Showing results by narrator "Gordon Pinsent" in All Categories

Ernie Tarn has been working all fall and now it is a week before Christmas in Newfoundland in the early 1900s. He’s been saving up enough to buy a $1 pair of screw-heel skates like those he saw in Mr. Walker’s shop window last Christmas. Ernie lives alone with his widowed mother. On Christmas Eve, Ernie walks to the merchant’s store just as the last barrel of shipped goods is about to be opened. When the top comes off the barrel, there is a pair of nickel-plated skates, much fancier than the old screw-heel model, but equally dazzling is a bird-shaped butter cooler.

Ned Vatcher, only 14, ambles home from school in the chill hush that precedes the first storm of the winter of 1936 to find the house locked, the family car missing, and his parents gone without a trace. From that point on, his life is driven by the need to find out what happened to the Vanished Vatchers. His father, Edgar, born to a poor family of fishermen, had risen to become the right-hand man to the colony's prime minister, then suffered an unexpected fall from grace. Were he and his wife murdered? Was it suicide? Had they run away? If so, why had they left their only child behind?