Lizzie! (7 page)

 

 

CHAPTER 14

W
ell, we weren't done with interviews because the next morning before school Officer Frank arrived with another squad car marked
MIAMI POLICE
.
The gang of four
—that's what Mom called them afterward—knocked on the door. Actually, they knocked on the screen door because both the front and the back doors were open to air out the bacon smell from a little bit of overcooking I had performed.

Everybody trooped in and sat around the living room. Nobody wanted coffee. The situation looked dark.

Officer Frank spoke. “Lizzie, I want an honest answer. Did you tell Julio you had gone to the authorities? Is that why he left?”

I was astonished. “No! How could I? He has no phone. And I don't drive.”

“We have information that your boyfriend's brother took you both in his car to an undisclosed location late yesterday.”

I don't like to admit it but I have a temper. Mom says when I was a toddler I used to throw temper tantrums in the middle of an aisle at the supermarket, and I remember from those times how everything turned into a churning sea of red. That was what was happening right now. I took three deep breaths to calm the sea before I answered.

“First of all, he's not my boyfriend, we are merely”—here I stumbled over ‘best,' then settled on ‘good'—“friends. Second of all, Josh's brother Greg drove us in his own car to the farm stand out on 131 where you can buy Breyers
ice-cream sugar cones, and he treated us both. I had chocolate-chip mint and I can prove it because I dripped some on my T-shirt and it hasn't gone through the wash yet in case you need the evidence.”

There was some chuckling at this and then Officer Frank said, “Well, your monkey worker's gone missing and we were hoping you could provide us with a lead.”

This was really hard. I didn't have any idea where Digger had taken him to be
placed in protective custody
,
but I was pretty sure Digger didn't want anyone to know Julio had come back in the car with us. I wasn't going to volunteer anything more than a direct answer.

“I don't have a clue,” I said. “I only know his name is Julio Blanco and his uncle Jeb—Jesús Ernesto Blanco—was holding him as a slave to take care of the tamarins and weed the garden and so on.”

Then Officer Pedro Herrera from Miami Police spoke. “And to compound the situation, Señor Blanco has vanished.”

“Vanished? But his plane is out in Henry's cow pasture.”

“Not anymore. We seized it right after your last conversation with the Woodvale force.”

“How do you seize a plane?”

He answered, “It has been impounded and flown to an airstrip under our control.”

At that point Digger arrived a little out of breath. “¡
Hola
! I was taking my morning constitutional to the jetty and just as I turned around I noticed your squad cars out front.”

I was so glad to see him I almost cried but I managed not to and settled down.

Nobody responded after he said
hola
, so Digger introduced himself to the officers he hadn't met yet. “Chief Diego Martinez, retired.” After Officer Frank got up and shook his hand, the others got up like dogs in a dog-training class and shook hands all around, and Mom fetched a chair from the porch and we went on from there.

Digger said, “Julio Blanco is seventeen years old. He is, or was, a fugitive from justice. He was sent to the Big Mangrove detention facility only because there was no family member to release him to on probation. He is an orphan. His uncle was out of the country and could not be reached. After six months the boy ran away because he feared for his life.”

“Feared for his life? From a staff member? I find that hard to believe.”

“No, no. He was well treated there, he liked the work, which as you know has to do with saving the mangrove trees from encroachment.”

“What was he afraid of?”

“Apparently he had served as a lookout in a home burglary. It was the classic kid crime—break in, grab what you can—but the homeowner reappeared before they were done, so they ran.”

“Did he have a record?”

“No, he was clean. But he'd dropped out of school and was living on the street. The two perpetrators were caught by an alert traffic cop as they ducked past him.”

“So then he agreed to identify the two perps?”

“Yes. They had prior arrests for break-ins, so they were going away. But other members of the gang are at large and he fears he has been fingered.”

“So he was a gang member?”

“No. He wanted to join, and serving as lookout was to be his ticket in.”

“Does this gang have a name?”

“They call themselves
Los Pícaros
. Ruffians, or rogues.”

“Go on.”

