Bee trained her light on the fireplace. “Look,” she said, as her light revealed a pot that hung from an old wrought-iron hook over the fire pit. The pot was blackened around the bottom but still had shiny metal along the outer lip, as if it wasn’t very old.
I went over to the fireplace and examined the pot and also the ashes in the fire pit.
“Somebody’s been having fires in here,” I said.
“Too hot for fires,” Bee said.
“I know, but the ashes are still fluffy and all gathered together in a nice pile. Old ashes flatten out and get hard.”
Bee took the pot from the hook. She put it on the floor and shined her light down inside it. There was something smeared on the inside of the pot that looked like leftovers from somebody cooking butterscotch.
“What do you think this is?” Bee asked as she tapped her finger against it.
I used a fingernail to try to scrape some of the stuff off the inside of the pot. I couldn’t get much, and it didn’t look like anything I wanted to taste. “No idea.”
We brought the pot to the plywood table. The burn marks on the plywood seemed to match the size and shape of the pot bottom. I pointed that out to Bee. “Looks like they took the pot when it was hot and rested it here.”
Bee tapped the table around the blackened wood, where there were tiny splash marks the same color as the inside of the pot. “I think it’s the same stuff,” she said. “Looks like they poured it out.”
I put my face down close and sniffed. “No smell.” I chipped at it with my fingernail, and a small bit came free. “It doesn’t look like food,” I said, rolling it between my fingers. “What do you think they poured it into?”
“Who knows?”
“Keep looking,” I said. “We need to find more.” I had no idea exactly what we were looking for, but I was convinced we had stumbled onto something important.
We shined our lights over the rest of the plywood table and around the cabin but found nothing else. Finally my hopes started to plummet all over again when I thought about what we had: a pot with some melted stuff inside and our word against Uncle Charlie’s that we’d seen him bury an old crate filled with something heavy. I knew what Daddy would say about such little evidence: that we couldn’t prove a thing.
Out of desperation I dropped to my knees and started looking around on the floor underneath the table. That was when my light caught a momentary reflection. I crawled over to where I had seen the glint, but when I aimed my light right at it, I could see nothing but old wood boards with wide cracks between them.
I tried several more times, and only when I shined my light at the same angle I had the first time did I see the glint again. “Come over here. I think I found something,” I said. Bee came to my side of the table and added her light, and with the extra brightness I could see a metal object where it had fallen in the crack between the floorboards.
“What is it?” Bee asked.
“I think it’s a piece of jewelry.”
“Miss Jenkins’s?”
I took my knife from its sheath and slipped the blade into the crack. Taking great care, I worked the tip of the knife along one side of the crack, then pressed it against the metal thing and started to work it up and into the light.
Bee gasped as it came free. The ring looked like it was made out of silver, and it had a big, clear stone in the middle. “I think it’s a diamond ring!” Bee said.
“You don’t think it’s a fake?” I asked.
She put her light on it, and we could both see the sparkles in the stone. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting it’s real,” she said.
I realized that the cabin was probably so dark even in daylight that it would have been invisible down between the floorboards and would have only shown up if somebody was really searching the way Bee and I had been. We had finally gotten a lucky break.
We were so intent on getting the ring that we didn’t hear the truck engines outside until it was too late.
Nineteen
“Quick!” I said. “The flashlights!”
We clicked them off, throwing the cabin into total darkness. The caged feeling of tight space and the smells of wet wood and mold and mildew came rushing in on us. I stuffed the ring into the pocket of my blue jeans and shoved my knife back into its sheath. I reached out, groping in the dark, and found Bee’s hand as the first flashlight beams approached the cabin.
“. . . said you had everything,” I heard Uncle Charlie say in an angry tone.
“I thought you’d gotten the stuff in the cabin when I was trailerin’ the dozer,” Bubba Simmons said.
“I gotta do everything myself,” Uncle Charlie growled. “If I hadn’t asked again, you could have blown everything.”
