"Uh, Bill, there"s something we need to talk about," Blake muttered. "Something that Mrs. Emerson told
me."
"The mother, she worries, as all mothers worry about young girls," Bill acknowledged. "I know girl is too young, now. But, I will marry her one day. I know this. I wish only that she will remember me while we are in army. I will be ready in six, seven years. She will marry me then."
Bill"s absolute certainty confounded Blake. Blake couldn"t imagine what would be happening to him in the next six days, much less in six or seven years. How could Bill, who was only a couple of months past eighteen, just like Blake, be so sure of the future?
"If you say so," Blake remarked. "That"s if you live through the next few hours."
Surprised, Bill looked at Blake, the question written all over his face.
Grinning, Blake answered the unspoken question. "Buddy or not, I"m not going to be the person who tells Mrs. Bates that a bunch more people have been invited to her party. You get to do that all by yourself, my friend."
* * * "Bill and Vicky, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G," Hayley chanted, much to Vicky"s chagrin. "Good grief, Hayley," Millicent muttered. "Grow up, why don"t you?" Hayley grinned as she answered, "Well, maybe they aren"t now, but they will someday." "I don"t think so," Mary said, glad to see that the girls were recovering their normal natures. "At least, I better not catch them at it anytime soon."
The girls all giggled and blushed and continued to poke good-humored fun at Vicky for a while, until Vicky asked, "Millicent, what did you do to yourself? You look different." "Oh, just a little haircut." Millicent preened, pleased that someone had finally noticed. "The stylist said that my hair was overwhelming my face, so she got rid of a bunch of it. She said it detracted from my looks."
"Ohhhh, a stylist, was it?" Susan grinned. "You couldn"t just go to the beauty shop, like the rest of us?" "Beauty shops are for peons," Millicent pretended to sniff haughtily, "Us real rich folk go to see a stylist."
Even Mary had to laugh. Millicent did look much different. Without the ma.s.s of hair, she no longer looked like a moppet, but more like the young woman she was. She still looked like a little pixie, but she didn"t look like a child anymore.
* * * Vicky was the first to arrive at the Bates home, along with Judy. Arend Nebel"s screamed imprecations had had a profound affect on her. She felt she had to make amends, somehow. She knew that most of the group didn"t really share her view. Still, some people had been hurt, and Vicky felt responsible.
When Brandy answered the door, Vicky handed over the covered dish that she had brought for the party.
"I know we"re early, Brandy, and I"m sorry. I just really need to speak to your guests."
Brandy looked at Vicky in surprise. "How do you know Justine and Henning?" she blurted out.
"I don"t know them, exactly. But, I"ve done them some harm and I have to fix it. Could we see them, please?"
Brandy escorted Vicky and Judy into the kitchen, where Justine and Henning were sitting at the table, enjoying a quiet moment before the party began. After introducing everyone, Brandy sat down with the rest of them and stared at Vicky and Judy, curiosity in her face.
Vicky touched the bandage on her cheek, and tried to speak, but wasn"t able to. Judy, watching with
concern, decided to step in.
"The reason we"re here is that Vicky kind of thinks we may have done something bad. We didn"t mean to, exactly, but looking back on it, maybe we did. We took advantage of people and we didn"t realize that they were people just like us. People trying their best to get ahead and do well. We feel kind of bad about doing it, and we want to make it up to you, somehow."
Henning looked at the girls with interest. He could tell that they meant their words. The shame on Vicky"s face was clear to see. He recognized her, just as Arend had. She was the girl who had driven
down the price of the stock Arend had sold. She had convinced Arend that a lower price was better than
no price at all. Arend had sold all the stock he owned and come close to ruining himself.
Henning; however, was a sharper player of the game. In spite of Arend"s urging, Henning had continued to hold on to his father"s investments. Those investments would begin paying, and soon, he felt. Not everyone had sold their stock at bargain prices. Quite a few people besides the girls had continued to buy instead of sell.
"You should not worry. Arend, he was always a bit impatient," Henning explained. "Always, he was in a hurry, never able to wait. You did not cause his madness. I discovered, recently, that he was always not the man I thought I knew."
Vicky started crying. "I feel so bad. I never meant to hurt anyone. I keep wondering how many people are in the same boat, just because of me. I"ll never do that again. Never. I"ll be honest and give honest value, I swear."
"Is not so bad, to be, how do you say . . . sharp trader," Henning answered. "What is American saying, Ah, yes, I have it . . . "never give a sucker the break even.""
Judy burst into laughter. It took a while for her to calm down and explain.
* * * "How did this happen?" Donna wondered. From a small celebration with a few friends, her "mortgageburning" get-together had somehow become a full-blown party, complete with covered dishes, music, and dancing in the street. It wasn"t exactly what she had counted on. It was nice, even enjoyable, but not what she had planned.
She wandered around, talking to people she knew and meeting the people she didn"t know. Some of Henning"s friends from work had stopped by, ostensibly to check out the garage she wanted to remodel, and wound up staying. Susan Logsden and all her friends were here, along with a German woman and her little girl. Susan had introduced Mrs. Gundelfinger as her teacher although Donna wasn"t too clear on what the woman taught. Young Blake Haggerty had even set himself up as a DJ, with one of those silly microphone things.
Donna headed toward Blake, intending to ask him for some slightly quieter music. Heather Mason apparently had the same idea, since Donna heard her pleading with Blake to play her favorite Fats Domino CD. Blake good-humoredly gave in, and the loud music got toned down a bit.
