Lizzie! (8 page)

 

 

CHAPTER 16

A
t some point I must have dozed off, because when I woke up I heard the sweetest sound in my life, which was men's voices and I knew they had come to rescue me. I tried to call out but of course I was gagged so the only sound that came out was a sort of gargle. I heard them exclaim over the broken padlock. Then there was the welcome sound of heavy boots entering the shack and their voices as they poked around in the wooden boxes and stomped into the corners. I couldn't make out the actual words, but I thought I recognized Officer Frank's voice. And then to my horror the voices moved away and the door closed and silence crashed back down on me like a grand piano dropped by mistake from a high-rise apartment.

I started to sob again. You would think that there couldn't be any tears left by now, but there were. My chest hurt from heaving up and down and my nose was so stuffed up that it was getting hard to breathe and I was scared I would suffocate before I could starve to death. Years and years from now when somebody found the trapdoor and opened it, there would just be this pile of bones with a disgusting snotty bandanna still attached to the skull.

I don't know how long I lay there thinking about how much my mom would miss me and how Tigger would be all confused by my absence—and even The Hammer in Algebra I would notice I was gone, so then Josh would get to answer every problem the rest of them were stumped by. And Josh, the real Josh, how much would he miss me?

My thoughts were jumping around all over the place now, from the Scarecrow to Lia and Tom and to my honorary grandparents I had come to love, when I suddenly heard another sound. A car door slammed and footsteps came running up to the door, then entered. Then I heard the sound of wooden boxes crashing down and then I heard the iron bed getting pushed back against the wall and the rug ripped away. Fingers found the ring on the trapdoor and flung it open. Daylight shone in and made me blink. Then a head peered in, blocking the light.

“
¡
Madre mía
!
My poor baby! At last I've found you,”
said a familiar voice.
And Digger started down the ladder. It took him only a minute to untie the bandanna from around my mouth and another minute to undo the one tying my hands together. Then he sat down beside me on that grotty mattress and folded me to his chest and rocked me back and forth as I blubbered some more. “Shh,
mi amor
, shh. It's over, it's over, it's all right now,” he murmured.

“But how did you know where to find me?”

“Fifty years in police work,
toda mi vida
, fifty years of uncovering evidence and solving crimes, I knew where to look. I tried to reach Julio to take him with me but there was no answer so I just jumped in my car and drove out here alone. The minute I came in, when I saw the bed in the middle of the floor, I knew at once it was covering something. In so small a shack the bed would normally be against one wall, right?” I sort of hummed against his chest so he went on.

“And these old storage buildings, often they had a root cellar. A cool place to keep the fruit until it could be packed for shipping. But never mind all that. Now, let's get you out of here.”

He tugged me to my feet and pulled me as far as the ladder. But there was no way I could climb it. Digger studied the situation. Then he said, “Put your arms around my neck,
chica
. We will go up the ladder together.” And we did. I could hear Digger grunting and straining under the load of my ninety-pound body. At last we were aboveground. The little shack looked like heaven to me then, with four walls, on terra firma, as Teresa would say. We both sat on the bedstead for a minute resting and then a terrible thing happened. Digger bent forward groaning, wrapping his arms around his chest.

“What is it what is it?” I yelled. “Oh Digger, is it your heart?”

He nodded, rocking back and forth holding his chest, and then he finally stretched out flat and pillowed his head on my lap. I saw his cell phone strapped to his waist and with a lot of wiggling and straining forward I was able to unhook it. It was just like Mom's phone. I tried to stop shaking as I dialed 911.

My hands were clammy but my voice was strong as I told the operator how to find us.

“It's on the little dirt road just past the turn to Wilderwood on County Road 232.” The operator told me to stay on the line until help arrived. I did, but meanwhile I was thinking that I gave Digger his heart attack—first with moving the heavy boxes, then with having to climb down the ladder and then, worst of all, carrying me back up piggyback. If he died it would be my fault.

I told myself that this was a
macabre
thought—from
danse macabre
, dance of death. It goes all the way back to the plague, the black death of the Middle Ages. I probably shouldn't do this with words, especially at a moment like this, but it's the only way I know to keep from screaming and pounding on things. The operator was still on the line. He kept asking me if the individual was still conscious. I kept bending down to talk to Digger and each time he murmured, “Still here,
chica
,” so that much was good. It felt like it was taking forever. And then at last I heard sirens. Their wail grew stronger, and behind them I could hear the special bleating horn of an ambulance.