“By that time Señor Blanco had returned. Julio was the only child of his dead brother and sister-in-law, who were killed in a car crash a year earlier. He gave Julio a place to stay and enough money for groceries. In return he was to tend the gardens and fields and feed the birds—it seems that Blanco was dealing in exotic birds before the tamarins.”

“What kinds of birds?”

“Tropical exotics. Parrots and macaws. Umbrella birds. He'd fly off with two or three at a time in boxes but Julio never knew the
destinations
.
”

There was a long silence while the officers digested this information. Then Digger continued. “Julio was clearly Blanco's prisoner. He had no transportation. Blanco told him several times that he was shielding him from the authorities at Big Mangrove, and more important, he was keeping him safe from
Los Pícaros
. He hinted that he could contact the gang at any moment, so Julio wasn't tempted to leave. Also by then he had developed a deep feeling for the little monkeys who were in his care alone. He installed big tree limbs for them to climb, and baskets to serve as sleeping nests. ‘They became my family,' he told me.”

“And what about Blanco, where is he from?”

“He is originally from Miami. Julio said he didn't know where he was living now, only that he came and went by plane. Once he had disposed of the tropical birds he went away for a long while.”

“Did he know where he'd gone?”

“Julio couldn't be sure, but he thought Central or South America. When Blanco returned he had the tamarin monkeys and a stack of cages and Julio helped his two accomplices unload the plane and put the cages together. The monkeys had been transported in burlap bags and were badly dehydrated. Julio immediately supplied them with water.”

Officer Frank turned aside to confer with the others. “We need to research these . . . What did you call them, tamar-minds?”

“Tamar-
ins,
” Digger said. “Golden lion tamarins, they're rare and endangered. Efforts are being made to save them through captive breeding.”

I was impressed. Digger had done some homework.

He went on. “Apparently the shack Julio was living in had once been a storage facility for citrus equipment. That is where he found the wicker baskets, so he went out and cut some gumbo-limbo tree limbs to put in the cages and then he tied the baskets up high for nests.”

Then one of the Miami officers had a bright idea. “Did you discover any connection to drugs involving this fugitive?”

“I beg your pardon?” Digger drew himself up. “Of course if I had I would have reported it. Like you, I am an officer of the law.”

They didn't ask Digger if he had any idea where Julio had gone. I had been holding my breath waiting to hear what he would say, but I was spared.

Right then the memory of those two men on the jetty came back. If only it hadn't been so dark, if only I'd been watching a little earlier. But I just kept quiet.

The reason I didn't speak up was I still wasn't positive the man was Blanco. After all, look at all the other times that people thought he was somebody else. Suppose I was wrong? Then I would have fingered the wrong man.
To finger
, a transitive verb meaning to inform on.

That concluded the interview. After the squad cars had driven off Mom made some coffee for Digger and herself and I had another glass of orange juice while we all calmed down.

Finally Mom drove me to school and explained why I was late. In English class I slipped a note to Josh.
Cops again. Looking for Julio.
At lunch we were once again the most popular kids in the class.

“You mean the cops came all the way from Miami to grill you?” Herbie asked. And Winnie Ellerman repeated her invitation to do a complete makeover of my face next Saturday. But I couldn't tell them anything.

I shook my head and said, “I'm not allowed to divulge any information.”

Seeing Jeb Blanco on the jetty was weighing on my conscience. I didn't mention it when Officer Frank Franklin was grilling me because not being super sure—sort of not trusting my own eyes—kept holding me back. Still, why in the world hadn't I told Digger? When Mom came to collect me I asked if we could stop at Teresa and Digger's. Aurelia was there fussing over Teresa, who had a bad cold.

“Don't come in, don't come in! I'm full of germs!”

“I just need to talk to Digger,
abuelita
.
I'm sorry about your cold. Can he come out?”

Digger materialized eating a raw carrot. “Is Teresa very sick?” I asked him.

“No, it's just a nasty cold. You know, the kind with a stuffy nose and runny eyes. Not dangerous but not fun.”

“What are you eating?”

