The knots were tight. My numb fingers kept slipping on them. “You’re going to be okay, girl, it’ll be all right,” I crooned. I took out my picks and finally managed to pierce the heart of one of the knots. Hours went by or perhaps minutes—in the cold dank dark it wasn’t possible to count—but the threads came loose. I moved Bernie’s arms to her sides and began chafing her forearms and wrists, get the blood moving.
“We need to get out of here,” I said, “but it will help if we can find my phone and my gun.”
Bernie’s teeth were chattering. She was clinging to me, smelling sickly sweet, the symptom of shock.
“Who is he? Did you arrange to meet him here?”
“Non! Non, j’ai été stupide—”
“Bernie, my French is primitive. Tell me in English.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she whispered. “That I would show you—but I didn’t imagine—and the stadium, it’s so big and so dark. And then I saw the open door, and it was like the photo you brought home, and I thought, I will prove to her—to you—that she was a coward and a fool, I will find the journal of this Annie. And then he jumped on me, out of nowhere. I tried to fight, but he was too strong. He lives in here, he tied me to this shelf where he is living. He said no one looks behind here, even the men who come in every day to check on pipes and valves, they don’t know this little space exists, that I will die here.”
She gave a hysterical gulp and clung more tightly to me. “Then I heard you calling and I tried to get free, tried to call to you, I was so frightened, I thought you would leave and never know I was here, and then I fell off the shelf where he tied me.”
A homeless man in the bowels of Wrigley Field? Not so strange, maybe: I’ve encountered homeless families camping in the bottom of elevator shafts and in cardboard shanties by the river. Why not underneath a baseball park?
“Where’s your flashlight?” I asked.
“He stole it from me. He said his own flashlight is dead and mine is a good one.”
If he had set up housekeeping back here, he had to have some source of light. I gently removed Bernie’s clutch on my arms, moved her into the circle of my left arm, used the right hand to grope amid the detritus on the shelves. Something sticky, a mess of cloth that stank of stale grease. A matchbook. Yes, a matchbook.
I struck a flame and saw a jumble of partially eaten food, cups of beer, stadium seat cushions, a filthy blanket with the Cubs logo still showing faintly blue against the dirt.
The match went out. I lit another. In its brief life I saw a row of makeshift torches, rags wrapped around wooden spindles. I gave one to Bernie to hold and lit it with another match, lit a second for myself.
Bernie was trembling and weeping, but she obediently followed me into the body of the tunnel.
“Your homeless man locked us in and barricaded the door,” I said, “but I’m betting there’s a way out at the other end. I sent a message to your dad and to the police, that you’d been seen climbing into the stadium, so I’m hoping they’ll be here looking for you. But you and I are not going to wait around for someone else to rescue us.”
BEANBALL
Under the flickering light of greasy rags, we finally found my phone and gun. They had landed in the sludge under one of the cables, a couple of yards away from the perimeter I’d been patting. It would have been a long night in here with the rats. I wiped the phone on the underside of my jacket. It seemed to still be alive, but showed only 29 percent battery. I put it in airplane mode so it would stop wasting energy looking for a signal; I wouldn’t use the flashlight unless I absolutely had to.
I tore a strip of fabric from my underpants—the cleanest garment I had on right now—so I could clean the gun barrel. Bernie wrung her hands, demanding that we get going, oh, why stand there playing with your weapon?
“I know, darling, I know, but if worse comes to worst and I have to shoot, I don’t want this gun jamming or blowing up on us.”
I gave her small tasks, things she had to concentrate on, working to bring her back from the edge of terror: Hold her torch over the gun barrel. Rewrap the rags around my torch. Tie her shoelaces. It’s amazing how much you can steady yourself by tying your shoelaces.
By the time I’d finished with the gun, Bernie was calm enough to tell me what she remembered of the night. She’d been imagining going to Wrigley for more than a week—my guess about her scouting trip to the ballpark, the night she’d said she was going out with friends from the peewee hockey league, had been correct.
“That time, I just wanted to see if I could do what Uncle Boom-Boom and you did, you know, see if I could climb up the bleachers. It looked like fun. Only then, when I saw the pictures, I knew this Annie, she must have left her diary here. I would have done that.”
Of course she would have. She was seventeen, with a high sense of adventure and a low sense of consequences.