The Secret Book Club (8 page)

One Saturday night, several months before the start of this summer that was changing Olivia in subtle but noticeable ways, Olivia, Flora, Nikki, and Ruby had had a sleepover at Min's house. In the wee hours of the morning, as the girls were starting to fall asleep, Ruby had said, “If you guys could each have just one wish, what would it be?”

Olivia had said, “I'd wish for endless wishes.”

Ruby had said, “I'd wish to be a millionaire.”

Nikki had said, “I'd wish I could go to sleep.”

And Flora had said, “I'd wish I weren't shy. If I weren't shy, everything would be different.”

Now Olivia, sitting alone in her backyard on a humid July Saturday, remembered Flora's words and thought, If I weren't smart, everything would be
different. Immediately, she realized that wasn't true. Even if she weren't so smart, she would still be tiny and uncoordinated and uninterested in clothes and iPods and sports and boys. And she would still have been left off Tanya's guest list. Furthermore, she could understand Flora's wish not to be shy, but Olivia could never wish not to be smart. She thought the thrill she felt when she solved a tough problem to be akin to a bird soaring far above the earth and seeing everything clearly laid out below, like a puzzle that's already been pieced together. Olivia would never relinquish that clarity. But she still wondered how she might have felt if she had reached her hand into her mailbox and pulled out an invitation of her own.

Well, that moment was over, Olivia admonished herself. Over and done with and gone. And the summer was slipping by. Did she really want to face her first day back at school having moped away the entire vacation? No. And did she want to continue to punish Nikki and Flora for having gone to Tanya's party without her? No. Particularly not when she was the one who had urged them to go in the first place.

Olivia heard a small noise at the edge of her yard. She shook herself free of her thoughts and saw Ruby, Flora, and Nikki, each holding her copy of
Roll of Thunder
, crossing quietly from Min's yard into hers. Their approach was tentative, and Olivia knew why.
She felt a tickle of annoyance, followed by a tickle of regret. She stood up and called cheerfully, “Hey, you guys! Come look at our garden!”

Flora glanced at Nikki, then grinned and began to run. “Do we have any vegetables yet?” she called.

“Well, no, not yet,” replied Olivia. “But everything is doing really well. Except for the cucumbers. Look at them.” Olivia pointed to two plants that were now nothing but stalks, the leaves having been eaten away.

“What happened to them?” cried Ruby, sounding greatly affronted.

“Slugs. At least that's what Mr. Pennington said.”

“Dang old slugs,” said Ruby.

Olivia stood facing her friends, smiling at Ruby, and tried to figure out how to explain her complicated feelings to them. But she couldn't, at least not right away, so she was grateful when Nikki said, “I've been waiting and waiting to talk to you guys about the book.”

“Me, too,” said Ruby. “And before anyone asks, yes, I finished it.” She didn't add that she had finished it ten minutes before Nikki had arrived that morning.

“Where do we start?” asked Flora. “There's so
much
to talk about.”

Olivia sat in the grass at the edge of the vegetable garden, and the others sat with her.

“I want to start by apologizing,” said Ruby.

“For what?” asked Nikki.

“For what I said about the Jim Crow laws. How could I ever have thought they sounded funny?”

“You didn't know,” said Olivia. “You don't have to apologize. You'd only have to apologize if you still thought they were funny.”

Ruby let out a yelp. “No! Now I see what you were saying about separate but equal, Olivia.”

“And how it was really separate
and un
equal,” said Nikki. “Like the schools.”

“And their books,” spoke up Flora. “I kept looking at the chart that was inside Little Man's reading book. There were so many things to notice about it — that when the book was eleven years old and judged to be in Very Poor condition, it was then given to a black student instead of a white student. The black students got all the old, ratty things.”

“And the black students weren't called black or Negro,” said Nikki. “They were called nigra.”

“Did you notice,” said Olivia, “that the word
White
was capitalized, but
nigra
wasn't? It didn't even deserve a capital letter.”

“I wonder why the teacher, Miss Crocker, wasn't upset about the books,” said Ruby. “I didn't understand that.”

