The Girl from Felony Bay Page 14

  The horses were sleeping, but Timmy woke and trotted toward me as I came across the field. I gave him a quick nose rub, then continued on my way. Timmy, and soon after Clem and Lem, fell in behind me and followed me over to the gate, all of them hoping for a midnight snack.

  Bee was already waiting for me, and I told her about Uncle Charlie and Ruth sneaking out in the pickup.

  “You think they’re going to Felony Bay?” she asked.

  “Where else?”

  “So they are behind what’s going on there.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out what they’re doing with that crate.”

  I nodded, thinking exactly the same thing. “Got the flashlights?” I asked.

  Bee handed me one. She had another for herself. I was about to lead the way out of the barn, but I stopped.

  “We have to be really careful,” I said. “If they’re at Felony Bay like we think they are, and if they happen to hear us or see us, we have to hightail it as fast as we can.”

  “Why?”

  “There are only three ways to get out of there: up the dirt track toward the township road, back on the path toward the big house, or out past One Arm Pond and through the pastures to the plantation drive. Uncle Charlie knows that, and if we’re not quick, he’ll be able to trap us.”

  “We have to run in the dark?”

  “If they hear us.” I nodded. “Fast as you can. Don’t worry about anything else.”

  “Snakes?”

  I shook my head. “Just run.”

  Before she could ask any more questions or get any more upset, I led the way out of the barn toward the big house, where we would find the path that would take us to Felony Bay. On the way I found an oleander bush and cut a long stick that was thick enough to be sturdy and forked at one end. I used my knife to cut the forks about four inches long.

  Bee didn’t ask what the stick was for, and I didn’t offer to explain. I figured she would find out soon enough if we ran into a problem.

  We reached the big house, skirted the edge of the yard, and checked for unexpected lights that would show that Grandma Em had heard Bee sneaking out. The house was as dark as a crypt.

  We got to the back corner of the yard and quickly found the trail that led to Felony Bay. As we stepped into the woods, the night seemed to envelop us. To our left the river glowed through the trees, its surface the color of honey as it reflected the moonlight. The air was thick with the scent of early-summer flowers and vines, heavy with mock orange and honeysuckle; and up ahead the trilling of hundreds of frogs populated the night.

  We went slowly, our flashlights off, using the moon and the light reflected from the river to guide us. We had decided that, on the off chance that Grandma Em was awake and looking out her bedroom window, we would not use flashlights until we were well away from the big house. When we finally thought it was safe, we flicked them on, and I felt relieved to have the powerful beams light our way.

  I took the lead and kept my light aimed at the ground, examining the thick, dark roots and vines that coiled and ran through the dead leaves, making sure none of them was a snake out searching for a meal. The night breeze moved gently across my skin, while overhead I heard the harsh cry of a night heron on its way to the river to hunt fish.

  We moved faster with our lights on, but we would turn them off well before we reached Felony Bay in order not to give ourselves away. We would also need to give our eyes time to once again adjust to the moonlight.

  After about fifteen minutes, the undergrowth on our right began to thicken, and I knew One Arm Pond had to be just ahead. The peeping of the frogs grew louder. In spite of my desire to hurry, I slowed my pace, keeping my eyes on the ground. Behind me Bee must have noticed my caution, because she said, “What’s the matter? It’s not Green Alice, is it?”

  “No,” I whispered, but I kept picking my way along with care. There was no sense in frightening Bee if there turned out to be no need.

  After another couple minutes, the cacophony of the frogs had become almost deafening, so I knew One Arm Pond had to be directly on our right. I couldn’t see it through the leaves, not even moonlight reflecting off the surface, but I could smell the musty odor of pluff mud. I was studying every single root, vine, or stick with great intensity now, and that’s when I came to a quick stop.

  Two feet ahead of me, way too close for comfort, something that looked at first like a thick black root had just crawled from underneath a layer of dead magnolia leaves. It was maybe four feet long and as thick as a beer can in the middle. The sight made my heart start to hammer.