Everything happened so fast after that. It was crazy, like a series of flash camera shots popping one after another. Digger on a stretcher with medics on either side. Police from Woodvale and others from the towns around Wilderwood swarming through the doorway and filling up Julio's pitiful little shack. Some of them climbing down the ladder into the cellar—the trapdoor was still open—to look around. And then more medics kneeling beside me telling me I would have to go to the hospital in an ambulance too, just to be checked out after my ordeal. I kept saying I was fine, I just wanted to go home, but they said it was
protocol
. I haven't had a chance to look that one up but anyway, I knew it meant that whatever they said I would have to do it. And then Brianna Longname was there kneeling down to talk to me over all the hubbub, and she said, “Your mom and grandmother have gotten the news. They will meet you at the hospital. In fact they'll probably get there pretty soon after you do.”

By then Digger had been carried out on his stretcher and two very nice medics loaded me into the back of the second ambulance. When I started to cry again and said it was too scary to lie down and be strapped flat after being tied up, they said I didn't have to, so they let me sit up and I had a medic on either side of me. One kept taking my blood pressure, which was also protocol and she said it was normal. The other kept giving me little paper cups of bottled water because I was so parched from being gagged. We had a police escort with siren and the ambulance driver used his horn every few minutes. I only wish I could have divided myself in two and one of me could have been in the other ambulance with Digger.

I had to wait for them to bring out a wheelchair to wheel me into the ER and then they took me into a cubicle with just curtains, no walls or doors, and helped me take off my grotty clothes, which was definitely okay with me. I never wanted to see those shorts and T-shirt again. A nurse helped me put on a johnny that tied behind my back. After that I had to lie on a bed there and just wait. I could see shapes of nurses and doctors going by outside the curtain and caught snatches of conversation, a lot of it about who was meeting who for lunch in the cafeteria. I worried and worried about Digger, who could be alive or dead, and maybe he was dead this minute and they weren't telling me, and then a hand reached up and swished the curtain open and a voice said, “Lizzie?” It was Josh's dad, Dr. William Blaine.

“I know you're worried about Chief Martinez, so let me tell you first that yes, he did have another heart attack, but it was a small one. He was lucky you were able to call 911 right away and we were able to medicate him promptly. We'll keep him here under observation for a few days and then he should be good to go, as we say.”

“Can I see him?”

“Sure, just as soon as I check you out.”

He listened to my heart, and then to my lungs while I took deep breaths and then looked in my mouth and down my throat and felt around behind my ears and down my neck. He looked at the scrapes on my legs from being hauled around and said they weren't serious—what he recommended was a long hot soak in bubble bath.
Exotically scented
bubble bath
is what he actually said, which just proves that people are full of surprises.

Then my mom was there hugging me and crying, and then I cried too, and Dr. Will said, “I'll just fill out the necessary paperwork for discharge and leave you two to finish up.” He said it in a nice sympathetic tone, as if it was okay to cry together, whereas he could have been sarcastic, which made me like him even better.

I had to put the same dirty clothes back on because Mom was too rattled to think to bring me clean ones when she heard where I had been found, but that was okay. They let us go up to the ICU and just peek in at Digger. Teresa was sitting in a chair on the far side of the bed and Digger was hooked up to a whole bunch of buzzing monitors that I suddenly remembered from after my accident. But he lifted his free hand and blew me a kiss. Teresa came out in the hall to speak to us. Mom said how sorry she was and I said how scared I was that I had caused it. Teresa said that although it was terrible that Digger had a second heart attack, “Think how good it was that it happened while Lizzie was there with him and she called for help right away.”

“But Teresa, I think it was all my fault from his lifting those boxes and coming down the ladder and then carrying me up it piggyback.”

Teresa shook her head. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. We knew his arteries were clogged to begin with, and he kept sneaking jelly doughnuts and apple pie from the 7-Eleven. The cardiologist is going to do an angioplasty and we're hoping he can put in two stents where the blockage is worst.”

Angioplasty. Stents
!
My head was spinning from this new language.

 

 

CHAPTER 17

W
ell, in spite of everything that happened to me I didn't get to miss a single day of school because the
abduction
—from
ab
, away, and
dutere
to lead—a much better word than
kidnapping
—took place on a Saturday night. I can't believe I was home in my own house by noon on Sunday. Mom wanted me to take it easy the rest of the day so I propped myself up in bed and opened
Pride and
Prejudice
again, thinking it would put me to sleep. It did. When I woke up the sun was going down and Jane Austen was lying on the floor open to chapter ten where Elizabeth refuses to dance with Darcy.