“Well, I didn’t. We’re takin’ care of it, ain’t we?”
They were coming fast and getting close. There was only one place to hide, even though the idea made my skin crawl.
“Come on,” I whispered. I tugged Bee’s hand and used my other hand to feel my way toward the kitchen.
Lights from the men’s flashlights were already hitting the cabin’s front door when we stumbled into the back room. The musty odors of the cabin were twice as bad in there. It stank of wet, punky wood and rot. I thought of a swamp, of spiders as big as my hand, of stinging centipedes and poisonous snakes. Every surface seemed to crawl.
I heard heavy footsteps outside, and I jerked Bee to one side of the doorway. As I moved farther, my foot went through a rotten piece of floorboard. I started to fall and nearly jerked Bee off her feet as well, but I flailed blindly in the dark and caught the wall with my other hand.
My hand made a thumping noise against the wood, and I felt a sharp stab as a splinter stabbed into my palm. It was everything I could do not to cry out. My heart was pounding, and I could hear my pulse slamming against my eardrums.
Outside the cabin the flashlights stopped.
“You hear that?” Bubba growled.
“Yeah,” Uncle Charlie said. “Probably just a possum or raccoon.”
“Suppose,” Bubba said, not sounding too sure.
A second later their flashlight beams sliced through the cabin’s darkness as they came inside.
“Okay, grab one end of this plywood,” Uncle Charlie ordered.
Their feet shuffled, and they went out slowly. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my racing nerves enough to think. As my eyes once again grew accustomed to the cabin’s total darkness, I could see the outline of a lighter opening along the kitchen’s back wall. As my eyes adjusted further, I could make out moonlight gleaming off leaves outside.
Bee and I were both still holding our breath, and I was trying to figure out if I could risk turning on my flashlight for just a second to see what was between us and our potential escape route, but I could already hear voices and footsteps as Uncle Charlie and Bubba returned to the cabin.
“I’ll get one of the sawhorses. You get the other,” Uncle Charlie said. I heard wood scrape as he grabbed one; it banged the doorframe as he went out. Bubba was just a second behind.
Once again I thought about using my flashlight, but Uncle Charlie was already coming back. His flashlight beam hit the door and then he was inside again. “Where’s the pot?” he called out.
“On the hook where it’s always been,” Bubba answered as he came into the cabin.
“It’s not.” Uncle Charlie’s light played around the room. “It’s on the floor next to where the table was. How’d it get down there?”
“I dunno.”
I could tell the hamster that powered Uncle Charlie’s brain was working overtime. “I don’t like this. I’ll take the pot out to the truck. Check out the back room for anything suspicious.”
“You check it. I never went in there. It’s half falling down, and I think it’s full of snakes.”
At hearing the word snake I felt Bee stiffen beside me. Her hand shot out and grabbed my shoulder, her fingers digging in so hard, I nearly yelped.
“I’m not the one who forgot to get the table and pot,” Uncle Charlie said. “You check the back room.”
Bubba belted out a couple curse words and started toward the room where we were hiding, his flashlight penetrating the darkness and illuminating a tangle of junked furniture, falling beams, and wind-blown trash. Bee and I were hidden to the left of the doorjamb, but we would be in plain sight the instant he stepped into the room. I crossed my fingers and made a wish that Bubba would be too afraid of snakes to step all the way inside.
As if he had heard my wish, he stopped just outside the room and let his beam play around the walls. Bee and I were just enough to the side to still be hidden. My heart was banging so loudly that I was sure he must hear it, but he just stood there.
“I’m waiting,” Uncle Charlie prodded.
Bubba cursed again, but this time he stepped into the room. His movements were jumpy and tense, as if at any second he expected to get bitten. He turned away from us and shined his light into that corner; then he started to turn in our direction.
There was only one thing to do.
I held my breath and waited, and when his light hit us, I screamed and jumped out at him, my hands stretched toward his face.
