Secrets on 26th Street (10 page)

Finally Helen plunked down her empty cup on the table. “I'm still thirsty.” She licked milky foam from her upper lip.

Susan stood up. “I'll get the milk. I want more, too.”

Susan filled Helen's cup to the brim and handed it to her, but the cup slipped from Susan's hand and clattered to the floor, splattering milk everywhere. Then Susan knocked over the milk bottle. A white river flowed out and cascaded into Bea's lap. Smaller streams ran across the table and dripped over the side onto Lucy and Helen.

Bea leaped up, an astonished look on her face. She was soaked. A dark stain was spreading down her blouse, her apron, her skirt. Milk dribbled off her clothes onto the floor.

“Susie, you made a mess,” said Lucy, eyeing first Bea, then her own flooded plate. Bea was holding her sopping skirt out from her body.

“Yeah,” said Helen. “You managed to soak everything and everyone, except yourself.” If Susan didn't know better, she would have thought Helen was really mad.

Susan hurried to help Bea take off her apron. “You better change, Bea, before you get chilled. I'll clean up out here.” She began fetching rags from the ragbag under the dry sink.

“Come on, Lucy,” said Helen. “You and I will have to change, too.” Helen marched Lucy to the bedroom, throwing an angry glance at Susan over her shoulder. Helen
would
make a wonderful actress, Susan decided.

Bea looked hesitantly at the sea of milk on the table and the floor. “I suppose I should get into something dry, but I'll be back to help straightaway.”

As soon as Bea started down the hall, Susan stuck her hand in the apron pocket to snatch the telegram. Suddenly she heard Bea's voice. “Susan?”

Susan jerked her hand from the pocket. “Yes?” Had Bea seen her?

Bea was standing at the entrance to the kitchen. For a moment she was quiet. Then she said, “Don't feel bad, love. It wasn't your fault.” With that, she disappeared into her room.

Susan felt a rush of guilt. She hated deceiving Bea. Then she hardened herself. Bea had brought it on herself, hadn't she, by deceiving them first.

Quickly Susan plunged her hand back in the apron pocket and fished out the telegram. She opened it with trembling hands. It was three short lines:

SIR GEORGE UNABLE TO SEND REQUESTED FUNDS STOP REMINDS MISS RUTHERFORD OF HER DEFIANCE AT THEIR LAST MEETING.

It was signed by some official in the British Parliament, a secretary of some kind.

Susan must have read the lines three or four times before the realization sank in.

The telegram had nothing to do with Mum
.

It made no sense to Susan at all.

Susan refolded the telegram and stuffed it back into Bea's apron pocket. She hung the apron over the towel rack on the dry sink, and with her rags, she sopped up the spilled milk from the table. Then she grabbed the mop to tackle the floor. All the while her mind whirled.

Why on earth was Bea getting a telegram from the British Parliament?

Then, from some corner of Susan's memory, the words came floating back:
He was so stern, my grandfather was … He was a member of Parliament … We haven't spoken in years …

The telegram was from Bea's grandfather.

After dinner, Susan huddled with Helen in their bedroom, and Susan told her everything about the telegram and about Bea's feud with her grandfather.

“I'm stumped,” Susan said. “If Bea asked her grandfather for money, she must be desperate. But I don't understand it—it seems like she has plenty. She spends it right and left. She even paid all our back rent as easy as buying a ticket to the picture show.”

“Maybe that's it,” said Helen. “Maybe the money she gave to Lester for our rent was all she had. I noticed her yesterday mending a hole in her stocking. She never used to do any mending. She'd just go out and buy a new pair.”

“Yeah,” said Susan. “Now that I think of it, those treats on Sunday were the first things she's splurged on in weeks. Yeah. Maybe Bea is out of money.” She gnawed the inside of her lip, pondering. “But she wouldn't wire her grandfather for plain old spending money. There's too much bad blood between them. Bea must need money for something really important.”

“But what, Susie?” Helen whispered.

Susan was grim. “I wonder if it has something to do with Mum. All I can guess is that the money Bea needs has something to do with Mum coming home.”

Helen's eyes widened. “Do you think Mum's being held for ransom?”

Susan shook her head. “Poor people like us don't get kidnapped for ransom. I'm thinking it's something else.” Susan felt a sudden burning in her chest as a thought occurred to her. “You know what I think, Helen?
I
think it has something to do with Bea's secret.”

Helen's mouth dropped open. “Bea's secret! I forgot all about it. But how could her romance have anything to do with Mum?”

“I don't think her secret
is
a romance. And I don't think it's a spy mission either. I don't know what Bea's secret is, but I have a feeling it might be wrapped up in
all
of this—the fight with her grandfather, Mum's disappearance, the telegram,
everything.
” Susan stood up and peered down at Helen on the bed. “We've got to find that letter with the secret in it, Helen—tonight.”

“But you can't just go snooping in her room. That's … not right.”

“Is it right for Bea to lie to us about where Mum is?” Susan asked.

Helen gave a troubled sigh. “No, I guess not.”

Susan was sorry to put it so bluntly, but she had to make Helen understand. Like it or not, they could no longer trust Bea.

“You'll have to get Bea out of the house somehow,” Susan told Helen, “so I can search her room.” The girls decided that Helen would ask Bea to take her to the Girl Scout meeting. Susan would beg off, saying she had too much homework. Bea and Helen would be gone at least an hour, Susan figured. After she got Lucy in bed, Susan should still have plenty of time to scour Bea's room for the letter.

