Took (3 page)

I knew by the uncertainty in her voice that she didn't believe her own words. But what could she do? It was the only school in town.

Mom led us into an office filled with old-fashioned dark furniture. A thin woman looked up from a typewriter and did a funny thing with her mouth, which I think was meant to be a smile. Her hair was pulled tightly back from her face, and she wore a plain black dress with long sleeves. She scared Erica and made me nervous. Even Mom looked uncomfortable. According to the sign on her desk, she was Miss Danvers, school secretary.

“You must be Mrs. Anderson,” she said to Mom. “And you are Erica and Daniel, if I'm not mistaken. Welcome to Woodville Elementary.”

While Erica and I sat side by side, as silent as mutes, Mom filled out forms. Miss Danvers returned to her typing. I watched, fascinated by the sight of a real live person using an antique instead of a computer.

“Their official transcripts should arrive any day,” Mom said as she handed Miss Danvers the completed paperwork.

A bald man with a gray mustache stuck his head out of an inner door and smiled at us. “I'm Mr. Sykes, the principal. I hope you two will enjoy our school—a bit smaller than you're used to, I'm sure. Not as up to date, maybe, but—” The phone in his office rang, and he excused himself to answer it.

I knew sarcasm when I heard it.

Miss Danvers led the three of us down a hall. The walls were grayish green and bare. No bright paintings, no starred reports, no posters. The closed doors to classrooms were unadorned too. It was very different from the schools I'd gone to in Connecticut.

Miss Danvers stopped at a door labeled
SEVENTH GRADE
. “Wait here,” she told Mom and Erica.

Opening the door, she ushered me into the room. The teacher was a large woman with a stern face. She looked at me as if I were an invasive species.

The kids in the room stared at me. They sat in old-fashioned one-piece desks arranged in straight rows from the front to the back of the room. No artwork. No projects. Just the flag and a faded portrait of George Washington. The blackboard was made of slate, and sticks of chalk and erasers lay on the ledge beneath it. It looked like a classroom from an old black-and-white movie.

I glanced over my shoulder. Mom was staring into the room in disbelief. “Daniel, this is Miss Mincham, your teacher,” Miss Danvers said. Turning to the class, she added, “Boys and girls, Daniel's from Connecticut, that little state near New York City.”

Their eyes flicked over me, taking in my khaki pants, turtleneck sweater, and parka—standard clothing in either Pine Ridge or Carson Middle School, but not here. The uniform for both boys and girls seemed to be jeans and T-shirts, old and faded and either too big or too small.

A boy in the back of the room snickered. He must have been fifteen or sixteen years old, from the size of him. Two girls whispered to each other and giggled.

Miss Mincham rose to her feet, an awe-inspiring sight. Almost six feet tall and weighing about two hundred pounds, she frowned at the boy in the back row and the two girls. Then she told me to take a seat in the back row—the empty one next to the giant boy.

The class was studying history. Miss Mincham called out events from the Revolutionary War and asked kids to supply the dates when they happened. I've never been good at remembering stuff like that, so I didn't do any better than the rest of them. When she shifted the subject to math, she sent us to the blackboard for drills in long division. English consisted of reciting rules of grammar. And geography was naming capitals of foreign countries.

In the cafeteria, a kid knocked my lunch tray out of my hand and pretended it was an accident. In gym class, a bunch of boys cornered me in the locker room and shoved me around, sneering at my clothes and my snobby accent. Ignoring their behavior, the gym teacher blew his whistle and yelled, “Okay, that's enough, out on the floor, let's play some basketball.” I was bumped into, tripped, and hit on the head with the ball—all accidentally of course.

By the end of the day, I hated Woodville School. I found Erica, and we boarded the bus that would take us home. The driver was a woman named Mrs. Plummer, the first nice person I'd met all day. She told us our stop was the last one. “It's a long ride,” she said.

As we rumbled along narrow roads, uphill and down, letting kids off at farms and trailer parks along the way, the boy behind me kicked the back of my seat, and his friend said things like “I'm from Connecticut and I'm better than you,” in what he thought was a good imitation of the accent I never knew I had.