He did just what I hoped. He bellowed and jumped back in fear and surprise, tripping over the doorjamb and dropping his flashlight. I had my flashlight ready, and I turned it on and pointed it toward the back door.
We ran across the rotting floorboards, feeling them bend and nearly break under our weight. They held just enough, and a second later we were out in the night. I turned my flashlight off, and we crept forward trying for silence.
Behind us I could hear Uncle Charlie snapping questions and Bubba choking on his anger and trying to explain that he’d just been attacked.
“By what?” Uncle Charlie demanded.
Bubba’s voice came back low and heavy with shame and confusion. “I don’t know. Somebody. Somebody small.”
Uncle Charlie went silent. Next I heard him shout my name. “Abbey?”
Silence. Bee and I moved very slowly, pushing blindly into the wall of vegetation, trying lose ourselves in the thick undergrowth.
“Abbey? Are you out there?” Uncle Charlie shouted again.
Bubba was still blubbering about having had the life just about scared out of him.
“Stop whining and get around back,” Uncle Charlie snapped.
I heard footsteps coming around the side of the cabin, and then I saw two flashlight beams stabbing through the bushes all around us. Bee and I continued to worm our way as far into the brush as we could go. Thick vines made movement difficult. They snagged us and blocked our way. Thorns stabbed our skin and grabbed at our hair, but we were so scared, we barely felt them.
Uncle Charlie must have heard us, because he stopped just about opposite of where we were. He shot his light in our direction, but the leaves were too thick.
“Abbey, I know you’re in there,” he snarled. “You come on out right now. Don’t make me come after you.”
Bee and I didn’t move. Uncle Charlie and Bubba kept shining their lights all around us, but I could tell they weren’t sure where we were. They walked up and down and tried to shove their way into the bushes in several different places, but they were too big to squirm between the vines and thorns.
Bubba tried three or four times to punch through the thick jungle. “I ain’t going to jail because of your niece.” I heard what sounded like a cocking gun. I tried to swallow, but my throat felt like it was full of sand.
“No, somebody might hear,” Uncle Charlie grumbled. He sounded sorry that he couldn’t let Bubba open fire. “Come on,” he said, after a few seconds. “We’ll get Ruth and seal the place off, then wait for sunrise. It’ll be easy to find them then.” He started retreating, then called back over his shoulder, “Hope the snakes and black widows don’t get you girls first.”
Beside me, Bee let out a choked whimper. I patted her back to try to reassure her that everything was going to be okay, even though I had no real belief that it would. A few seconds later I heard two truck engines start and pull away, but it didn’t make me feel any better because I knew exactly where they would be going. One of them would be waiting for us on the trail that led back to the big house, someplace just past One Arm Pond. It was a perfect choke point, so narrow there between the pond and the river that we could never get past them. Another of them would be on the plantation drive blocking the way to the big house, and the third would be down by the township road blocking our way off the plantation.
What made their plan perfect were the smaller ponds and marshlands around the plantation that blocked our escape in a number of directions. There were only a couple ways to get off Reward, and unfortunately Uncle Charlie knew them as well as I did. Even if we could slip past them, I wasn’t sure where we should go or what we could do. After all, Bubba Simmons was the deputy sheriff for Leadenwah Island. If we asked anyone for help, Bubba was the person they would call.
Another problem, as if we didn’t have enough already: Bee’s leg wasn’t all the way healed. Because of that we would need to move more slowly than I could on my own, which meant we probably didn’t have a chance of getting to any kind of safety on foot.
“It’ll be okay,” I whispered to myself as much as to Bee. “I’ve got an idea.”
