“It was you! You found a way to steal Miss Jenkins’s gold and then you blamed Daddy!” I blurted out. “He trusted you! You’re his brother!”
“Your dad and I never got along too good. He always thought he was the smart one.”
Bee was still on the floor, but now she rose up on her elbows. “Where’s my grandma?” she demanded. “I want to see her!”
“Your grandma’s probably at her house,” Uncle Charlie said. “I lied. We didn’t do anything but cut her phone line. She’s probably worried sick about you by now. But she’s not going to find you. Not anytime soon.” He gave his horn a loud honk and waited. After a second the back screen door opened, and Ruth and Deputy Simmons came out. Ruth hung back on the porch steps while Bubba approached the truck.
“Well, well, what’ve we got here?” he said, smirking.
Uncle Charlie killed the engine and hit a button that popped the door locks. Then he came around to my side and jerked open my door. I turned and fired off a kick, getting in one good one. He grunted in pain, but he quickly recovered, grabbed my arm, and slapped me hard across the face. It stunned me enough for him to jerk me out and throw me down on the ground. A second later Bee landed beside me.
My face burned from where he had hit me, but I was too angry to even think about crying. I just wanted to find a way to get free and then slug him as hard as I could. Jimmy Simmons’s swollen nose would look like nothing compared to what I would do to Uncle Charlie’s. Bee craned her neck in my direction, and when our eyes met, I could tell that she was just as angry and scared as I was.
“You’re even stupider than Daddy always said,” I sneered, looking up at Uncle Charlie. He looked down at me, and then he pulled back one foot. For a second, I thought he was going to start kicking. I didn’t care. “You may think you got him to take the blame for stealing Miss Jenkins’s gold, but you’ll never get away with this,” I said.
Apparently deciding not to kick me, Uncle Charlie smiled. “Hate to break it to ya, Squib, but yes we will.”
He said it with so much cocksure conviction that it brought me up short. “How?” I demanded.
“I’m a student of history,” he said, sounding so pleased with himself. “And a student of history knows the important details other people overlook. Did you know that during the Civil War all those fine Southern ladies melted down their jewelry and tea sets into ingots and gave them to the Cause? Did you know that, Squib?
I just glared at him.
“There’ve been rumors about treasure in Felony Bay for years, so when we find a big bunch of buried gold, is anybody going to think it isn’t from the Lovely Clarisse? What’s your guess, Squib?”
My heart suddenly sank as everything became clear. Uncle Charlie and Bubba Simmons hadn’t been cooking anything in the blackened pot in the fireplace.
“You melted down the jewelry,” I said.
“Y’all ain’t as dumb as you look, Squib,” he said. “Made gold ingots just like the old ones. I even got the CSA stamped right into the metal, same size as the originals. CSA stands for Confederate States of America, Squib. We even got the jewels sewn up just like the real thing in bags cut from an old silk ball gown. I bought a crate and a lock that date back to that time at a flea market in Mississippi. I thought of everything. And now we’re about to make history finding that lost treasure.”
I closed my eyes for a second, remembering the moldy-smelling yellow gown Ruth had brought into the kitchen a few days earlier. It really did seem like Uncle Charlie had thought of everything.
“Enough talking—we’re wasting time,” Bubba Simmons said. He looked down at us. “We gotta finish this.”
Bubba’s tone sent chills down my back. I knew he was talking about Bee and me.
Uncle Charlie wiped his lips on the back of his wrist, looking uncomfortable all of a sudden. He walked over to Bubba and lowered his voice. “Why don’t y’all handle it?” he suggested.
“Me?” Bubba scoffed.
“Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t . . . we didn’t plan on . . . you know.”
Bubba’s face wrinkled in anger. “We also never planned on your niece and her friend snooping. How else you gonna guarantee she don’t go running off at the mouth and telling everybody what we did?”
Uncle Charlie looked scared, like he was figuring out for the very first time that he was in way over his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice so soft I could barely hear the words.
“Toughen up,” Bubba said. “We can’t back out now. We’re gonna make it look like an accident.”
