the ground and our search and stepped out from beneath the ceiling of the trees to a place where moonlight touched the ground.

“Please, boss,” he whispered. “Please, you gotta help me. He’s gonna need me soon, and this window is almost closed. This is my last chance.”

“Does he really need it?” I asked.

“I made him a promise.”

“I know. But is the important part of the promise it or you? When he needs you, can’t you just be there?”

He turned and looked at me, like he had genuinely never thought of that before. “I… I…”

Then, Mr. Dupré, then something happened that will convince people I’m crazy, if everything I’ve told so far didn’t do the trick. Then there was a gust of wind, chilling wind that sliced right through my robe and into my bones. More importantly, though, it grabbed the branches of the trees above us and slowly pulled them back, and the moonlight that had shone on my companion’s face was now shining somewhere else.

The beams of moonlight bore down, converged almost, onto the rotted old stump of a tree. And there, just in the center of the illuminated area, was a hollow knothole.

He whispered then, in a quiet reverent voice. “I never saw that hole before.”

“Could it be that simple?”

“Look. Please, look.”

The moonlight showed me the hole, but did not glow strongly enough to show me what was inside it. I imagined bugs and spiders and other creepy-crawlies that stayed up at these hours while respectable folks were in bed, and the thought of reaching into that hole blind made me ill. Still, I’d gone this far. And he was right. I did promise.

I rolled up my sleeve and stuck my arm into the hole. I was terrified I would pull it out to find a leech hanging from my wrist, plumping up on my blood, but except for grime and dirt, I found the hole empty. “I don’t feel anything,” I said.

“Keep looking. You have to.”

Then my hand fell upon it, a lump of grime that was more solid than the rest, and in a circular shape. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled it from the hole. “I think I’ve got it,” I said. “Is this it?”

But there came no answer.

He was gone.

The walk back to the cabin did not seem to take as long as the walk out, but then, return journeys never do. In my hand I clung to the cold, grimy lump I’d gone so far to find inside that tree, cradling it like a precious gem. Halfway home, one of my slippers snagged on a bush and tore open. Between the snow and the dirt, they were ruined anyway.

When I walked back into the cabin, the first thing I saw was the clock on the wall, still illuminated in the moonlight. Considering how long the walk back had been, by my estimate, the man in the yellow coat had vanished just after midnight. His window had closed.

I didn’t crawl back into bed right away, as you might expect. I didn’t even run a bath or a shower, or wash my hands. Instead, I went to the small jewelry box I brought to the cabin with me (a silly whim – why would I need my jewelry in the woods, Hal teased). Inside was a bottle of polish. I poured a measure of it into a shallow bowl, then dropped in what I had found in the tree. The polish began to dissolve the grim and what wasn’t merely eaten away, I managed to clean off with the old toothbrush I used on my own jewelry. By the time I climbed back into bed with my husband, who never even realized I was gone, I had uncovered the amethyst stone and the letters stamped into the side: F.D.D.

There’s not much else to tell, Mr. Dupré. I spent the rest of our time in the cabin wishing I could get home and start looking for you. I told Hal about finding the ring, but not about my late-night trek and unusual visitor. He wouldn’t have understood, I know. He didn’t even believe that the ring was the same one lost by your grandfather so many years ago.

When we got home I started looking for you in earnest. I started at the hospice, where a few friends I still had there managed to find your grandmother’s address for me. I contacted her, and she remembered me, but when I told her I was interested in finding you she thought I was hoping to leech onto you like some publicity-hound. I didn’t know what had become of you at the time, and I was rather surprised by her reaction. I suppose I could have told her about the ring, but I figured she would think I’d lost my mind. I didn’t even want to produce the ring and stir up old memories.

I couldn’t find you or your parents listed in the phone book. I later realized that was because your parents had moved to Baton Rouge and you, of course, had an unlisted number. I found a few more relatives, but like your grandmother, they thought I wanted something from you. Clearly, you’d made something of yourself.

Finally a few days ago – and nearly four months after I found the ring, I went to the library. After a few days of searching through the Timberton Charger newspaper I saw your picture and realized what had become of you, about how far you’ve advanced as a filmmaker. I was almost proud, as though (this is terribly silly, so please forgive me) it were my own grandson.

The picture, though – when I saw your picture it took me totally by surprise. I have never seen you as an adult before, Mr. Dupré, but I saw your face that night in the woods. A face very like yours walked with me through the woods. Curtis, oh Curtis. How you look like your grandfather.

Once I found you, I convinced a librarian I meant you no harm and they helped me use the computer to find an address to get in touch with you – through the movie studio, yes, but I do believe this letter and package will finally find its way to you, where it belongs. I hope the studio forwards this to you in a timely manner, because from the way your grandfather spoke to me on Christmas Eve I am certain that time is of the essence. Perhaps this letter will serve as a warning to you too, Mr. Dupré. Something may happen to you soon, something harrowing, and you will need your grandfather there. I pray this ring finds you in time. I pray that your grandfather will be with you when that moment happens. And I pray that you believe everything I’ve said to you in this letter and don’t just dismiss it as the yammerings of an old fool.

Sincerely,

Sandra Deets.

From the desk of Curtis Dupré

May 12, 2005

Mrs. Deets,

I don’t think you’re crazy. I did need him.

He was there.

Thank you.

Curtis Dupré