Free The B Girls by Cari Cole Page B

found a lined basket on a lower shelf
filled with all manner of paper bits. Receipts. Post cards. Notes. Greeting
cards. Letters. It looked like a mixture of mail Belle couldn't bear to part
with and things she emptied out of purses and pockets at the end of the day.
Nothing that remotely related to the Dunlap Broadside, the Declaration of
Independence or Colonial era ancestors.
      She
went downstairs empty-handed and found Jane and Mae shaking their heads.
Neither had found anything useful.
    "So, someone probably did break in," Jane
said.
    Lucy hated to agree. It seemed so paranoid except
for the fact that Belle wasn't home. She dropped into the chair she'd spent the
night dozing on and reached up to pull her glasses off her head.
    "Ouch! Damn it!" She tried to free a few
strands of hair caught in the nosepiece and wound up with the glasses dangling
in front of her eyes. She yanked and blinked back tears when hair came loose
with the glasses.
    She put the glasses on the end table with a
disgusted sigh. "I shudder to think what my horoscope says. Probably lock
yourself in the bathroom and come out next year."
    "We could start searching the rest of the
house," Mae said.
    Lucy started to shake her head when she remembered
something. "Maybe we won't have to," she said. "I think I know
where to look."
    Jane and Mae followed her as she went into the
kitchen and removed a brick from the raised hearth of the fireplace. "I
forgot all about this. Belle showed it to me years ago. She told me I could use
it to hide my most secret things when I spent my twelfth summer with her."
    Praying she wouldn't find any spiders, Lucy put her
hand into the hollow space--and pulled out a bundle of letters tied together
with a frayed black ribbon and a folder full of loose papers.
    "Jackpot," Lucy said, holding up her
prize.
    The letters were indeed what they'd been looking
for, written by Lucy's ancestor, Paul Morris to his wife Molly during the Civil
War. The loose papers were Belle's notes and more computer printouts.
    Paul's grandfather, John Morris, was the printer's
boy who'd supposedly taken the original Declaration of Independence from
Dunlap's in July 1776. Paul had moved south, married Molly, and obtained a
homestead grant. Belle had tracked down the Morris' old homestead grant to what
was now Cohutta wilderness area.
    They struggled to read Paul's chicken scratch,
wading through descriptions of military equipment and living conditions and
getting misty at the sentimental parts while looking for any reference to the
Declaration.
    The biggest surprise was the fact that he'd written
the letters while wearing a Union uniform. No wonder they'd been worried about losing everything, the Morrises
were Union sympathizers.
    "This is it!" Lucy said.
    "You found something?" Jane asked.
    "I think so. He says he hid their most
precious possessions in Lover's Cave on the old homestead." She read on,
"And he put a map of the cave under the hearthstone at the cabin."
    "That doesn't make sense," Jane said.
"Why would he need to tell her that if she was living at the cabin?"
    Lucy looked at one of the envelopes. "This is
addressed to Molly in Atlanta. She must have gone to family in the city when
the war started."
    "So Belle did have a lead on the Declaration.
Our ranger friend said she was planning to find the homestead site," Jane
said.
    "We have the coordinates of the homestead,
right here in Belle's notes," Lucy said. "Maybe we can find the clue
there."
    "Now?" Jane said.
    Lucy nodded. "Yes. If the cops aren't willing
to do anything to find Belle, I'm going to do it myself. I can't just sit on my
hands and wait."

 

Break
A Leg

 
 
 
    They made one stop at a wilderness outfitter for small
daypacks and basic supplies.
    "I found something that will take us right to
the exact spot we want." Lucy held up a phone-sized bit of electronics.
    "What is it?" Jane asked.
    "Off-road GPS. You just enter the map
coordinates you want to go to and follow the