I won't even list the reporters for newspapers and TV stations who showed up that afternoon. Mom had a hard time getting rid of them, but she did sort of organize them so I wouldn't have to tell the story over and over. I didn't pose for a single picture but a swarm of photographers got me anyway. Brianna came to help control what she called the
paparazzi,
who are
those sneaky photographers who hang around movie stars like pigeons, always moving just far enough away so you can't catch
them. But the story of my abduction and rescue wasn't just local, it was national news! It made my flesh creep to see the replay of Mom and me being interviewed on every channel. And then a thousand pictures of Julio's shack, but they couldn't get inside it to snap the trapdoor because there was a cop there around the clock. You can be sure that if they could have opened it up to see the root cellar, they would have. Well, you can imagine, the emails back and forth with Trippy just flying through outer space. Now I had a
real-life drama
to tell her about. That's how they say it on TV. She had already read about the abduction on the
Clarion & Bugle
's web page. I told her it was weird being famous all of a sudden. I didn't think I liked it much.

“You poor goonie!!! I would have died down there in that root cellar!!! But the famous part ought to be fun. I wish I could be down there with you and your mom and all.”

I promised to keep her up-to-date every day from now on. Trippy was lobbying for another trip to Florida for her graduation from eighth grade. Her mother said the weather was awful in Florida in the summer and no one in their right mind would want to go there but if that was what she wanted. . . . Did Lizzie think her mother would let her come again?

“Of course she is welcome,” Mom said. “It's important to hold on to old friends.”

And speaking of old friends, a big surprise came in the snail mail. A letter from Tony! His dad had come home from the broadcast studio in Madison with the news right off the wire from the AP. That stands for the Associated Press. Tony said the story of my abduction was sick, really sick. He said it was boss, a hundred times bigger than the little kid stuff we had done like tying our sleds to his dad's car bumper, bigger than trying to sniff homemade snuff. It made him feel way boss to be my old friend. And he hadn't forgotten those two candy bars. He wrote to me snail mail, just addressed to Woodvale, FL, with its zip code, because he didn't have my email but here was his. I emailed him a quick note saying more to come.

This was what being famous felt like and except for hearing from Tony, I hated it. The whole next week I cringed every time some kid at school would tell me she read the whole story in the
South Florida Gazette
or something. I just wanted to be normal again, or as normal as an eleven-and-a-half-year-old girl in a wheelchair who is graduating from eighth grade in couple of months can be.

Josh was the only one who didn't badger me with questions. In fact he didn't ask a single one. But I asked him to ask his dad when Digger would get out of the hospital and he wheeled up to me the next day and said, “Good news.”

We were just on our way to the cafeteria for lunch. “The angioplasty was a piece of cake according to the cardio.” (That's med-speak for cardiologist.) “They put in two stents—you know, those little mesh things that hold the arteries open—and got him up that afternoon. He only has to stay overnight and then they'll discharge him.”

“So then he won't just have another heart attack?”

“Nope. He should be good to go, but he has to show up three times a week for six weeks for cardio rehab.”

“What's that?”

“It's like a class for people who've had heart attacks and are now recovered but they have to work out on exercise bikes to get their heart rate up and learn how to eat right and stuff like that.”

“Poor Digger! No more jelly doughnuts.”

“No, but he got his life back.”

Speaking of hearts, mine was just about broken by Josh's big news. He's been accepted by Phillips Andover Academy, which is a fancy prep school way up in Massachusetts. Josh claims it isn't fancy at all and that they have a very
diverse
student body which Graver doesn't have—though we do have two Indians from India in our school and one of them, Vijay in the class below us, is so smart it's scary. “If you do well at a prep school like Andover your chances of getting into a really first-rate college are very good,” Josh said.

“Because you want to be a doctor, like your dad?”

“Well, that's a long way off. But when I get there I want to specialize in CP and other things like it. You can specialize in neurology and study what shuts down in the brain and try to figure out why.”

I didn't say anything but I was thinking how much I'd miss him.

“But we have the whole summer to hang out,” he said as we rolled through the cafeteria line, choosing chicken fingers and chili.

“I'm going to stay at Graver right through high school because I need to stay in a warm climate.”

Josh found the right thing to say. “There're lots of top-notch colleges in the South.”

“Trippy is coming down for two weeks and right after we graduate. Mom is going to drive us all the way to the Georgia primate refuge where the tamarins are. She said we could spend a day there to watch how they're being rehabilitated. I wish you could come, Josh.”

“I bet I could talk Mom into it.” He reached his plate out for a chicken finger. “You want one of these? They're full of trans fat.”

“Oh, sweet. I mean about coming to Georgia. And yuck, no. I'll take the chili.”

“And what about the bear cubs? Do you know what happened to them?” I hadn't thought about Buddy and Blossom since the abduction what with everything else that was going on.

“Brianna is coming over for supper tonight and I'm sure she'll have some news.”