by Becky Melby
“All right.” Emily waved from the front step. Her arms must be getting tired. “Good-bye.”
Five good-byes. The lady finally lifted her foot off the ground and Adam added his good-bye, closed the door, and walked quickly away from the car. He didn’t really think Mrs. Willett looked like she should be driving. She’d practically passed out in the hidden room, but he had more important things on his mind.
“So, you sold your house.”
“Can you believe it?”
He couldn’t tell if Emily looked happy or not. Maybe she was just in shock at how easy it was. Or maybe she was changing her mind. He hoped so. He stepped onto the first step and announced his idea. “We have to go to Missouri. We have to figure out what Hannah and her dad were doing there and what happened to them.”
“We do?”
“Yes. We have Mrs. Willett working on things here, so we need to go down there and see what we can dig up.” He stood a step lower than Emily. Looking up at her, he used what Grandma Blaze called his puppy dog eyes. If his grandmother couldn’t say no to them, maybe Emily couldn’t either. “Pleeease?”
Emily burst out laughing. “I’m not the one you have to convince! I think it sounds like a blast, but I don’t know who would go. Your uncle probably couldn’t leave his jobs and your grandma might not feel up to it and—”
“Just you and me. And Lexi if she quits being stupid.”
“Your grandma has temporary guardianship. I don’t know if you can even leave the state legally. And they’re not likely to let you go all that way with someone they hardly know.”
“So we convince Grandma to go. We can get a hotel and she can stay there while we hunt around if she’s not feeling good.”
“Hotels cost money.”
“Then we can take our pop-up.”
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“Everything. Come on, let’s go talk to—” He didn’t bother finishing because Jake’s truck drove into the driveway. “Don’t tell him,” he whispered.
“You can’t plan—” She quit talking when Jake slammed the truck door and waved.
“What are you two up to?”
“Conspiring.” Emily smiled at him with a goofy look on her face. They were getting married. Definitely. “Adam is hatching a plan.”
Great. Just blurt it out. This is where his plan died.
Jake put his hands on his hips. “What kind of a plan?”
Here goes nothing. “Mrs. Willett talked to a lady in St. Louis who knew a guy who had a letter.” He rubbed his hand on his forehead and looked at Emily. “You tell him.”
Emily told it way faster than Mrs. Willett. “So now Adam thinks some of us need to go to Missouri to search out more information.”
Jake smiled at her with the same goofy look. “Sounds fun.”
What?
“I don’t think I can get away, but my mom might jump at the chance to do something adventurous.”
Seriously? Jake wasn’t going to try to talk them out of it?
Jake grinned. “It would be good for all of you. But you’d need to go before”—he bit his bottom lip—“you need to be back here to work on the trim.”
Something was weird there, but Adam didn’t try figuring it out. “Yes! Let’s go talk to Grandma! I’ll map out our route and put it in my GPS and find campgrounds, and we should talk to the guy with the letters and see if we can…” He was halfway across the road when he realized Emily was still on the step making goo-goo eyes at Jake. He laughed and kept on going.
Vacation with Emily? Lexi threw her shoe at the giant purple penguin in the corner. Emily finally moved out and then invited herself along on a family vacation? The other shoe bounced off the wall and landed on the bed. Pansy looked up and gave her the evil eye. Even her cat was against her.
Plopping onto the purple spread, she stared at the phone she’d grabbed as she stomped through the living room. Naomi’s mom would invite Lexi to go with them on their trip to Wisconsin Dells. Mrs. Benner was like that.
Visions of boat rides, water slides, and candy stores danced in Lexi’s head as she dialed. Mrs. Benner answered.
“Lexi, how are you?”
“Not the greatest.”
“What’s the matter, sweetie? Anything some chocolate chip cookie dough could fix?”
Lexi smiled. “It would sure help.”
“What’s going on?”
“My grandma’s making me go on a trip next week with her and Emily.” Naomi told her mom everything—Mrs. Benner knew about Emily.
“And you don’t want to go, do you?” There was a slight pause. “I wish we could take you with us. We’re taking my mother and it’s kind of a family trip, you know. Here, talk to Naomi. She’ll cheer you up.”
“Hey, Lex. What’s up?”
The picture she painted for her best friend made her eyes burn. “Can you imagine? Stuck in the car for hours and hours with my grandma and Emily blabbering in the front seat and Adam reading to me about UFOs or one-celled animals or plant moss the whole time? I’ll go crazy.”
“I wish you could go with us. I asked a couple days ago just ‘cause it would be way more fun with you there. My mom’s being weird.”
“This stinks for both of us.”
“Yeah. I’m downloading a ton of cool music. You should, too. You can plug in and shut them out.”
“I don’t want to shut out, I want to get out! How can I get out of going?”
“Get sick.”
