PART 2
I called 911 again.
This time I didn’t ask for a welfare check.
“My name is Lena Strand,” I said. “I’m a pharmacy technician. The man across the street is 88, on a blood thinner and heart medication that haven’t been picked up in five weeks. I have the records. And someone is signaling SOS from his basement right now.”
I asked for the same two officers.
They were back in seven minutes.
This time, I walked over with them. I showed them the pharmacy screenshot. Hazel stood at our window, still flashing the light, so they could see where the answer came from.
Curtis opened the door. He wasn’t smiling now.
“You were just here. He’s asleep.”
“Then you won’t mind if we wake him up,” the older officer said.
Curtis didn’t move.
And then all of us heard it.
Knocking. Faint. From under the floor.
Three short. Three long. Three short.
The officers pushed past him.
The “old man asleep in bed” was two pillows under a quilt, with Mr. Abe’s Army cap on top.
The basement door had a new padlock on the outside.
Mr. Abe was sitting on a cot down there, in a cardigan, holding a flashlight with almost no battery left. No water. No pills. The furnace vent down there was shut.
He looked up at the officers and said, very clearly, “Took you long enough.”
Then he asked if the little girl across the street was all right.
He’d been locked in that basement since the afternoon.
Curtis had finally caught him signaling from the bedroom window and dragged him downstairs. He took the flashlight. Mr. Abe had a spare hidden in his sock drawer for forty years, “just in case.” He’d kept it in his pocket.
The basement window faced our house.
He’d been flashing SOS for hours, every few minutes, hoping one little girl was still awake.
Mr. Abe spent a week in the hospital. Weak and underfed. His heart was strained, but it held.
Curtis was arrested that morning.
Over the next month, the investigators found the rest. He’d drained $38,000 from Mr. Abe’s savings and had already listed his watch collection online. He’d stopped the heart pills on purpose.
“Old people die in their sleep all the time.” He’d said it to me himself.
He’s in prison now. Elder abuse, unlawful imprisonment, and theft.
Mr. Abe came home in February with a home health aide, a new phone, and a list of numbers. My number is first.
The first thing he did was knock on our door with a small velvet box.
Inside was my father’s old wristwatch. It had stopped working the year he died. Hazel had given it to Mr. Abe last summer, asking if he could “fix Grandpa’s time.”
He had.
“Your grandfather taught you the code,” he told her. “And you saved my life with it. So this belongs to you.”
Hazel still sets her alarm sometimes. Not at 3 a.m. anymore. At 8 p.m.
She flashes GOODNIGHT across the street.
And every single night, he flashes it back.
THE END.
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Children notice what adults walk past. If a child tells you something doesn’t feel right, listen.
Would you have believed Hazel’s notebook right away? Tell us in the replies.