The Girl from Felony Bay Read online

  I thought about what she was telling me and also what she had left unsaid. “Nothing bad is going to happen to Bee’s and my friendship,” I said.

  Grandma Em smiled, and I could sense her relief. “I just didn’t want you to misinterpret Bee’s actions if she becomes silent or gets very sad.”

  “She hasn’t been that way, except the first day we met and at the hospital.”

  Grandma Em nodded. “Yes, I know.” She rubbed her hands together and sighed. “Well, I just wanted to let you know how important it has been for Bee to have such a good friend. I hope you guys keep hanging out together. And I hope you will keep this between us and not share it. I wouldn’t want Bee to think that I go around talking behind her back, but I thought it would be good for both of you if you knew a few of the facts.”

  I nodded. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

  “Thank you, Abbey.”

  She got up out of her chair and began to walk out of the barn. I watched her go, but then I cleared my throat. “Grandma Em?” I waited until she turned to look at me. I was thinking about the fear she said Abbey’s father had. “Do you think my father is afraid to wake up?”

  Grandma Em looked at me for several long seconds, then shook her head. “No. I think your father is definitely going to wake up. I’m not a doctor, but that’s what I think.”

  My heart started coming back down to normal. I smiled. “Thanks.”

  Grandma Em glanced at her watch, then gave me a wink. “I have to get us to the airport,” she said as she turned again and headed back toward the big house.

  I watched her walk away, wondering why she had chosen now to tell me all that stuff. It seemed almost like she had managed to read my mind. How could Grandma Em have known that I’d been thinking about telling Bee that maybe we shouldn’t hang out anymore? She couldn’t have, I decided, but she had also told me in no uncertain terms how important it was for Bee to have my friendship. Grandma Em had talked to me because she cared about Bee’s happiness. But did she also realize that what made Bee happy might also get her hurt?

  I thought about that for several moments, but then I thought about something else as well. Everything Grandma Em had told me about Bee was also true for me in spades. Bee’s friendship was the best thing that had happened to me in a long, long time, and I wasn’t going to do anything to screw it up. No way.

  I hurried out in the direction of the big house. I got there just as Grandma Em and Bee were putting their overnight bags in the car.

  I called out to them as they climbed into the car, and Grandma Em turned toward me. “Make it quick, young lady. We have a flight to catch.”

  I grabbed the back-door handle, pulled open the door, and climbed inside. Bee turned around in her seat and gave me a surprised smile.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Grandma Em demanded.

  “I have to go to the hospital to see Daddy. Would you drop me off at the bus stop on your way? You go right by it when you leave the island.”

  “You’re not doing anything on the mystery, are you?” Bee asked. “You can’t without me. We’re only going for two days.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, lying through my teeth.

  “Does your uncle or your aunt know where you’re going?” Grandma Em asked.

  “Like they care.”

  Grandma Em gave me a look, but she started the engine and put the car in gear, and we headed down the drive. Ten minutes later she dropped me at the bus stop, and I thanked them and said I’d see them when they got back.

  Forty minutes after that, I got off the bus in front of University Hospital.

  I headed up to Daddy’s floor, rang to get in, and waved to the nurses at the main desk as I hurried down to his room.

  “Okay, lazybones,” I called out in my cheeriest voice when I walked in. “Time to wake up. It’s your daughter.”

  I sat on the edge of his bed and held the hand that did not have the tubes going into it. My heart was hammering, and I was holding my breath. I had come because I’d decided I needed to tell him at least a little bit about what was happening. Since all my months of happy talk hadn’t had the slightest effect, telling the truth was a risk I needed to take. What Grandma Em had said to me had made me realize that I had to be honest with Daddy, at least a little bit.

  “Listen up,” I said, giving his limp hand a squeeze. “I need to tell you about some things that are going on at Reward because I really need your help.” I told him about Felony Bay and the No Trespassing signs. I didn’t tell him that the rest of the plantation had been sold because I didn’t want to give him too much bad news all at once. Also I told him I believed that he had intended to give Felony Bay to Mrs. Middleton, because he knew it was heirs’ property and rightfully hers. I also told him that the people who had bought the land had no intention of giving it to Mrs. Middleton.

  “I really need your help on this, Daddy,” I said. “I’m pretty sure Uncle Charlie had something to do with it, and also Bubba Simmons. I think they’re digging for treasure out at Felony Bay because of all those holes. And I keep wondering if all this stuff has something to do with your falling off the ladder, and with Miss Jenkins’s gold and stuff. I’ve got Custis doing some research for me, and he’s supposed to get back to me today or tomorrow, but he’s afraid of Mr. Barrett and the other lawyers getting mad at him if he does too much. I need more help than Custis can give me. Everything is so complicated that my brain gets tied in knots just thinking about it.”

  I stopped and looked at his face to see if my news was having any effect. Nothing. He was sleeping so still that he almost looked dead. But when I looked really closely, I could see he was breathing, the same shallow breaths as always.

