Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin

Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin

Author:Maxine Kumin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: lizzie!, maxine kumin, YA, fiction, diary, handicapped, disabilities, zoo animals, accident, kidnapping, mystery, young adult, friendship, family, gender, elliott gilbert
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2014-04-28T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 13

Well, the next day right after Mom drove me home from school, there was Digger dressed in his chief of police uniform again, waiting with two police officers in front of our cottage. In my whole life this has never happened to me before. For just a second I thought they had come to arrest me because I knew about Julio from the day Trippy and I discovered the warehouse and I hadn’t told right away, and that the woman officer was there to strip-search me before they put me in a jail cell.

But it turned out they only wanted to interview me and Mom (which of course should be Mom and me), because we had both met Jesús Ernesto Blanco, who said to call him Jeb.

Mom invited them in and we all sat in a row in the living room as dumb as doorstops and then the male officer, who said to call him Officer Frank for Frank Franklin, began.

“Now Lizzie, your mother has described how you and she first met Mr. Blanco. Do you remember anything special about him?”

So I had to tell about the royal-blue shirt with some sort of monogram and the shoes with tassels. And the blue eyes and the rimless glasses that made him look like a professor. And then I said that I thought I knew him from somewhere else, but when I said so he said he had the kind of face that everybody thought looked like somebody else. In Philadelphia he said a man stopped him on the street and was positive Jeb Blanco was his second cousin.

“You’re very observant,” Officer Frank said and I saw his lips were twitching with what I thought was a smile. He was scribbling away in his notebook. “I must ask you not to divulge this information to the press, do you understand what that means?”

Of course I knew the word divulge. It has a neat origin from the Latin di-vulgare, to spread among the people—that’s where we get the word vulgar too, but I also knew I hadn’t divulged anything.

I suddenly had a flashback to two men I saw on the jetty where one was fishing, or maybe just pretending to be fishing while he waited for his buddy, and the other one was picking his way out to visit him. I was watching through my binocs and I thought to myself that the visiting man looked familiar, and my heart started to pound. Could it be Jeb Blanco! But I was too flustered inside to say anything to Officer Frank. “You understand, Mr. Blanco is now a person of interest.”

I waited for my heart to slow down and then I looked at Mom. I asked her, “Did you tell about what Henry said? About the plan to give away the land and all?”

“Yes, I reported the entire conversation.”

“So why don’t we move on?” the woman officer said. Her name was Officer Brianna Hermann Kasperowicz and it barely fit on her yellow metal name tag.



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