Taken (5 page)

The guard patrol arrived just then in a machine-gun-mounted van. Two men in black uniforms jumped out and surveyed the situation. One pointed to some downed electrical wires. The other one shouted, “Everybody out of the Square! Right now!”

Mrs. Veck led us on a quick march back into our classroom, where we all sat in stony silence. Patience and I stared defiantly at the Dugans; Sierra and Whitney sneered; Hopewell hung his head miserably; and Sterling Johnston seemed lost in thought.

Mrs. Veck turned on the vidscreen. She managed a tight smile. “Well, that was interesting. Now it’s time for us all to join the Amsterdam Academy for the holiday celebration up in New York.”

The screen showed eight scenes of kids sitting at eight mahogany tables, scattered all over the U.S., staring at vidscreens of their own.

They all looked miserable.

The dark boy was back. I heard him muttering into his two-way. I could pick up very few distinct words; the rest was an audio blur. I believed he was speaking Haitian Creole. That would have made sense. He had the derma and the physical features common to Haitians. I listened hard, trying to sense his mood, trying to pick a time to engage him in conversation.

Finally, he picked the time himself. He folded up the two-way, turned, and looked right at me. We held this stare for perhaps ten seconds. I expected him to speak at any moment, but he did not.

I finally took it on myself to start. I asked, “Do you speak English, too?”

His lip curled into a sneer. Was he angry? Was he going to hurt me? He wouldn’t answer at first, but I steadfastly maintained eye contact, so he finally gave in. He replied, in clear, unaccented English, “Of course I do. What kind of question is that?”

“Well, I only heard you speaking, you know, Creole.”

“I see. So you figured I just fell off the banana boat.”

“No.”

“You figured I just floated here on a piece of wood, with my nineteen brothers and sisters, my
frès
and
sès—
”

“No. Not at—”

“To find a better life in America, cleaning your toilet bowl after you just used it.” His tone of voice was calm, but his words were angry, and they frightened me. I had definitely offended him. Deeply. Might he get up? Might he hit me, or worse? There was certainly no one around to stop him.

I quickly stammered, “I’m sorry. I heard you speaking one language. I should not have assumed that you did not speak another one. You speak it very well, I might add.”

His sneer returned. “Listen to you. You are still assuming.”

“What?”

“Now you assume that I am incapable of speaking any language other than English, the language of the slave master. Isn’t that right?”

I started to deny it, but I stopped myself. I had to win this boy’s confidence somehow. I decided to tell him the truth. “Yes. You’re right. I did assume that. And I apologize again.”

The truth had a definite positive effect on him. The sneer dropped. He asked me,
“Parlez-vous français?”

“Uh, no, actually. I don’t speak French. I speak a little Spanish. I want to learn French. We can take it next year, in high school, and I do want to.”

“C’est ma première langue.”

“Uh, sorry, I didn’t get that.”

“It is my first language.”

“Oh. I see. And Creole is your second?”

The sneer returned, but at half strength. “No. English is my second. Creole is something I picked up recently. And it’s not a language, in my opinion. It’s a creole.”

My mind raced, trying to come up with a good reply. And failed. Instead, I heard myself repeating a line from Mrs. Veck: “You can’t define a word using the same word.”

His brown eyes looked right into mine. They were very intelligent eyes. I hadn’t noticed that before. He said, “They are different words if you see them on paper. One has a capital
C,
and one has a small
c. Comprendez-vous?
”

“No,” I admitted.

“The word
Creole,
with the capital
C,
describes Haitian Creole as a civilized language worthy of capitalization, just like French or English. But in fact it is not a civilized language. It is a creole, with a small
c,
which is defined as a civilized language mixed with the language of a savage tribe. In the case of Haitian Creole, you have the language of the civilized masters, the French, mixed with the languages of the many African tribes that they enslaved. No disrespect to my
frès
and
sès,
but their language is a textbook example of a creole with a small
c.
” He paused to let that sink in with me.

I said, “Well, thank you. I didn’t know that.”

He turned away, very satisfied with himself.

I had the impression he was about to resume ignoring me, so I decided to ask him something else. Anything else. “Uh, does that guy on the other end of the phone speak French, too?”

I waited quite a while for a reply, but he finally did say, “No. None of them speak French. They speak Creole and Spanish, mostly. And some English. Bad English.”

