This year’s film festival was featuring movies from the 1950s. Aunt True had pounced on the brochure when I showed it to her.
“Wait until you see Rear Window,” she’d said with a happy sigh, scanning the list of movie titles. “Grace Kelly is SO gorgeous! And so is Audrey Hepburn—you’ll love her in Sabrina. And you’ll love Singin’ in the Rain, and Born Yesterday, and Ben Hur, and Father of the Bride!” She looked up at me and smiled. “What a fantastic series! I think I’ll get tickets for Rusty and me too.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Double-dating with my aunt and Professor Rusty did not exactly fit into my perfect summer plans.
“Truly!” My mother’s voice snapped me out of my daydream.
“Yes?”
“Can you feed Bilbo?”
“Lauren’s home for the weekend—that’s her job!”
“I know, but she’s busy. Rooster’s organized a scavenger hunt for the younger kids.”
“Can’t Hatcher do it?” As usual, my brother had gone AWOL—military shorthand for “absent without leave.”
“He’s helping your father show Aunt Lily and Uncle Scott the Underground Railroad hiding spot,” my mother replied.
Of course he was. My brother always managed to find something more interesting to do than chores. “Fine,” I grumbled.
“Excuse me?”
“Fine, ma’am.” My parents were sticklers for politeness. And in a military family, that meant plenty of sirs and ma’ams.
This past Spring Break, the Pumpkin Falls Private Eyes—that was what my friends and I called ourselves—had solved another mystery in town. Two, actually. One involved maple syrup rustlers, or at least what we’d thought were rustlers, and the other involved the Underground Railroad. It turned out that one of my ancestors had been involved with helping runaway slaves. She’d hidden them right here in Gramps and Lola’s house. We’d discovered the secret compartment under the front stairs that had concealed the runaways and the escape tunnel that led through the cellar and under the back lawn to the cemetery. After the tunnel caved in, my parents had decided it was too dangerous to preserve, despite its historical value. Professor Rusty had begged my father not to seal it.
“It would be an irreparable loss!” he’d protested, but my father hadn’t budged. My aunt’s boyfriend still hadn’t quite forgiven him, although he was somewhat mollified by the fact that the secret compartment under the stairs was left intact.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and checked the time. I was going to have to hustle to make it over to the Mitchells’ and back before dinner.
The Mitchells were our neighbors. They were away for a few weeks and had offered us the use of their house for the reunion. It had six bedrooms, just like Gramps and Lola’s house, and half the adults were staying there. Most of my cousins were sleeping outside in tents. Only Mackenzie and I opted to stay indoors.
“Smart girls,” Grandma G had said when she’d heard this. “I like my creature comforts too.”
I double-timed it around the picnic tables, slapping down the rest of the paper plates and anchoring them with silverware, then setting out rolls of paper towels. Uncle Teddy’s blackberry jalapeño ribs were famously messy. The aroma wafting over from the grill was making my mouth water. Uncle Teddy was the undisputed king of barbecue in our family. “Low and slow” was his motto when it came to smoking meat, and he knew exactly how much heat to put in his signature sauce: enough so your lips tingled a little, but not so much that it made your nose run. That didn’t stop half my family from adding extra hot sauce. I smiled, thinking about the surprise that would be waiting for them at dinner.
One thing about our family reunions—the food was always fantastic. Everyone contributed their favorites, from Uncle Rooster’s signature lasagna to Aunt Sally’s famous banana French toast to Uncle Teddy’s ribs and more. On the final night, we always “splashed out,” as my mother called it, and chipped in to have dinner catered. And being Texans, and being Giffords, there was no such thing as too much barbecue, so we always had the catering for that meal done by the Salt Lick, a family favorite near Austin.
This time around, though, we were in Pumpkin Falls, not Texas, and my parents had opted to host a clambake for our final meal. Not that we were anywhere near the ocean—you pretty much couldn’t get any more landlocked than the Pumpkin River Valley—but clambakes were a New England tradition, and my mother was determined to send everybody home having had what she called “a genuine taste of Yankee food.” And this year that meant a house call from Lobster Bob, instead of the catering team from the Salt Lick. But the clambake wasn’t until tomorrow night. Tonight, there was barbecue!
I sniffed the air again greedily, then loped off across the lawn toward the neighbors’ house. Lauren was the animal-lover in our family, and she was usually the one who looked after the Mitchells’ pet ferret. This summer, though, my younger sisters were both away at camp, so most of the time I was the one who ended up stuck with cleaning Bilbo’s litter box and giving him his meals.
Another part of my perfect summer was the fact that, with Lauren and Pippa at Camp Lovejoy, and with my brothers shortly heading off to a weeklong wresting clinic at Boston University, I would have my parents’ undivided attention.
As the middle kid, it was easy to be overlooked. But this summer, for a