  “Also,” I went on, “I had another one of my dreams last night. I’ve never told you about my dreams—actually I’ve never told anyone—but I had one before your accident that was like a warning that something bad was going to happen. I had another one last night, and now I think something equally bad is going to happen at Felony Bay. I just don’t know what it’s going to be, and I don’t know how to stop it.”

  I looked down at his face again and gave his hand a squeeze. “Come on!” I said. “Wake up. I really need your help.”

  He just kept sleeping, his mouth slightly open, his body still. The tubes dripped. I wanted to scream at him and shake him, but I knew it would do no good. A tear broke from my eye, ran down my cheek, and splashed down on his wrist. For the first time since the accident, I felt my hope starting to fail me. I wondered if it was possible that Daddy might never wake up.

  Fourteen

  I left the hospital, caught a bus heading downtown, and told the driver where I needed to go and asked him how to get there. He let me off at Broad Street and told me to ride the DASH bus up Meeting and get off when the bus made its turn to go south on King.

  I did what he told me: got off on King and walked north a few more blocks. The neighborhood got seedier, the buildings more rundown, but I finally spotted the sign I was looking for. Charleston’s daily paper, the Post and Courier, was located in an ugly, windowless building that looked more like a fortress than a newspaper company.

  I stood on the sidewalk for several moments and thought again about whether I should go inside. Daddy had always told me about what he called the Law of Unintended Consequences. It’s sort of like when you think that slugging some jerk in the nose will settle an argument, but then you do it, and instead of ending things, you have a fight on your hands where you risk getting your butt kicked. I thought this might be one of the places where that law comes into effect.

  Still, I needed more facts than I was going to get all by myself or through Custis, and newspapers were places where people dug up the facts, even though sometimes they also twisted them. I crossed the street, went inside, and asked the lady at the small reception desk if I could speak with a reporter named Tom Blackford.

  I had never actually met Tom Blackford, but he was the reporter who had writ
ten most of the articles about Daddy’s accident and all the unanswered questions. He had even written pieces about my family, about how my ancestors had been wealthy planters and later on phosphate miners, and about how Daddy had been a bright student and gone to the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School.

  The articles also talked about how my grandfather had left Reward to Daddy and the family phosphate business to Uncle Charlie, and how Uncle Charlie had proceeded to lose the company’s money and shut it down. The problem with the articles was that the facts were true, but Blackford sort of twisted them up to suggest that Daddy was partly to blame for what happened to the family business.

  The articles also talked about Miss Lydia Jenkins, how she had inherited a fortune from her father while much of the rest of her family was poor. There was also an even more mysterious story, about how, as a young woman, she had heard glass breaking in the middle of the night but thought nothing of it, but in the morning found two bullet holes in the headboard of her bed. The police never found out who fired the shots, but Miss Jenkins had decided that someone in her family had tried to kill her to inherit her money. From that point forward she had distrusted everyone around her, including bankers and most everyone else. She had even insisted on keeping most of her fortune in the form of cash and gold in the vault in her house. Even after her stroke, she had continued to keep everything in her vault. Until it was stolen, that is.

  I looked up on the walls in the waiting room, where various articles had been posted. The one right near my head was one of the last articles Tom Blackford had written about the “accident.” He reported that Daddy had been the one person Miss Jenkins really trusted. He claimed Daddy was the only one besides Miss Jenkins who knew the combination to her vault, and supposedly Daddy had kept careful records every time he went into the vault and removed any part of her fortune to sell it for her. The articles didn’t actually say it, but they made it sound like Daddy had been stealing from Miss Jenkins for years and that it was karma that he had fallen off the stepladder and gotten caught after he had finished cleaning her out.

  I felt myself getting steamed about the articles all over again but forced myself to calm down. Daddy always said that hating newspaper people because they wrote vicious articles was like hating rattlesnakes for biting. Neither one could help what they did, he said, and the best course of action where either was concerned was to avoid them. I had tried to follow Daddy’s advice, but every time a new article about Daddy or Miss Jenkins or Reward came out, my curiosity would get the best of me, and I would read it and then try hard not to cry. I had finally picked up the phone one day and called Tom Blackford and told him that he was writing a lot of terrible lies because my father was innocent. Tom Blackford had told me that he was sorry, but he was an investigative journalist and his job was to report the facts and then interpret them the way he thought best. I got mad and told him that his best thinking obviously wasn’t very good, because he’d only gotten part of the facts and he was either too lazy or too stupid to get the rest of them. That’s when he told me that I wasn’t the most polite young lady he’d ever spoken to, but he hoped that Daddy would wake up soon because he would really like to hear what he had to say in his own defense and then write that part of the story, too. My phone call hadn’t made a bit of difference, and Tom Blackford had gone on writing his articles and saying the meanest things about my father that anyone could imagine.

  Now I wondered if Tom Blackford would remember my phone call and refuse to see me. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case, because while I would have dearly loved to kick Tom Blackford in the shins as hard as I could, what I really needed to do was talk to him. The stories he had written had made him the most well-known reporter in the city, and I had to count on the fact that he wanted more great stuff to write about and would help dig up some of the information I so desperately needed.