“Yeah? Yeah, I’ll bet. How about you, though? How come you speak English so well?”

I thought it was a harmless question, but his lip curled up again into a full sneer. “I see. Well, there is a simple explanation for that. I was plucked from the ocean by an eccentric white billionaire, who bet another eccentric white billionaire that he could teach me to speak better English than King William.”

I couldn’t tell if he was really angry or simply mocking me. I assumed he was angry. “I’m sorry again. I didn’t mean to offend you—”

“I am not at all offended. It is a typical rich-white-girl reaction. You look at me and figure I cannot do anything requiring a brain.”

“No. I don’t think that. I—”

“For your information, I speak English because I am a citizen of the United States, a primarily English-speaking nation.”

“Well, sure. Okay. So what about the French?”

He shook his head slowly. “Forget it. You don’t need to know anything about that.”

“But I want to.”

“Why? So you can tell the FBI about it? So you can have me caught, tried, and executed by lethal injection? I don’t think so.” He didn’t say anything else for a few seconds. Then he remembered something. “Oh yeah. I have a message from Dr. Reyes. He said you can sit up now, if you want. He said the sedative has passed through your system.”

“Oh, I see. Thank you. Does Dr. Reyes talk to you in English?”

He didn’t reply, but I thought I saw him smirk.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position. Then I reached around the stretcher and found a latch. I raised up the back piece of the stretcher and affixed it so that I was now seated at a ninety-degree angle. I felt so much better that I spoke to him again, conversationally, without even thinking about it. “Well, I want to be able to do what you do, to speak different languages. I want to learn French and Spanish. And Creole, too.”

“Pourquoi?”

“‘Why’? Does that mean ‘why’?”

“Oui.”

“Because Creole is spoken here in Florida. I want to know the languages that are spoken around me.”

He didn’t reply.

“Would you teach me a few words in Creole?”

After a pause he said, “Sure. Why not? Here’s all the Creole you’ll ever need to know:
Vòlè
means ‘thief.’”

I repeated it phonetically: “Vo-lay.”

“
Mantlè
means ‘liar.’”

“Mant-lay. Okay. Great. Now can you tell me some good-thing words?”

He snorted. “Good-thing words? Is that even English? Listen: the Haitians around here don’t use little-white-girl, ‘good-thing’ words. For example, they have no word for ‘helipad,’ or ‘yacht basin,’ or ‘satschool.’ Those are words in common use in The Highlands, correct?”

“You’re right,” I admitted.

“Probably the only Creole you have ever heard came from the lawn guy, or the garbage man. Both of them were, I am sure, complaining about you, the masters, as they muttered along in their slave language.”

“That’s not right. We don’t treat people like slaves.”

“If they work in The Highlands, they work under the constant watch of guards with machine guns; they must step carefully around electric fences; their every move is recorded on vidcams as they do your dirty work.”

“I do my own dirty work. I have my own set of chores, and then I help Victoria do hers when no one is around.”

“Victoria. Is she your family’s slave?”

“No!” This time, I was the one who didn’t speak for a while. I finally managed to say, “Victoria is my favorite person in the world. She is like my mother. She is nobody’s slave.”

He rolled his eyes. I ignored that and continued. “She works for RDS, and she makes a lot of money. She is saving it so she can go to college someday and become an attorney.”

When he replied, it was without sarcasm. “It sounds like you admire her.”

“I do.”

“And you trust her.”

“Completely. With my life.”

“Then why do you have a vidcam in her bedroom?”

I stopped to think. How did he know that? Then I protested, “That’s got nothing to do with us. That’s RDS policy. And she doesn’t mind it.”

“She doesn’t?”

“No.”

“Has she said that?”

“No. But I know she doesn’t. I know her.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“All right. What’s her real name?”

I froze. Flustered, I finally stammered, “I—I don’t know.”

“I see.”

“She doesn’t use her real name at work.”

“I see. And why should she, when she has a perfectly good slave name?” I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. “The entire situation is ridiculous. You don’t know the first thing about her, which is her name. She pretends to be your little French maid, or English, or whatever. That’s all you know. You know a fictional character.” He turned back to the two-way with finality, signaling the end of our conversation.

That was fine with me. I didn’t want to hear him bad-mouthing Victoria anymore.