He waggled the carrot at me. “This is all I'm allowed between meals,” he complained. “I've already eaten two. Want a bite?”

I nodded and he broke me off a piece from the unchewed-on end. But before I put it in my mouth I took a deep breath and said all in a rush, “Digger, I have something to tell you I didn't tell the Miami policeman, I don't know why. But you remember when he asked you if Julio had been involved with drugs and you said, ‘Like you I am an officer of the law?' ”

“I remember it well,
chica
.”

“Well, I think I saw Jeb Blanco or somebody who looks like Jeb Blanco again out on the jetty.”

“When was this?”

“I think it was Monday night. I was sitting on the back porch with my binoculars looking at the last sandpipers before they went away for the night. I keep a little chart of how late they stay. They stay later in good weather than they do in the rain, but that's not the point—only that's how I came to see two men out on the jetty in the almost-dark. They were talking and waving their hands as if they were having an argument. I was playing with Tigger. You know how you trail her little toy mouse along the floor and she'll pounce on it and so on. The sandpipers had already gone. I got a glimpse of one of the men. I caught the glint of light off his glasses. I'm almost positive it was Jeb Blanco.”

“
Ay,
mi vida
, this is very big news.”

“What will happen now? Will I get arrested because I didn't tell them earlier?”

“No, because it was a detail you only remembered on this day,
chica
, you understand?”

I nodded but it wasn't exactly true.

“I will take care of it,
chica
.”

 

 

CHAPTER 15

T
he next day was Saturday and I spent most of it at Josh's. Mom had gone out with Aurelia and Teresa for the day, to look at wedding dresses. Aurelia and Tom the Lion were actually going to do it! Get married, and I would be invited to the wedding. So today I'd been invited to stay with the Blaines. Josh and I did our algebra homework first. Mr. Hammersmith or The
Hammer
,
as he is known behind his back, always gives us some real brainteasers over the weekends. They're optional for extra credit. Like this one:

It is possible for a set to have no elements. For example, there are no horses 25 hands tall (a hand is 4 inches). Such a set is called a null set, expressed by a pair of empty brackets { }. List ten other examples of a null set.

Most of the kids groan but Josh and I both think they are fun to work on. We came up with about thirty examples, like the set of months that begin with the letter
K
. Or the set of odd numbers exactly divisible by 4. Monday, when kids turn in their answers, The Hammer will hold up the wrong ones and say things like “near-ums don't count,” or “close but no cigar.” He says it in a nice jokey way. You wouldn't think it to look at him in a suit and tie but he's really a very sweet person.

Then Josh wrote an essay on the Bill of Rights for his history class and after he was done I borrowed his laptop to write an essay on
The Scarlet Letter
for my English class. I asked Josh if he'd ever read it.

He said, “I think I did, but I don't remember it well.”

So I described the plot. “The story seems so old-fashioned. I mean, I feel sorry for Hester, but even sorrier for little Pearl, who is probably going to grow up with a depressed mother. And anyway, I can think of a dozen women on TV who could be wearing the big
A
on their pinafores, if we still had pinafores.”

We both laughed. And then I emailed the essay to myself so I could print it out at home on Mom's printer. With those chores out of the way, we got to talking about the murder on the jetty that Digger discovered and all the excitement it created. Josh said he thought the murder victim was probably in some gang that was out to get Jeb Blanco, who had once been a member too and Jeb Blanco killed him instead.

I said, “Maybe Jeb owed him money so he killed him.”

“But how did he get out on the very tip of the jetty in the middle of the night?” Josh asked.

“Maybe he came by boat.”

“In that case, where's the boat?”

Then I said, “Jeb Blanco is giving me the creeps. Can we play Scrabble instead?” Josh really trounced me. He built
m-o-s-q-u-i-t
into the end
o
of my
m-o-t-t-o
and he managed to block me out of two triple word score chances. Scrabble can get to be a very fierce game. Mom and I have stopped playing because I am very competitive and I can't stand to lose every time, but it's even worse if she
lets
me win. I don't know why I take it so hard. It's a mother-daughter thing. But when Josh won I didn't mind at all. Josh's mom Jenna had bought fresh bluefish for dinner, and corn on the cob, which we shucked on the back deck. That's one thing I can never get over in Florida. You can eat fresh corn like, forever. In Wisconsin it's an eight-week . . .
phenomenon,
and that's it.

