chapter three

About three weeks after the disappearance of Shannon the Nelson family received this letter: -

 

Mr and Mrs Nelson

Your daughter is safe, however you have got two weeks to send us £5 000 000! If you leave the money in cash under the big stone in the Never Ending Park in your village the girl shall be returned unharmed. On the other hand should you fail, you shall never see her again. Be warned, we shall know if the police are notified about this. . . . .

Yours forever

Unknown

 

They burned the letter and left no money under the big stone, they didn’t care about Shannon, as far as they thought it was good riddance of bad rubbish! They were glad to get rid of her!

 

That very next day little Dominic was born into that family and Shannon was forgotten by all, except Bobby who never forgot, always remembered, always preyed, always hoped, always loved, waiting, just waiting for her to come back.

 

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Days turned into week and then at last the boat was in the port �" which port? The poor girl would never find out! There were people everywhere! She was scared of the crowd; she was frightened of this strange place. She was taken of the boat and straight into a big car! They were in the car for what seemed like hours and hours and then at last it stopped outside this massive, massive house, at least four times the size of her house at home!

 

Shannon, that day did not know that this big house would be her home for the next twelve years of her life! She didn’t know what was going to befall her. Form that day till she was about eight years old, she was drilled with housekeeping lessons and by her ninth birthday she knew more than a sixteen year old girl would know about housekeeping!

 

By the time Shannon had turned nine she was turned into a slave girl for the family. She had to do everything that Peggy or Tommy or that spoilt rotten son told her to do. She cleaned and cooked and washed and ironed and the poor girl never got a thank you or even a nice word from anyone. The work was hard and painful for the young girl to do, and if she ever dared to do anything wrong the poor girl was taken and beaten unmercifully. Sometime she worked so hard that she could not even sleep at nights because she was too tired. Because of all this Shannon became awful thin and weary and soon she became unwell, but she had to continue to work. Once she was so ill that she collapsed! When Peggy found her they locked her up in a room for two weeks, feed her on bread and water. This was not much but she gained strength to go on form this! And so this was how the next twelve year passed. I will not go into detail of what went on in these twelve years as it would be depressing and I would be afraid of depressing my readers!!

 

As the years now crawled by, her being the servant of these horrible people, her first five years of her life started to fade away! Gradually she even forgot what her parents looked like and then one day she couldn’t remember them at all! However, Bobby never left her; he was all she was living for, the faint hope that she would see him again kept her alive and doing the work. She remembered every little detail of him and at night, when she wasn’t too tired to dream, she would dream of him, coming to rescue her!

 

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            In a small, old fashioned village called Coolgardie in Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia, was a pretty girl called Judith Shilling, who was not having a successful romance life! There was a lot of complications. First of all she was seeing this boy who was called Rod Baxter, who was indeed and in no question very handsome, yet he was not the type of man that her good Christian parents would accept and encourage, and they certainly did not want their daughter to be going out with such a boy as this! Mr and Mrs Shilling did know about this Rod and Judith and they could do nothing but prey that God would somehow break up this awful relationship! They prayed that God might open her eyes to see this your curser as who he was and love the Lord Jesus, who died for her sins, instead.

 

            Day in and day out Mr and Mrs Shilling pleaded with their daughter, Judith, hoping to change her mind, but nothing would alter this girls mind and heart. This left the family very much in prayer. Even Mr and Mrs Shilling’s nineteen year old son, Dale, who was in Geography Bay, with his friends, Bobby and Jack Boyle, who were cousins, on a trip, was telephoned home to try and persuade to break it up. It was not right, the whole town was talking about it and some of them had even retold stories that they had heard about this young man Rod Baxter, and these stories where not the good sort, and they made Mr and Mrs even more scared in what their daughter was doing. Judith’s parents and her brother told her these stories and all she done was laugh and said, “If you believed everything that you heard you would eat everything thing that you see.” She would not harken to her mother’s plea. She would not listen to her father’s wisdom. She would not take heed to her brother’s compassion. It was useless.

 

            “I will not let her; I will not give her away. She is walking into a trap and I will not allow it. I will refuse to let her go.” Her father said to Dale and his wife later that day. “This is not how I wanted it. I was hoping that she would see sense and I would not have to take action. I shall forbid the marriage. She brought this upon herself. There is nothing more we can do. She will hate me, but I can’t let her go into this, I can’t.” This was the first time that Dale had seen his father actually crying.