I sat back and looked at my vidscreen. The blue numerals read 13:13, and the red light was on. I stared into it, trying to imagine who was watching. I figured that the kidnappers were sending a vid image to my father, to scare him. They were showing him the pathetic, sniveling victim, in her little-girl footed pajamas, waiting desperately for the currency to be delivered. It was all standard operating procedure for kidnappers.

I knew their game, all right.

I just hoped my father did.

Rituals of Social Inversion

H
aitian? Spanish? Was one of the kidnappers working inside The Highlands, pretending to be a lawn guy? Or a garbage man? I doubted it. All workers at The Highlands, according to the brochure, were “rigorously screened, using FBI databases.”

So where would a kidnapper have the chance to see me outside of The Highlands? How had I been targeted? Then I remembered. And I felt foolish, because it was so obvious! The kidnapper had seen me in Mangrove on Kid-to-Kid Day, an event co-sponsored by The Highlands and the town of Mangrove.

Kid-to-Kid Day actually began with Patience Patterson and me. Patience overheard her maid, Daphne, taking an emergency phone call. (RDS employees are forbidden to talk about their outside lives to clients.) Daphne’s family, who lived in Mangrove, had lost their house and all their belongings in a grease fire. Patience and I decided to help them, rules be damned.

We snooped around in Mr. Patterson’s vidfiles and learned where Daphne really lived. Then we accessed the Martin County Fire and Rescue database. We learned that Daphne’s younger siblings—twin girls in fifth grade, a boy in seventh grade, and a boy in ninth grade—had lost every stitch of clothing except what was on their backs when they ran from the house.

Patience and I, without Daphne’s knowledge, pulled out lots of our own clothes and put them in two large bags. Then we visited families in The Highlands who had seventh-and ninth-grade boys. When we were through, we had four big bags of shirts, pants, sneakers, dresses, et cetera.

Our next step was to figure out how to deliver them. Daphne would not be allowed to accept anything from us. She wasn’t even allowed to tell us that she had a family, or that she had a real name. So we asked Mr. and Mrs. Patterson what to do. At first they were mad at Daphne for taking a personal call in a place where Patience might overhear her. But then Mr. Patterson saw a business opportunity. He offered to take the four bags to Mangrove and to deliver them personally to the mayor if my stepmother, Mickie Meyers, would agree to vid the event for her show.

Mickie jumped at the chance. She arranged for Daphne’s four siblings, their parents, and the mayor of Mangrove to be standing outside the burned-out shell of the house when Mr. Patterson arrived in his bulletproof car, followed by two Highlands security guards in their van.

Mr. Patterson presented the bags to the kids as Kurt’s camera ran. Then, to Mr. Patterson’s surprise, the kids gave him something in return. It was a
tornada—
a wooden doll with the letter
P
carved in the front and a face carved on the back. One of the twin girls explained to him that the doll symbolized her wish to see him again someday and to return the favor.

Mickie’s vidcast of the event was such a success that both The Highlands and the town of Mangrove decided to do it again the following year. They didn’t have another burned-out family, so Mickie came up with the idea of using kids from my class and kids from the town in an event she titled “Kid-to-Kid Day.” That outing went smoothly, too, except for an incident where a town kid, some mean boy, tripped Hopewell and gave him a bloody nose. Albert cleaned Hopewell up quickly, though; the vidcast went on as planned; and it scored more high ratings.

As a result, the third annual Kid-to-Kid Day was scheduled for Saturday, December 22. It turned out to be a very full day—full of people, and events, and details. It was exactly the kind of day that I needed to focus on. I made up my mind to concentrate next on Saturday, December 22.

I remembered that the students from my class gathered in the Square at 09:00. The group included Sierra, the Dugans, Sterling Johnston, Hopewell, Patience, and me. (Whitney’s family had already headed south in their yacht to spend the holidays in the Berry Islands.)

By 09:15, our group of seven kids, four maids, four butlers, two guards, one realtor (Mr. Patterson), and one teacher had loaded up sixteen bags of clothing into the storage bay of the security van. Lena also handed Mrs. Veck two cartons of books for young readers—all Ramiro Fortunato novels—from the book division of SatPub, Mickie Meyers’s parent corporation.