The two words were prettier than any music she’d ever put on her iPod. “Yessss. That’s why you’re my BFF. You’re a genius.”
“I know.”
“What should I get? Bronchitis? Tonsilitis? Something I can fake good without making myself throw up.”
“It can’t be so bad that they want to take you the doctor, but something contagious. How about poison ivy? There’s tons of it down by the river.”
“Nah. I had that when I was ten. Mom put stuff on it and still made me go to school.”
“I faked a fever for a couple days by rubbing the thermometer on my bedspread really hard.”
“My grandma has the kind you stick in your ear. I got it to a hundred and three once by holding it on my lamp, but then Mom stuck it in my ear and I got grounded for trying to get out school.”
“When I was five I drank my grandpa’s prune juice and I couldn’t get off the toilet for a whole day. My stomach hurt so bad I couldn’t even stand up straight.”
“That might work.” A day of horrible stomach cramps would be way better than a week of Emily acting like she was part of the family. Then again, who would know if her stomach actually hurt? “Only I don’t think I need the prune juice.”
“Let me hear your best stomachache sound.”
Lexi groaned and flopped back on the bed. Pansy yowled and Naomi laughed. “Perfect, Lex. It’s gonna work.”
CHAPTER 26
Emily sat in the lobby of the Hampton Inn, her gaze volleying between the door and the clock. Ten minutes to wait. Maybe less, but not a minute longer. Dawn Anne was a stickler for staying on schedule. After their first girl trip, Emily and Susan had started calling her “Mom” right along with Sierra. Dawn Anne set their alarms, told them when to be quiet and go to sleep, and doused them with water if they refused to crawl out of bed.
Disney World, San Antonio, Las Vegas, the Black Hills, and Apostle Islands. They’d seen the country together. When Dawn Anne’s husband got a job in Denver, Emily and Susan had flown out for a skiing trip at least once a year.
They were an eclectic foursome, but their temperaments meshed. Dawn Anne got them to the next stop on time. Susan forced them out of indecision over maps and menus. Sierra provided their excuse for Magic Kingdom, M&M World, and the San Diego Zoo.
And Emily? She clamped her forearms over her churning stomach. Emily was the tension-tamer, the practical joker, the witty commentator, the one who sang her silly preschool songs and made them laugh. What would her role be now
that laughter was inappropriate?
She’d awakened at six with a stress headache. Percocet dimmed the pain, but the stress found a new target in her belly. Perspiration dampened her top lip. One minute her skin was hot, the next cold and clammy. Did any of them think this was going to be just like old times?
Pushing to her feet, she pulled out her phone and found a number she’d put in her contacts list last night. A Realtor in St. Louis. While she was looking up information on Missouri, an ad for foreclosures had popped up. She’d found one dirt cheap that claimed to be structurally sound. St. Louis. One step closer to the Pacific.
Unless her talk with Jake turned out different from any scenario she’d envisioned yet.
The automatic front doors slid open. Three women she barely recognized walked through. One, hand on a rounded belly, wiped away tears of laughter. Next to her, a tall, tanned woman practically doubled over as she laughed. Behind them strode a dark-skinned girl with sleek black curls and the long legs of a dancer.
And a guide dog.
“I love this house.” Dawn Anne ran her hand across the granite countertop. “I want to buy it.”
Still in awe of the easy banter, Emily shook her head. “You’d never leave Colorado.”
“Actually…” Dawn Anne smiled and nodded toward Sierra, kneeling on the floor beside Beacon. “It appears we will. If our rising star lets her mom and dad follow her to Julliard in the fall.”
Susan gasped. Sierra pumped the air with her fist. “I got a full scholarship and I can start a year earlier than I thought!”
Emily grabbed the edge of the counter to steady herself. Dawn Anne’s hand grasped her elbow. “You okay, Em?”
She felt the color seeping from her cheeks. “Scholarship? How? I thought…”
Sierra stood, one hand on Beacon’s head. “Crazy, isn’t it? I auditioned a month ago.” A wide grin accentuated high cheekbones. “I thought that dream was dead, but Mom found a dance instructor in Denver whose daughter is blind. She’s amazing. It’s hard, but I just needed to learn new tricks, like being really precise in my counts. It’s kind of a cool faith builder.” Joy lit unseeing eyes. “My instructor told us about a foundation that awards scholarships to handicapped dancers. Well, deaf and blind dancers. Pretty hard if you only have one leg.” She burst into giggles that spread to her mom and then Susan.
“A full…” Emily’s voice barely made it over the sound of sanding and men’s laughter from upstairs. She rubbed her hand along the granite countertop she leaned on for support. So all of this work was for—
“What say we go get some food for those hardworking hunky men upstairs? And us.” Susan patted her tummy. “This little guy demands feedings every three hours.” Her eyes darted to Emily.