Josh's dad Will and his brother Greg tended the fish on the outdoor grill with a lot of kidding and poking each other with the baster. They were supposed to be using it to baste the fish with this special sauce Jenna had made from limes and I don't know what. When it was ready we all assembled around the dining table and took turns rolling our ears of corn on the stick of butter that had been “sacrificed for the greater good,” Jenna said. Dessert was strawberries to dip in melted chocolate. I couldn't help feeling how terrific it was to have a father there picking the bones out of his fish, and chewing his ear of corn keyboard-style all along one row and then the next, and even talking with his mouth full. Talking about Greg's soccer team's chances of going to the state championship, and about how sweet it was not to have to worry about the phone ringing to call him to the hospital because he wasn't on call tonight. Josh had said that his dad was gone every other weekend when he had to stay out at Dirk Isle, and so they mostly didn't see him from Friday till Monday night. We sat around the dining table just pleasantly chatting until the sun started to go down. Then Jenna said she would drive me home in the van, so Greg rolled me up the ramp and Jenna fastened me in and when we got to our cottage she unfastened me and let me shoot down the ramp the way Josh does. That was sweet too.

It turned out Mom wasn't home yet, but the back porch door was open, so Jenna helped me get in. “I'll wait around till she gets here,” Jenna said.

“No, don't bother, I stay home alone lots of times when Mom isn't here.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive. I'll be fine.”

“Okay. But promise me you'll lock the door when I leave.”

I thanked her again for a lovely time. And then I said, “You have a very nice family.” My voice kind of squeaked as I said it. I didn't realize I was close to tears. Jenna said, “Thank you Lizzie” in a sort of surprised voice and then she bent over and gave me a hug. Then she went out the front door and I locked it behind her.

I wheeled around and turned on a few lights. Mom and the Scarecrow had gone out to dinner—she'd left a note to tell me where they were and also to say that her cell phone was on if I needed anything. I leaned back in my chair and daydreamed about how it would be with the Scarecrow as my father, cheering me on at the debate team finals or just grilling bluefish for a family dinner. Maybe we could find Julio and bring him to live with us and just as I was imagining adding a room to the back of our garage I heard footsteps in the kitchen.

“Mom?” I said, though I knew it wasn't Mom, and suddenly a hand came down hard across my face. It was a man's hand I knew. He tied a bandanna so tight over my mouth that I couldn't scream and then he tied my hands together with another one. Then he scooped me out of my chair while I kicked feebly and squirmed against his body, but it was no use.

He kicked the back screen door open with one foot, then he slipped around the side of the house and threw me into the back of a large car and we shot away from the curb. I was on the floor of the backseat, wriggling and moaning and he said, “It's no use
pequeñita
. Give it up.” That's when I knew for sure it was Jeb Blanco.
Pequeñita
. That's what he always called me.

He didn't say where we were going, but I knew. Don't ask me how, but I felt it in my bones, so it was no surprise when we turned off smooth highway and bumped onto dirt and then turned again. He shut off his headlights as we crept forward and I knew we were on the little road that led to Julio's shack.

When he finally stopped the car he got out and pulled out a penlight—you know, one of those tiny flashlights you can shine around in a small circle to find something you've dropped in the dark. By craning my neck up I could just make out the shape of a big padlock and I figured the police had padlocked Julio's shack to preserve the evidence. They always put yellow tape around buildings or holes in the street to preserve evidence while they think about the next thing to do. Blanco cursed under his breath, but in Spanish so I didn't know what he was saying. He came back to the car and popped the trunk. Then he went back to the lock and I saw he had a hacksaw in his hand. Once he'd sawed the lock open he came around to the back door of the car to get me. I desperately wanted to fight him off but he was right, it was no use. He hauled me out like a bagful of monkeys. Kicked the door open, walked in, and dumped me onto a bed. Even in the dark I knew it was Julio's bed.