Finally, there was only one kid on the bus beside Erica and me. Despite the lurching ride, he staggered up the aisle and sat down in front of us. Leaning over the back of the seat, he stared at us. He was maybe ten years old, a scrawny boy with dingy blond hair and sad brown eyes. He looked as if soap was not used in his house, either on him or on his clothes.

“My stop is the last one,” he said. “Did you forget to get off?”

“No,” I said. “We're the last stop.”

He shook his head. “There's no stop after mine.”

“We just moved here,” I told him. “We live on a farm, just over the bridge.”

His eyes widened. “You live on the Estes family farm?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I don't know who used to live in our house.”

I glanced at Erica, who was staring at the boy.

“Is something wrong with where we live?” she asked.

“It's where the girl disappeared,” he said.

“What girl?”

I nudged her. “Don't listen to him. He's just trying to scare us.”

He looked at me. “I'm not lying, if that's what you think. Just ask anybody about Selene Estes. They'll tell you.” He shoved his face close to Erica's. “Something got her and drug her away and nobody ever saw her again.”

Erica drew back, her eyes fearful.

“Nothing dragged her away,” I told him. “She got lost and fell off a cliff or something.”

“Hah,” the boy said. “That's what you think. There's things out in these woods people from Con-neck-ti-cut ain't never heard of.”

With a grinding of gears, the bus stopped and the boy got off. I looked out the window and saw him standing by the road, making a face at me. Then we jolted and bumped and swayed around a curve and up a hill, leaving him and his stories behind.

The bus made its next and final stop at the end of our driveway. As we got off, the driver, Mrs. Plummer, leaned out the door and called, “Don't believe anything Brody Mason tells you. He's a born liar, that boy.”

As the bus drove away, Erica turned to me. “Do you think a girl disappeared from our house?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You heard what the bus driver said. Brody or Brady, or whatever his name is, is a liar. He was trying to scare you.”

“He did scare me.” She fumbled to adjust the shoulder strap on her backpack. “He wasn't lying, Daniel, I could tell.”

I straightened her strap for her. “Listen, Erica, that boy was definitely lying. And do you know why? The kids here don't like us. We're outsiders. That's why they're so mean.”

Erica turned to me, her eyes bright with tears. “My teacher, Mrs. Kline, is mean, too, even meaner than Miss Davis back at public school in Fairfield. She kept me in at recess and made me write one hundred times ‘I will not daydream in class.' The girl who sits behind me whispered that I'm ugly. At lunchtime, all the girls laughed at me and said I talk funny and wear weird clothes. They wouldn't let me sit at a table with them either.”

“It was exactly the same in my class,” I told her. “I got beaten up in gym, and my teacher called me stupid because I didn't know the capital of Rhodesia or the exact date George Washington crossed the Delaware, let alone rules of grammar, which nobody ever taught me.”

“Maybe Mom will teach us at home.”

I shook my head. “No. She'll just tell us to be patient and the kids will start liking us. You know, all of a sudden they'll realize how nice we are. Even if we do come from Connecticut.”

“You don't believe that, do you?”

“No,” I said. “In fact, I don't think even Mom believes it.”

Erica frowned. “Do you hear noises at night?”

I looked at her, surprised by the sudden change of subject. “Do you?”

“Sometimes I hear a sort of whispering. Almost like somebody's calling me. It sounds like this—
Air-ric-cah, Air-ric-cah
.”

She said it in a low, scary voice—a weird, drawn-out version of her name.

“It's just the wind,” I told her. “Hear it blowing in the tops of the trees? It sounds like it's whispering up there.”

Erica shook her head. “No, it's not like trees or wind. It's my name. Then it whispers other things. I can almost make out the words, but not quite.”

She broke away from me then and ran to meet Mom on the front porch, her red hair flying in the breeze, her backpack bouncing.

I followed her slowly, thinking about what she'd said. I was sure that Erica had imagined the whispering voice, but when I looked at the woods behind the house, I felt my chest tighten with anxiety. In the late-afternoon light, the shadows of the trees stretched across the field. The woods were already dark, and the mountainsides were in shadow.

