“I can’t interview my mom,” I said. “If she finds out the envelope is missing, she’ll kill me.”
“You are way too unsneaky,” Julia said. “All you have to do is ask questions that don’t reveal what it is you’re really getting at.”
Caitlin nodded. “That’s what Nancy Drew would do.”
CHAPTER 24
Emma
Julia’s mom dropped me off. When I walked in the front hall, my dad called, “Hello, Emma! How was the food pantry?”
His office is on the first floor, across the hall from my mom’s. I found him sitting at the computer. He was wearing a sweatshirt with PENN QUAKERS printed across the chest in faded ink. The Quakers are the University of Pennsylvania mascot, and my dad bought the sweatshirt when he was in medical school a thousand years ago.
“We shelved soup,” I said.
“That’s good. That’s great.” He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “What’s on tap for the rest of your afternoon?”
“I thought I’d break some windows and then maybe spray paint graffiti on stop signs.”
Dad nodded, still looking at the screen. “Sounds good.”
“Da-a-ad?”
He looked up and blinked. “Wait. What did you say? You’re painting?”
“Never mind. What are you working on?”
“New study,” he said. “I’m supposed to understand it by Monday.”
“Where’s Mom?”
Dad glanced around the office as if she might materialize.
“Still at legal services?” I reminded him.
“Oh—right. Probably. And your brother is at hockey practice. Are you coming to his game tonight?”
“Is that kosher—hockey on the first night of Hanukkah?” I asked.
Dad shrugged. “Oh, sure. The hero of the Hanukkah story was a warrior, Judah Maccabee. He’d definitely approve of hockey.”
“I’m going to keep my options open,” I said. Then, with total disregard for sneakiness, I asked, “Uh, Dad? You haven’t seen a brown envelope, have you?”
“What’s in it?” Dad asked.
“I’d rather not say.”
Dad nodded. It’s pretty obvious from which parent I get absentmindedness. “I’ll keep an eye out. Is it important? Life or death?”
“Yes,” I said.
Dad nodded again, then looked back at the screen. “I’ll let you tell your mom when you’re ready,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
* * *
My bedroom is not the messiest. It’s true I keep an undisturbed colony of dust bunnies under my bed, and my desk and bedside table are covered with books, magazines, papers, crayons, watercolors, glue, pens, pencils, and healthy snack foods. But I do tug the sheets up on my bed, throw my dirty clothes in the hamper, and empty my wastebasket the night before trash day.
Last year my parents let me take down prints that had been on my wall since kindergarten and tack up posters of my favorite bands and celebrities. At first, my mom thought unframed posters were a disgrace, but now she’s used to it.
“It’s your room,” she says.
Then she sighs.
I had already looked in every drawer for the missing envelope, under every book and paper, even under the covers. Nothing. Could it be in the family room? The kitchen?
I expanded my search that afternoon. I even made Ike move so I could look under the pillow in his bed.
“You didn’t take it, did you, guy?” I asked him.
He cocked his head, trying to understand.
“Nah, I know you didn’t. It’s the kind of thing you would’ve done when you were a puppy, but now it’s only worth it if it tastes good, right?”
Ike still didn’t understand, but he woofed to be agreeable.
When Mom came home with Benjamin, I decided to follow my friends’ instructions and play Nancy Drew.
“Benjamin!” I knocked on his door. “I know you’re in there!”
The door swung open. My brother scowled. “What do you want?”
“Nice to see you too,” I said.
“I have to rest up for the game tonight,” he said.
“Are you even gonna get to play?”
My brother is one of the smaller kids on his team.
“Thanks a lot,” he said—and I realized that explained his grumpy mood.
“You’ll grow,” I promised.
“When?” he asked.
“Not by tonight,” I admitted.
“What do you want?” he repeated.
“You know that envelope of photos for GG’s book?”
“No.”
“Yes, you do,” I insisted, and then I explained.
“You lost those pictures?” Benjamin said. “I can’t even imagine how much trouble you’re in.” This idea obviously cheered him up.
“Thanks, that’s helpful,” I said.
“Are you coming to my game?” he asked.
“Do you want me to?”
Benjamin shrugged. “No. Yeah. I don’t care.”
From my brother, that was practically an enthusiastic yes. If he really hadn’t cared, he would’ve plain said no.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go. I don’t have anything better to do.”
“Because you’re a loser,” he said.
“Yeah.” I sighed. “You’ve got that right.”
CHAPTER 25
Emma
My brother spent most of the game on the bench. Even so, his team’s 2–0 win made my great-grandmother happy the next night when she, my grandmother, and two complete sets of aunts and uncles came over to celebrate Hanukkah.
GG is thin with good posture and dyed orange hair that forms a frizz halo around her face. She always wears earrings and makeup along with dresses and stockings for special occasions. Lately, she has trouble with her memory. Some people think this makes conversation tough, but Benjamin thinks it’s great. Unlike the other women in my family, GG doesn’t grill him for details.
“Benjamin! Such a handsome young man,” she said. We were in the living room after the Hanukkah prayers were said and the candles lit. “Come here and sit by me. Now, how goes it?”