 

But what he did next was really scary. He shoved the bed with me on it farther into the corner against the wall. Then he set the penlight down under the bed so it cast only a small circle of light on the floor. There was a ratty dusty rug that had been beside the bed and I watched while he rolled it up. To my horror I saw there was a narrow trapdoor hidden underneath where the rug had been. He knelt down muttering and rooting around until his hands closed on the ring that let him pull it open. And then I was terrified because I knew he was going to put me down there. I moaned and shook my head back and forth but he just said in this calm voice, as though he had done this a hundred times before, “It's no use
pequeñita
.
No use at all. You will wait here for Julio.”

Then he went out of the shack and I figured he'd gone to look for a ladder and I was right, because about five minutes later he came back in dragging this big wooden ladder, like from before the Civil War. It was so old it was full of splinters, which he kept cursing at and stopping to suck a finger. It took him a long time to wrestle it into place. Then he went down it testing each step. I could hear him bouncing on them one at a time and then he came back up and came over to pick me up.

I struggled and fought as hard as I could until he said, “Listen,
niña
. Either we go down the ladder together or I just drop you down and forget about you, do you hear me?”

I nodded my head yes. Though which was better—to die instantly from being dropped on my head or to die of starvation and dehydration in
durance vile
? Because Julio was never coming back here. He was in protective custody
someplace safe. I
hoped he was happy there.

Once Jeb Blanco got me down the ladder I huddled on the damp dirt floor and started sobbing. I couldn't help it. This was worse than my worst nightmare. He watched me for a couple of minutes and then he went back up the ladder and pulled the mattress off Julio's bed. He threw it down so that it landed right next to me and he said, “There. Pull yourself up on that. I know you can.”

So I did. And then he threw me down this ratty old army blanket. “You will stay down there until Julio comes back, you understand?”

He didn't wait for an answer but went back up the ladder. I watched the trapdoor close over me, leaving me in the pitch dark. Then I heard him unroll the rug and pull the iron bedstead back over it and then I heard him dragging in something, most likely some old wooden boxes that had once held birdseed and bunches of bananas. I could hear him grunting as he worked, and from the thumping I gathered that he was stacking them on the bed. Then the outside door closed and after that I couldn't hear anything because I was sobbing so hard. I cried for about five minutes and then I got hold of myself and sort of snugged the blanket up around me as best I could with my hands tied together. I had two forever useless legs, and now my hands were all but useless too. I lay there thinking about how sorry for myself I'd been in the hospital after my accident. A kid just about my age tried to make friends with me there. He had been in a pickup truck rollover and his spinal cord was severed so his arms and legs were paralyzed and he was a quadriplegic. He lay on his back and spoke into a little tube that hung over his face. This was what he had to live with every day for the rest of his life. I wondered where he was now or if he was even still alive. In the total blackness I couldn't do anything except lie there with four fingers holding that musty old blanket. I wondered how long it would take me to die.

I thought about how it must have been when Mom came home all bright and cheery and called, “Lizzie?” and then she and the Scarecrow saw my empty wheelchair and no sign of me. Mom must have totally freaked out when she couldn't find me. I wondered what she did next. Did she sit down and cry or did she pick up the phone and call Digger and then the Woodvale police and then the Miami police? Or was she crying so hard that she couldn't talk and so she handed the phone to the Scarecrow and he made the calls? And then I thought about Digger and Teresa, who were my
abuelito
and
abuelita
, and I thought that Teresa would have come over to our cottage right away to hold and comfort my mother and that Digger was already figuring out that I had been kidnapped by Jeb Blanco. But where would Jeb Blanco have taken me? Had he dropped me off the jetty to drown? What would Digger do? I cried a lot more. Some of it was over Josh who I might never see again just as we were getting started on a real friendship, and then I cried because I wouldn't get to see Lia and Tom marry, and would the Scarecrow marry my mother after I was dead and on and on.