The Highlands’ van was a long gray scary-looking vehicle. It was more like a bus than a van, customized with armor, bombproof sides, and black-tinted, bulletproof windows. It seated between twenty and twenty-five people, depending on the configuration. For this trip, the guards had removed the top-mounted machine gun and stowed it on a rack to the right of the driver, eliminating two seats in the process.

The four butlers—Albert, William, Edward, and James—went over the security plans with the guards. Each butler would carry a Glock 450C, an NLS (non-lethal stun) gun, and an aerosol can of organic repellent. None of these weapons had been used the previous two years, but they decided to keep them in the security plan just in case.

This was to be the first Kid-to-Kid Day for the Dugans. They seemed to have no clue what the day, the field trip, or the gift exchange was all about. Pauline snarled at Mrs. Veck, “Why do we have to go? This sounds so stupid.”

Mrs. Veck smiled kindly. “Well, Pauline, you girls did return your permission slips. They were signed by both of you and by your parents. That permission slip described the trip in great detail. Didn’t you read it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It was too long.”

I commented to Patience, “That, and the fact that she can’t read.”

Pauline snarled, “Shut up!”

Maureen stepped forward. “Maybe I’ll snap your scrawny neck, hor.”

Patience lined up next to me. “Maybe you won’t, dumbass.”

Mrs. Veck interrupted: “Girls, girls. This is a day for giving. And it’s a day for learning.”

This time it was Maureen who snarled, “Learning? It’s Saturday. And we’re supposed to be on Christmas break.”

Mrs. Veck replied, “All school field trips are about learning. And this trip will provide some excellent opportunities. Do you remember our discussion yesterday about King Edward the Seventh?” All of us looked away. She continued, “Well, we’ll be talking about him some more, and about his parents, and about Christmas traditions. A lot of our Christmas traditions come from Edward’s family, and from his era.”

At that moment, Mickie Meyers, Lena, and Kurt the cameraman pulled up in an electric cart. Mickie shouted at us, “Everybody ready to roll?” She didn’t wait for a reply, which is good, because it would have been a long wait. She led her group onto the van, and the rest of us followed.

I sat with Patience near the middle. Mrs. Veck told the rest of the students to sit around us so that she could lecture on the way. Mickie and Kurt set up in the aisle to shoot her speeches and our reactions, should there be any.

Finally the maids and butlers climbed on and dispersed themselves throughout the van. Albert came down the aisle to check our ID cards. These cards, issued by the federal government, were embedded with microchips that contained our personal information. They also served as global tracking devices for any kids who didn’t have them implanted. (Supposedly the cards were hard to come by, but the Dugans bragged that they had cards to prove they were eighteen years old and that they had used them to drink in Bermuda.)

When he’d finished his check, Albert gave a thumbs-up signal to the guard in the driver’s seat and we took off. We drove parallel to the north wall of The Highlands, on the bank of the St. Lucie Canal. Families who lived along the north wall, like Whitney’s, could sail directly from The Highlands to the Intracoastal Waterway. From there they could turn north toward Amelia Island, or south toward Fort Lauderdale, or they could continue east to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. (“Beyond,” however, included some areas controlled by pirates, so people tended to stick to a few safe destinations.) My house was on the south wall. It was not literally a wall, though. It was an airstrip surrounded by an electronic security fence.

This field trip was a rare outing for us. Highlands kids didn’t often get to travel beyond the walls. School came to us via satellite links. Shopping was done online and then delivered to us by tightly screened UPS or FedEx trucks. Even doctors came to us in special security ambulances.

Once we got past the guardhouse gate, we accelerated toward the Florida Turnpike, and Mickie signaled Kurt to start shooting. She raised her microphone and began, “I’m Mickie Meyers. And we are privileged to ride along with Mrs. Veck’s class on Kid-to-Kid Day, a wonderful tradition that began here three years ago. On Kid-to-Kid Day, children from The Highlands, a wealthy Martin County development, bring clothes to children living in Mangrove, an impoverished local town. In return, the children of Mangrove give the Highlands children handmade gifts.”

Mickie took a step toward Mrs. Veck. “I am told that this type of day has its origins in the past, and that it may even tie in with our discussion yesterday about an Edwardian Christmas. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Veck?”

“That’s right.”

“And just who was this King Edward who gives his name to our theme?”

“He was the son of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. They are generally spoken of together, as a couple—Victoria and Albert.”

