The Girl from Felony Bay

by J. E. Thompson

  Rufus and I slipped through the fence and headed across the dew-soaked grass toward the horses. They turned their heads at our approach, and the pony nickered once, then trotted toward us. He nuzzled his head against my chest and then started to sniff at my pockets, where he smelled his carrots.

  “Good morning, Timmy,” I said as I slipped one of the carrots out of my pocket and let him have it. He chewed contentedly and followed me as I gave a carrot to each of the carriage horses.

  Once everyone had gotten their treat, I put my arms around Timmy’s neck, then slipped onto his back. After a good look around just to make sure no one was out watching, I grabbed a handful of mane and gave a slight squeeze with my legs. We trotted for a short distance and then began to canter.

  We went around the field like that for a while, and at one point I reached forward, slid my arm along Timmy’s neck, tightened my grip on his mane, then let my body slide off his back. I kept slipping until I was pressed hard against his side, and my one foot on his rump and my arm around his neck was all that kept me from falling off. It was a trick move I had seen in some old movie on TV, and I was teaching myself to do it just in case someone came along while I was riding and I needed to hide. I hadn’t met the new owners of the plantation, but I suspected that they might not approve of me riding Timmy without permission. Of course, Uncle Charlie had told me that I was never allowed to ride Timmy again and that if I ever got on him, even once, I would be severely punished, whatever that meant. Even so, I tried to tell myself that I was doing the right thing by giving him some exercise. After all, it’s important to keep horses and ponies in shape to prevent injuries.

  I rode Timmy for a little while longer, until we were both sweated up, and then we headed toward the barn. The summer job that Uncle Charlie and Ruth had arranged was for me to feed and water and generally care for the new owner’s horses every day, muck out the stalls, and clean and oil the tack. I think they expected me to complain because the work was hot and sweaty, but for me it was perfect. I didn’t have anything else to fill my time. My old friends from Miss Walker’s all lived far away, so I had no way to see them. Besides, since Daddy had been accused of being a thief, most of them didn’t know what to say to me, so they didn’t say much at all.

  Also, the day Timmy was sold had been one of the saddest days of my life. Even though I didn’t own him anymore, having a job where I could spend time with him and take care of him and make sure he was okay took away some of the hurt.

  The new owners of Reward lived in Atlanta. I hardly knew a thing about them, other than their name was also Force, just like mine, but apparently we were not related. Uncle Charlie had handled the sale of the plantation, but I don’t think he had ever met the people, just their lawyers. Supposedly Mr. Force was a very wealthy businessman who traveled all over the world visiting his various investments. He was so busy that he hadn’t even come to see his new plantation since he’d bought it the previous winter.

  The one thing that made me think Mr. Force might be a nice man was that he had adopted the two old carriage horses. According to the man who had brought them here a few weeks earlier, Mr. Force and his daughter had been on a trip when she had seen the old horses and felt sorry for them. Supposedly she had asked her father to buy them and give them a nice place to retire, and he had done it right on the spot.

  When Timmy and I reached the barn, I turned around and looked to make sure the two carriage horses were following. Their names were Clem and Lem, which seemed perfect because of their slow way of walking and doing everything else. I twisted the tap above the watering trough and filled the big galvanized tub to the top. Then after the horses had a good, long drink, I opened the gate so they could walk to the barn and into their open stalls for their morning grain.

  Once they had eaten, I took Timmy out of his stall, hitched him to the cross ties, then hosed him down and brushed him until his coat glistened. Afterward I did the same to Clem and Lem and put fly coats on all three horses, sprayed them with fly repellant, then put them out in a different pasture.

  I spent the next couple hours mucking out the stalls, then cleaning and oiling the saddles and bridles. With most of the work finished, I walked out of the barn and down the drive toward Reward Plantation Manor, the big house where Daddy and I used to live. The name made it sound like some fancy Southern mansion with tall white columns, but it wasn’t. It was a pretty, old wooden house with green shutters and shaded porches on the front and back. I checked to make sure there were no cars around and that the new owners hadn’t shown up unexpectedly, then I went to a window at the far end of the house and peeked inside.

  It was Daddy’s old library, and it looked almost the same as it had the day I found him lying unconscious on the floor and bleeding from a big gash in his head. A stepladder had been set up in the middle of the room, and when I looked up at the ceiling, I had seen that a couple of old cypress panels had been moved aside to reveal a secret storage space. There had been pieces of gold jewelry and coins and what looked like diamonds scattered around, stuff that I had never seen before, as if Daddy had been trying to get them out of the hiding place or maybe trying to hide them when he fell. Either way, they didn’t belong to him.

  I stared into the room for a long time, remembering the scene as if it had been yesterday. I knew what the police claimed had happened. I knew that pretty much everybody else agreed with them. But I also knew that all of them were wrong. I thought about the last year, living with Uncle Charlie and Ruth, and about last night, about the letter from Miss Walker’s. And I thought about Daddy, lying there motionless in his hospital bed.

  I was going to find a way to prove he was innocent, and I was going to do it this summer. I just didn’t know how.