“I think that's what slavery did to people,” said Flora.

“Slavery! The Logans weren't slaves. Miss Crocker wasn't a slave,” said Ruby. “I thought this story took place years and years after slavery.”

“It did. But it kind of felt to me like slavery hadn't ended. The effects still lingered.”

“That's one of the things that make the story so complicated,” said Olivia. “I mean, not the story itself, but the things that led to it.”

“The things that led to the story having to be told,” said Nikki.

Olivia consulted the letter that had accompanied
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
. “I think I know now why we're supposed to talk about the Underground Railroad,” she said.

“What
is
the Underground Railroad?” asked Ruby. “I never found anything about that in the book. Is it like a subway?”

“No,” said Olivia, “it wasn't a railroad at all.”

“It was a way for slaves to escape to freedom in the northern states or Canada or Mexico,” explained Nikki.

“To escape secretly,” added Flora. “People who were against slavery would help them travel at night, then take them to places where they could hide safely during the day.”

“And you can see,” said Olivia, “after you read about Mr. Granger and some of the other characters in the book, why slaves would have to escape like that. They
would never have been allowed to go free otherwise. Even after abolition, lots of white landowners thought they had a right to use black people, to make them work for them. They just figured out other ways to get what they wanted.”

The girls sat quietly for a few moments, and Olivia became aware of a pair of barn swallows chattering to each other in a tree in Mr. Pennington's yard.

“Why, I wonder,” said Ruby finally, “didn't Cassie's family go north to escape Mr. Granger and all the trouble?”

“Because of the land,” Olivia replied.

Ruby frowned. “What?”

“The land.
Their
land. Four hundred acres,” said Olivia. “Cassie's grandfather had bought it fair and square. From the Grangers, no less. But it wasn't just that it had been Granger land. It was what the land represented.”

“Freedom,” said Nikki.

“Independence,” said Flora.

“But now they couldn't afford the land,” said Ruby, frowning again. “Cassie's father had to work on the railroad to earn extra money. Plus, there was so much trouble around. The burnings and beatings …”

“The Logans didn't want to run away,” said Olivia.

“That's what I thought,” said Flora. “And you know what I started remembering?
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Did any of you read that?”

“I did,” said Nikki.

“I saw the movie,” said Olivia.

“What is it?” asked Ruby.

“It's a true story,” Flora began to say.

“Well, it actually
is
Anne Frank's diary,” said Nikki.

“Anne Frank was a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam during the Second World War,” Flora continued. “Her family saw trouble coming, but they couldn't leave, even though some other Jewish people were able to escape to safe countries. So the Franks lived in hiding in Amsterdam for two years, and Anne kept a diary during that time. Eventually, someone betrayed the Franks, and the Nazis came and took them all to concentration camps. Everyone in Anne's family died, except her father.”

Ruby looked stricken. “But … but … that's
horrible
.” She glared at the others. Then she said defiantly, “I would have found a way to leave Amsterdam. And I think the Logans should leave the South. That's what our last chapter should be about.”

Flora regarded her sister. Finally, she said, “Ruby, if we started noticing trouble of some sort around here — just very subtle things at first — like maybe we hear that over in Bolton someone is beaten up because he speaks out in favor of something other people don't believe is right —”

“Like what?” said Ruby.

“I don't know. Like he says it's okay to hire people based on the color of their skin, and to refuse jobs to qualified African-Americans.”

“But that's
wrong
,” said Ruby.

“He has a right to his opinion, though, doesn't he? Anyway,” said Flora, “let's say this man gets beaten up. Then someone gets beaten up for
supporting
fair hiring practices. And then in West Hook a store is burned down because the people who own it had put a sign in the window stating their feelings about equal rights. And then we start hearing rumors that this trouble is just going to keep growing and growing in a very frightening way, and that a lot of people are going to be in danger — like the Franks were. And
then
Min says we should escape to Canada. I mean, move there. What would you think, Ruby? Would you want to leave Camden Falls? Leave the Row Houses? Leave all our friends?”

“No,” said Ruby in a small voice. “But how would we know this trouble was really going to grow? Maybe it would just go away.”

