Eventually, Fir was brought into the meeting room. Reg could see at a glance that he had been poorly treated. Plenty of fodder for her outrage.
“Is this the way you treat all prisoners?” she demanded. “Or just the homeless and disabled ones?”
The tall police officer looked at her with apprehension. “I was not involved in his arrest. I don’t know anything about the way that he’s been treated.”
“No?” Reg demanded. “You can’t tell just by looking at him? His clothes are dirty and torn; he has a black eye and abrasions on his face—who knows about the rest of his body! Did the police beat him? Or did you just put him in with the general population where the other prisoners would abuse him? I will be calling the media, and this may just make the front page. Is that what you want to see? Mr. Blumenthal’s battered face on the front page of the Black Sands paper? Maybe this is big enough it will make it to Miami, or even a national paper! This is outrageous.”
“Ma’am, I think you need to calm down. Sit down and have a visit with your… friend. I’m sure you’ll find that he’s been treated with respect. If there have been any violations, we can address the specifics. Mr. Blumenthal has not had any complaints. He has not asked for a doctor or anything else.”
She glared at him. “Mr. Blumenthal is nonverbal,” she said acidly.
He swallowed, made a helpless gesture, and fled from the room, shutting the door behind him. Reg glanced around for surveillance equipment. There was no obvious camera or observation window. But that didn’t mean that it was free of listening devices. She looked at Fir Blumenthal, sitting across the table from her, looking tiny and thoroughly baffled by what was going on. She leaned closer to him.
“Forst sent me,” she said softly. “You can use your inside words and I will hear you.”
His eyes widened. He looked very much like his brother. Of course, they were twins and the first gnomes she had ever encountered, so it was understandable that they would resemble each other. She didn’t think they were identical twins, but Fir had the same white beard and round face as Forst. He had no cap, showing off a pale, gleaming scalp.
“You can hear us?”
“Yes. I can hear you. I came to help. Forst is very upset about you being arrested and wanted me to see what I could do about getting you out. I hope that my yelling doesn’t bother you; it’s just a way of getting the black coats to pay attention. They’re not very good listeners.”
“You can yell,” Fir agreed, the corner of his mouth lifting in a small smile. “If that’s what will free me from this cage.”
Reg nodded. She looked at his injuries, the sadness that Forst had felt earlier washing over her. They had hurt the poor, defenseless little man just because he was different and vulnerable. He wanted to protect his plants from the developers who wanted to bulldoze them all away, and for that, they had hurt him and imprisoned him. “Tell me about what happened. Who hit you?”
Fir rubbed his abraded cheek, flinching slightly at his own touch. He touched his blackened, puffy eye tenderly. “Some of it from the black coats. The eyes and the worst pains, from the other humans in the cage.” His large nostrils flared. “They call us animals, but animals do not behave that way. Only humans behave that way, attacking and imprisoning and causing harm.”
“I know. We don’t have a very good track record, do we?”
He again smiled, a little sunnier this time. “You are different. How did Forst know you could hear inside talk?”
“Well…” She didn’t know if she should reveal that she had heard him weeping. Did the gnomes have a social code that men should not show emotion? Or would he think it was normal and appropriate? “I heard him… talking to himself. So I knew. I didn’t even realize at first that it was inside talk and not outside talk; it was so clear in my head.”
“You will be able to get me out of here?”
“I think so. I have a friend who is going to try to help. She’s here in the police station, though I don’t know exactly where right now.”
“You can talk to her too?”
“I can talk to her. Telepathically, you mean? No. I just talked to her on the phone earlier. I’ll have to wait until she comes here or calls me back. She can’t understand telepathy.”
He nodded. He picked at the dirt under his nails. His hands were calloused from plenty of manual labor. She pictured him working in his garden, tending to his plants.
He smiled at her. “Yes. I miss my garden.”
“Where is it? Who is the developer that wants to ruin it?”
Fir described the location, and Reg, picturing it, tried to place it on her mental map. He talked about the plants that grew there and what each one liked as if they were his children. He spoke of the small stream that watered them and the water birds that came to drink and to hunt for insects.
“That sounds lovely. I can understand why you don’t want to leave it.”
“I must get back there.” His eyes swam with tears. “I must get home to my living things.”