  Four

  Three hours later I was reading a book in the shade of a big live oak on one side of the barn when I finally saw a plume of road dust from Uncle Charlie’s black pickup as he drove out the plantation drive. It was nearly eleven thirty, and I assumed he was on his way to a card game or a bar. That meant the coast was clear, so I headed back to the house with Rufus trotting at my heels.

  Back in the kitchen I emptied the dishwasher from the night before, wiped off the counters, and cleaned up the spilled milk that was left from Uncle Charlie’s cereal bowl. After I let Rufus lick up the rest of the milk from the bowl, I washed it, put coffee in the machine, and turned it on. Then I sat and read my book and waited for Ruth to appear. She came down about twenty minutes later, sniffing at the freshly brewed coffee and carrying what looked like an old-fashioned yellow ball gown made of some shiny stuff like silk or satin.

  I could tell right away that Ruth hadn’t expected to find me there, because she looked surprised and angry. “What are you doin’ here?” she demanded, half turning and bundling up the the gown behind her back. She must have been embarrassed. A ball gown was totally un-Ruth. Not that I had much to brag about in the clothing department, but she tended to dress like a train wreck. All of her clothes looked like they had never met an iron, and most of them had burns from her cigarette ashes. Ruth couldn’t find the department-store makeup counter with a map, and her dull brown hair was usually as tangled up as a bird’s nest. She’d have looked as silly in a ball gown as I would have in a chicken suit.

  “Finished my chores at the barn,” I said. “So what’s the dress for?” I added, unable to leave it alone.

  “Nothin’. It’s just a dress.” As if to make her point, she tossed it onto one of the kitchen chairs, where it fell half onto the floor. She left it there and walked over to pour herself a mug of coffee.

  I caught a big whiff of mustiness coming off the dress. It smelled like it had been in some attic trunk for about a hundred years. I wondered where she would have gotten it, seeing as how there’s no way she owned it. But I didn’t get a chance to ask any more about it, because she took her coffee out on the back porch steps, lit a cigarette, and sat there while she smoked it. When she finally came back into the kitche
n, she looked around at how everything was cleaned up, then squinted at me as if she was just noticing me for the first time.

  “You sure you finished your barn chores?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said in a mocking tone. “You only talk like that when you want something.”

  I pursed my lips and forced myself to be quiet and not bug her about the dress or anything else.

  “What?” Ruth asked when the silence stretched.

  “I’d like to go see him.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who. Please?”

  She poured another mug of coffee, then stood at the sink for a moment looking out the kitchen window. When she turned toward me and spoke again, her voice had become softer. Unlike Uncle Charlie, Ruth was actually capable of being human at certain times. “He probably has no idea that you’re there. You do know that, right?”

  I bit my cheeks hard. I could not and would not accept that. “That’s not what the doctors say.”

  “They said if your dad is gonna come out of his coma, talking might help. I’m sorry to say it, but that if is getting bigger every day. It’s been nine months.”

  She did not have to tell me that. It had been eight months and twenty-seven days. That afternoon at about three o’clock it would be eight months and twenty-eight days since I had found Daddy lying on the library floor.

  The doctors had told me that the best way of helping Daddy wake up from his coma was to go in and talk to him and read books to him and just let him hear my voice. They said if he could hear me, it might help him work harder to find a way to wake up again. I didn’t care what Ruth or anybody said, and I didn’t care how much time had gone by. I was going to visit him every chance I got and let him hear my voice.

  “Please, Ruth. I’m sure you’re going out sometime today. Just drop me off where I can catch the bus. Please.”

  Ruth took a deep breath, and I could tell that she was weakening. She scowled, but she picked up a dishrag and tossed it into the sink. “Fine. But don’t be expecting me to drive you all summer.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You ready to go right now? I don’t have time to waste.”

  “Yes,” I said. I raced up the stairs, grabbed the book I had been reading to Daddy off my dresser, and hurried back down.

  Ruth snatched her keys off the hook by the door and jerked her head for me to follow. I told Rufus to stay, and I ran into the yard behind her.

  Ruth drove me to the bus stop on Johns Island and let me out, and twenty minutes later I was looking out the window of a city bus, watching the world become more and more suburban as we got closer to downtown Charleston. We went past the round Holiday Inn and over the bridge called the Old Connector, and after another block we came to a stop near the Medical University and the University Hospital.

  Charleston is an old city, full of big, old buildings, many from the eighteen hundreds and even the seventeen hundreds. The Medical University is pretty modern by comparison. The campus is full of tall structures with lots of glass. If you’re sick, it’s the kind of place you want to be.

  I got off the bus and walked toward the biggest and newest hospital building. It looked so shiny and bright that it just had to be full of hope and certain cures for its patients. At least that’s what I told myself.

  Daddy’s room was on the sixth floor, and I took the elevator up and then pushed the button beside the hallway door. The nurses were used to seeing me and buzzed me in. I waved to them and went straight to Daddy’s room.

  “Good morning,” I said when I walked in. I always held a magical hope that I might come in, greeting him like nothing was wrong, and he might just answer me right back. But he just lay there the way he always had, flat on his back, his face still and peaceful. He could have been sound asleep like any normal person except for the clear tube that went from a drip bag above his bed to an IV port on the back of one hand and another tube that carried food up his nose and from there down into his stomach.

