I stuck out my chin. “This land has always been part of Reward,” I said.
He looked at me, and his face grew red. “Well, it ain’t anymore. So I’m tellin’ you for the last time, you git off this property! You don’t move right now, I’ll arrest you both.”
I stood my ground. “If this isn’t part of Reward, who owns it?”
“None a your business,” Bubba growled, and started toward us.
He was the kind of person who looked half crazy when he got angry. Bee and I started to edge back toward the path as Bubba kept coming. We were almost running, and I could hear Bee sucking air between her teeth and I knew her leg had to be hurting bad.
Bubba followed us all the way out to the No Trespassing signs; then he stayed there and watched as we headed back toward the big house. I walked behind Bee, going as slow as she needed to as she limped along on her cane. I felt like a dog who was running away with its tail between its legs. It made me mad to get chased off, but it also made me curious. Something weird was going on at Felony Bay. If the land wasn’t part of Reward anymore, I wanted to know why. Also who had bought it, and why were they digging holes and chasing everybody off?
When we got back into the yard by the big house, Bee turned to me. “Let’s not say anything to Grandma Em about that guy.”
“Why?”
“She’ll just tell me I’m never allowed to go near that corner of the property again. Trust me. I know how she thinks.”
“Okay.” I shrugged and followed her into the kitchen, where we found Grandma Em cutting up a fresh chicken for that night’s dinner. She glanced at us over her shoulder. Maybe she saw the way my eyes went straight to the chicken, or maybe she knew how much I had loved her BLT sandwiches, because she asked, “Bee, you want to ask your friend to stay for dinner? We have plenty of food.”
Bee smiled and looked at me. “Want to join us?”
I nodded. “Thanks.” My mouth was already salivating at the prospect of having two home-cooked meals on the same day.
“She’s going to stay,” Bee said.
Grandma Em let me use her phone to call Ruth and let her know I wouldn’t be home for dinner. The two of us started to walk out of the kitchen, but then Bee stopped and said, offhanded like, “Hey, Grandma, when we were walking around, we saw No Trespassing signs on some trees, but Abbey was pretty sure it’s our property. You know anything about that?”
Grandma Em shook her head. “The only thing I really know about is this house and the grass that’s right around it. Best ask your daddy when you talk to him.”
Bee went on. “But he wouldn’t have sold some of the land without saying something, would he?”
Grandma Em put her hands on her hips and gave her head a shake. “Honey, that son of mine is too busy on that company he bought in India to think about anything else.” She turned toward the sink, and I heard her mutter, “Including his own family.”
Bee and I walked out of the kitchen, and Bee motioned me upstairs. “Okay,” she said. “So if my dad hasn’t sold any land, what do you think is going on? Did your dad sell that land to somebody else and not tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“I hate it when some rude person tells me something is none of my business,” Bee said.
“So do I.”
Bee nodded. “So we ought to figure out what’s going on.”
I smiled and grabbed a pen and a pad of paper from her desk. “Let’s write down what we need to know. I’ll make the list.”
Bee nodded. “First, if part of the plantation got sold, when and how did it happen?”
“Great question,” I said, writing it down. “The problem is Uncle Charlie was the real-estate agent who sold Reward to your dad.”
“You can’t just ask him?”
“You have to know Uncle Charlie,” I said. “I don’t think he’d tell me if my clothes were on fire.”
Bee laughed, but then I saw her give me a searching look, as if she had as many questions about my life as I had about hers. Neither one of us was giving much away.
“Another question,” Bee said, after a few seconds. “If my dad didn’t buy Felony Bay, who did?”
I nodded and wrote the question down.
“And why do you think they were digging those holes?” Bee asked.
I wrote down Holes?
“They sure had dug a lot of them,” Bee said. “But that reminds me. Who was that man?”
