Saving Lucas Biggs (17 page)

Margaret flinched at the sound of that.

“But the thing is, Luke
knows
his dad would never kill anybody,” I said after I thought it over some more. “Even if he really
does
think Aristotle is a weakling. Even if he
has
been mad for so long because Aristotle wouldn’t let him fight that it’s done something to his brain. Even if he
wants
to believe his dad’s way failed. Underneath it all, there’s no way Luke could think Aristotle would commit murder and run out on everybody in Canvasburg. Luke loves his dad. I know he does. He
has
to.”

That’s when the terrible look crossed Margaret’s face.

“Josh?” she said shakily.

“Yeah?”

“
You
have to love your father,” she said. “
I
have to love my father. It’s who we are. It’s the way we’re made. But what if Luke—”

I said, “No.”

“I hate to say this as much as you hate to hear it, but listen,” she pressed. “What if our plan works? What if we get Aristotle out, send him across those mountains into New Mexico and bring Luke to him, and Luke won’t go? What if he crosses over to Biggs’s side anyway?”

“No.”

“Josh,” she said.
“What if saving Aristotle doesn’t save your friend?”

She was one tough cookie. Not afraid to look the worst directly in the eye. “Stop,” I pleaded. “It will. I know it will.
I know Luke
. Luke is good. I feel it like I feel my own bones inside me.”

At this, Margaret O’Malley stared at me like I’d just hung the moon. Then she smiled and said, “That’s good enough for me.”

Margaret

1938

OUR PLAN TO SAVE ARISTOTLE was crazy, and the craziest thing about it was that, except for two unexpected bumps in the road—later, I’d think of them as Bump One and Bump Two, like something out of Dr. Seuss—the plan went just the way we’d hoped it would.

Between the effects of overstaying, which were getting worse by the minute, and Aunt Bridey’s scorching green stare down with the nurse on duty, it wasn’t hard to get me admitted to the infirmary, where I was one of two patients, the other being easy to find since his room was at the other end of the second-floor hallway from mine and was marked with a sign that said prisoner.

Once I was there, the plan went like clockwork: at nightfall, when the orderly dimmed the lights so that we all could sleep (including him, it turned out, in a chair outside Aristotle’s door), I sneaked downstairs, located the night nurse (she was in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and listening to a radio soap opera), slipped past her to the back door, opened it, collected the rope that Josh had left in the milk crate, gave one mourning dove call, got an answering one from Josh, went to my room, got under the blanket, which smelled so much like bleach my eyes watered, and waited.

At least I was supposed to wait, but it had been a while since I’d had any of Aunt Bridey’s tea or food—and the hospital food in 1938 made its twenty-first-century counterpart look like the food of the gods—so I was woozy and my head felt like someone was beating on it with a rubber mallet, and I dozed off. I woke up maybe half an hour later to find the light in my room burning and Bump One standing at the foot of my bed, looking for all the world like Aunt Bridey with a mustache.

I sat up and snatched my movie star sunglasses as fast as I could, but as I fumbled to slip them on, the mustachioed Aunt Bridey said, “Don’t bother. I’ve already seen them.”

“What do you mean?” I said in my best sweet-little-girl voice, which I had to admit wasn’t all that great. It didn’t help that my heart was bouncing around the inside of my chest like a demented frog.

Doc O’Malley, because who else could it have been, didn’t answer, just came to the side of my bed, whisked out a thermometer, shook it, and said, “Open.”

I opened and sat there with the thing clamped firmly under my tongue as the doc took my pulse and shone his flashlight into first one eye, then the other.

“Foolish girl,” he said, angrily, “foolish, foolish girl. Don’t you know you’re playing with fire?”

The first thing I thought of was the blasting caps, which Josh might have been planting in the milk crate even as I lay there, helpless. I started to speak, to tell the doc something like “Who, me? I hate explosions. I don’t even like to be in the same room with matches, sweet little girl that I am,” but Doc O’Malley gestured to the thermometer and gave one sharp shake of his head to shut me up.

“I hear you’re staying with my sister,” he said, grimly, “who is no doubt aiding and abetting in whatever desperately misguided scheme you’ve undertaken.”

He slid out the thermometer. Whatever he read on it made him make a
tsk
sound and look madder than ever, so it took me a second to realize what he’d just said.

“Your
sister
?” But of course Aunt Bridey was his sister. “But that makes you—”

“Don’t!” he barked. “Don’t tell me who you are. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

He was my great-grandfather. I’d known that, of course. The information had been rattling around inside my crowded brain for some time, but it was one thing to know a fact and a totally other thing to have it standing in the same room, taking your temperature and glaring at you.

“Look at your eyes, glowing like lanterns,” he said with disgust. “I saw my sister in this state often enough. You’ll feel even worse after your return home, and it will serve you right.”

He smacked the bedside table with his hand, making me jump.

“Good God, child! What is it? Are you just a fool? Or does no one in your time take the forswearing to heart?”

Before I could answer, he said, “No. Don’t answer that. I can’t know anything about who you are or where you’re from. All I know is that you must go back there, now. Tonight. This second, if possible.”

“But I can’t!” I cried. “I have to save my . . .”

The look on his face stopped me.

“Please,” I said, “I do take the forswearing to heart. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t a matter of life and death.”

Doc O’Malley gave a harsh laugh.

“Life and death. By traveling, you may be endangering more lives than you can comprehend. You are flying in the face of history!”