Mom waved to me from the porch, and I broke into a run, suddenly eager to be inside, safe from whatever might be hiding in those woods—things that didn't exist in Connecticut.

After dinner that night, Erica told Mom and Dad about the boy on the bus and what he'd told us. Our parents agreed with me. This was an old, old farm, and no one had lived in the house for a long time. It was exactly the sort of place that inspired people to make up stories.

“It must be a country version of an urban legend,” Dad said. “Like the man with the—”

Mom stopped him with a sharp look.

“The man with a what?” Erica asked.

“The man with a monkey,” I said, to rescue Dad. I definitely didn't want him telling Erica about the man with the hook. In fact, I myself didn't want to hear that story, not here, not at night, not when anything could be out there howling in the dark, watching us through the tall living room windows Mom hadn't gotten around to covering with curtains.

“Does the monkey disappear?” Erica persisted.

“Of course not,” I told her. “He and the man run away from the circus and live happily ever after in a tarpaper shack.”

Erica laughed. “And they eat wild berries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

Dad winked at me. “Exactly!”

Erica snuggled beside Mom on the couch and listened to a chapter of
The Moffats
, a book Mom loved when she was Erica's age. And still did.

But when it was time for bed, Erica said, “I don't want to go upstairs. It's so dark outside my window.”

“Daniel's right across the hall from you,” Mom said, “and Dad and I are in the next room.”

“Will you come with me, Mommy?” Erica asked. “And tuck me in and sit with me till I fall asleep?”

Dad sighed. “Give in now, Martha, and it'll be the same every night.”

Either Mom didn't hear him, or she ignored him. Scooping Erica up as if she were still a baby, she carried her upstairs.

Dad shook his head. “Your mother is spoiling that child.”

I shrugged, opened my odious social studies book, and began memorizing the imports, exports, and native products of Germany. What a waste of time Woodville School was. My textbook had been published thirty years ago.

When I passed Erica's door later, I heard my sister say, “Are you sure it's just a legend?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “Please stop worrying about it. No one disappeared. A girl named Selene never lived here. That boy was a liar.”

The next morning, Erica and I sat in the front of the school bus, right behind Mrs. Plummer. The bus slowed for the second stop, and Brody got on. Erica stared out the window, pretending not to see him, but I gave him a dirty look. He made an ugly face, sat down behind us, and began kicking the back of my seat.

As the bus filled with kids, Brody told them where Erica and I lived.

One girl said she never walked down the road past our driveway. Her friend claimed that her big sister and some of her friends drove up the driveway on a dare. It was few years ago, when no one lived in the house.

“They heard people crying and wailing and calling Selene's name. They didn't see nothing, but they got out of there fast.”

Erica pressed her fingers in her ears and hummed, but I listened to every word. If I was dumb enough to believe their stories, a family named Estes lived on the farm about forty or fifty years ago, maybe more, no one was sure. It was before they were born, but their parents or maybe their grandparents remembered it. They had a daughter named Selene, and she disappeared when she was seven years old, and no one ever found her. One girl said she was took. Maybe it was the demons in the woods, a boy suggested. Maybe Old Auntie the conjure woman up on Brewster's Hill got her, Brody said. Or, worst of all, a girl said, Old Auntie's razorback hog, the one called Bloody Bones, ate her up.

Nobody agreed about who took Selene, but they all agreed she was never found.

By the time we arrived at school, Erica was trembling. We waited until the bus was empty and then got up to leave.

Mrs. Plummer stopped Erica. “Don't let them scare you,” she told my sister. “It's just a yarn people been spinning for years, not a speck of truth in it. A girl named Selene disappeared, but she wasn't ‘took.' There's no conjure woman and no Bloody Bones.”

She rummaged in her purse, pulled out a pack of Life Savers, and handed it to Erica. “Help yourself. You, too.”

We each took one and thanked her. “They're not really bad kids,” Miss Plummer said. “Just nobody's taught them manners. They've grown up as wild as bears in the woods. Give them time. They'll get friendly when they're used to you.”