A Girl Named Digit (8 page)

“Did you notice any erratic behavior?” Veronica’s face went blank again, so the reporter went on. “Anything different from normal?”

“Well yeah, there was that weird thing in Schulte’s class, where Mr. Schulte was upset and she ran out of class.” The proverbial light bulb, though dim in this group, lit up over Olive’s head.

Veronica caught on. “That was really strange, or erotic as you say. Plus I heard he called her at home after that.”

Kat finally got it. “And she missed school for the rest of the week. Has anyone like even questioned him?”

Cliff looked back into the camera, looking like he’d cracked the case. “You heard it here. Potential foul play in the disappearance of the Higgins girl. Leaves parents wondering how safe their children are at even the toniest of public schools. Back to you, Allison.”

On our second full day of captivity, the first set of documents arrived with cold toast and warm yogurt. We had two cups of gas station coffee with powdered milk and Sweet ’n Low. While the food was disgusting, the documents gave us a renewed sense of purpose—in short, something to do.

“We might as well dig in,” John said, running his fingers through his nearly dirty hair. “If not into the food, then into these.” He picked up an accordion file full of paper. Not stapled, not binder-clipped, not even rubber-banded to suggest order or segments. It was a mess. Dig in was all we could do.

I gulped down a bit of yucky coffee and boldly announced, “I’ll start.” But as I began with the first page and then flipped through the rest, I was shocked to see gibberish. They were all in some sort, or several sorts, of European, Middle Eastern, and Slavic languages. “What are we supposed to do with this stuff?”

“I think the plan is that I translate and you decode.” John reached across our uneaten breakfast and took the pile from my hands.

“How are you going to do that? Did they send an FBI language decoder ring?”

“I speak most of these languages. I traveled a lot as a kid.” He didn’t look up. I recognized in him that spark of diving into something you love. It was as if I were no longer there. Which of course made him all the more attractive.

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. Let me get a few of these translated. These are mostly in Portuguese, Czech, and Farsi, and then you can do your thing.” All business.

“But how could you . . . ?” I gave up. I didn’t want to disturb him by turning on the TV, so I decided to try for a little personal hygiene. I crammed myself into the tiny bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth. I undressed and washed myself as well as I could with a sink full of lukewarm water and a small washcloth. We seemed to be sharing a bar of soap that had both an industrial fragrance and a prior owner. Could the FBI have coughed up a new bar of soap for our efforts?

When I was done, I got dressed and lay back on my sleeping bag, watching John work and playing math games in my head. I wondered how many cubic inches of air it took to fill a room that was twelve by six feet, adding in the two-by-three-foot bathroom and subtracting for the three pieces of furniture and the masses of our bodies.

Just as I was close to the answer, my back pocket started to vibrate. I nearly jumped, hoping that John hadn’t heard that faint
zzzzz
sound. Who in the world would be calling a kidnapped girl? I got up and went back into the bathroom to check it out.

“Olive Grossman Text.” I stared at my phone for a few seconds like it was going to bite me. Was this an old text coming in, or was she seriously texting me to crack the kidnapping case? I opened the text and read,
I think this is bullshit. Where are u?
I started to write back,
No. No. The kidnapping is legit. Promise.
But I couldn’t be texting her if I was really bound and gagged somewhere. So I just turned off my phone and hoped she’d lose interest.

John looked up as I came out of the bathroom. “You’re good to go.”

“Can’t the FBI get a computer program to do the translating?” I was looking through the sheets of handwritten translations he’d given me and noticed his odd but highly regular printing. Everything about it was so uniform that it almost looked as if it could be its own font. I could imagine it on the big list of fonts on my laptop: John Bennett Bold.

“They can and they do. But conversations like these are really hard to translate that way. They are so conversational and the people speak so heavily in idioms that you really need a translator who has spent time in the specific area.”

“Like what?” I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he knew all these languages. I felt like quizzing him, but he wasn’t in the mood to be made a show of.

“I can’t think of one. You get started, and I’ll translate the next batch.” I decided to stay on my “bed” to read. John had commandeered the food crate for his feet, and I had no other place to recline.

The documents were transcripts from intercepted cell phone conversations. I expected to read this:

Bad Guy 1: So we’re all set. I’ve got the dynamite, and you bring the matches
.

Bad Guy 2: Terminal Eight, JFK, see you there at ten a.m.

Bad Guy 1: Bye-bye
.

Bad Guy 2: Later
.

Not exactly. I started reading through the most mundane conversations ever. “Honey, will you pick up my dry cleaning?” (Evil dry cleaning?) “Basketball practice was changed to Wednesday night.” (Explosive basketballs?) “They have heirloom tomatoes at the bodega on Seventy-seventh and Lexington.” (Rocket launcher tomatoes?) . . . Seriously.

John was still furiously translating, like this all meant something. After about twenty pages, I had to ask: “What are we doing?”

Not looking up. “It’s a process. We have to get through these and look for some kind of code. These guys know they are being monitored, so they have to speak in code. Isn’t that what you do?” Now he was looking at me, and I started feeling a little defensive.

“What I do? I go to school; I go to parties. Let’s not start saying this is what I do. I didn’t ask for this.”

