Saving Lucas Biggs (23 page)

“And unfortunately,” said Grandpa Joshua ruefully, “I think we’re
both
right.”

Margaret had told me how, back in 1938, Grandpa Joshua set off a blasting cap behind the old infirmary to distract everybody while she ran down the hall to spring Aristotle Agrippa. And it sounded like the plan had worked fine, right up to the part where Aristotle refused to have any part of it.

So I devised a plot of my own, along similar lines, to get into the courthouse to see the judge. I convinced myself I’d better not tell Margaret about it, because the last thing she needed was to get in even deeper trouble with Judge Biggs. Plus, in the back of my mind, I knew if I let her in on the plan, there was a good chance she’d say it was a terrible idea and tell me not to do it.

And I wanted to do it.

I hid behind the Victory courthouse in the rain holding a Green Giant smoke bomb left over from the Fourth of July. The bomb was my version of blasting caps. The commotion it caused would allow me to slip in, corner Judge Biggs, and jam that Quaker star in front of his nose for him to see, really see. If I had to tie him to his chair and prop his eyes open with toothpicks, well, I would run right over to Safeway and buy a box.

I went through my soggy matches in about forty seconds without raising so much as a spark, and the rain fell harder every second, and as I eyed the electrical outlet by the back door, I wondered if it would be possible to light the fuse of my smoke bomb by yanking a coat hanger out of the nearest trash can, jamming it into the socket, and using the resulting sparks to light the sopping fuse. I paused briefly to reflect that I’d come to the point in the story where some guy with a square jaw usually mutters, “That’s so crazy it just might work,” and then, since there wasn’t a guy like that in sight, I went ahead and stuck the coat hanger into the socket. Of course, the sparks that spewed out didn’t light the sopping fuse any better than my matches had, but I personally got a pretty good jolt, and I blew every fuse in the old-fashioned courthouse, plus I saw a few stars, and maybe a couple of planets.

While pandemonium reigned inside, I shook the constellations out of my brain and staggered upstairs to the judge’s office. I found him hunched over in the dim rainy-day light filtering through his window, oblivious to all the noise, scratching away at something on his desk. Hearing me come in, he furtively stuffed whatever it was beneath a law book at his elbow.

When he saw who I was, a smile spread across his face. I understood what Grandpa Joshua meant about that smile. It was yellow, foul, and weary, with a whiff of boredom, a dash of distaste, and a hint of anger, but no trace of humor, and in the middle of it all lurked a colossal empty blank. I felt like a January wind had poured off the side of Mount Hosta and swirled down the back of my shirt.

“Don’t fool yourself into thinking that it makes one iota of difference,” he warned me, “that I was once friends with your grandfather.”

“Could you just look—” I pleaded, spreading the Quaker star in front of him on his desk.

“I’ve seen all I need to see,” hissed the judge.

“But you don’t even know what it is!” I insisted. “It’s from your—”

“I’ve seen all I
ever
need to see!” bellowed Judge Biggs. “Now leave before I have you locked up!”

“Please—”

“Bailiff!” he roared.

I turned to go. I picked up the Quaker star.

But that wasn’t all I picked up.

What in the world could possibly embarrass a man like Judge Biggs? I wondered. What would he need to stash under his books when somebody walked into the room like he was a fifth grader hiding a love note?

Why not pilfer it and see?

Margaret

2014

CHARLIE AND I WERE DOWN but not out. No way. We just needed a little time to regroup and strategize a plan for getting Judge Biggs to listen to us. We tried to think like generals or chess players, although sometimes, I admit, we just had conversations like this one:

Charlie: “I bet if the judge’s got a light inside him, like the Quakers say, it’s a bare-minimum light, like a microscopic bioluminescent shrimp at the bottom of the ocean.”

Me: “A microscopic bioluminescent shrimp that’s been swallowed by a giant sea slug at the bottom of the ocean.”

Charlie: “A single-celled bioluminescent bacterium stuck to the butt of the bioluminescent shrimp that’s been swallowed by a giant sea slug at the bottom of the ocean.”

Etc.

And then the
Victory Voice
published my letter, my thank-you note to the town of Victory.

For days after the letter came out in the paper, our phone rang off the hook with nice, hugely embarrassing calls from friends, neighbors, teachers, relatives. My dad even somehow got hold of the letter and used the one short phone call he got that week to say that he loved me harder than rocks and older than stars and bigger than time. After every phone call, my mom either told me she was proud of me or just
looked
it, and even though I was happy that all this was happening, I flat-out couldn’t wait for it to be over.

I’m sure it would’ve been over long before the end of that week, too, except that even our small-town newspaper has an online edition, and the letter went viral. Modestly viral. Very modestly. I wasn’t even in the same viral universe as the cranky-faced cat or the flash mob marriage proposal or any of the bazillion cute puppies or hip-hopping toddlers, but the
Voice
did forward me a bunch of emails from folks who had read and liked my letter, some of them from places I’d only ever read about in books, like Prince Edward Island, Canada, and Brooklyn, New York.

Not from Providence, Rhode Island, though. I didn’t get an email from there. What I got instead, one Saturday evening when Charlie and I were sitting in my family room playing chess and brainstorming, for the umpteenth time, how to get that talisman in front of Judge Biggs’s big, mean face, was a knock on the front door.

It was a woman in a bright blue sweater with bright blue eyes to match and wild dark hair wrangled into a French twist, curls sproinging out all around her face, which happened to be just exactly the kind of hair I’d always wished I had. She was young and tall and smart-looking.

The first thing she said was “I swear I’m not a stalker.”

She put up her hand, like a person taking a vow, and laughed a nervous little laugh.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s good, I guess.”

Then she tipped her head to one side, thinking.