“How?”
“Just trust me. Help me get ’em back in the truck.”
As Bubba bent over to pick up Bee, I forced myself to speak again even though I was so scared I was about to wet my pants. “I can’t believe you got sucked into doing this. You’re just an idiot like Uncle Charlie.”
Bubba’s lips got tight. “I didn’t get sucked into nothing,” he said in a low, nasty voice.
“Yeah, well, this whole thing is a really stupid idea,” I said, turning back to Uncle Charlie. “Nobody’s going to believe you when you try to explain our disappearance.”
“Wanna bet, smart mouth?” Bubba said. “Your uncle told me all about the crazy stuff y’all done in the ponds and rivers around Reward. Nobody gonna be too shocked to find out you ran y’allself into some serious trouble.”
That gave me an even worse feeling in the pit of my stomach. I pinched my lips, wondering if he had thought of the same thing I was thinking of right that minute. I sure hoped not.
Bubba glanced at Uncle Charlie and jerked his head toward the truck. “Get it done,” he said.
Uncle Charlie’s face contorted. For a second or two, I thought he looked a little bit uncertain, maybe even guilty. But then he set his jaw, and he reached down and pulled me to my feet, then threw me over his shoulder. He walked me to the back of his truck and used one hand to unfasten the hooks that held the tailgate. I didn’t even fight because, to be honest, I was pretty close to giving up, and it was everything I could do not to start crying like a baby.
From up on his shoulder, I could look toward the back door. I saw Ruth there, standing up on the back steps. She had one hand to her mouth and the other wrapped around her stomach as if she was in pain.
Once the tailgate was lowered, Uncle Charlie dumped me on it, then got up himself and dragged me farther into the truck bed. When Bubba dumped Bee on the tailgate, he dragged her back, too.
“Planning to kill your own flesh and blood, Uncle Charlie?” I asked.
He straightened up and looked at me, his voice shaking. “If you’d have minded your own business and done what I said, you’d have been fine. You got only yourself to blame.”
“You really believe that?”
He refused to meet my eyes as he turned away from me, hopped off the tailgate, then slammed it into place.
“I’m so sorry,” Bee whispered. “I know you stayed quiet in the hospital because of what they said about hurting Grandma Em.” She shook her head. “If we’d just screamed, we could’ve gotten away.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said to her. I didn’t know why I said it. I was pretty sure nothing was going to be okay, but I didn’t want her to be as scared as I was. Uncle Charlie had been right, I was thinking. None of this was Bee’s fault. It was all mine.
I heard Uncle Charlie open the driver’s door, but before he climbed in, I heard Ruth’s voice. “Charlie,” she called.
Uncle Charlie’s door squeaked as he held it and swung it back and forth in little arcs of nervous energy. “What?”
There was a long silence. I couldn’t see Ruth, but I heard her footsteps as she walked up to Uncle Charlie. Her anxiety was so intense, it felt like static electricity in the air.
“We can’t do this,” she whispered when she got close.
Uncle Charlie squeaked his door. “But we can’t trust them to keep their mouths shut, can we?” he asked, when he finally stopped.
&nbs
p; Ruth didn’t say anything.
“We don’t have any other choice.”
I heard what might have been a stifled sob, then Ruth’s footsteps as she hurried away. A second later the screen door slammed and then also the inner door. It was plain that she was upset about what was happening, but it didn’t matter. She might not be a monster like Uncle Charlie, but she was a coward, which made her almost as bad.
“We best get going,” Bubba said as he climbed into the other side of the truck.
Twenty-four
The truck headed out, and Uncle Charlie turned left on the main plantation drive. My heart sank. I already suspected where we were heading, so I wasn’t a bit surprised when we turned right onto a little-used dirt track. As we bounced over the ruts, I began to hear bullfrogs booming out their deep croaks. My spirits crumbled as I recognized the sounds of One Arm Pond.
