The 12 Dogs of Christmas Read online

  The12 DOGS

  of

  CHRISTMAS

  By Steven Paul Leiva

  Photographs by Ken Kragen

  Based on the screenplay by Kieth Merrill

  Story by Kieth Merrill and Steven Paul Leiva

  Based on the book The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

  by Emma Kragen

  And a screen treatment by Steven Paul Leiva

  © 2007 by Kragen and Company

  Photographs by Ken Kragen; photograph of Emma on the train by Don Muirhead

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leiva, Steven Paul.

  12 dogs of Christmas / by Steven Paul Leiva based on the screenplay by Kieth Merrill ; story by Kieth Merrill and Steven Paul Leiva based on the book The twelve dogs of Christmas by Emma Kragen.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4003-1053-1 (tradepaper)

  ISBN-10: 1-4003-1053-9

  I. Merrill, Kieth, 1940– II. Kragen, Emma. Twelve dogs of Christmas. III. 12 dogs of Christmas (Motion picture) IV. Title. V. Title: Twelve dogs of Christmas.

  PZ7.L53724Aad 2007

  [Fic]--dc22

  2007013515

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 08 09 10 11 HCI 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my daughter Miranda

  Dog lover nonpareil

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1. Emma

  2. It’s an Adventure!

  3. Doverville

  4. The Brothers Doyle

  5. Aunt Dolores

  6. A Double Rescue

  7. Puppy Love

  8. Old Jake

  9. Puppy Trouble

  10. Shack Attack

  11. Emma Undercover

  12. Caught!

  13. Dolores to the Rescue

  14. Emma to the Rescue

  15. In the Mayor’s Office

  16. A Small Change of One Heart

  17. A Canine Christmas Eve

  18. A Triple Reunion

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to give his thanks and admiration to Ken Kragen, gentleman and scholar of the sky. Appreciation must be given to Kieth Merrill and the full cast and crew of the film, The 12 Dogs of Christmas, for without them there would never have been this novel. I’m sure Ken and Kieth join the author in thanking Emma Kragen for her doggone wonderful and lyrical changes to an old classic, thereby making a new classic. And everyone involved in this project must give thanks to Amanda Martin for always holding things together with wit and charm, only two of the many attributes the author married her for.

  Prologue

  Max was a Poodle. Not one of those little Poodles, a Miniature or a Toy with puffy and fluffy fur finely cut and clipped like bushes in a French garden, who spent their days sitting in the laps of ladies who also seemed finely cut and clipped. No, Max was not one of those Poodles; Max was a Standard Poodle, proudly standing two feet tall, and although he was well groomed, it was not in a puffy and fluffy way but in a handsome boy-dog way with a coat of beautiful black curls.

  Max had led a privileged life. He was the pet of Thaddeus Whiteside, the kindest man on the Upper East Side of New York City. Max’s life had been one of warmth and food and love and play. Especially play, for Mr. Whiteside, despite his hair being as white as white could be, was more like a human boy who liked to laugh a lot than he was like the other men who used to come to Mr. Whiteside’s beautiful four-story house on the Upper East Side to talk to him about what they called “business.” Now Max did not know what business was, but it certainly was not play, because none of the men ever laughed about it.

  “It’s the Depression, Mr. Whiteside,” one of the men had said one day. “You can no longer afford this house.”

  And then their beautiful house was not as warm, and the food was not as plentiful—but the love was just as strong, and Mr. Whiteside still laughed when they played . . . until the day when some other men came and started taking things away, including Max’s big, beautiful doghouse that had always sat in a corner of Mr. Whiteside’s bedroom and was Max’s very special place.

  Did all this make Max sad? Of course it did. And when a dog is sad, he can whimper to let his human know, but if a human is as kind as Mr. Whiteside, he doesn’t have to hear his dog whimper, for he can see it in his dog’s eyes.

  Max’s eyes never got so sad as when the other humans were moving things out, and Mr. Whiteside had to put Max in a wooden, cage-like box.

  “I’m sorry, Max,” Mr. Whiteside said. “I’m very, very sorry, but I can’t take care of you any more. But you’ll be okay, I promise. Look . . .” Mr. Whiteside picked up a copy of LIKE magazine, his favorite magazine because it always had big photographs he could show Max. “See this lady?” Mr. Whiteside asked, pointing to a picture of a woman in front of a barn surrounded by a small group of dogs. “This is Cathy Stevens. They’re calling her the Dog Lady of Doverville. Doverville is a town in Maine that has outlawed dogs! Can you imagine such a thing, Max, outlawing dogs? But since this Cathy Stevens actually lives just outside the town limits, she’s set up a dog orphanage to take in all the dogs the townspeople have to give up. Well, I figured if she can take in Doverville’s dogs, she can take in one more dog from New York City. So that’s why I’ve put you in this traveling case and . . .”

  Mr. Whiteside stopped talking when he heard a big crash coming from outside. He rushed to the window, opened it, and looked down one story to the street below where all his beautiful things were being loaded onto a truck.

