Memento Nora by Angie Smibert Page B

I kind of surprised myself.
     
    Winter nodded at me as if she was actually impressed.
     
    The chairman glared at Officer Bell again. “Didn’t you tell them?”
     
    “No.” The cop shrugged. “This was your idea. You tell them.”
     
    Mr. Carver groaned. I kept standing.
     
    “We’re the underground,” he said.
     
    Winter snorted at that.
     
    Mr. Carver visibly bristled. Then he focused on me and spoke calmly but firmly. “Young lady,” he said.
     
    I decided to sit down.
     
    “We are an underground group of concerned cit-izens. . . .” He paused, looking for the words. “Let’s just say we’re more than a support group.”
     
    Ms. Curtis stood again. “In the beginning, all of us”—she looked at Mr. Yamada and a few others—“lost somebody to Detention. We all had a loved one or friend who was ‘away,’ as George so delicately put it. So we got together to support one another mentally, emotionally, and even financially. We still do that.”
     
    The chairman lowered his eyes.
     
    “So?” I asked.
     
    “The financial thing is the tricky part,” Officer Bell said to me.
     
    Mr. Yamada nodded. “It’s illegal to give money to suspected terrorists.”
     
    “Koji and Doug are correct,” Ms. Curtis said. “Which is why the Jonas Defense Fund—our legal defense fund—is so important and quite enough to get us all sent ‘away,’ too.”
     
    A strange look came over Micah.
     
    “There’s so much else we do—or could do,” the chairman said. He looked like he wanted to say more but thought better of it. Plus, Ms. Curtis was glowering at him. “But let’s not get into it right now.” He turned to my friends and me. “The bottom line is that your activities, no matter how admirable, put ours at risk. That comic of yours has spread way outside Hamilton and DC, even beyond the East Coast.”
     
    I still didn’t get how we put them at risk, but that was all they would say. They refused to tell us what else they did. They just made us promise to stop what we were doing. Micah was oddly quiet during the whole thing.
     
    “And if we don’t?” I asked.
     
    “Officer Bell will have to do his job,” the librarian said curtly.
     
    Officer Bell shook his head slowly. ”Katie, don’t use me to threaten them.”
     
    Ms. Curtis did not look happy with him.
     
    “I’ve had enough of this crap.” Mr. Yamada stood up. “I only agreed to bring Winter to listen. You kids don’t need to promise anything. We’re leaving.”
     
    “Koji,” the cop said, rising. “Let me take these two back to school.” He and Winter’s grandfather exchanged a look, and Mr. Yamada nodded.
     
    “It’s okay,” he reassured us. “I trust Bell.”
     
    Winter just stood there next to her grandfather, staring at the cop with her X-ray vision as if trying to gauge his intentions. She didn’t say a thing.
     
    Micah and I ended up back in the cop car again. I wondered why Mr. Yamada—whose daughter and son-in-law had disappeared into Detention—would trust this cop. Why would any of them? And why would he be part of this so-called underground?
     
    So I asked Officer Bell.
     
    And to my surprise he told us.
     
    “It was the black vans,” he said without taking his eyes off the road.
     
    Micah sat up when Bell said that.
     
    Last year, Officer Bell said, back when he had still been on patrol, he’d noticed that whenever there was a bombing in his area, some witness always reported seeing a black van. None of the detectives had seemed to take this seriously. There are dozens of black vans at any one time in the city, they’d say. Then he’d seen one leaving the area near a bombing right after it happened. So he followed the van back to a building downtown and saw it go into an unmarked parking garage next to Tiffany’s. He’d called it in, thinking the store might be the terrorists’ next target. Nothing happened, though, and the next day he’d been bumped down to searching bags at