The truck jerked to a stop and made a bumpy K-turn, and then the engine died. I heard the doors open and close. A second later the tailgate dropped down. When I craned my neck, I could see One Arm Pond glistening like cut glass in the light wind that riffled across the water’s surface. A white ibis flew overhead, its orange beak curved like a scimitar, and a small gray heron stalked the shallows along the near shore. It all looked so peaceful and beautiful, and normally it would have been—just not today.
Green Alice’s nest was all the way on the other side of the pond, but even though I couldn’t see her yet, I could feel her presence. The alligator was there just the same as she always was, huge and powerful and deadly, if you were stupid enough to go swimming in her pond or canoe too close to her babies.
The truck sagged as Uncle Charlie hoisted himself into the truck bed. He took Bee under the arms, pulled her roughly to the edge of the tailgate, then jumped down. Bee let out an angry snarl and fired off a kick that caught him under the ear, but she was too well taped to do anything else.
“Ouch!” Uncle Charlie cried, putting his hand to his head. “Help me out here, Bubba.”
Uncle Charlie took Bee under the armpits, and Bubba took her feet, and they hauled her onto the small dock and put her down. Then they walked over to Daddy’s old fiberglass fishing canoe, kicked it a few times to warn any snakes that might have found their way underneath, and took it by the ends and rolled it over.
A second later I heard a loud thump and the sound of wood cracking. I craned my head around to see Uncle Charlie holding the canoe while Bubba stomped on the thwarts. When he finished breaking the last one, Uncle Charlie rolled the canoe on its side, and Bubba began to stomp the fiberglass hull, breaking the wooden ribs.
When they finally put the canoe in the water, it was a bent, misshapen husk. While Uncle Charlie held it to the side of the dock to keep it from drifting away, Bubba Simmons grabbed Bee under the arms, dragged her over, and then rolled her into what was left of the canoe. Afterward he came over to the truck for me. I tried to kick him in the head, but he was ready for that. He reached over the side, grabbed the collar of my shirt, pulled me around headfirst, then loaded me onto his shoulder like a man carrying a sack of potatoes.
The canoe was now a big, open envelope, with its ribs cracked and the thwarts fallen in against the hull, the water easily sloshing over the lower sides. Bubba bent over and dumped me beside Bee. As I tumbled in, my head hit the gunwale so hard that for several seconds I couldn’t focus.
“What are they doing?” Bee’s voice penetrated my fog of pain.
As my head started to clear, I felt a sudden rush of movement as Bubba gave us a big shove out into the pond. Beside me Bee tried to sit up to see where we were going. I didn’t bother, because I already knew.
Green Alice’s nest was on the far shore, almost directly across from the dock, probably a hundred yards away. The shove would get us a third of the way there. After that the morning breeze would slowly do the rest. Even as I thought those things, the breeze quickened, and we started moving faster.
For a moment there was silence on the pond. Then I heard Uncle Charlie’s voice. “We don’t have to stay here, do we?” I could tell he was scared.
“I don’t reckon we do,” Bubba said. “That gator’ll take care of things soon enough, and until it does, they won’t be going anywhere.”
“You’re being real stupid, Uncle Charlie!” I shouted in as loud a voice as I could muster. “Nobody’s gonna believe this was an accident if we’ve got duct tape all over our arms and legs!”
“What if she’s right?” I heard Uncle Charlie say.
“Gators eat duct tape just like they eat everything else,” Bubba said.
“Oh no, Abbey!” Bee exclaimed, the realization hitting her. “It’s Green Alice they’re talking about, isn’t it?”
In the next second I heard the pickup’s doors close and the engine rev as Uncle Charlie turned around and drove back out the dirt track. The sound of the truck quickly faded.
I was still trying to think what to tell Bee when words became unnecessary.
Something like an angry snort came from very close to the canoe’s side. A second later we felt a powerful thump against the canoe’s damaged hull. The blow made us roll right to the gunwale and brought a wave of pond water over the side that sloshed around in the bottom of the canoe. We had already drifted too close to Green Alice’s nest.