“Well, I am a total stranger from out of town who tracked down where you live and came knocking on your door out of the blue, so I guess . . .”

“You kind of are a stalker?”

She laughed again.

My mom’s voice came from the kitchen: “Margaret, who is it?”

Then Charlie came up next to me and said, “Margaret, your mom wants to know who it is.”

We looked at the woman, who put out her hand for me to shake, which, after just a second’s hesitation, I did. Even if she was a stalker, she seemed like a nice one.

“I’m Charlotte,” she said. “I read your letter. My, uh, my family used to live around here.”

“I’m Margaret,” I said, “and this is Charlie.”

“Hi,” said Charlie. “Wait. Did you say ‘Charlotte’?”

“Yes,” said Charlotte.

“So?” I said.

Charlie stiffened and flushed. “Uh, nothing. Nope. That name doesn’t ring a bell at all. No, sir.”

“Weirdo,” I muttered, poking him in the ribs.

“Margaret?” called my mother.

“It’s Charlotte,” I yelled over my shoulder. “She read my letter. Her family used to live around here.”

“Well, invite her in, for heaven’s sake,” yelled my mother. “You’re probably letting moths in.”

Right on cue, a gray moth floated past Charlotte and through the front door.

In a matter of minutes, Charlotte was sitting in our living room with a cup of coffee and a chunk of my mom’s shortbread in front of her, explaining her connection to Victory, which at first seemed like not much of a connection at all, since both she and her mom before her had grown up in Rhode Island, and her father was from Madrid, Spain. Charlotte explained that she had just finished graduate school back east with a degree in ecology. She told us quite a lot about herself, actually, except for one thing.

“Charlotte, why don’t you tell us what brought you here?” asked my mother, when Charlotte had stopped for breath. My mom’s voice was polite, but she had an expression on her face that I recognized, one that said,
Answering this question is not optional
.

Charlotte’s eyes widened for a second, and she said, in a fluttery way, “Oh, that! Ha ha. Yes, you must be thinking, ‘Who is this crazy girl coming all the way from Rhode Island?’”

My mother smiled, faintly. “Something like that,” she said.

Charlotte’s own smile faded, and she sighed.

“Right. Look,” she said, leaning forward, “my grandparents were married here in Victory, and my grandmother left before my mother turned a year old. Left her house and her husband and never looked back. She hated this place. My mother never knew her own father, and she never came back to Victory, not once. I swore I never would either. And then I saw your letter, Margaret.”

Her eyes when she looked at me were like pieces of summer sky.

“If I were in your situation, I would’ve been too mad to write a letter like that. I think I would’ve wanted to do what my grandma did, turn my back on the whole place. But you, you were so bighearted, so thankful.”

I wanted to tell her about how it was a matter of simple math: good + good + good + good > BAD. But I didn’t want to interrupt.

“And I realized that that was something I wanted to learn,” Charlotte said, “so I started by learning everything I could about you and your family.”

Charlotte shook her head, making her curls jump around.

“It was so wrong, what happened to your dad,” she said.

“It sure was,” I said.

“I am so sorry.”

It was strange; she didn’t say it the way people usually did, to mean she was sad for us. She said it like something was her fault.

“Why?” said my mother, puzzled. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Maybe not, but, well—” Charlotte took a deep breath and said, “I came here to face my grandmother’s demons, I guess. Or demon. And to help.”

“With what?” I asked.

“Freeing your father, of course,” said Charlotte, like that should’ve been obvious.

Charlie and I looked at each other, startled.

“Well, that’s very kind of you,” began my mother, “but frankly, I don’t—”

That’s as far as she got before Charlie cut her off by almost shouting, “Margaret and I need to talk to Lucas Biggs, the judge from her father’s trial. Talk to him in person.”

I stared at him, stunned. How could he blurt that out in front of a total stranger
and
with my mom sitting right there, my mom who knew nothing about what he and I had been up to? The really strange thing, though, was that as soon as he said it, the air in the room changed until it felt almost like time travel; everything lit up, shimmering, and
full
. Charlotte’s eyes flooded with tears, and she pressed her hands to her mouth.

When she took her hands away, she said, “Oh, Charlie. I am either the best person for that job or the very, very worst.”

Before I could really register this, my mother was turning to me and Charlie in amazement.

“Judge Biggs?” she said. “Charlie. Margaret. Why on earth?”

Now that Charlie had let the cat out of the bag, I made the split-second decision not to try to stuff it back in.

“We can change his mind,” I told her. “I know it.”

She reached out and touched my hair. “Oh, honey, if only it were that simple.”

“No,” I said, impatiently. “It’s not just that we think we’re such nice kids that we can talk the big, bad judge into releasing Dad. Charlie and I have something real to show Judge Biggs that will make him see things in a new way. I promise you.”

“What is it?” asked my mom.

This time Charlie managed to keep silent, thank goodness. But I wished with all my heart that we could tell her. She definitely deserved to hear the whole story, but I just wasn’t ready to tell her about the time travel. She knew about the O’Malley family quirk, of course. My dad had told her long ago, before they’d gotten married, but if she knew I’d gone back on the forswearing, she might be so mad and worried that she’d watch me like a hawk, which would make it way too hard to do what Charlie and I needed to do (whatever that was) to get my dad free.

“I can’t tell you right now,” I said. “But I need you to trust me.”

My mother sat very still for a moment, considering this, and her face was awfully stern, but then she took a deep breath, cupped my cheek in her hand, and smiled.

“Oh my girl,” she said, “
that
I can do.”

I swore to myself that someday, just as soon as all of this was over, I would tell her everything.

“But Charlotte, what did you mean?” I asked. “When you said that you were either the best person or the worst to get us in to see the judge?”