Holt Chronicles Book 1

Chapter One

I used to take my family for granted. I'm sure we have all been there. There comes a time in every child's life where their parents just become annoying, and siblings even worse. I can remember how much my older sister LeeAnn and I used to fight. Sometimes it was worse than cats and dogs. It was always over stupid things too, like socks, or which member of the Jonas Brothers was the cutest, but this is expected when you have two girls sharing a room. You see, my sister was two years older than me, with my brother sandwiched in the middle. Alex and I didn't get along any better either. Of course we didn't fight over the Jonas Brothers, no Alexander and I would fight over who got to play playstation first after school. The cool thing about having siblings though, was that no matter how much we fought I always knew there would be someone in my corner if things went wrong; or so I thought.

Our parents had to work out of town a lot, and not trusting my sister not to kill us meant that we spent a lot of time at our dad's best friend's house. His name was Aaron, but we all called him Peanut. I don't really know why, but when I was younger I thought it was because he had a peanut shaped head. Anyway, when we were little going to see Peanut was the best. He was in many ways like an uncle to us, but that wasn't enough to save us from tragedy.

I can remember exactly what the three of us were doing when we got the news. Momma and Daddy had dropped us off at Peanut's one weekend while they went on another business trip. We each had our thing, the thing that made us who we are. For LeeAnn it was always music. I mean it's not to say that Alex and I didn't like music, because we did; we loved it, but neither of us loved music more than LeeAnn. Alex had always been great at building things, I remember how he used to spend hours working on small lego models of transformers; ones that could actually transform. Then there was me, I have always loved art. I have been coloring ever since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I have been keeping sketchbooks and drawings since I was eleven.

Anyway, the three of us were sitting in on the bed in the spare room. The room itself wasn't really anything special. Your average size bedroom with a full size bed, with matching little wooden nightstands on either side. The nightstands were a deep cherry wood color, the legs rounded with a swirled design etched into them. Each stand had a small drawer right under the table top. The top of the stands, were almost clover shaped with the same swirled design etched into the rim. There was a small entertainment stand with a flat-screen television on the opposite wall of the bed and nightstands. The entertainment stand had a few of our favorite movies in it; some of the Disney classics, like The Little Mermaid, or The Lion King. LeeAnn was in the middle of writing another song, while Alex and I listened to her sing, she had a beautiful voice. Often times the three of us would sing together. It was something that we loved to do. Alex wasn't as interested in what LeeAnn was doing as I was however he would give his opinion every once in a while. You see Alex was more interested in the book of logic puzzles he had brought with him, and while I loved helping my sister write her songs, I had my sketchbook and was in the middle of sketching out the scene before me. I was completely unaware that it would be one of the last happy memories we would have for a long while.

I heard the house phone ring, but I didn't think anything of it. It was probably just my parents calling to say they were on their way to pick us up. I already had all of my things together so it didn't really matter much, but something didn't seem right, Peanut didn't call up to us right away. Any other time my parents called, as soon as he saw the number Peanut would call up to us and tell us to get our things ready. Something was definitely off. I looked at my ipod to see what time it was, 6:30 something was definitely wrong, Momma and Daddy were supposed to pick us up at four.

"LeeAnn? Shouldn't Momma and Daddy be here by now?" I asked my sister

"Don't worry Dawn," she replied "They probably just ran into traffic somewhere, I'm sure they'll be here any minute."

It wasn't long before I heard Peanut hang up the phone and come upstairs to us. His footsteps heavy and dragging, as if he was being weighed down by a million iron chains.