Several seconds went by, and then she hit the canoe again. The sound of her whacking the hull was thunderous. We heeled dangerously, took on more water, and this time a long, white seam appeared in the fiberglass. The water in the canoe’s bottom was already making us heavier and less buoyant, so that even if the wind changed direction, it would barely push us away.
I was in full-time panic mode. We needed to come up with some way to distract Alice or frighten her, something that would buy us enough time to get to shore and escape. But how do you distract an angry mama alligator when you can’t move?
I didn’t know whether Alice was hitting us with her tail or her snout or trying to bite into the canoe’s side. It didn’t really matter. Alice had already buckled the canoe’s hull in some places. Water was leaking through the seams in the fiberglass. I jerked helplessly against the tape on my wrists and ankles. I realized that even if we didn’t break apart or capsize, we could still drown right here in the bottom of the canoe.
Fortunately Bee seemed to be thinking more clearly than I was. “Abbey,” she said, her voice sharp as a whiplash. I realized she had been talking to me for several moments, but I hadn’t been hearing. “Slide back toward me,” she commanded. “Hurry!”
Bee’s voice snapped me out of my panic. I used my knees and elbows to inch backward while she moved in the opposite direction.
“Okay, stop,” she said, just as Alice slammed into us yet again.
I realized that the canoe was no longer rolling as much because we had taken on so much water. Also, Alice’s attacks seemed to be pushing us away from her nest but thankfully not out into deeper water. A second later I felt a soft bump and realized that the canoe had nosed into the pond’s mud bottom. I raised my head and saw that we were much closer to shore than I had realized, but it wasn’t going to help, because neither of us could climb out and run.
Bee was working hard to change that, pressing her face against my wrists. A second later I felt a tug as she managed to snag the end of the tape in her teeth and pull some of it free. I forced myself to hold still and felt her tug again, then a third time.
Just as I was finally starting to move my wrists, Alice hit us yet again. One of the seams cracked all the way, and for one second a long, yellow tooth poked through.
I knew it was a matter of seconds before Alice hit us again, and that it wasn’t going to be long before she broke the canoe in half. Once that happened, she would drag each of us to the bottom of the pond, where we would become food for her babies. I could feel Bee continuing to work on the tape, but it wasn’t coming away fast enough.
There was a big splash, and my muscles turned to jelly. It had to be Alice, prepari
ng to smash us again. But then I heard a voice from someplace close by, and I tried to sit up and look around. Bee stopped and looked up, too.
Skoogie Middleton was standing on the shore of the pond only about twenty yards away from us. The splash I had heard was a piece of wood he had thrown that was now floating beside Alice’s head.
I didn’t know why he was there or how he had managed to find us, but I watched in amazement as Skoogie threw another stick. This one landed on top of Alice’s head, right between her eyes. I could also see Alice’s two baby gators. They were in the water, closer to Skoogie than to us, which meant Green Alice’s attention was now totally focused on Skoogie.
Skoogie saw me looking at him and yelled, “Y’all get outta that canoe!”
My body was paralyzed, because I saw Alice already moving toward Skoogie, her powerful tail driving her faster than I’d ever seen her move.
“She’s coming!” I shouted. “Run!”
I don’t know whether he heard me. He stood there as if he was hypnotized, and I could feel the cold dread rising up in my belly as I saw what was about to happen.
Alice shot onto shore, her short legs and long, thick body skimming right over the pluff mud. She raced up the bank toward Skoogie like a green torpedo. Still, he just stood there.
I closed my eyes and waited for the screams that were sure to come when Alice grabbed him in her powerful jaws. But for several seconds, I heard nothing.
“Get outta that canoe!” Skoogie yelled again.
I opened my eyes in amazement as Alice charged him again. Just as he must have done the first time, Skoogie stood his ground and let her get close, then he jumped to one side and ran around behind her. Alice stopped and turned with slow, laborious movements. While alligators are very fast in a straight line, they are slow as molasses when it comes to turning around. Alice had charged him twice, and she already looked tired.
The Girl from Felony Bay Page 18