The frantic man dashed through the streets, silently pleading that he make it in time. Finally he caught a glimpse of what he was looking for through a window. He burst through the doors at top speed and shouted the message he had come to deliver.
"HEEEEELP! THE BUTCHER'S ROBBING THE BANK!" Everyone in the building gasped.
"That's awful!" Mr. Botsford exclaimed, "but why are you telling us?"
"Isn't this the police station?" The man asked.
"No, this is the grocery store. The police station is down the street."
"Thanks." the man replied before taking a deep breath and running off shouting in the direction of the police station.
As he was running off, he heard a voice saying "Word up!" He smiled to himself for just a moment, before his face returned to a mask of panic and he continued yelling on his way to the police station.
In all honesty, he had known that he wasn't at the police station. Even if he hadn't known exactly where the police station was (after receiving directions to it from various places in the city) he was perfectly capable of reading the sign on the grocery store and/or reasoning out that a police station would not be filled with shelves of food.
He had only fallen back on the excuse of believing he was at the police station to mask his true reason for being there. He had only continued on to the police station to support that excuse. He knew something that most people didn't know.
It had happened a few months ago. He had been attending a play at his son's school. The school had been attacked by a monster. As a parent, his first reaction was to make sure his kid and then all the other kids were safe. As he and a couple of other adults were rounding up all the kids, he had seen one girl heading off on her own.
Concerned for the girl's safety, he had followed her with the intent of getting her back to the relative safety of the auditorium. He was about to call out to her and tell her to come back to the auditorium where it was safe, but then something happened. The girl shouted "Word up!" and transformed into word girl before his very eyes.
He had been uncertain of what to do with this information at first. He knew word girl's secret identity and, from what he'd gathered from talking to Mr. Botsford, her parents didn't. In the end, he had decided to keep the secret. He didn't have all the information and she may well have had a good reason for keeping it to herself.
This meant that when things came up that normal people couldn't handle, he was the only person with any clue as to how to contact Word Girl. When something came up, he would go and find her. He had gotten a reputation for having a poor sense of direction since then because he always went to find word girl first (the police in the town were useless) and was then left with no explanation for announcing the problem to the grocery store other than being lost and confused.
Even if getting help was all he could do, he liked being able to do something. And it was true, he did help. He was one of Word Girl's main sources of information. She appreciated his help, too, even if she never knew it was intentional.