  “Please be careful with that dresser! It belonged to my mother!” Mr. Whiteside yelled down below.

  And from below came a not-so-friendly voice that said, “What do you care? It’s not yours anymore!”

  And now, as Mr. Whiteside turned away from the window, Max saw the sadness in his eyes. It was a sadness he had never seen in Mr. Whiteside before . . . and a sadness he would never see in Mr. Whiteside again. At that moment, one of the other big men came and took Max away. They locked the box that looked like a cage with a shipping label that read: PLEASE DELIVER MAX TO THE DOG LADY, C/O DOG ORPHANAGE, DOVERVILLE, MAINE.

  1

  Emma

  Emma O’Connor was a tomboy. Whether she was a natural tomboy or a tomboy because of her circumstances, even she was not sure. She might very well have liked to have worn pretty and frilly dresses, and she might very well have liked to have gone to fancy tea parties, but she lived in Pittsburg in 1931 when the country was suffering through the Great Depression, a time when very few had the money to be frilly or fancy. And it was just she and her father. Her mother had died several years before, and her father knew nothing about the raising of girls. So he dressed her in knickers— those funny boy pants that never made it down to the ankles—when she went to school, and he dressed her in an old pair of his overalls—slightly adjusted for her size—when she went to work.

  Even though she was only twelve years old, it was necessary for her to work to help earn enough money for them to live. Her father
worked every job he could find, but there just weren’t that many jobs for men those days. So Emma delivered the Pittsburg Herald to all who could afford the luxury of a newspaper. Once a week she also collected all the bacon grease that her neighbors had saved for her in empty coffee cans. She could sell the grease for a few dollars to a company that used it to help make soap.

  Emma O’Connor was a tough kid. Not mean, mind you, she was anything but mean, but tough—because she had to be.

  It was the beginning of the Christmas season, and no twelve-year-old girl could be tough when visions of brightly wrapped presents appeared out of nowhere, and desires for a warm hearth and hot cocoa kept tugging at her, but had nowhere to take her.

  Is it any wonder that Emma was a bit sad when she was finishing up her paper route that day? It was almost Christmas, and yet the headlines on her papers had nothing cheerful to report. And when she told Mr. Lawson that she was collecting for the paper that day, he said to her, with some embarrassment, “Can’t afford it anymore, Em. Take us off your list.” Then, as she did everyday, she walked past the local Hooverville, the empty lot where people who were homeless because of the Depression had built a bunch of makeshift shelters out of box-wood, cardboard, and scraps of metal. Well, that was sad every day, but even sadder around Christmas. Even the Salvation Army carolers, singing the songs Emma had always loved, seemed a little sad. Emma stopped to listen for a minute, gave them a smile, and wished she could have put a nickel into the collection pot, because poor as she was, she knew a lot more people had more reasons to be sad than she did. For at least she had her father, and he had her, and they had always taken care of each other, so everything— eventually—would be all right.

  Wouldn’t it?

  When Emma got home to their dim, cold apartment, she found her father staring at an official-looking document. “Dad?” she said as she put down her paper route earnings on the desk. Her father, whose name was Douglas, looked at her and said straight out, because he knew his girl was tough, “Em, we’ve been evicted. We have to leave tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “We have to move out.”

  “Where are we going to live?” Emma asked, fearful of the answer. “Not the Hooverville, we aren’t going to—”

  “No! We are not. I’m going to send you to your Aunt Dolores.”

  “I have an Aunt Dolores?”

  “I’ve never told you about her, have I? Well, yes, you do, sort of, it’s a long . . . Look, she’s a good woman, and I’m sure she’ll take you in. She lives up in Maine, in a little town that I remember being quite beautiful called Doverville.”

  “But I want to stay with you!”

  “Of course you do, honey. And I want you to, and you will again soon, I promise. But not right now. Right now I’ve got to figure out how to make things right, Em. I’ve got one last chance to be a very good father—and a very good man. I have decided that the country may be in a depression, but that doesn’t mean I have to be. I’m not going to be. I’m going to go out there, no matter what the odds, and find a way to take care of you. But I’ve got to do it alone, Em. I can’t ask you to go through what I may have to go through until I find that way.”

  Emma was confused. What her father was saying both comforted her—and scared her.

  Emma did not sleep much that night. She passed the long hours weeping for her father and humming one of her mother’s old songs. She alternated between the two, calming her sobs with the memory of her mother’s song. She couldn’t stand for her father to hear her cry through the paper-thin walls of her room. He had enough to worry about right now.

  2

  It’s an Adventure!

  The next morning Emma’s father took her to Pittsburgh’s Penn Station and put her on a train. Any other time riding the train would have been exciting. But all Emma and her dad could think about was that they were parting. Mr. O’Connor found Emma a seat, got her settled in, and ran his hands over the old wool cap he had given her to be sure it fit snugly on her head.

  “Why do I have to go?” Emma asked for the hundredth time. “I want to stay with you!”

  “I know, Em, but it’s only for a little while. I’ll come and get you before Christmas.”

