There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around by Vivian Vande Velde

Author:Vivian Vande Velde
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

A Friend, with Friends

I REALIZED I'D BEEN reading all in a rush. My heart was pounding and my hands were sweaty. Sentimental jerk, I told myself, to get so caught up in things that happened a hundred and fifty years ago. Everybody involved was long dead. The passage had explained a lot—such as that Grandma's secret room must have been added later or they wouldn't have needed to hide the runaway in the root cellar. But the passage did not explain what I needed to know.

I flipped through the next pages, looking for something that would help me, but all the while I was wondering, Did he make it to Canada? He must have, I thought; he was so close. It takes us a little more than an hour's drive (two, if Dad's behind the wheel rather than Mom), heading west toward Buffalo, then over one of the three or four bridges at Niagara Falls.

If those bridges were up in the 1800s.

And, of course, it would be slower without cars and expressways.

Not to mention with slave catchers breathing down your neck.

I looked for more, for an acknowledgment from their Quaker neighbors that they'd safely delivered the man to Canada or had received word that he'd arrived safely.

But there was nothing more about him.

Except, maybe, that in a couple of places—before an entry, or after one and having nothing to do with anything—Winifred wrote things like:

All worrying does is pass the time.

Then, on June 23, in the middle of complaining that it had rained every day for the past two weeks and talking about a shopping trip, Winifred mentioned the neighbors again:

I saw Naomi Stearns at the notions counter, where I was looking for new brass buttons for Jacob's jacket. Naomi smiled and nodded but had not a word for me until I was leaving, having found nothing to my liking. Then, just as I passed her, she turned and, doing so, knocked over with her elbow a display of lace and ribbons from the counter. "Oh my, how clumsy!" she said, and putting her bag on the counter so that she could more easily pick up the spools of ribbon, she knocked a box containing packages of pins and needles off the opposite side of the counter.

Never having seen Naomi Stearns be anything less than graceful, I estimated all of this was intentional, so I stooped down to help her fetch up the rolling spools, leaving Mr. Willoughby on the far side of the counter to scramble after the pins.

Naomi whispered to me, "Federal marshals are watching my husband and me."

"Yes?" I said, making pretense that I did not understand, though I feared I did. Already I was certain I did not want to become involved. Through the open doorway of the store, I could see a man who was unfamiliar to me loitering in the doorways across the street, watching us while pretending not to, though anyone with any sense at all would go in out of the rain.

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