Reg nodded. She looked toward the door, but Jessup didn’t immediately appear. “Tell me about what you did before they came to get you. They said that you vandalized their property and that you were trespassing after they told you to leave.”
He described the things he had done to their vehicles and heavy equipment, and Reg suppressed a smile. She couldn’t help cheering for the underdog, the little man fighting the big corporation. She delighted in the things he had done to show the company that he wasn’t going to be walked all over.
“You understand that they say the property is not yours? That it belongs to someone else and they want to change it?”
“They want to kill it. They want to kill all of the plants and put in their stone highway and monstrosities. Any soil that is left, they will cover with their carpets of tame grass, and they won’t even let that grow properly. They will plant trees and a few foreign flowers and then pat themselves on the back that they have made it look ‘natural.’ How could such a monstrosity be natural?”
“How much space is in your patch? How big is it?”
He shrugged. “A garden gnome does not need much. But we are being squeezed out of even the tiniest plots. They want it to be all stone and shelters that block out the light. They want nothing that is wild to be left.”
Reg nodded, thinking about it. There was a tap on the door, and Jessup put in an appearance, poking her head in first to make sure that it was safe to enter.
“Come in.” Reg motioned to one of the other plastic chairs. “Unless you’ve already figured out how to get Mr. Blumenthal out of here and we don’t have to wait any longer.”
“No such luck,” Jessup said with a grimace. “But the gears are turning. It’s in the works. Hopefully…”
“As you can see, Mr. Blumenthal—”
“Fir,” the gnome inserted.
“Fir has not been treated well while in police custody. He’s been beaten up by the police who arrested him and by the other inmates in custody. Why they would think it was okay to put a defenseless, disabled man into the general population, I have no idea.”
“I’ve already talked to them about it. Although I didn’t know the condition he was in. You, I mean,” Jessup said, facing the gnome and addressing him directly.
“What kind of human is she?” Fir asked Reg, studying the Asian woman curiously. He had apparently not had a lot of interaction with humans of different races.
Reg answered Fir in her head instead of out loud. “I don’t know for sure. It isn’t polite to ask.”
“She is not very ugly for a human.”
Reg snickered and didn’t pass this information on to Jessup.
“So how long do you think it is going to take? Maybe we can get Mr.—Fir some medical care? And some food? I would say clean clothes, but they might not have his size.”
“And a pipe,” Fir suggested. “They took my pipe.”
“You can’t smoke in here.”
“We could take him to the doctor, but I think that just a first aid kit and ice pack are probably all that’s needed,” Jessup said. “I don’t know how gnomes feel about medical examination.”
“What is medical examination?” Fir repeated to Reg.
“It’s… looking at your body to see where you are hurt or sick so that you can be treated. So they can bandage you or give you what you need to mend properly.”
He raised white eyebrows high. “We do not need human remedies. Gnomen know proper physic.”
Jessup looked from Fir’s face to Reg. “He doesn’t want a doctor, does he?”
Reg shook her head in agreement. “Why don’t you get a first aid kit, then? He’ll get whatever kind of traditional healing he needs when we get him out of here.”
Jessup was out of the room for just a few minutes, then returned with a small white plastic box of supplies and an ice pack from the freezer. “First, let’s get these cuts cleaned up,” she suggested, moving closer to Fir and leaning in to examine the injuries. She ripped open a pre-moistened pad and removed it from the foil wrap. “This might sting a bit, but if you just hold still—”
Fir jumped back when she moved it toward him. He grabbed it from her hand and brought it to his nose, sniffing. He made a face and threw it down on the table. “That is not a proper remedy,” he accused.
“It’s just to help to clean it up and keep it from getting infected,” Reg explained. “Sometimes traditional remedies smell bad too, don’t they?”
“I know what herbs smell like. That is not safe.”
Reg shrugged at Jessup. “Okay. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I don’t want to accidentally give him something that might do him harm.” She turned back to Fir. “How about the ice pack? Just put it against your eye; it will help it to feel better.”
He gingerly picked up the ice pack, examined it, squished it around in his hands, then carefully brought it up to his face. He relaxed, holding it there. “This is good,” he approved.
“Good. And how about something to eat? Did you get breakfast? It’s almost lunchtime now.” She looked at her phone. The hours were speeding by. She hoped that Forst and Fir appreciated her efforts.