"Thanks, Heather," Donna said. "I was beginning to wonder if my hearing would survive that last
number."
"Me, too, Mrs. Bates. I just hate that stuff," Heather said. "It"s a really nice party, you know. I"m having a lot of fun."
"I"m glad to hear it, dear. It isn"t exactly what I had planned, but what the heck. I"ll have a big audience when my time in the spotlight comes."
Heather looked at Donna curiously. "Spotlight?"
"Oh, yes, Heather. This whole thing started out as a little celebration for me. I made the last payment on my mortgage a couple of weeks ago. The house is paid for, finally."
"But that"s just nuts, Mrs. Bates." Heather blushed from the top of her head to the tips of her toes when that exclamation rang out. During a lull in the music, Blake"s microphone had picked up her words and sent them flying through the crowd. Everyone around them turned to look at Heather, who now seemed
to be a complete loss for words.
Donna stared at the girl and said, "Perhaps you"d like to explain that remark, young lady."
As the fl.u.s.tered Heather looked for a way out of the limelight, Vicky Emerson started to apologize for
her. "She didn"t mean it the way it sounded, Mrs. Bates. Heather just isn"t very diplomatic."
"I should say not. I"ve worked and slaved for years to get where I am. Some teenager doesn"t need to be telling me I"m nuts."
"I"ll be glad to explain it, Mrs. Bates, really, I will. Vicky"s right, I didn"t mean it the way it sounded. I
was just surprised that you"d be willing to keep your money locked up that way," Heather said.
"Money? What are you talking about? I said I paid off my house, nothing about money." Donna was
becoming interested in spite of her annoyance. The whole town knew these girls were getting rich, and knew they"d gotten their start by selling their toys.
"Money, Mrs. Bates. This house represents money, and quite a bit of it, at that. Every house in this
neighborhood is worth a fortune, at least a half-million dollars. Some of them are worth even more than that. What you"ve got is a great big chunk of money that"s just sitting here, not growing and not doing you any good. I"m sorry, but it isn"t the smartest thing you could do," Vicky explained. "I"m recommending that my parents pull their equity out of their house, with a second mortgage. Then, we"ll invest that equity. Some of it will go into OPM, and some of it will go into new companies, to spread the risk. It"s called diversifying."
People from all around the neighborhood were listening with interest. Everyone knew about savings accounts, but hearing business theory from teenagers who were getting rich was, well, weird. The attention had grown beyond Vicky and Heather"s ability to cope with. They desperately wanted out of this. Judy, always the showman, stepped up and took Blake"s microphone.
"Okay, everyone. Give us a few minutes. Listen to some music and relax. Since everyone seems so interested in this subject, we"ll get something organized and be back in a few. Just enjoy the party."
* * * The audience watched as seven teenaged girls and one adult went into a huddle. They huddled so long that some people, who were just watching them, started to get bored. It was almost thirty minutes before Judy returned to the microphone and started speaking.
"The first thing that we really need to mention is the difference between what"s happening now and what was going on back up-time. Economically, I mean. "Up-time, we had what"s called a saturated economy. That means that there was business and production from all over the world. There wasn"t room for a lot of expansion, unless you had some fancy new technology or something. If you wanted to open a business, you had to compete with all the businesses what were already there, so it was really hard to make money.
"Down-time, things were different. Most of Germany, most of the world we landed in, was in the middle of a big depression, as well as in the middle of a big war. It"s not like that, now, here in Thuringia. We have all sorts of things that people know how to make, and all sorts of things we are making. And, we have millions of people to sell these things to. My sister says it"s like the beginning of the Golden Age, back in America, near the end of the nineteenth century. Right now, right here, we have the beginning of what"s probably going to be about fifty years of rapid expansion, a "bull" market.
"That means that what you should do with your property is different. We already have tourists coming to see the Ring of Fire. The roads and the waterways are going to get better, so more and more people will come. That means that your property is worth a lot more than it was up-time."
Nothing that Judy was saying was really new to anyone. Everyone had heard the same words, or read them in the paper, or seen people talk about it on TV. It was the same old thing, but now the information
changed a bit. Judy took a note card from Susan and started talking about a subject near and dear to the hearts of average Americans, taxes.
"Even up-time, having your home paid off wasn"t really the most profitable thing to do. It was safe and it
was simple, but not profitable. Now, in a new Golden Age, it isn"t even very safe. As the property values go up, so will the taxes. It will take a few years for the taxes to catch up, because the government has put a twenty percent per year limit on those taxes. The government had to limit the growth of the taxes or half the people inside the Ring of Fire would get evicted when the taxes come due in a few months.
Think about that.
"The taxes you pay will go up twenty percent per year for at least the next ten years. That"s just to catch up to the value of your property today. It"s like it was back in the Silicon Valley, in California, when houses that people bought for fifty thousand dollars in 1960 were worth three million dollars in 1999.
The government is protecting you from being forced out of your property, because no matter how much the a.s.sessed value of your home goes up, the taxes aren"t going to go up more than twenty percent.
That"s still a lot of money, though. Taxes that were a thousand dollars last year are going to be twelve hundred this year. In ten years, they"ll be about sixty-three hundred. How hard is it going to be to save that kind of money?
"If you leave your equity in your home, you"re probably going to have to sell it in a few years, just to pay the taxes that are going to come due. You"ll have to do that unless you have something else to make you rich. Bad news, isn"t it?"