Susan waited for ten minutes after Lucy was tucked in to be perfectly sure that Bea and Helen were well on their way to the Hudson Guild. She crept into Bea's room and carefully stepped over the creaky floorboard in front of the door. From the nightstand, Bea's clock ticked out a warning to
hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry
. Susan stood by the nightstand, forcing herself to breathe evenly. Then she reached for the handle of the drawer and gently, gently pulled it out. Inside, Susan found Bea's reading glasses, a pair of silk gloves, a box of hairpins, and a stack of embroidered handkerchiefs.

No letter.

Susan groaned. She should have known Bea wouldn't leave the letter in the drawer where Susan had seen her place it. Bea probably moved it the first chance she had to a more secure hiding place.

But where?

Someplace inaccessible, maybe a jewelry box, something with a lock. Yet, to Susan's knowledge, Bea had no jewelry box. She kept her brooches on the dresser. The only other jewelry she had was a locket with her mother's picture, which she wore all the time. Bea's trunk was full of clothes and hats, and it wasn't locked anyway. There was really no place to hide anything.

Where then? Where should she look? The clock seemed to tick more loudly than ever, making Susan aware that minutes were slipping by while she wavered.

She'd just have to start. Anywhere. The dresser was as good a place as any. Her knees wobbly and her heart hammering, she pulled out the top drawer. Bea's underclothes. Stockings and chemises and bloomers. She lifted each garment in turn, felt among its folds for the letter, and then replaced it exactly as Bea had had it.

She checked each drawer in the same careful way, feeling more and more tense as the letter failed to appear. The bottom drawer was the heaviest, and it had always stuck, so Susan yanked hard at it—too hard. The drawer jerked loose from its runners and toppled out.

Susan stared, not believing what she saw under the dresser where the drawer had been: a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She could guess what was inside that package, for it was wrapped just the way it had been when Bea pulled it out of her trunk on the night she arrived.

It had to be the Trafalgar Square photograph.

Susan picked up the package. She loosened the strings and let the brown paper fall to the floor. The frame looked even more richly burnished than it had the first time she'd seen it. Susan pictured Bea polishing the dark wood; she pictured her wrapping the frame and placing it gently under the dresser, then sliding the drawer in on top of it. Bea had obviously gone to great lengths to hide this photograph.

Why?

Susan studied every detail in the photograph for a clue. Something was nagging at her brain … something. Then she had it: the girl standing next to Bea looked like a much younger Alice Paul, the stirring speaker at the suffrage rally.

Susan wanted to be sure, so she slid the photograph out of the frame to have a closer look.

And then, right into her lap, as if inviting itself to be read, dropped the letter. Bea's letter.

The
secret
letter.

Tick-tick, tick-tick
, went the clock. A horn beeped down in the street. Susan's pulse beat in her throat. She unfolded the letter and began to read.

She skimmed over the first couple of paragraphs—about doings of people Susan assumed were friends of Bea's and the writer's. When Susan's eyes fell on the third paragraph, her heart began to pound. The writer was asking Bea to come to America to help with “our cause.”

Goose bumps rose on her skin as Susan read again the familiar line: “Your work must be kept secret for now.” What? What was the work that Bea was to do?

Susan's eyes raced on, searching for the answer. “We want an appearance of strength,” the writer went on, “not division, and there are those among us, even among our leaders, who wouldn't approve of what you're doing. There will be time for full disclosure later. When we've achieved our goal, no one will question our methods.”

No one will question our methods
. It sounded so grim.

Then Susan glanced at the signature, and a chill ran down her spine. The letter was signed simply “Alice.” But Susan could supply the last name—Paul.

The writer of Bea's letter was Alice Paul.

And the “cause” Alice Paul mentioned was the suffrage movement.

So Bea was a suffragist. Well, that did explain some things. Like Bea's argument with Mum over Kathleen's stand on suffrage. It also explained Bea's injuries Saturday night. She got them at the suffrage rally.

But the letter left even more questions
un
answered. What was the work Bea was doing for suffrage that had to be kept secret? And what did it have to do with Mum?

Susan wracked her brain for any detail that might help her make a connection between Bea's secret and Mum. She thought back to the night Mum disappeared. She remembered Bea hobbling in, walking past Susan and Helen with scarcely a hello, and she remembered thinking it was strange that Bea didn't comment on Mum's absence.

Then Bea had been so reluctant to let Susan into her room. That heavy sigh, as if Susan was a bother. Her eagerness for Susan to leave. And the way she had turned her photograph away from Susan's view.

Why?
Susan thought.
Why did Bea try to keep me from looking at that photograph?

She couldn't have known Susan was at the suffrage rally. Maybe Bea was afraid Susan had seen Alice Paul's picture in the newspaper and would recognize her as one of Bea's friends in the photograph.

Why, though, would Bea want to hide her friendship with Alice Paul? It came back somehow, Susan was sure, to Bea's letter and her secret work for suffrage. But the more Susan's thoughts went round and round, the more confused she felt. She didn't see how Bea's letter could have anything to do with Mum. Whatever Bea was doing for suffrage, surely Mum would have no part in it. She had seen what had happened to Kathleen.

Which meant Bea's secret had led Susan nowhere.

C
HAPTER
10

T
RACKING
D
OWN
M
UM

The black iron railings of the fire escape blocked Susan's view from her bedroom window. She had to lean out to see the trains that rumbled by on the Grand Central Overpass, and even further out to see the steamers and tugboats that pulled through the dark, restless waters of the Hudson.

Susan spent most of the night leaning out the window, watching the life of the city below. She couldn't sleep. She felt dark and restless like the Hudson—and lonely She wondered if Mum was somewhere out there in the ever wakeful city, missing Susan as much as Susan missed her.

Susan finally grew sleepy as the pink light of morning washed the last faint stars from the sky. She crawled back in bed next to Helen and Lucy. The last sound she heard before she drifted off to sleep was the rattle of the milk wagon across the cobblestone street below.