“Bubba Simmons,” I said. “He’s a part-time deputy sheriff on Leadenwah Island, but he’s somebody you want to stay away from. Daddy used to say that Bubba’s naturally mean, and when he’s drunk he’s even meaner. Daddy also said that Bubba drinks a lot.”
Bee smiled, but her face became serious. “We have to figure out if my dad was cheated when he bought this place.” She reached for the list I had made and started looking it over.
While she did that, my own thoughts wandered back nine months earlier to when I had made a similar list, writing down the questions that needed to be answered to prove Daddy’s innocence. I still had the list beside my bed, folded up in my diary. I hadn’t looked at the questions in a long time, but I didn’t need to because I knew them all by heart.
Daddy was strong and healthy and never a klutz, so how did he end up falling off the ladder?
The ladder was in the middle of the room, far away from his desk, so what did he hit his head on to get hurt so badly?
If he stole Miss Jenkins’s jewelry, when did he do it and why were there so few pieces left? What happened to all the rest?
Daddy had plenty of money in the bank, and his accountants could show how all the money came from his law practice. So if he stole Miss Jenkins’s gold and jewels and sold them, where was the money?
Daddy was always totally honest in all the things he ever did. If he didn’t need the money, why would he choose to steal from Miss Jenkins?
If Daddy didn’t steal the gold and jewels, who did?
If someone else did, how did they steal it?
Is it possible that Daddy was framed so that somebody else could get away with the crime?
I had taken my list of questions to the police and to Mr. Crawford Barrett, Daddy’s law partner. I had asked them to help me get answers, but now, nine months later, not a single one of my questions had ever been answered.
Bee looked up when she finished reading and then handed the list back to me. I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket for safekeeping. “Tomorrow,” I said, “we’re going to start getting some answers.”
Eight
I walked back to Uncle Charlie and Ruth’s house that night after eating the most delicious roast chicken dinner with roasted baby potatoes and garden-fresh broccoli. Rufus trotted beside me, full from his own dinner of chicken scraps. The moon was nearly full, rising over the trees in the eastern sky and giving plenty of light to lead me home.
The piece of paper with all the questions Bee and I had written down bulged in my back pocket, and the need for answers was burning in my brain. How was it possible that Felony Bay had been sold to somebody else? Reward Plantation had been in my family from the early seventeen hundreds to nine months earlier, roughly three hundred years. Daddy never would have broken up the land unless he’d been desperate. So who had done it, and how had it happened, and why? Those No Trespassing signs at Felony Bay made me angry, as if a chunk of our land had been stolen right out from under our noses.
One thing I was sure of was that Uncle Charlie had at least some of the answers. I wanted to march right into the house and demand that he tell me what was going on. Who had bought the land? Had he had something to do with it? Why had he let that happen, and why hadn’t he said anything? Did Bee’s father know that part of the original plantation land had been sold to someone else? There were so many questions and no answers.
I also knew that I needed to be careful. Uncle Charlie was strange about a lot of things,
and giving up information was definitely one of them. Daddy always said that liars are the most suspicious people of all, always convinced that someone’s trying to put one over on them, since they’re always doing the same. That was Uncle Charlie, all right. Every time I asked him something, he looked at me like I was trying to trick him. That was especially true when he’d been drinking, which by this time of night was guaranteed.
I walked up the dirt track toward the house so deep in thought that at first I didn’t notice the pickup truck parked out in front. But Rufus saw it. Down by my side, he started to make a low growl, and I put my hand on his head and hushed him, pulling him away from the center of the track, where we were outlined in the moonlight, over to where the field of corn whispered in the night wind. The stalks had already grown higher than my head, and I could stand inside one of the rows surrounded by the sweet, toasted smell of growing corn and look out at the car and the vague shapes of two men standing in the yard just beyond it.
I crept down the row and found a place where one of the stalks had fallen and I could cross silently to the next row. There I found another fallen stalk and crossed another row, pulling Rufus along beside me, patting his head each time he started to growl. The hiss of wind moving through the corn blanketed any sound we made.