  “Okay, lazybones,” I said, keeping my voice cheerful even though I never felt cheerful when I saw him like that. Seeing those tubes go into his body always reminded me that he was balanced right on the edge of being alive and being dead. “Let’s see. I’ve got a lot to tell you. School got out for the year yesterday. I had a great year and got straight As, ’cause I wanted to make you proud.”

  I really did get straight As, but I hadn’t told Daddy that I was no longer going to Miss Walker’s School for Girls. I also hadn’t told him that Reward Plantation had been sold or that Timmy had been sold or that I was living with Uncle Charlie and Ruth and pretty much hated every minute of it. Daddy had always raised me to tell the truth, but there was no way I could tell him the truth about my life. I was afraid that if I told him what it was really like, he might never want to wake up.

  I made up some happy stories about things I had done and places I had gone with old friends from Miss Walker’s, and when I couldn’t think of any more good lies to tell, I took out A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and went to my bookmark and started to read from where I had stopped the last time.

  From time to time, I would stop reading and look up at Daddy lying there so peacefully, and the picture in my brain would flash back to that day I found him on the floor of the library. I had called 911, and a police car came to the plantation along with the ambulance. While the medics took care of Daddy, the policemen looked at the jewelry that was scattered around the floor and at the secret hiding place, and then they went out to their car and came back and took pictures. Afterward, when Daddy was in the hospital, the police discovered initials on some of the jewelry that made them suspect that it had belonged to one of Daddy’s clients, Miss Lydia Jenkins.

  Miss Jenkins was very old and very rich and, according to everyone, very strange. Daddy never ever talked about any of his clients, but other people sure liked to talk about Miss Jenkins. They said that she didn’t trust banks or paper money or insurance companies and that she kept all her wealth in the form of gold and diamonds in an old bank vault in her huge old house in downtown Charleston. According to the rumors, Miss Lydia Jenkins didn’t trust her own family any more than she trusted banks. She had never married and never had any children of her own, but she thought her nieces and nephews were all just after her money.

  She had been Daddy’s client for many years, and he was apparently the only person in the world she trusted. Two years earlier Miss Jenkins had suffered a stroke that had left her almost completely paralyzed and unable to talk. Sometimes when I went to downtown Charleston, I would catch sight of her in her wheelchair being pushed along the sidewalk by her nurse.

  The police went to Miss Jenkins’s house to ask about the jewelry. Miss Jenkins’s nurse identified all the pieces. And when they went to the big safe that only Miss Jenkins and my father supposedly knew the combination to, they found the safe door unlocked and the safe totally empty.

  Miss Lydia Jenkins, who had hardly spoken a syllable since her stroke, got extremely upset. When the police asked if my father had stolen her gold, all she managed to say was “Stole it.” She said it over and over.

  About an hour later, I had finished reading to Daddy and I was walking down the corridor on my way to the elevator when I saw a familiar face coming toward me and recognized Mr. Crawford Barrett, Daddy’s law partner.

  “Abbey!” he said, when he caught sight of me.

  Mr. Barrett was tall and thin with a straight nose, sculpted chin, and longish gray hair that he combed straight back. Daddy liked to say that Mr. Barrett was the picture everyone had in their head of an upper-class, intelligent, and honest lawyer, like the kind of person you’d see playing a lawyer on TV.

  “Hi, Mr. Barrett,” I said.

  “Visiting your dad?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I had some time between appointments, so I thought I’d look in on him myself. Any change?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe he’l
l wake up for you,” I said.

  “I can only hope. You know, sometimes when I get stuck on something in a case, I like to come and talk to your dad just the way I used to when he was in his office. I tell him what my problem is and pretend he answers me and tells me what I should do. Maybe one of these days, he will.”

  “Yessir, I hope so, too.”

  I appreciated that Mr. Barrett would still come to visit Daddy after all these months—goodness knows it was more than Daddy’s own brother would do—but at the same time I was angry at him. I realized my reasons for being angry probably weren’t his fault at all, but I couldn’t help it. Mr. Barrett had been the one who took over everything right after the accident, when the police formally accused Daddy of stealing Miss Jenkins’s gold and jewelry. Daddy was in a coma and couldn’t appoint an attorney now, but Mr. Barrett had a power of attorney that let him act for Daddy if he ever couldn’t act for himself.

  He talked to Miss Jenkins’s lawyer and got her to agree that they would not press charges against Daddy for something called grand larceny if Reward Plantation was sold and that money, along with everything else Daddy had, was given to Miss Jenkins. I told Mr. Barrett it was wrong to sell anything until Daddy woke up and had a chance to tell us what really happened, but he said the courts wouldn’t wait. And he said that the law firm, and all their partners, would be ruined if we didn’t settle and sell Reward to pay back Miss Jenkins. He also said it looked to the whole world like Daddy had done a very bad thing, and while he remained certain that Daddy would be able to exonerate himself when he woke up, the town’s opinion wasn’t going to change one bit until that happened. He said selling the plantation was the only way of salvaging our family’s honor.