Read Online Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin - Free Book Online Page B

I’ll be right back.”
    It was no use saying I want to come too, so I just nodded. I could see a little shack across the road. Probably that was where Jeb Blanco had been hiding Julio. But it was frustrating not knowing the whole story.
    They were gone quite a while. I heard them talking but as soon as they came close to the car, they stopped. Digger looked very grim.
    To my astonishment Julio was coming with us. “Where are you taking him? Are you taking him to jail?”
    â€œNo, chica . I am taking him to be placed in protective custody. I am going to keep him in a separate location until we can get a lawyer to untangle this mess.”
    â€œRob the Scarecrow? The lawyer who works in the same office as Lia’s boyfriend?”
    â€œVery possibly Robert Jacobson will take the case. Until then, Lizzie, I am swearing you to secrecy.”
    â€œYes, but tell me . . .”
    â€œRaise your right hand and swear.”
    â€œI do, I do! Now tell me.”
    â€œIt’s privileged information, chiquita . I can’t tell you.”
    â€œNot anything about his background, like his place of birth and so on?”
    Digger look very grave. “No, mi amor, not even that.”
    On the drive back to Woodvale nobody spoke. It was eerie, like someone had died. I found out later that Digger had examined the two dead tamarins on the floor of the warehouse. Julio told him he thought they died from fright when Jeb and his buddies were stuffing them into burlap bags to take them to the plane. They were probably the same two men who drove the car out to meet Blanco’s plane every time he landed in Henry’s cow pasture.
    Digger took me to our cottage and waited until I had gotten in. Two minutes after he drove away with Julio, Mom returned. She was very cheerful. “Guess what? The doctor in the emergency room was very nice and we didn’t have to wait very long at all. He put Henry’s mother on a diet for her blood pressure and ordered medication for her swollen legs and Henry has a number to call to tell the doctor how she is doing.
    A miracle,” Mom said, rolling her eyes, and I knew she was remembering what we went through after my accident. Just thinking the word hospital makes me smell it all over again, the ironing-board smell like when a shirt is being pressed, the fresh-scrubbed smell that pricks your eyes open when they push your bed down the hallway as the lights go by overhead. Two weeks in the ICU on a rotating bed. Two more weeks in the neuro unit. Three weeks in the rehab hospital. I don’t usually let myself go back to those times. There were a lot of days when all I wanted to do was sleep. But that doesn’t work in a rehab hospital. In rehab they are waking you up all the time to go to PT. You have to get up into a sitting position, you have to learn how to transfer to a wheelchair by sliding onto a board and then sliding from the board to the chair. When your arms get strong enough, you can transfer just using your deltoids and pectorals—or whatever they’re called—without any board. I was terrible at it at first. I cried a lot in the beginning. Now it’s easy.
    Sometimes I still cry in secret, though and a lot of it is about how good my mom was to me. How the accident was my own fault for being in such a hurry to show off and now I would have to pay for it the rest of my life. And even though I say I don’t care about not having a father, I sometimes cry about that too.
    Mom took leave from her teaching job at the university and came to stay with me every single day. She brought piles of books on my favorite subjects—horses and exotic animals and one by one the Harry Potter books. When I didn’t feel like reading myself she’d read to me. She was always upbeat.
    Even before we got back to Woodvale that day I could see that Digger was different now. He was still my grandfather but suddenly he had turned very professional. He had