  “What?” Bee asked.

  I shook my head and said nothing, just held my oleander stick out in front of me with the forked end pointed at the ground.

  “What?” Bee asked again.

  “Just don’t move.”

  We stayed perfectly still, but the snake sensed my body heat or my smell. It started to coil, and it opened its jaws and gave a warning hiss. My flashlight beam lit up the inside of its mouth. It was snow white, true to its name: cottonmouth. Of all the venomous snakes that live in South Carolina, I was most afraid of the cottonmouth. It was the one snake that would attack when it felt threatened.

  Behind me I heard Bee’s intake of breath, and then the sound of her feet shifting backward along the path. Her motion was likely to antagonize the snake, and that meant I had no time. I waited until the snake’s head moved sideways for just a second as it searched with its heat sensors preparing to strike, then I stabbed down with my oleander stick.

  It was a lucky shot. I managed to knock the head down to the ground and pin it between the two forks. The snake thrashed and fought, and it was amazingly strong. Thankfully the stick was also strong and held the snake’s head in place.

  If it had been a copperhead or a rattlesnake, I would have picked it up by the tail and thrown it into the woods as far as I could, comfortable that it would hightail it once it landed. But not a cottonmouth. I knew there was a decent chance that the snake would hit the ground and come right back after us, most likely moving too fast to pin again. I took my knife from the sheath on my belt, leaned down, and cut off its head in one stroke.

  The headless body spurted blood, but it continued to move, striking blindly in all directions. I knew it might keep that up for another five minutes or so, but I also knew we could ignore it. I wiped the blood off my knife, cleaned my hands against the bark of a palmetto tree, then turned to look at Bee.

  She was standing several feet behind me, her hands to her mouth. “You okay?” she asked in a trembling voice.

  I nodded. “How about you?”

  “I hate snakes.”

  “I’m not so fond of this particular type myself.”

  “I can’t believe you just cut off its head.”

  “It was either him or us.”

  She shuddered and shook her head. “I hope we don’t see any more.”

  “We’re almost past the pond. That’s the worst place for cottonmouths.”

  She nodded and gave a wan smile as if that was at least somewhat encouraging news. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we were going to have to turn off our lights for good in another fifty yards or so, as we’d be getting close to Felony Bay.

  We made our way past One Arm Pond without any more problems. Gradually the sound of the frogs faded behind us, and when I thought we were well clear of the pond and hopefully of more cottonmouths, I stopped walking and clicked off my flashlight.

  “What are you doing?” Bee asked.

  “Turn off your light.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re getting close, and we can’t risk using our lights from here on, in case Uncle Charlie and Ruth are there.”

  I could see her expression and knew she didn’t like the idea, but after a second she flicked hers off. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Just wait.”

  We stood there about a minute, and gradually I began to pick out the f
aint light on the path and the moonlight reflected on the river to our left. The river acted like a night-light, giving a gentle glow to everything around it.

  When my eyes had once again adjusted to the dark, I could see the ground under my feet and even make out the shadowy shapes of roots and sticks. I could also see the path winding up ahead of us as it snaked its way through the undergrowth. We started moving again, more slowly than before, and we soon came to the line of No Trespassing signs on the trees that marked the boundary of Felony Bay. I pointed them out to Bee, and she nodded.

  A little farther, I began to hear the sound of the excavation machine. It grew louder as we moved forward. The undergrowth gave way to the horseshoe beach, and I could look through the leaves and see a pair of bright lights moving in tight, jerky motions.

  At the edge of the undergrowth we squatted behind a thick bush and looked out at the beach. Bubba Simmons was on the same small excavator he had been operating the other day. Its headlights were aimed at the ground where he was digging a fresh hole. When he turned the machine, his headlights momentarily lit two nearby people standing beside a pickup truck. I recognized Uncle Charlie and Ruth. In spite of the fact that I had been expecting to find them there, my breath caught in my throat.