Mrs. Veck paused briefly, reaching one hand out and waving it to get Sterling Johnston’s attention. She then continued, “Prince Albert, a German, brought many Christmas traditions to England that are now thought to be English. Queen Victoria loved those traditions and practiced them over her long life.”

Mickie wasn’t really listening. She was watching the scene unfold on Lena’s screen. But she made a rotating motion with her hand, urging Mrs. Veck to keep talking, so she did.

“Many of our modern customs come to us from that era. And some stem from a very interesting phenomenon that happened at Christmastime known as
the ritual of social inversion.
The king or lord always had food and drink left over from the fall harvest that was just sitting there, about to spoil. So, in the first days of winter, he shared it with the poor people, the peasants. The peasants, for a few days at least, got to live like lords.”

Mrs. Veck turned to us. “Now, students, how might that phenomenon, the ritual of social inversion, relate to Christmas?”

Patience actually raised her hand and answered: “We give to the poor at Christmas, like on this trip to Mangrove.”

“Yes indeed. That’s a good modern example. But who can look back with me for many centuries—for 2,035 years?”

I had no idea where Mrs. Veck was going with this, so naturally she called on me: “Charity?”

I tried: “Uh, the birth of Jesus, maybe?”

“The birth of Jesus indeed! A poor baby. Now, who bowed down to Jesus on the first Christmas?”

“The Three Kings?”

“That’s right. Three wealthy kings bowed down to one poor baby! Many Spanish cultures consider Three Kings’ Day, El Día de los Reyes, to be an essential part of Christmastime, the day when the poor and the meek are honored in a ritual of social inversion. In fact, the town of Mangrove celebrates its Christmas Carnaval on that day.”

Mickie interrupted. “What does this have to do with Victoria and Albert?”

“Well, Victoria and Albert enthusiastically embraced the ancient rituals of Christmastime, and they brought those rituals into modern London society. And from there the customs traveled to the New World, to our world.”

Mickie nodded briefly. Then she signaled to Kurt to stop shooting and moved to a front seat, next to Lena.

Patience told me, “I did a paper on Victoria and Albert. They had it all. They were the richest, most powerful, most glamorous couple in the world. They were even happy! But Albert died forty years before Victoria. She spent all that time mourning him and building monuments to him, monuments of her love. That’s what I want some guy to do for me.”

“Marry you and then die?”

“Marry me. Love me desperately. And then die. Then I’ll build monuments to our love.”

We continued driving east past Indian Well, a former migrant town that housed workers for the many wealthy communities in the county. From the van window, I could see rusty trailers, small cinder-block homes, and RVs that would never ride again. We passed a lake called Deep Lake, preceded by signs that advertised its “great bass fishing.”

Sierra told Maureen, “My dad says that Deep Lake is stocked with killer bass fish. They’ll eat anything that falls in there.”

Patience and I started to scoff at her, but Mrs. Veck surprised us by saying, “That’s true, Sierra. In fact, they used to call it Killer Bass Lake. Who can tell me why they might have changed that name?”

After a moment, she gave up: “No one? How about to make it more appealing and more marketable to fishermen?”

Everyone avoided eye contact with her. “Okay, then. Let’s all look across the lake. That means you, too, Sterling Johnston. Now, what do you think those huge metal towers are on the other side?”

I looked where she was pointing. The south side of the lake was bordered by a row of tall steel structures. I gave Mrs. Veck a break. “Those are high-tension electrical wires.”

“Yes. Thank you, Charity. Who can tell me what their purpose is?”

Maureen actually made a comment: “Don’t those have electromagnets or something that come out of them and eat your brain? Don’t kids down here have, like, a hundred times more brain tumors than we do?”

Mrs. Veck smiled. “I don’t know, Maureen. Would you like to research that information and share it with us?”

“No. This is supposed to be vacation! I don’t even know what we’re doing here. We’re supposed to be out on our boat.”

That exchange ended the teachable moment, and Mickie and Lena came back to our area with a vidscreen and huddled a long time with Mrs. Veck.

My attention snapped back to reality when I heard the ambulance door slam shut. The dark boy had slipped outside. Almost immediately after, I heard a sharp, crackling sound from somewhere beneath me. What was it? Where was it coming from?

I listened for a few seconds, and I heard it again. It was close by. A new burst of sound led me toward the foot of the stretcher. I scooted forward on my hips until I could bend and look underneath.