Half smile. Zing. “Back to work, Buffy. Time to leave the mall and figure out how to stop the vampires.”

Ha-ha. I decided to try. If heirloom tomatoes were bombs and the bodega was a bomb-making place (probably not the technical term), then they were on sale?

Day two went on like this, with me searching for something that wasn’t there. He translated pages and passed them to me. I read them, saw nothing of note, and placed them in an orderly pile. I waited for more pages and monitored the crease between his dark eyebrows, his utter concentration. The brow gave way to his wide dark eyes, which sat on the cheekbones, which led to the jaw, which acted as a frame for his perfect lips. Had I gone mad?

My brain had obviously been compromised. I didn’t know if it was the crappy food, the lack of sleep, the threat to my life, or some narcotic being pumped into our cell. But at the end of the day, I knew I had to regroup. He’d barely looked at me all day, and I was fabricating some kind of mad crush. Enough.

“I’m going to sleep. More tomorrow.” I went to the other side of our tiny room and arranged my air mattress against the wall. I got in my sleeping bag and took mental inventory of the situation. I was sleeping in my clothes; I needed a shower; I was hungry—but not hungry enough to eat another turkey sandwich. And I was having a strangely fun time.

I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and turned on my phone, just to make sure it was still charged.

Olive Grossman Text (4):

1. I went to your house yesterday to see your parents. Danny was by the pool totally relaxed. And I’m supposed to think you’re kidnapped?!

2. Kat thinks you’re in rehab.

3. Danny told me not to worry about you and we swam. I wore your blue bikini, love it!

4. Wore it home, btw. Give it to you when you get back. Ur coming back, right?

Three more days passed as the crack crime-fighting team of Farrah and John got nothing but the giggles. All the documents were translated, and we read them over and over, eventually acting out the conversations like we were in the fifth grade play. A few more days of this and I was sure we’d be in a full-blown musical production of
Terror in Terminal 8.

Farrah: No, I didn’t hear about the schedule change
.

John: Well, they e-mailed you
. . .

Farrah: You can’t expect me to run home and check my e-mail in the middle of the day
.

Scintillating theater. We read the transcripts of two old guys talking about how the entrance to the park had been closed off at Seventy-sixth Street that morning. We were a mother and a son talking about the cousin who showed up for Sunday dinner looking a little high. John read his parts with different accents to keep them fresh. So what had started as Czech had turned into a middle-class Brit or an Oklahoma oil baron. In short, we were getting nowhere.

Our favorites were Scarlet and Luke, who were in the throes of a secret romance and speaking Portuguese. There seemed to be someone named Britney (I am
not
making this up—John translated it into the spelling of the troubled diva herself), who was helping them sneak around. It read like a romance novel, and we were really getting into it.

Scarlet: Hey. I was hoping you’d call
.

Luke: Can you talk
?

Scarlet: When can I see you? I really think this is the right thing. I can’t think about anything else
.

Luke: So you’ve made up your mind
?

Scarlet: Yes. I’ll try to come see you tonight, but if I can’t get there, don’t think it’s because I’m not committed
.

On and on this goes. By the seventh transcript, we’d gotten through five weeks of these conversations. They’d met out several times, never saying where. Britney knew all about it, but they seemed a little paranoid about being followed. At the bottom of Scarlet and Luke’s transcripts, there was the tag “UES, NYC,” and the time of day. John clued me in that UES was Upper East Side, pleased that he’d cracked it and I hadn’t. What did I know? I’d never been east of Arizona.

Scarlet: I really need to see you
.

Luke: What’s wrong
?

Scarlet: There’s something going on with Britney. She’s a cheater. We can’t trust her anymore
.

Luke: Of course, she’s a cheater—that’s her whole game. Why are you acting like that’s news
?

Scarlet: Because now she’s cheating on us. Britney’s a first-class slut, and I can prove it
.

Luke: You can
?

Scarlet: Enough to get her messed up for good. I found it in an e-mail; she sent it to try to show me how much support there is for what we’re doing. But it shows a lot more than that. I’ll give you what I have, but I have to explain it to you. I think there’s a way we can use it to take care of those left behind
.

Luke: Shhh, honey
.

Scarlet: Right. Meet me at seven
.

Later
. . .

Luke: Where were you? I waited until nine
!

Scarlet: They’re watching and listening all the time. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to meet you
.

Luke: You have something to give me. Proof
.

Scarlet: Of course, it’s packed up. You’ll have it
.

Luke: Are you crying
?

Scarlet: I’m fine. It’s just . . . just that I have it all packed in his diaper bag. It contains everything you’ll need to take care of him after I’m
. . .

Luke: Careful, honey
.

Scarlet: Sorry
.

John and I had moved our armchairs together, sharing the food crate as a footrest and awkwardly leaning in so we could both read the transcript at the same time. I took the pages and straightened them on my lap. “This kind of flies off the rails as a newly blossoming love story. There’s a baby? And a diaper bag? Full of what? Diapers?”

John got up to stretch his legs. We’d been reading for hours without a break. “Probably full of evidence against Britney. And I agree—the drama is too high even for new romance. And all of a sudden he’s calling her ‘honey’?”