  Uncle Charlie stepped to the edge of the hole, looked down, and gave a nod. Bubba climbed off his machine, and then the two of them walked over to Uncle Charlie’s pickup and pulled the tarp off the crate, lifting it off the truck and dragging it over to the hole.

  I hadn’t seen anyone else, and I thought it was just the three of them working together, but then I heard another voice. It was a man. He was someplace out of the light. With the noise from the excavator, I couldn’t understand what he said, but something about his tone was bossy, like he was the one in charge.

  Uncle Charlie turned toward the voice and nodded. Then Ruth came over and opened the lid of the chest and held it while Charlie and Bubba walked over to the falling-down cabin. They both had flashlights, and they disappeared into the cabin’s dark interior and reappeared a moment later carrying burlap bags that pulled their shoulders down with the weight.

  The man in the shadows said something else, and Uncle Charlie and Bubba put the bags down with a loud clinking sound and went back into the cabin. Ruth started unloading the contents of the bags into the crate as Uncle Charlie and Bubba brought two more bags. The process continued until Uncle Charlie and Bubba had brought out five bags each. Once all the bags had been unloaded, Ruth closed the top of the crate and hammered the rusty lock closed.

  Finally Uncle Charlie and Bubba brought over two long cloth straps, which they slid under the crate. The crate was very heavy now, and they grunted and strained as they shoved it to the very edge of the hole. Once it was in place, Bubba climbed on the excavator and backed it close to the crate while Uncle Charlie put the looped ends of the straps over a hook on the back of the machine. Then, as Uncle Charlie and Ruth shoved the crate over the edge of the hole, Bubba backed up the excavator, using the straps to lower it to the bottom.

  When the crate was in place, Uncle Charlie unhooked one end of each of the straps, and then Bubba drove away from the hole, pulling the straps free. Uncle Charlie finished unhooking the straps from the excavator, dragged them over to the side of the cabin, and tossed them into the darkness. Bee and I stayed perfectly still as we watched Bubba use the excavator to put some of the dirt back in the hole.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Bee whispered.

  “It looks to me like they’re burying the chest.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  I shook my head. “No idea,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true. An idea had popped into my head, but it seemed so lowdown and preposterous that I didn’t want to say it out loud.

  When Bubba finished, he turned off the excavator’s engine. A sudden silence settled over the night. The man in the shadows said something, and Uncle Charlie raised his hand in a wave. A second later a car door slammed, an engine started, and headlights went on. The car made a K-turn, and its lights panned over the area, but it was on the far side of the cabin. Bee and I ducked, but it wasn’t necessary, because the lights never even came close to us. A second later, we caught a quick glimpse of taillights.

  As the car disappeared, heading toward the township dirt road, Ruth came over and joined Bubba and Uncle Charlie. “What a jerk,” she said. “Can’t be bothered to get his hands dirty.”

  “Thinks he’s got more to lose than everybody else,” Bubba growled.

  Uncle Charlie gave an annoyed snort. “Let’s get this place cleaned up and get some sleep.”

  They spent the next few minutes walking around and picking up gas and oil cans and some trash, and then Bubba loaded the excavator onto a small trailer that was hooked to his pickup. Lastly Uncle Charlie and Ruth took some garden rakes and smoothed out the excavator’s tread marks.

  The three of them stood together again and looked at what they had done. “Looks good enough,” Uncle Charlie said. “People will be stomping it up pretty good once we bring them out here.”

  Ruth nodded. “Let’s go. I’m dead tired.”

  They climbed into the trucks, and a second later I heard two engines start. Uncle Charlie pulled out first and then Bubba, and they both drove out toward the township road.