  He had made this promise last night, hoping it would make Emma less sad. Christmas was less than a month away. But that’s what worried Emma. How could her father find work and a new home in so short a time? A tear slipped down her cheek. But her father quickly wiped it away.

  “Come on now; you’re my tough girl.”

  Her father then took out of his pocket an envelope with a name, Dolores Snively, and an address written on it.

  “You are going to like your Aunt Dolores. She can’t wait to see you.”

  “You promise to come and get me?”

  “By Christmas,” her father reassured, putting the envelope in Emma’s coat pocket.

  “Promise.”

  “I will,” Douglas O’Connor said as emphatically as he could while holding back tears of his own. Then he hugged his daughter. Emma held on to her father tightly, but soon her father was gone, and Emma was alone.

  A moment later, the train came alive and slowly lurched out of Penn Station, picking up speed and rumbling faster and faster away from Pittsburgh.

  Emma just stared through the frosted window, into the gray, uncertain about the future she found herself traveling toward, about going up to this place called Doverville, Maine, and about going to live with an Aunt Dolores she hadn’t even known existed. But most of all she worried about her father. What was going to happen to him? Was he going to have to live in a Hooverville, in some kind of a cardboard shack?

  Because she had not slept the night before, the rhythmic sounds of the train soon helped worry give in to sleep.

  Max watched in confusion as the humans carried him in his box that was like a cage down the stairs of Mr. Whiteside’s house and out the back entrance and to a truck waiting in the alley. The men loaded Max onto the truck, and he braced himself as the truck rumbled and bounced through the streets of New York until it finally arrived at the freight loading dock at Grand Central Station. Then they loaded his cage into a train.

  “Hey, George! Here’s another one to Doverville. To that Dog Lady. Jeepers, this is becoming the Canine Express!”

  Soon a huge door on the giant box was slammed shut, making everything dark. Max lay down with a whimper, wondering what was to come.

  When Emma awoke, Pittsburgh was far behind her, and she was amazed to see a landscape of long stretches of farmland, dotted now and then with houses and barns. Emma had lived her whole life in Pittsburgh and had never been out of the city. She had never seen anything like this! She sat up straight to get a better view. Hey, she realized, this doesn’t look so bad. It could be an adventure! Emma was always ready for a new adventure. Her dad would borrow pulp magazines from a friend and read her the adventures inside. He enthusiastically performed all the voices of the characters and became Emma’s personal radio show. And in the library she had found and loved the adventures of Robin Hood and Tarzan and Little Orphan Annie. All those adventures had carried her out of the dreariness of the Depression, and out of Pittsburgh. But now here she was, on her own real adventure. She tried to think about the excitement that lay ahead, and not about her father left behind.

  Eventually the train slowed as it came up to a huge city of unbelievably tall buildings.

  “Excuse me,” Emma said to a lady in fur who sat across the aisle. “Is that New York City?”

  The lady in fur looked at Emma and smiled. “Of course it is, darling. The greatest city in the world!”

  New York City! It was the city where she was going to have to change trains to catch the one going to Maine. How will I . . . oh, all those people and all those trains! Emma’s thoughts raced until her hand came to rest on the envelope her father had given her. It’s an adventure, she told herself. She remembered that the envelope held detailed instructions. Like the clues to a mystery,
she mused. I’ll be okay. It’s an adventure.

  3

  Doverville

  Emma was amazed by Maine. It was snow-covered and beautiful, and everything was bright because the air was so clear, nothing like her Pittsburgh home. But it was still an unknown. She anxiously stepped off the train at Doverville Station. Emma took a deep breath, and like a good adventure hero, took the lay of the land.

  The first thing Emma noticed were boxes and crates and carrying cases and cages being unloaded from the freight car of the train onto a large wheeled cart. And all of them contained dogs—all kinds of dogs, including two Dalmatians, a Golden Retriever, a couple of Beagles, a Chihuahua in a carrying case, and one large Poodle. There was also a woman all bundled up against the cold, and a young boy around Emma’s age similarly bundled, standing by a flatbed truck directing the freight handlers to load the dogs onto the truck carefully.

  “They seem to be coming from all over, Mrs. Stevens,” said one of the handlers.

  “I know,” said the woman. “It was the magazine article. I thought maybe the publicity would get me some donations. Instead it’s just gotten me more dogs.”

  “Well, I suppose you don’t have to take the delivery.”

  “How could I do that? Look at them. They’re beautiful. And this Standard Poodle—what a handsome boy he is!”

  A kind-looking lady looked through the slats of Max’s cage and smiled at him, which was nice. But she was not Mr. Whiteside, and Max wanted Mr. Whiteside. “What’s your name, boy? Oh, I see.” The lady looked at the label on the cage. “It’s Max. Well, Mike,” she said to a boy standing nearby, “this is Max. We better get him loaded.”

  The boy came over and tugged at Max’s cage, which was still on the freight cart, but the cage went nowhere. It seemed to be stuck on something. He tugged again, and again, and once more, which was not fun for Max, as it jerked him around in the cage. He wished the boy would stop. Then a girl walked up and said, “Here, let me help.”