Numbly, Emily nodded. “Why don’t you two go. Sierra and I can walk the dog.” Not that her legs were stable enough to cross the room at the moment.
Dawn Ann and Susan grabbed purses and left. Emily stared at Sierra. “Congratulations. I thought you were focusing on piano.” Her voice faded. “This is amazing. Dance has always been your first love.”
“Yeah. I used to think I couldn’t live without it. I found out I could, but how cool is it that I don’t have to?” She blinked several times. “God is so awesome.”
“Yeah.” Emily’s numb brain didn’t know where to take the conversation from there.
“Tell me more about your house.”
“Can you keep a secret?” The question blurted out. She hadn’t planned it.
“Better than anyone.”
“This house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
“Really?”
“There’s a room off the cellar and we found old letters that give proof it was used to hide slaves.”
“Why is it a secret?”
“I don’t want this place turning into a circus while we’re trying to finish the remodeling. I want this work done…soon.” Voicing it brought the truth home with breath-stopping force: none of her self-imposed deadlines mattered anymore.
“Show me the room.”
Emily hesitated. “Okay. It’s this way.” She touched Sierra’s arm.
“Tell me everything.”
“Run your fingers along the edge of the door. I’ve counted at least six different colors of paint.”
Sierra caressed the wood. “It’s like feeling history.”
Feeling history. “It is. There’s a built-in cupboard in the corner by the window. I stripped it and refinished it. It felt like going back through time, each layer of paint represented an era, or a season in someone’s life. I tried picturing women at the turn of the last century or in the forties or sixties. The cupboards are all new and I need to sand down all the trim, but I don’t want to do this door.”
“You should leave it. The lady who’s buying it might like the slice of history.”
“Maybe I will.” She opened the door. “Here, on this side of the door you can just barely make out a faded painting or stencil of a basket with a handle. The basket is full of apples and one apple is sitting beside it.”
“Does it look really old?”
“Yes. And the cool thing is, there’s an almost identical picture carved into the tombstone of the wife of the man who built this house.”
“Wow.” Sierra rubbed bare arms. “Goose-bumpy.”
“I know. Grab the railing. It’s rough. Be careful you don’t get splinters. I’ll go first and you can put your hand on my shoulder. There are eight steps.”
“Must be a low ceiling.”
“It is. The walls are stone. Huge, square stones. The floor is rough cement, looks like it was spread with a hand trowel, not very level. There’s one tiny window with a ledge under it. When we go back upstairs I’ll show you what I found there. Three more steps.”
“It stinks down here. No offense, but it’s kind of reeky.”
Emily laughed. “It’s damp. I’m sure being so close to the river doesn’t help. Straight ahead are shelves. When Cara’s great-grandmother lived here, they were packed full of canning jars. Tomatoes, beans, beets, corn, you name it.”
“Bet that was pretty.”
“It was.” Emily swallowed hard. “Very colorful. That had to be such a good feeling, to know your family would have food for the winter because of the work of your hands.”
“‘I sing for joy at the work of Your hands.’” Sierra’s clear, sweet voice filled the cellar, ending in a giggle. “Sorry. Couldn’t help it.”
“Don’t ever apologize for singing. You have a beautiful voice.”
“Thank you. Dillon likes it.” The giggle returned.
“That boy is head over heels for you, isn’t he?”
“Yes. And the feeling is very, very mutual. Now back to the tour.”
“The shelves are full of my stuff now. Plastic bins of winter clothes, things like that. The whole shelving unit was sagging to the left when I first got here. Jake fixed it and—”
“That boy’s head over heels for you, isn’t he?”
Emily coughed. “As I was saying, while he was fixing them, we discovered that the wall behind the shelves is attached to the ceiling by wheels in a track, like a barn door.”
“And it’s hiding the room?”
“Yes. Here, you can open it.” She guided Sierra’s hands to the edge of the wall.
“There’s just enough room for my fingertips. So you really can’t tell it’s a door when you look at it?”
“It just looks like a wall. There’s one step down into the room.”
As the door slid away, Emily felt for the flashlight she’d left on the shelf. It wasn’t there. She looked up at the single bulb hanging over the stairs and the weak afternoon light struggling through the mud-spackled window, and helped Sierra down the step.
“There are wide benches on your right and left and straight ahead. The one on the right has a hinged lid with room for storage underneath. Sit down on the bench to your right and feel around with your right hand.”
“I.”
“Mariah.” She traced the date. “Do you know how many people they hid here?”
“No idea. The letters refer to parcels. Everything had to be in code. This area wasn’t as well-traveled as routes through Ohio. From here, people were taken to Lake Michigan, and steamboats took them either directly to Canada or to Michigan and then Canada.”