“This is Aristotle speaking to Luke, even from beyond the grave,” I said, picking up the square. “Telling him that his father wasn’t weak or a liar or a murderer. Telling him that peace can be as strong and brave as anything.”
“If only he could’ve gotten his message to Luke,” lamented Margaret.
“Arisotle couldn’t. But we will!” I cried. “We’ll save Lucas Biggs, and we’ll save your dad!”
Grandpa Joshua smiled. “We just might,” he said.
I guess Margaret and I should’ve seen what was coming next, since Judge Biggs had such a long and distinguished history of ignoring evidence. But we didn’t. We foolishly thought he’d be as anxious to get Aristotle’s message as we were to deliver it. So we ran home and dialed the courthouse.
Of course, a guy like the Honorable Judge Lucas Biggs doesn’t answer his own telephone.
We asked the voice on the other end if we could make an appointment to see the judge.
Were we a colleague in the judiciary? wondered the voice.
No, Margaret and I had to admit. We weren’t. But we had something really important to tell Judge Biggs.
Were we a municipal, county, state, or federal official?
No. But this was information he’d definitely want to hear.
Were we an attorney?
No. But this had to do with one of his cases.
Were we with the newspaper?
Not exactly. But in addition to affecting one of his cases, the case of John O’Malley, no less, what we had to say was going to change the judge’s entire life.
Not exactly with the newspaper? Then exactly who were we with?
Uh. Actually one of us was John O’Malley’s daughter and the other one was her friend Charlie. Oh. And we also had Charlie’s grandfather on standby—he used to be the judge’s best friend back when they were thirteen; he was sitting on the bed folding his laundry and listening. And he said—
Click. BZZZZZZZZZ . . .
Grandpa Joshua said we’d have a better chance of cornering the judge if he didn’t come with us. So Margaret and I took the Quaker star, hiked downtown, and parked ourselves by the courthouse door.
It wasn’t until three hours later, after the sun had set, that the judge came out. Margaret hollered his name.
At first, I thought he was playing a game, which seemed odd, since the guy was nearly ninety and not exactly known for his sense of humor. “Who said that?” demanded Judge Biggs, staring through Margaret and me like we were ghosts.
“Judge Biggs,” panted Margaret excitedly. “Look!” She fumbled in her pockets for the star, but she was nervous.
“I have no time to waste,” roared Judge Biggs, focusing his eyes on her at last, “on the children of criminals.”
Carefully removing his gaze from Margaret and her trembling hands, he strode toward a colossal black car waiting at the curb. I took a deep breath and jumped in his way. And to my horror, the judge looked at me. His eyes searched my face curiously as if I’d just stepped out of a forest to bring him news from a faraway civilization. But abruptly, he changed his mind about hearing my news and turned away.
“If they come near the courthouse again,” snarled Judge Biggs to a bailiff hurrying up, “arrest them.” And he folded himself up behind the wheel of his black Cadillac and drove off.
“Lucas Biggs,” explained Grandpa Joshua when we told him what’d happened, “has been dealing in lies so long that he’s lost faith in the power of truth, lost it so long ago that he’s forgotten how to see the truth even when it’s right in front of him.”
“But we’ll restore his faith,” said Margaret matter-of-factly, smoothing the Quaker star on her knee, “when we show him this.”
I reached out, and she handed it to me. “But,” I mused, “if Grandpa’s right, he won’t look until he gets his faith back, and if Margaret’s right, he won’t get his faith back until he looks!”
“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 l
ight, 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 tha
t 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?”
For a second, Charlotte seemed to deflate. Then she gathered herself, ran her hand over her messy, beautiful hair, and started to talk.
“My grandmother took her baby and left her husband because he wasn’t the man she thought he was. I guess he put on a good act there for a while, but he turned out to be rotten. So rotten that when she left him, she dropped his last name like a dirty rag and left it behind, too.”
Even though I had no idea of what was coming next, a shiver went up my spine.
“That name was Biggs,” said Charlotte. “Judge Lucas Biggs is my grandfather.”
That night, the moon was nowhere in sight, and the stars over The Octagon looked like shoals of fish, so silver, densely packed, and swirling. Charlie and I lay on our backs, taking in the sky, and talking about what we—a “we” that now included not just me, Charlie, and Grandpa Joshua, but Charlotte, too—should do next.
“He might not agree to see her,” I said, deciding to go ahead and set the worst possibility out there right away. “I mean, he never tried to see her grandmother or her mother or her, not in all those years.”