  Bee and I waited two full minutes, letting the night sounds settle around us. Bugs buzzed and chittered, frogs peeped from One Arm Pond far behind us, and the occasional heron or other night bird cried out, but otherwise the night was silent. There were no voices, no rumbles of car or truck engines to signal anyone coming back.

  I looked at my watch. Two fifteen. We had more than two hours until sunrise, and I thought it was a good bet that nobody else would come around. It would give us plenty of time to check things out and try to figure out what Uncle Charlie and the others were up to.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  Bee nodded and pushed out of the bushes and down onto the flat sand beach of Felony Bay. I followed, and we walked over to where Uncle Charlie had been standing just a short time ago and shined our lights down on the fresh pile of sand that now covered the crate.

  “I wonder what’s in there?” Bee said.

  “Sounded heavy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Bee said. “Like iron or steel . . . or maybe gold. But why would they bury it here?”

  “Because I don’t think they’re trying to hide it,” I said. “I think they want to pretend they found it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yes, it does,” I said, finally putting voice to the ideas that had been taking shape in my brain. “It makes sense if it wasn’t your gold to start with. It makes sense if it’s not really old Confederate gold but gold that you stole.”

  Bee looked at me, and she got it right away. “You think your uncle stole Miss Jenkins’s gold and blamed your dad? But how could he have gotten to it, if it was locked up and only your dad knew the combination?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t think of any other reason why he would do this. And since we know my dad didn’t steal Miss Jenkins’s gold, this would explain where it went, wouldn’t it?”

  Bee sighed. “Okay, so how do we prove it?”

  Bee’s question stopped me cold. We might know what was going on, but we couldn’t prove anything. It was going to be our word against Uncle Charlie’s and Ruth’s and Bubba Simmons’s and one other person’s we hadn’t seen. And we were just two twelve-year-old girls.

  Suddenly I saw the whole thing, just the way it was going to unfold. Uncle Charlie and Ruth were going to call the newspaper and the television stations and tell them they had made an amazing discovery. They would tell them to bring their cameras out to Felony Bay, where they would show them the hole they had dug and the treasure crate they had discovered. The papers and TV stations would buy it hook, line, and sinker. The gold they had stolen would become theirs, and nobody would challenge them . . . except a couple twelve-year
-olds.

  I felt my spirits plummet. “We can’t prove any of it,” I said.

  Bee poked me with her elbow. “Wait. This doesn’t make sense. Miss Jenkins’s jewelry would have obviously been newer than centuries-old Confederate gold, right? So even if your uncle found a way to steal it, he can’t just ‘find’ it. I mean, he’s not stupid enough to try that, is he? There’s got to be something we’re missing.”

  “You’re right,” I said, thinking that Bee was thinking much more clearly than me.

  “Come on,” she said, pointing toward the open door of the old cabin. “Let’s look in there.”

  We went to the door and pointed our lights inside what had once been the sitting room. Vines covered the doorjamb and snaked along the floor in long tendrils. Everything was layered with dust and rotting leaves and bird poop, but I could make out a brick fireplace to our left, and to our right a doorway that led to the kitchen and the bedrooms. As we stepped all the way inside, the sweet smell of the night disappeared, replaced by the odors of mildew and rot. I held my oleander stick out in front and shined my light on the floor, cautious of snakes, until I remembered that Uncle Charlie and Bubba had been in here. Their stomping around would have driven most snakes to find a safer spot.

  Other than all the leaves that had blown in, the front room was still in decent shape, but the back of the house had started to lean to one side. When I stepped over and looked into the old kitchen, I could see the night sky through holes in the ceiling and rotten spots on the floor where the boards had fallen in. It looked very spooky, like it would probably be dangerous, not to mention full of nasty creatures like snakes and spiders and centipedes.

  “Check this out,” Bee said.

  When I pointed my light in her direction, I saw a piece of plywood in the middle of the floor that rested on two sawhorses and made a crude worktable. I went over and looked more closely. There were drops of something on the wood and circular burn marks on the end nearest the fireplace.