Twenty
We waited. Sitting there in the dark and hearing the soft sounds all around us, listening for the slither of a snake or mistaking the light brush of leaves against our skin for the touch of a poisonous spider was almost more than either of us could take. I knew that for Bee those empty moments were even worse because she was new to all of this, where at least I had spent more than a few summer nights outside in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Finally, after enough time had gone past that we were sure no one had stayed back to try to trick us, we moved out of the undergrowth. The moon was lower in the night sky now, its light much dimmer. Still, its dusky reflection off the water in Felony Bay gave us a sense of direction.
Bee let out a shuddering sigh when we finally crawled free of the last of the vines and thorns and stood up in the open. “We have to get back to my house and tell Grandma Em,” she whispered.
“We can’t,” I said, finally breaking the bad news. “Remember what I said earlier. It’s too easy to catch us if we go along the path back to the big house. That’s what they want.”
“So what are we going to do? We can’t just sneak out of here and call the police. Bubba’s the deputy.”
“Yeah.”
“Mrs. Middleton’s trailer is just down the road, but . . .” Bee’s shoulders sagged, and she shook her head. “We can’t go there. She’s poor and old, and we don’t know what might happen to her if we got her involved.”
I smiled, relieved that Bee had come to the same conclusion I had. “We’re going into town. We’ll find Mr. Barrett or Custis and tell them what’s going on. They’ll know what we should do next.”
Bee looked at me in the dim light, and I could see the disbelief in her eyes. “We’re going into Charleston? That’s ten or twelve miles. What are we going to do? Steal a car?”
I waved a hand. “Come on.”
We started back along the path that led to the big house, but when we reached the line of No Trespassing signs, we cut left and followed them away from the river. The low light of the moon made it much harder to see in the woods. Fortunately the yellow No Trespassing signs acted like a set of markers to keep us from wandering off track.
To our right the steady chorus of frogs marked the perimeter of One Arm Pond. We followed the signs until the sound of the frogs faded; then I started to look to our right. When I could finally make out an end to the line of trees that were slightly darker than the night sky, it meant that we had reached the pastures. I whispered to Bee, and we headed slightly to the right, toward where I knew we would eventually find a pasture fence.
We moved very slowly, our lights stil
l off, trying to be silent. Overhead an owl hooted from the branch of a live oak. It was answered by another owl much farther away, its cry faint as a whisper. To our left a grazing deer, alerted by our scent, blew a high-pitched huff to warn other deer.
By the time we reached the pasture fence, the moon had disappeared completely, and the darkness was deep and nearly impenetrable. I led the way by feel through the fence and across the uneven grass, stepping with care to avoid gopher holes.
I wasn’t sure of direction, having only the pitch-black shadow of the trees against the nearly pitch-black sky to steer by. We finally came to another fence, climbed through, and went to the next fence. At the third fence, we turned right and followed the fence line until it turned left.
My shin hit the watering trough before my hand felt the gate. It hurt, but at least it told me we were in the right place. We slipped through the fence and crept toward the barn. I touched Bee’s arm before we stepped inside, stopping her. It suddenly occurred to me that Uncle Charlie might have guessed what we were about to do and be waiting here for us to show up. I didn’t think he was that smart, but I knew it was a risk.
We stood for maybe a minute listening for strange sounds. We heard nothing. After a few seconds, I went inside and asked Bee to hold her flashlight beneath her shirt and then turn it on. Rather than throwing a hard beam, it put out a soft glow, just enough for me to find a couple of grain buckets and fill each one with a handful of oats.
Bee turned off her light, and we went back into the pasture. We found Timmy and the two carriage horses against the far end, and they woke up as we approached and nickered when they smelled the grain.
As the horses came toward us, I turned and headed toward the barn. Bee went ahead and held the gate so that I could walk straight through. The stall doors were open, so each horse went into his own stall, hoping for a bucket of food.
While Bee slid the stall doors closed, put more feed in the buckets, and hung them inside the stalls, I went to the tack room and felt my way over to Timmy’s saddle, blanket, and bridle, which I brought out and put on the floor outside Timmy’s stall.
The Girl from Felony Bay Page 15