Maybe I was callous, but I couldn’t think about the lives I might be endangering. There just wasn’t room in my head. I could only think of my beautiful father in his bare cell facing certain death. And Aristotle doing the same thing a few doors down.

Aristotle! If anyone could help us free him, it was the doc. He was a doctor. Hadn’t he taken some kind of oath to keep people alive?

I took hold of the doctor’s coat sleeve and said, as fast as I could before he could stop me, “I need to free Aristotle Agrippa. Will you help me?”

The doc flew back like I’d bitten him. He clamped his hands over his ears.

“For God’s sake, child, don’t speak another word. Just go back to wherever you came from. I beg you. From this moment on, as soon as I exit this room,
you do not exist for me
.”

Without another glance in my direction, he switched off the light, walked out the door, and closed it soundlessly behind him.

I lay in the dark, shivering with fever and fear, cocooned inside the smelly blanket, waiting for whatever awful thing would happen next, but what happened was . . . exactly nothing. The hours dragged by, until I knew that the time for the next part of our plan must be drawing near. The overstaying had turned my fingers clumsy, but I managed to put on my shoes, pulled the heavy coil of rope out from where I’d hidden it under the bed, and clutched it to my chest, waiting, waiting.

Then—
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
The noise was thunderous, way louder and longer lasting than I’d expected. Josh said there’d be a small explosion, enough to get people running to discover the cause, but to me, it sounded like he’d just blown the back door off the place and the milk crate to smithereens.

Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, I slipped out into the hallway in time to see the orderly disappear at a run down the stairs; then I threw the rope in the wheelchair and tugged it—a big, brown, unwieldy wicker number—out of my room, ran with it down the hallway, and burst through Aristotle’s door.

He lay handcuffed to the bed, conscious but groggy, confused, and only slightly more lively than when I’d seen him last, bleeding on the parquet floor of the cigar parlor.

“Hello, Mr. Agrippa.” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you.”

“Who are you?” he asked, weakly, his hand pressed to the bandage on his head.

“We’re saving you,” I told him.

I had the urge to hug him, but there wasn’t time. There wasn’t a moment to lose. I whirled around, looking for a place to tie the rope, and found that, as Aunt Bridey had predicted, Aristotle’s metal bed was bolted to the floor. I tied the rope to one of its posts, using the knot Aunt Bridey had shown me. Then I unlatched and pushed open the casement window, and mourning doved at the top of my lungs.

For a terrible second, nothing happened, and then there was Josh, Aunt Bridey’s bolt cutters strapped to his back. He didn’t waste time waving up at me, just seized the bottom of the rope and started to climb. I held my breath, since this was the most uncertain part of the plan, relying as it did on the strength of one extremely scrawny, spaghetti-armed kid. Maybe it was adrenaline again, maybe it was because Josh had been a jewel thief or a spider in another life, but whatever it took to scramble up that wall, Josh must’ve had it, because in a surprisingly short time I was helping him over the sill and he was
in
!

I could hear voices outside the building and smell smoke, and I figured that we still had some time to work with, although not much. But we were almost there! All we needed to do was cut Aristotle’s handcuffs, help him into the wheelchair, and get him down the elevator, out the front door, and into the woods where the donkey waited to carry him to Aunt Bridey’s and then, as soon as possible, over the mountains to New Mexico, where we would reunite him with his son.

And that’s when we hit Bump Two.

Aristotle wouldn’t go.

As Josh began to wrangle with the bolt cutters, and I feverishly whispered a nutshell version of our plan into Aristotle’s one bandage-free ear, he reached over and took Josh gently by the wrist.

“No, Josh. I cannot go. Please leave before you are caught,” he said.

We stared at him.

“But you have to go!” Josh whispered. “They’ll kill you if you stay.”

“I don’t think so,” said Aristotle.

“No!” I said. “They will. We know they will!”

“The miners must not believe I would run. They will lose heart, and that must not happen. They must know I stood by them. Please, you go!”

Before I knew it was happening, I was crying. I grabbed Aristotle’s hand.

“Please, please, please come! You don’t know how much depends upon it.”

That’s when we heard the footsteps on the stairs.

“You’ll die!” cried Josh.

I’ve never seen anything as at peace as Aristotle’s face when he said, “Better to die than to run. Now, go.”

We went. What else was there to do? If we were caught, I might die in 1938. Josh might be sent to prison himself. At least if we were free, there was still a chance. Josh went first so that he could help me when I got to the end of the rope. My body throbbed, my head seethed with what felt like lava, and a few yards from the bottom, my arms just gave out. Josh didn’t so much catch me as break my fall, but he got up and was helping me half crawl, half stagger into the trees when I remembered the rope still tied to the bed. They’d probably already found it! And then they would come after us for sure.

“The rope!” I whispered. “It’ll give us away!”

“Oh no! Maybe I can go back for it.”

Josh and I spun wildly around—and froze.

The rope wasn’t dangling from the window anymore. Instead, someone was standing there, holding it bundled in his arms. I could see the man’s face clear as day because he was looking right at me. Doc O’Malley. Without a word, he dropped the bundle. It landed with a soft thud on the grass, and Josh ran and picked it up. I never took my eyes off the doc, my great-grandfather, taking care of me despite his better judgment. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, one that meant, “Go!” Then he pulled the window shut and vanished into the room.