“Maybe that's what the Logans hoped would happen in the South,” added Olivia. “After all, slavery
had
ended years before. Things should have been getting better.”

“I wonder why people like Mr. Granger were allowed to get away with the things they did to black people,” said Nikki.

“It's so complicated,” said Ruby.

“But it shouldn't be either complicated or simple,” said Olivia, “because the things that led up to
Roll of Thunder
should never have happened in the first place. And they wouldn't have happened if people treated each other with kindness and fairness, instead of thinking they could own them and then step all over them and belittle them, too.”

An uncomfortable silence followed, during which Flora looked at her watch. “Wow,” she said softly. “We should really start writing our chapter. In exactly two and a half hours, we have to leave for the next part of our adventure.”

“I'll go get my computer,” said Olivia, jumping to her feet.

“I'm hungry!” exclaimed Nikki.

“Me, too,” said Ruby, and the solemn mood was broken.

Olivia made four cheese sandwiches and brought them, along with four glasses of water and her laptop computer, to the Walters' picnic table.

“How long do you think a chapter should be?” asked Ruby, her mouth full of cheese.

“Any length,” said Nikki.

“Whatever it takes to say what you want to say,” added Flora.

Ruby scrunched up her face. “What are we going to say?”

“Do you still believe the Logans should move north?” asked Olivia.

Ruby looked absently at the backyards of the other Row Houses. “No.”

“Let's think about the characters, then,” said Nikki, “like the letter suggests. And let's start with T.J.”

“T.J.!” cried Ruby. “What about Cassie? It's her story.”

“But T.J. is mentioned in the very last sentence of the book,” Nikki pointed out.

“Let's mention T.J., everyone in Cassie's family, and Mr. Morrison, since he was the Logans' friend,” said Olivia.

“What about the mean characters?” asked Flora.

“Let's make bad things happen to them,” said Ruby. “Put them all in jail. Even Lillian Jean.”

Olivia laughed. “This is going to be some chapter,” she said, and the girls set to work.

They were just finishing (Ruby had taken the computer from Olivia and was writing THE END in enormous purple capital letters), when Flora once again looked at her watch. This time she said, “Hey, we have to leave! Shut down the computer, Olivia.”

Five minutes later, Olivia, Nikki, Ruby, and Flora set out for 357 Harmony Lane.

Flora opened the Walters' back door, and she and Olivia, Nikki, and Ruby hurried through the house and out the front door.

“Okay. Lead the way, Olivia,” said Flora. “You're the only one who knows how to get to Harmony Lane.”

With Olivia in charge, the girls headed north on Aiken Avenue.

“And now we make a left here,” said Olivia.

“Well, this
is
exciting,” exclaimed Ruby. “More like the Melendys' adventures. I've never been on this street before.”

Flora studied the homes they were passing. “These houses look
really
old,” she said. “Older than the Row Houses.”

“They are,” said Olivia. “I think some of them are two or three hundred years old.”

“Wow,” Nikki said breathlessly. “Imagine living back then, in colonial times.”

“No electricity,” said Ruby.

“No running water,” said Olivia.

“You'd have to use an outhouse,” said Flora, wrinkling her nose.

The girls reached another corner and Olivia said, “Turn right. This is Harmony Lane.”

“It looks just like any other street,” said Ruby, sounding puzzled.

“Well, it's not a
magic
street,” Flora pointed out.

“Let me have my fantasies,” Ruby replied.

Flora felt a fluttering in her stomach. “What do you suppose is going to happen when we get to number three fifty-seven?” she whispered.

“We're going to step back in time,” Ruby intoned in a sepulchral voice.

“We're going to be swallowed whole by the house,” said Nikki. “It's an evil house, like in a Stephen King book.”

Flora shuddered.

“I wonder who lives at three fifty-seven,” said Olivia.

“Don't you have any idea?” Ruby asked her.

“No! I would have said so already if I did.” Olivia came to a halt. “But get ready to find out. This is the house.”