“Excellent, GG,” Benjamin said. “My hockey team won our game last night.”
GG clapped her hands and looked up as if God were personally responsible. “Isn’t that wonderful? My grandson is a hockey star!”
After that, GG turned to me and asked about school. When I told her I got an A on an English test, she said that was wonderful too, and then she turned back to Benjamin and asked about hockey.
“It’s going great,” he said. “We won our first game last night two to zero!”
GG clapped her hands. “Who would have guessed?” she said. “My grandson is a hockey star!”
For dinner, we ate all the traditional Hanukkah foods—latkes that came frozen from the deli, brisket from a different deli, salad from a bag, and a lemon sponge cake my grandma had bought at a bakery. After dinner, Benjamin and I were expected to play dreidel because we are the youngest cousins and by now the only kids. All the other cousins are either in college or grown-up. I didn’t mind playing dreidel too much—especially when I won a pile of Hanukkah gelt.
“Happy Hanukkah!” said the aunts and uncles as they departed. My grandmother—GG’s daughter—was the last to leave, and before she did, she pulled my mom and me aside.
“How are you doing with your section of the birthday book?” she asked.
I didn’t answer, and my mom said, “It will be done by Friday.”
“You haven’t started yet, have you?” Grandma asked.
Mom reached for Grandma and pulled her into a hug. “Nothing to worry about,” Mom reassured her. “Nothing at all.”
Grandma, slightly squashed in the hug, looked over my mom’s shoulder at me and rolled her eyes. “If you say so, dear. Good night, Emma. I love you.”
“I love you too, Grandma.”
Later, when my mom came in to say good night, I almost
told her about the missing photos . . . but decided against it, which is another way of saying I chickened out.
I might still find them before she ever knew they were missing, right?
CHAPTER 26
Emma
Then again, I might not.
Because the next day after school, I was heading for the van to take me home as usual when I heard my mom’s voice. “Emma!”
Looking over, I saw our car was in the school parking lot and my mom was waving.
“Is everything okay?” I asked as I climbed into the passenger seat. My mom never picks me up.
“Yeah, fine. I didn’t mean to alarm you,” Mom answered. “I just decided to take the afternoon off so we can work on GG’s project.”
Did you ever hear how right before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes? I don’t believe it. I have plenty of experience tripping over things, and I know as you’re falling toward the ground, your brain doesn’t do a single thing productive. It goes blank, which is its normal response to crisis—and this was the same as my brain’s response to my mom. It did not present me with a helpful story, excuse, or explanation—it just went blank.
The blankness lasted the whole time my mom was pulling our car onto Market Street and driving toward the expressway that would take us out of the city. Finally, I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “Uh . . . we can’t work on the project today, Mom,” I said. “I lost the envelope with Granny’s photos in it.”
Imagine these words spoken in the same tones as “The Funeral March.”
For several breaths after that, it was quiet.
Maybe I wasn’t going to get in trouble.
Maybe my mom would understand.
Maybe pigs would fly . . . because after the quiet part, my mom turned on all her lawyer logic and let me have it.
She is not a yeller, so this was controlled yelling—yelling with the volume turned down.
My mom told me the photos were irreplaceable (“I’m sorry, Mom”), and she had taken the afternoon off work (“I’m really sorry, Mom”), and now she would have to catch up on work for nothing (“I know you’re busy, Mom”), and how could I be so irresponsible? (“I didn’t mean to be, Mom.”) She told me she thought she could trust me (“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mom”), and Grandma was going to be very upset (“I know, Mom”), and didn’t GG deserve to have a nice ninetieth birthday? (“Yes, Mom.”) She wasn’t going to have another one. (“Probably not, Mom.”)
My mom doesn’t get mad often, and I think by this time she was almost as traumatized as me, because it got quiet again. Finally—as we were turning off the highway—I asked, “Haven’t you ever lost anything?”
And she said, “No.”
It takes about twenty minutes to get home from my school. Mom’s rant and my groveling took only about half that time, so there were still ten minutes for where-did-you-last-have-the-envelope questions. I was still answering as best I could when we pulled into the driveway.
“I can look some more,” I said. “Or we could do something different for the book, like write memories about GG or something.”
Mom was still mad. “I’ll think about it. First let me change my clothes.”
* * *
I don’t have to tell you how terrible I felt as I climbed the stairs to my room. I should have been more careful with the envelope. I should have told my mom the truth sooner. I should have looked harder. I should be an entirely different person, a well-organized person, a person who never loses anything.
Tomorrow I would become that person. I would start by . . . uh, indexing my lip gloss?
I was rummaging through the papers on my desk for the thousandth time when I heard a truck in the driveway. When I looked out the window, I saw it was FedEx.
I needed all the good-daughter points I could get, so I ran downstairs and opened the door even before the bell rang. Standing under the portico, the FedEx guy looked startled. “Emma Rosen?”
“Oh, wow. That’s me.” I signed, and he handed me a shallow, rectangular box.
“Have a good day.”
You can probably guess what was in the box, but I was so upset my brain had turned to oatmeal, and I had no idea . . . until I saw that the return address was Xi in Groton, Massachusetts.