  Of course that was where the Law of Unintended Consequences came into play. If he found new facts, would he “interpret” them to help Daddy or hurt him? And if he learned anything important, would he share it?

  I suddenly realized that the woman at the reception desk had tipped her glasses down to the end of her nose and was looking at me strangely. “Young lady, I asked you if Mr. Blackford is expecting you,” she said, sounding like a teacher when someone isn’t paying attention.

  “Sorry,” I said, snapping back to the present. “No, he’s not expecting me.”

  “And why do you want to see him?”

  “I have things to tell him about Reward Plantation he might want to know.”

  She raised her eyebrows and gave me a look. I gave her a look right back, and she finally picked up the phone and dialed an extension. “A young lady is here with information about some place called Reward Plantation,” she said to whoever answered.

  She listened for a second or two, then nodded. “Yes. Hang on.” She put her hand over the receiver and looked at me. “Your name?”

  “Abbey Force.”

  She repeated my name, then listened. “No, she hasn’t got a gun to my knowledge,” she said, raising her eyebrows and giving me a careful look.

  “I don’t want to shoot him,” I said. “I just want to talk to him.”

  She repeated that into the phone. “He wats to know if that’s a promise.”

  “Yes.”

  She told him. “He’s coming down,” she said after she hung up.

  She gave me an adhesive label and told me to write my name on it and stick it on my shirt. She also made me sign my name and the time of my visit in a book on her desk. I did what she asked, then waited by the locked glass doors that led to the interior of the newspaper.

  I didn’t know what Tom Blackford looked like, but he had gotten so much publicity for his articles on Daddy that I imagined he would be handsome and cool, like Robert Redford in an old movie that Daddy and I had watched once. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t the person who got off the elevator a couple minutes later.

  Tom Blackford was short with tired eyes and a horseshoe of limp dark hair around the sides of his head. He had two halves of a mustache that didn’t quite meet in the middle, and narrow shoulders, and even though he was mostly skinny, he had a gut that stuck out over his belt.

  He looked at my name tag, then at me. His eyes weren’t very friendly. “Well, the rude young lady I spoke to on the phone. You wanted to see me?”

  His voice was high-pitched and nasal, different from the way it had sounded on the phone. He must have been eating when the lady called, because he had bits of food stuck between his teeth.

  “I have something you might be interested in,” I said.

  “About your dad?”

  “No.”

  He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “I thought you were going to tell me you had new information that proved your father’s innocence.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from telling him once again what a pea brain he was. “There’s stuff going on at Reward that I thought you might want to know about.”

  He wrinkled his lips as if that whole subject was too boring for words. “Like what?” he said in a tired voice.

  “Like part of the plantation was sold to somebody other than the person who thought he was buying the whole thing.”

  Tom Blackford looked at me a moment, considering. Then he let out a sigh, as if what I’d just said had triggered barely enough interest to justify a conversation. He jerked his head for me to follow, held his ID card to the lock that opened the glass doors, and then pointed me inside the elevator. We went up to another floor and got out in a room full of people who were sitting at desks typing on computers. I assumed they were the other reporters.

  Mr. Blackford led me to a very small office along the side of the room. It had no window, but the walls were hung with pictures of him and framed copies of what I assumed were his most famous articles. Sadly, the first one I looked at said “Wealthy Attorney Accused of Stealing Millions,” and I felt my face start to color
with shame and anger.

  I sat in a chair he pointed to as he went around and plopped down behind his desk. He took out a pad of yellow lined paper, flipped to a fresh page, and grabbed a pen.

  “Okay, so Reward was sold.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “William Ellington Force.”

  “Another relative?”

  I shrugged. “In one sense.” I thought about telling him that William Ellington Force was a descendant of slaves who once lived on Reward, but I didn’t think it was fair to bring Bee’s family into this without asking their permission.

  “But another part of the plantation was sold to somebody else?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is important because your relative thought he was getting the whole thing?”

  “Well . . . yes. Or, no. I’m not sure, exactly.”

  “That’s it? That’s what you came here to tell me?” Blackford threw down his pen and shook his head. “That’s not news. Sorry.”

  He started to stand.

  “It’s news because I’m pretty sure that right before his accident my father had been about to deed that same property over to an African American lady who lives in a trailer down the road. Daddy thought it was heirs’ property and that it was rightfully hers, but she had been kicked off by my uncle Charlie.”

  Blackford looked at me. “Heirs’ property, huh?” His lips bunched and worked back and forth beneath his pitiful mustache. “I assume this lady’s not the new buyer?”

  It was my turn to treat him like he was dumb. “You’re not supposed to have to buy what’s already yours, are you?”

  He gave me a look. “So, who did buy it?”

  “Something called Felony Bay Land Company, LLC. I don’t know who owns it, but I’m trying to find out.”

  “What are they, real-estate developers?”

  “Well, I don’t know if they’re developers, but they’ve been digging a lot of holes.”

  “A lot of holes?”