When I reached the last row of corn, I moved back toward the house and stopped. From here the voices of the two men were a little clearer, and I could make out the occasional word. I heard Uncle Charlie say, “Machine,” and then another voice say, “Keep ’em out.” That second voice I recognized because I had heard it just that afternoon. My stomach froze, and I felt both sweaty and cold at the same time.
A second later the truck door opened, and then its engine started. It was louder than a normal engine; it must have had a busted muffler. I squatted in the corn beside Rufus as the truck backed up and made a K-turn. For a second its headlights panned across the cornfield and outlined the rows of stalks in sharp relief, and then they were pointing down the driveway. As the truck drove past, I caught a quick peek at the driver, with his messy hair and black whiskers. My suspicions were right. There was no mistaking Bubba Simmons.
I continued to hold on to Rufus’s collar until Uncle Charlie’s footsteps on the front porch and then the slam of the door told me he’d gone back inside, but when I let go, Rufus didn’t move a muscle. I realized that he didn’t like Uncle Charlie any better than I did, and I gave his ears a scratch.
We waited for a couple more minutes, then circled the house and walked in the back door, where Ruth was reading a magazine at the kitchen table. “Where you been?” she asked, as if she didn’t remember that I had called earlier to tell her I would be having dinner at Bee’s.
“The big house.”
She sniffed. “Don’t get used to it. You don’t live there anymore, and you got dishes to do here, girl.”
I bit my tongue, tied on an apron, and started rinsing dishes and loading them in the dishwasher. There was no use trying to talk to Ruth when Uncle Charlie was home. I had realized some time ago that even if Ruth was nice on occasion, she was just as mean as Uncle Charlie when he was around.
As soon as I’d finished the dishes, I walked to the doorway of the small den, where Uncle Charlie was watching television and drinking a beer. He glanced at me, and his face darkened.
“What?”
“Good evening to you, too,” I said.
My heart was bucking in my chest. I told myself to calm down, but I had a hunch that I was about to open a big can of worms.
“I was out walking today,” I began.
Uncle Charlie stared at the TV, not bothering to acknowledge that he was listening.
“Up toward Felony Bay, I saw a bunch of No Trespassing signs strung up on the trees.”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
Uncle Charlie’s eyes got smaller. I could tell from his expression that he was trying hard to be cagey. “What’re y’all talking about?”
“I mean why are signs there?”
“’Cause maybe the new owners don’t want y’all walkin’ on their land.”
“Mr. Force is the new owner. His daughter doesn’t know anything about this either.”
Uncle Charlie gave me a pained look. “He might a bought the plantation, but he ain’t the new owner of Felony Bay.”
My jaw dropped, but I quickly picked it up. “How’s that possible?” I managed after a few seconds.
“Simple. Felony Bay was a separate piece of property.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Uncle Charlie’s cheeks grew red. “Don’t argue with me, girl. If I said it was a separate piece, it was a separate piece.”
“Since when?”
“Long time.”
“So . . . who owns it now?”
“If they wanted y’all to know, I guess they would a come over and introduced themselves.”
“But you know who they are.”
Uncle Charlie’s eyes glimmered with his secret knowledge. “Maybe I do.”
“And you’re not going to say.”
“Ain’t none a your beeswax.” Then Uncle Charlie said something that I didn’t expect. He looked at me and smiled. “But you’ll find out soon enough.”
I went to bed a few minutes later, but I lay awake for a long time watching the moon through my window and wondering about Felony Bay and what Uncle Charlie was up to.
Nine
In spite of staying up a lot of the night tossing and turning with questions I couldn’t answer, I woke up extra early the next morning when Rufus stuck his wet nose in my face. As if that wasn’t enough to drag me out of sleep, Rufus gassed me with his Labrador retriever breath. It was almost strong enough to kill.
