“My father loved my mother dearly and did everything the kidnappers told him to do. He didn’t contact the police, he didn’t tell anyone, and he gathered together the demanded money and went to the meeting place they instructed him to, to deliver it. He’d expected my mother to be there and to be exchanged for the money, but they told him it didn’t work that way. That once they were safely away and sure that the policia weren’t there somewhere waiting to jump them, they would send my mother to him.”
“But they did not,” Domitian said softly, sorry he’d made her relive this sad part of her life.
“Oh, they did,” she assured him, and then added bitterly, “in pieces.”
Domitian winced. The kidnapping had happened three months before he’d met Sarita and learned he couldn’t read her. The detective he’d hired had mentioned in his first report that her mother had died in a kidnapping gone wrong, and her father was moving her out of the country because of that, but hadn’t given specifics. Domitian hadn’t asked for any.
“I am sorry,” he said softly.
Sarita acknowledged his words with a nod and turned her gaze back to her plate as she scooped up another bite of profiterole. After swallowing, she said, “After my mother’s death, my father was afraid the same thing would happen to me, and decided he had to get me out of Venezuela. He worked for the Royal Bank of Canada here. He was the assistant manager at their branch office in Caracas and, with the bank manager’s help, was able to get a transfer to a branch in Canada.” Her expression turned thoughtful. “I think the bank helped to speed up the paperwork needed for us to move, visas and whatnot. It still seemed to take a while, though, several months I think.”
She paused, apparently trying to recall, and then shrugged. “Anyway, off we went to Canada. We settled in a little town just south of Toronto where it would be easy for my father to commute into the city to his new bank. Fortunately, it was summer and school was out. Well, for everyone else,” she added wryly. “My father wanted me to get a good start once school began, and he wanted me to be able to protect myself, so he signed me up for martial arts two nights a week, and then hired me a teacher to teach me English. I spent that first summer learning English eight hours a day, every day. It was English, English, English with the occasional martial arts break at night.”
“Your father found a teacher willing to work seven days a week?” he asked with amusement.
“Oh no, the teacher only taught me during the weekdays, my father taught me on Saturday and Sunday . . . and usually for a couple of hours on weeknights after work. My whole life was mostly English. By the time school started, I was sick to death of contractions and the order of adjectives and nouns.” She rolled her eyes and then sighed and shrugged. “But I had learned enough that I was able to go to a normal high school.”
“Were you already in high school at thirteen?” he asked. It seemed young to him.
“Fourteen,” she corrected. “My birthday is—”
“July seventh,” Domitian finished for her with a nod. “Yes, of course. You would have been fourteen by the time school started.”
“Right,” she said slowly, eyeballing him. “Your private dick would have told you my birth date.”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Hmm,” she muttered, and then continued, “Anyway, my life was pretty normal again after that. High school dances, going to the mall with friends, bush parties, making—”
“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “Bush parties? This is what?”
Sarita shrugged. “Just what it sounds like, parties in the bush.”
Domitian pursed his lips briefly and then said, “That would be a very small party.”
“Heck no, tons of kids went. Like I said, it was a small town. There wasn’t much to do unless you drove to the city, and the first two years of high school there was no driving anywhere. But even after my friends and I all started turning sixteen and getting our licenses, none of our parents were willing to let us take the family car into the city. I don’t think anyone’s did really. The older kids were at the bush parties too.”
“In a bush?” he asked with disbelief. “Lots of you? In a bush?”
“Yes,” she said, not seeming to understand his confusion, and then her eyes widened. “Not the bush like a plant, not arbusto. Bush like a small woodland area or forest, bosque.”
“Ah . . .” Domitian nodded, a wry smile curving his lips. “I learned English centuries ago and still cannot get it right. I am impressed you mastered it in a summer.”
“I wouldn’t say I mastered it that summer,” she assured him, seeming amused. “I still struggled my first year of high school, but I knew enough to get by. Besides, you speak English perfectly. New words and terms or slang pop up all the time. Even speaking it daily it’s hard to keep up sometimes. The kids are always coming up with something I’ve never heard before.”
Domitian smiled softly. She was trying to make him feel better as if he might feel stupid that he’d made a mistake. His self-esteem wasn’t that weak, but it was sweet of her to be concerned for him.
“Anyway, like I say, everything was pretty normal after that. I finished high school, went to university to get a criminology degree, went through police training, and—” she shrugged “—now I’m living the dream.”
Domitian’s eyebrows rose at the tinge of sarcasm in her voice. “Your dream was not to be a police officer?”
Sarita made a face. “Yeah, it was, but—” she shook her head “—I wanted to be a police officer to help people. To make sure no one else lost their mother the way I did. Instead, I’m scraping drunks up off the sidewalk, stopping speeders, and arresting shoplifters. And none of them take responsibility for why they’re in trouble. Do they just say, ‘Thank you, Officer, for not leaving me to freeze to death on the sidewalk’ or ‘Sorry, Officer, you’re right. I was speeding’ and take their ticket or whatever? No. They’re always trying to give excuses. The drunk we pick up every night like clockwork never drinks too much, someone must have roofied him. The speeder was unfamiliar with the road and thought the speed limit was higher, or their speedometer must not be working, or everyone else was doing it, or they were speeding because they had to pee. And the shoplifter? Oh no, they weren’t shoplifting, they just absentmindedly dropped it in their purse or pants and forgot to pay.”
She puffed out a breath of exasperation. “And when those excuses that we’ve already heard a hundred times don’t work? Then they start cursing and shouting at us, and kicking out at us and struggling so that we have to wrestle them to the car. And the whole time they’re yelling at their friends to videotape this. ‘It’s abuse! It’s abuse!’
“It gets pretty fricking depressing at times, I gotta tell you. I became a police officer to help people, but they don’t want the help when it’s directed at them. Oh yeah, they’re happy when it’s directed at someone else but—For instance, a couple months ago Jackson and I pulled this guy over for speeding and weaving. He—”
“Speeding and weaving?” Domitian interrupted. “I understand speeding, but by weaving you do not mean—?”
“Weaving all over the road,” she explained.
“Ah.” Domitian nodded. “Sorry. Proceed.”
“So, he blows over the limit and—I mean on the breathalyzer,” she stopped to explain. “It reads how much alcohol they have in their system.”
Domitian nodded.
“Right, so he blows over the legal limit, and then freaks out when we arrest him. Starts cussing us out and even took a swing at Jackson. Fine. Nothing new there, right?”
Apparently it was a rhetorical question, because she went on, “Fast forward to two weeks ago. We’re called to a traffic accident. This cute little six-year-old was hit crossing the road from her house to her neighbor’s across the street. Turns out the driver was speeding and over the limit.”
“And it is the man you arrested two months earlier,” Domitian guessed.