Free Tomorrow's Sun by Becky Melby

at feet that seemed out of proportion to the rest of him. The bruise could have come from the junior high curse of a gangly, uncooperative body. “Glad to meet you, Adam. I haven’t met too many geniuses.” She winked at Lexi. “But now I know two.”
     
    “Can we see the room?” Large hazel eyes inspected the parlor, as if searching for the hidden door. Adam-the-genius clearly wasn’t much for small talk.
     
    Jake shrugged an apology, and Emily answered with a nod. “Right this way.” She pointed toward the kitchen.
     
    Adam scrambled down the steps with his sister at his heels. Emily followed. The twins stood in the middle of the cellar, vibrating like two idling engines. “Where’s the secret door?” Adam shuffled from one oversized foot to the other.
     
    “Is that the way a trained archaeologist would enter a site?” Jake tortured his nephew with a patronizing smile then turned to Emily. “I didn’t give them a lot of details.”
     
    “Okay. Survey the scene.” Adam turned in a slow circle. “Look for indications of something out of the ordinary.” Bending over, he retrieved a flashlight from a cargo pocket above his knee and outlined the ceiling with the beam.
     
    “There!” Lexi pointed to one of the rock walls. “I bet those rocks aren’t real.”
     
    Adam’s forehead wrinkled. “Noooo.” Emily had seen identical perplexity on his uncle’s face. “That’s…not…it.” With deliberate strides, he closed in on the opposite corner. “This paneling is strange.”
     
    Leaning closer to Emily, Jake hid his mouth behind his hand. “Bingo,” he whispered.
     
    “Smart kid.” Emily moved away from the scent of musk and fresh-cut wood. “What are you thinking, Adam?”
     
    The boy laid his hand on the wood. It moved. Adam gasped. He looked over his shoulder, eyes wide with delight. “This is it!”
     
    Emily nodded. “Open it.”
     
    The wall slid to the side, and Adam stepped back and let Lexi walk in first. Emily observed the gesture with an almost physical reaction. “That’s sweet.”
     
    “They compete, but they take care of each other.” Jake stood so close, his words ruffled her hair.
     
    “Wow.” Lexi’s voice was tight with excitement.
     
    “Wow,” Adam echoed. “This is like the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Stroking an iron hook the way Jake had, Adam dropped his professor voice and gushed like an awestruck twelve-year-old.
     
    Lexi sat on a bench and pressed both hands to her sternum. “We read about a sixteen-year-old girl that somebody hid around here.” Gaze still roaming the room, she pulled an asthma inhaler out of her back pocket.
     
    Neither Adam nor Jake appeared to notice. Emily sat beside her. “Does the dampness in here bother you?”
     
    “No. It’s nothing.” She took a second puff on the inhaler.
     
    “Caroline Quarlls.” Adam’s gaze was fixed on the door in the ceiling. “She was the first passenger on the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin.”
     
    Lexi nodded, holding her breath. “Yeah.” Her exhale rode on the word. “What if she was here, right where I’m sitting?”
     
    “She wasn’t in Rochester.”
     
    “We can’t jump to conclusions, guys.” Jake sat down opposite Lexi. “Miss Foster isn’t convinced we’re on the right track.”
     
    If you only knew
. The words on the yellowed pages shouted from three stories above. Jake Braden would need to take an oath—on penalty of no contract—that he wasn’t a sideshow barker in disguise before she’d tell him anything. She pointed to the door that had captured Adam’s attention. “Want to see where that leads?”
     
    “Yeah!”
     
    “I found a trapdoor on the porch.” Like a first-grader at show-and-tell, she couldn’t disguise the pride in her voice.
     
    Jake’s eyebrow elevated. “You’ve been busy since I left.”
     
    You have no idea
.
     
    “Take a look at this.” Jake pointed to the flower carved on the end of the bench.
     
    The