Flora, feeling as nervous as if she were about to be
called on to give a report to her class, stopped and stared at the house before them. It rambled this way and that, reminding her of the Popsicle-stick structures she used to build, adding first one and then another and another room haphazardly, even after she had thought her house was finished.

“The house kind of wanders around,” Ruby observed.

“It's pretty, though,” said Olivia. “I like all the gardens.”

“It looks like a house for gnomes!” exclaimed Nikki.

Flora laughed but said, “I'm a little afraid to ring the doorbell.”

“We have to. Whoever lives here is expecting us,” replied Olivia.

“All right. Let's be brave, then. Like Mrs. Frisby,” said Flora.

“And the Logans,” added Ruby.

The girls walked along a path to the house, clutching one another's hands. Flora was about to whisper, “Who's going to ring the bell?” when the door flew open and before them stood …

“Min!” cried Flora. “What are you doing here?”

Min smiled. “Visiting my friend Mrs. Angrim. This is her house.”

A woman stepped from behind Min and beckoned to the girls. “Come inside,” she said.

Flora, Ruby, Nikki, and Olivia walked through a doorway, the top of which was just inches above Min's head. Flora could easily have reached upward and gripped the door frame.

“Min,” said Ruby eagerly, “are you —”

But Min interrupted her. “Helen,” she said, turning to Mrs. Angrim, “meet my granddaughters. This is Ruby and this is Flora. And this,” she continued, resting her hand on Olivia's shoulder, “is Olivia Walter. You know her grandmother. And this is Nikki Sherman.”

“Hello, girls,” said Mrs. Angrim. “I understand you've been talking about the Underground Railroad.”

“That wasn't a real railroad, you know,” said Ruby knowledgeably. “It wasn't even a subway.”

Mrs. Angrim smiled. “No. I suppose you know what it was, then.”

“Sort of,” said Ruby.

“We studied it in school,” said Olivia.

“Well, I was told you might like to see the basement of my house.”

“The basem —” Ruby started to yelp, but she was silenced by Flora, who jammed her sandal into Ruby's ankle.

“It was once,” Mrs. Angrim continued, “a stop on the Underground Railroad.”

Flora saw Nikki raise her eyebrows.

“It
was
?” exclaimed Olivia.

“Yes. Over a hundred and fifty years ago. The house
was much smaller then. The families who have lived in it over the years have added on — and on and on. Follow me and I'll show you the room.”

“The room?” asked Nikki. “Just one room?”

“Yes. Off the main part of the basement. It had to be a good hiding place,” Mrs. Angrim explained. “Nothing that would call attention to itself.”

The girls and Min followed Mrs. Angrim through a series of small rooms. Like a rabbit warren, thought Flora, who decided she might feel a bit claustrophobic if she had to live in this house.

Mrs. Angrim made her way through the tiny kitchen, the others behind her single file, and at last she reached a trapdoor in the floor of a hallway. She pulled at a ring and the door rose with a creak. “Now down these stairs,” she said cheerfully.

Flora gazed after Mrs. Angrim, who descended into the hole via a dusty staircase. She saw only darkness and began to think of spiders and toads and lizards. “Um,” she said, but Mrs. Angrim pulled at a string hanging from the ceiling below, and the basement was suddenly illuminated. Flora could see nothing moving on the dirt floor and let out the breath she'd been holding.

When at last everyone had gathered in the basement, Mrs. Angrim led them to a dark corner and began to feel along one wall.

“Years ago, this wall was hidden by a movable
shelf,” she explained. “Anyone looking around the basement would have seen only a storage area.”

Flora watched in fascination as a section of the wall resolved itself into a door, which Mrs. Angrim pushed inward. She picked up a flashlight from the floor and aimed it through the tiny doorway. “This,” said Mrs. Angrim, “was where escaping slaves could hide.”

“In
here
?” exclaimed Ruby. “I mean, no offense, but was this room any nicer when it was part of the Underground Railroad?”

Flora was too astonished by what she saw before her to take much notice of Ruby's thoughtless remark. The room that had opened before the girls was dank, windowless, and small — about half the size of Flora's bedroom, which wasn't very big itself. It smelled of earth and dampness and whatever creatures thrived belowground, out of the way of sunlight and fresh air.