CHAPTER 27
Emma
“I hate searching for things,” my mom said, “and I’m bad at it too. Never once in all my years as a kid did I find the afikoman.”
The afikoman is a piece of matzo cracker that the grown-ups hide during the Passover holiday. Usually, the kid who finds it gets a prize. The afikoman symbolizes something or other, but really the point is to give kids something to look forward to during the boring parts of the long holiday meal.
I dunked a cookie in milk and said, “That’s pathetic, Mom.”
It was half an hour after FedEx delivered the box, and already Mom and I—sitting at the kitchen table—were making solid progress on the cookies. They were made from Hannah’s grandpa’s recipe for sugar cookies. Grace had cut them out in Hanukkah shapes—dreidel, menorah, Star of David—and frosted them in Hanukkah colors, blue and white with silver sprinkles. At first, we could hardly bring ourselves to eat them they were so pretty—but that feeling lasted only about a minute.
Mom and I knew we would have to set some cookies aside for Dad and Benjamin soon, but we weren’t ready to deprive ourselves yet. Fighting had given us both an appetite.
The note in the box said the flour power was supposed to “promote good feelings between you and your mom.”
Isn’t that weird?
How did Grace know that would be required on the day the cookies arrived? All I had told her was that I misplaced an envelope.
“In my defense,” Mom continued, “I do have a lot of cousins. But the point is that’s why I go to so much trouble to keep track of things. Because once I lose them, I will never find them.”
“I get it,” I said. “You’re like a bat. Bats have bad eyesight so they compensate with good hearing.”
Mom stopped chewing and frowned. “I’m like a bat?”
“Never mind. Are you still mad?”
Mom swallowed, then shrugged. “It’s hard to be mad while you’re eating cookies.”
This gave me courage. “So, do you want to work on GG’s book without the photos? We could write down some memories. It would be a start.”
Mom didn’t answer yes or no. Instead, she said, “What do you know about GG, anyway?”
“She was born in Europe”—I did the subtraction— “in, uh . . . 1926. And then her family came to the United States when she was around my age, around ten.”
Mom nodded. “She was born in Germany. Her family had some means and, luckily, her parents recognized how dangerous the political situation there had become. GG’s father had relatives in the United States, so he and the family were able to leave and come to New York. If they hadn’t, GG and the rest of her family probably would have been killed by Hitler and the Nazis.”
“If that had happened, Grandma would never have been born,” I said.
Mom nodded. “And then there wouldn’t have been a me or a you either.”
I knew about the Holocaust—when the Nazis killed millions of Jewish people and others they considered “undesirable.” This wasn’t only in Germany but everywhere the Nazis conquered during World War II. I had been taught about these horrible events since I was little, but they always seemed far away from my life. What my mom was telling me now made them seem very close.
“Are we done with the cookies?” Mom asked.
“For now,” I said.
Mom retrieved a round tin container from a cupboard and began putting the cookies inside. Still in perfect-daughter mode, I cleared away the milk glasses and plates and put them in the dishwasher.
“Okay,” Mom said. “What if you get some paper and we’ll start writing down some memories? If we have to, maybe we can use pictures from the Internet—like the town in Germany where
GG was born.”
“Good idea,” I said sincerely, since it had been my own idea in the first place. “And maybe there will be a miracle, like the Hanukkah one when a tiny bit of lamp oil burned for eight whole days.”
“You better hope so.” My mom laid her arm across my shoulders. “Because if we don’t find it, you’re the one who’s calling Grandma to tell her.”
Mom and I worked on GG’s book till dinnertime. Then, after dinner, Dad, Benjamin, and I looked all over the house one more time for the envelope . . . but there was no miracle.
Flour power might be strong enough to help me and Mom get over a fight, but so far it was doing nothing to solve a mystery.
CHAPTER 28
Emma
The next morning, Tuesday, Benjamin and I were putting on our coats when I had a thought. Except for being late, Kayden had worked hard, and hadn’t he mentioned he liked cookies? He deserved a reward . . . besides the supreme joy of making fun of my dancing, I mean.
“Hang on,” I told my brother. Then I ran to the kitchen and packed six secret cookies in my backpack for after school. Teacher Dustin wouldn’t mind, provided we cleaned up the crumbs.
The school day passed slowly, with me worrying the whole time about the missing envelope. Telling my mom had been horrible. Telling my grandmother would be a nightmare.
When the bell rang at three fifteen, I went up to the library. Waiting for Kayden, I started my history homework. I didn’t realize how much time had passed till I heard Teacher Dustin pick up the phone. “Do you know where Kayden is, by chance?” he asked, and I realized he must be talking to Kayden’s classroom teacher. “Well, he never made it here. Yes, go ahead and call the office. We can’t have small boys rampant in the hallways.”
“I feel insulted,” I said after Teacher Dustin hung up the phone. “Aren’t I nice to him? Don’t I make tutoring fun? Today I even brought cookies.”
Teacher Dustin’s eyes lit up. “Cookies?”
I didn’t say anything. I was remembering what else Kayden liked besides cookies. “Wait a second.” I stood up. “I think I know where he is.”
The Secret Cookie Club Page 7