I ate my usual bowl of cereal and fed Rufus, then the two of us snuck out the back door and headed to the pasture. Since the moment I’d opened my eyes, I had been thinking about the same things that had kept me up the night before—the No Trespassing signs, the holes, Uncle Charlie, and Bubba Simmons.
The temperature had dropped a bit overnight. Heavy dew lay on the grass, and thick fog drifted off the river, lending everything a mysterious quality that only sharpened my hunger for answers. Timmy and his fellow horses, Clem and Lem, looked as indistinct as ghosts where they stood against the fence. As soon as Timmy caught my scent, he nickered and came over to nuzzle me. You could barely see twenty feet in front of you, and Timmy’s back was dripping with dew and drifting fog, so rather than try to ride, I led him to the barn.
I fed and watered the horses, and when they finished their grain, I dried their backs and put on the fly coats they would need when the sun burned through. I did other chores, and once the fog started to lift, I let them back out in the pasture.
A yell came from back behind me. Bee was limping down the track on her way from the big house. “You done already?”
“Couldn’t sleep thanks to Rufus, so I decided to get an early start.”
“I was coming down to help,” she said, sounding disappointed that she hadn’t gotten there in time. A second later her thoughts seemed to shift, and she brightened. “Guess what! My dad called from India last night, and I asked him about that property.”
“What did he say?”
“He got on his computer and looked at the survey he received when he bought the plantation. He says there isn’t anything on the property that looks like a bay. He also said that while lots of parts of the plantation have names, there’s no Felony Bay.”
I nodded. “Uncle Charlie basically admitted that the land was sold to somebody else, but he won’t tell me who. Also, when I walked home last night, Bubba Simmons was at our house. I overheard him and Uncle Charlie talking about the holes and keeping us off the property.”
Bee looked at me a moment. “What do you think this is all about?”
I shook my head. “I think we need to find out.”
“So what are we going to do?” Bee asked.
“We need to get the facts.”
“How?”
I took a deep breath. “We need to go downtown and check the property records. One of the only things Uncle Charlie said was that Felony Bay was a separate property. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, and I want to find out if he was lying. Either way, I think there are records and things we can search. If somebody bought Felony Bay, once we find out who they are, maybe we can figure out why they did and what they’re doing.”
After I’d said it all out loud, the stuff we needed to do sounded really boring, and I was afraid Bee would want no part in it.
“So when do we start?”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You do want my help, don’t you?”
“Of . . . of course!” I said, unable to hide my surprise and my pleasure. “I just didn’t think you’d want to.”
Bee glanced at her wristwatch. “We should go up to the house right now. Grandma Em is planning to go out shopping, and it sounds like we need to get a ride downtown.”
We walked up to the big house and found Grandma Em just about to get in her car and leave. Bee asked if we might come along with her.
“What do you girls need to do in town?” Grandma Em asked in her deep voice. “Please don’t tell me you need to shop.”
The thought of shopping made me glance involuntarily at Bee, and I felt a sudden sense of dread. What if she wanted to go shopping before we did our research? I didn’t want to go into fancy stores where I wouldn’t have any money to buy anything and where I’d feel bad about my own clothes. Bee was tall and thin, and I have to admit she looked pretty in her well-fitting jeans. Her top definitely hadn’t come off the rack at a discount store. And her hair was straight and recently cut, and she had small gold-knot earrings that set everything off.
I couldn’t help feeling shabby in my old jeans that were already too short and my Atlanta Braves T-shirt that Ruth had bought at a church consignment shop a few months back. My ears weren’t pierced, because Daddy had said we were going to wait to do that on my twelfth birthday, and then he’d had his accident and Ruth couldn’t have cared less. Unlike Bee’s perfect hair, mine was curly and dark blond, and it only got cut when Ruth told me it looked as bushy as a palmetto tree. When it was cut short, I looked more like a boy, and when it was long, like a scruffy girl. Neither made me want to hang out in fancy stores where I couldn’t buy anything anyway.
The Girl from Felony Bay Page 6