Mrs. Angrim addressed Ruby. “Well,” she said, “there was some furniture in the room, but that was about it. And remember, there was no electricity then, so this room would have been lit only by candles or oil lamps.”

“Excuse me,” said Ruby, “but where did the people go to the bathroom? They couldn't leave this room, could they?”

“They used chamber pots,” replied Mrs. Angrim.

Ruby looked helplessly at Min, who whispered to her, “I'll explain later.”

Mrs. Angrim said briskly, “Escaping slaves traveled by night, for the most part, and often by boat. They didn't stay long anywhere, but sometimes they were able to hide out for several days and rest before moving on.”

“I wonder how many people stayed here altogether,” said Olivia thoughtfully. “I mean, over the years.”

Mrs. Angrim shook her head. “I don't know. But it could have been quite a few. There were probably entire families in here from time to time.”

“Families!” cried Ruby. “You mean there were kids? Kid slaves?”

“Absolutely,” said Min.

“Slave owners believed that they owned any children their slaves gave birth to as well as the slaves themselves,” added Mrs. Angrim.

Ruby didn't reply.

From a corner of the room, Flora heard Nikki mutter, “
Owning
people.”

“Imagine anyone having to hide out just to survive,” said Flora after a moment. She turned to Min and Mrs. Angrim. “Before we came over here we were talking about Anne Frank and her family and how they hid in the Secret Annex.”

“How did you get from
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
to that subject?” asked Min.

“We were wondering whether the Logans — in the book —” Olivia added for Mrs. Angrim's benefit,
“should have left the trouble in the South and moved north. And then we started talking about people who have to leave their homes, and about what happened to Jewish people who stayed in Amsterdam during World War Two.”

“Ah,” said Min.

Nikki was digging into the earthen floor with the toe of her sneaker. “Think of all the lives that might have been saved because of this little room,” she said.

“It's kind of exciting, I guess,” said Ruby, “but mostly … it must have been so scary.”

Flora shivered.

“I suppose,” said Min later, after Mrs. Angrim had closed the trapdoor to the basement and was leading the way through her house once again, “that this was a different sort of adventure than the ones the children had in
The Saturdays
.”

“I'll say,” replied Ruby. “Those kids lived in New York City and got to go to the circus and to an opera house and stuff.”

“But,” said Olivia, “today was really, really interesting.”

“It was thought,” Min went on, “that your visit here would make for an unusual adventure.”

What an interesting choice of words, Flora said to herself. Aloud she said, “Thank you for showing us the room, Mrs. Angrim.”

“Yes, thank you,” said Nikki and Olivia and Ruby.

The girls walked back down the path to Harmony Lane, leaving Min behind with Mrs. Angrim.

“Did you guys hear what Min said just now?” asked Flora when Mrs. Angrim's door was safely closed. “She said, ‘
It was thought
that your visit here would make for an unusual adventure.'”

“Yeah?” said Ruby, who might just as well have said, “So?”

“She knows who set up the book club!” exclaimed Flora.

“Of course she does,” said Olivia. “So do my parents and Nikki's mom. We already figured that out. Min's being very careful not to give away any clues about that person, including whether it's a man or a woman. I'll bet Gigi knows who it is, too. And if she knows, then Poppy does. I have a feeling Mr. Pennington knows, too. And probably a bunch of other people.”

“But what I think,” Flora continued, “is that
Min
is the secret person.
That's
why she had to be so careful about what she said. And look, there she was at Mrs. Angrim's house today.”

“That doesn't prove anything,” said Nikki as the girls turned a corner. “Besides, if Min is the mystery person, how did she deliver the packages to Needle and Thread the first day? They were already there when you arrived at the store that morning.”

“She could have arranged for someone else to deliver them,” said Ruby. “To throw us off the track.”

“Ooh. Tricky,” said Olivia.

“I like a good mystery,” proclaimed Flora. “It's not every day one comes your way. Unless you're Nancy Drew.”

Ruby clasped her hands together and gazed thoughtfully into the distance. “I wonder what's going to happen next,” she said.