Moon Over Manifest Chapters 26-28 Summary

Chapter 26

The girls have found some firecrackers to set off.
They decide to sneak into the school first to see if they can find that old "Ode to the Rattler" poem anywhere.
In the senior classroom, it hits Abilene: if a student wanted to write a secret message, he'd do it on the underside of the hinged desktop.
They check all the desks, and sure enough, find a bunch of funny rhymes—and eventually, the "Ode to the Rattler."
But suddenly, they hear a noise. The janitor is in the hallway, getting ready to wax the floor.
The girls run back to the closet window they came in through, but when Abilene boosts the other two out, she's stuck inside. Yikes.
She heads back to the classroom to think.
While she's there, she looks up the word "manifest" in the dictionary (talk about dedication to her studies), and finds out it can mean "to reveal" as well as "a list of passengers on a ship."
Suddenly she realizes it's gone quiet. The doorknob to her classroom starts to turn… when out of the blue, fireworks start exploding at the end of the hallway.
The janitor runs to see what's going on, and Abilene dashes outside, back to her friends. Jailbreak.

As Abilene walks through town over the next few days, people keep stopping her to tell her to be careful in her spy hunt. It kind of starts freaking her out.
One Sunday, Shady actually gets a halfway decent crowd at his church service: eight people.
It's a potluck, too, and Hattie Mae brought a cake. Yummers.
Abilene says it could win at a county fair and asks if they've ever had a fair in Manifest.
Um, apparently that was the wrong thing to say, because no one says anything and it gets all awkward.
But then they start reminiscing about the fair.
Well, then.
Abilene is upset that she didn't have a story to share; she is "all middle," without knowing her roots or where she was headed.
But when the old lady from that porch tells a story about her daughter at the fair, Abilene cheers up.

After the service, Abilene runs over to the town cemetery, to see if she can find out whatever happened to the old lady's daughter.
Not dead. Okay, that's good.
She stops by Miss Sadie's, who jumps right back into her story…