The Girl from Felony Bay Read online

  I knew all his reasons, and I realize that adults probably knew a lot more about money and laws than a twelve-year-old girl, but I still thought that he was just giving up, letting everyone in the world think that Daddy had committed a terrible crime. The police and Mr. Barrett hadn’t been able to come up with a single other explanation of how that loot came to be on Daddy’s library floor, and, so far, I hadn’t been able to come up with any answers either.

  But as I watched Mr. Barrett continue down the hall and turn into Daddy’s room, I made yet another promise to Daddy and to myself that I would prove he was innocent before the summer was out, or I would die trying.

  Five

  The next morning I woke up early again, grabbed a quick bite, and fed Rufus, and then the two of us headed out of the house and over to the horse pasture. I gave a carrot to each of the horses. Then I hopped up on Timmy’s back and we spent about twenty minutes cantering around the pasture and about ten more practicing the stunt-riding move I had been working on for the past few days.

  We both had a good sweat by the time we rode up to the gate that led to the barn. I slipped off Timmy’s back and froze.

  A girl I had never seen before was leaning up against the fence. She was slender and pretty with skin the color of coffee with cream and long black hair, and probably an inch or two taller than me. I noticed she had her right arm in a sling and her right leg in what looked like a removable cast. A metal cane hung by its crook from the top fence post.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said back. Her voice was flat, her eyes dull. She seemed angry or surly or something I couldn’t put my finger on. Right away I assumed that it was because she had seen me riding Timmy. I wondered how much trouble I was in.

  “I’m Abbey Force,” I said, hearing the hesitation in my voice. “I take care of the barn.”

  I paused for a moment, waiting for her to say something. She just gave me a blank look, as if she had little interest in anything I might say.

  “This pony used to belong to me,” I said, filling the silence.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said in the same flat tone.

  “That’s why I was riding him.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head, as if I was soooo boring. “I don’t care if you ride the stupid pony.”

  I felt my temper flare and took a breath, ready to tell her that Timmy was probably a lot smarter than she could ever hope to be. But then she opened her eyes, and what I saw there stopped me. I realized that this strange girl wasn’t being a snobby jerk. She was sad, maybe even sadder than I was, and she didn’t seem to care about anything.

  I felt my anger loosen and drift away on the wind. “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m Bee.”

  I waited for her to say her last name, and when she didn’t I asked, “Bee who?”

  “Bee Force.”

  On hearing her last name, several things clicked. Bee was the daughter of the new owner of Reward. But that wasn’t all. In the same instant I thought of something else, something that was a whole lot more complicated. I remembered a book Daddy had told me about one time. I think it was called Slaves in the Family, and it had been written by a man named Edward Ball, whose family had lived around Charleston for a long time and had once owned a lot of slaves, just like my family had.

  Daddy said the book had hit him like “a ton of bricks,” because it could have been written about our own family just as easily as about the Balls. In 1865, when the Civil War finally ended and the freed slaves went off to make their way in the world, one of the many things they lacked was a last name. Because of that, many ex-slaves took the last names of their old owners. Edward Ball’s book was about how he had set out to meet the descendants of those original exslaves. Daddy said the book made him think about the African Americans our family had owned. While we might not be blood relatives, he said, we were certainly relatives in terms of having come from the same place, living together and having an important connection. He thought Mr. Ball had done a great thing.

  Now standing in front of me was an African American girl with my last name. Force. It was a rare enough name, and now the idea that my ancestors had probably kept Bee’s ancestors in slavery made my face go bright red in shame.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I could tell that my embarrassment momentarily startled Bee out of her melancholy. She seemed to understand why I had apologized and why my face was beet red. “It was a long time ago,” she said softly. “Had nothing to do with the two of us.”

  “No, but . . .” I didn’t know how to finish the thought.

  Bee rescued the situation. “What’s your real name?” she asked.

  “Abigail,” I said. “But I generally punch anybody in the nose who calls me that.”

  Bee’s eyes brightened, and she laughed. She had a smile that made it seem like the sun had come out from under the clouds, and her laugh sounded nice and easy. “Mine is Beatrice, and I do the exact same thing to anybody who calls me that.”

  I held out my hand, and she took it. “Nice to meet you, Bee.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Abbey.”

  I glanced at her sling. “What happened?”

  “Car accident,” she said, the pain coming back into her eyes.

  “Well, I guess it could have been worse,” I said.

  “Um, right . . .”

  I realized that was a lame thing to have said. Breaking your arm and leg couldn’t have been any fun. I let my eyes wander around the pasture, watching the morning mist rise from the grass and the sun coming up over the live oaks, and I tried to think of something else to say so I didn’t look like such a dork. “Good place to get healed up,” I said at last.

  Bee gave me a flicker of a smile. “I guess.”

  I was thinking that Bee Force seemed a lot like me. I could see that she was very sad about something, but underneath that sadness I was betting that she was smart and tough, had a good sense of humor, and maybe even a little bit of a wild streak. Suddenly I thought my horrible, boring summer might actually be looking up. Out of nowhere, it seemed that I had found someone who had as many problems as I did.

  Bee stayed down at the barn while I did chores. She watched for a time, and when I started mucking out the stalls, she grabbed a spare pitchfork and tried to help. But she was pretty useless at that, with one arm in a sling, so I showed her how to clean and oil tack.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” she asked as she lathered a bridle with saddle soap.

  “Rufus.”

  “So where do you guys live?”

  I dumped a forkful of straw in the wheelbarrow and hooked my thumb in the direction of the tenant house.

  “Is Charles Force your dad?”

  I had caught something in Bee’s tone that told me she already knew Charles Force was a jerk, and I barked out a laugh. “Uncle,” I said.

  “Oh.” She sounded relieved, but then the silence stretched, and I felt her unspoken question hanging.

  “My dad’s in the hospital,” I added.

  “Oh.”

  “Well, thanks to your help, I’ve done everything I need to do today,” I said, wanting to change the subject. “Want to get out of here? You okay to walk with that cast?”

  She looked up from soaping the bridle. “Kind of hot for a walk. Where do you swim around here?”

  Now she was talking. A swim sounded perfect. But then I thought about Ruth. “I need to get a suit, but if I go home my aunt will probably give me more chores to do.”

  “I’ll lend you a suit. I bet we wear the same size.”

  “You sure swimming is okay for you? How can you swim with your sling and cast?”

  Bee shrugged. “I can take them off. The cast is fiberglass. Besides”—Bee raised her eyebrows—“do you always do everything you’re supposed to?”

  I smiled. “Course not. Have you gone in the river yet?” I asked.

  Bee wrinkled her lips. “That gross brown water?
”

  “It’s great. Trust me.”

  Bee laughed, and the sound was like a wave washing in from the ocean and covering over her sadness.

  “We just got here last night,” she said. “So the only places I’ve spent any time are the house and the barn. But if you say the river is good for swimming, let’s do it.”

  We put away the tack, and Bee and Rufus and I left the barn and headed down the plantation drive toward the big house. I’d looked in the windows probably a hundred times, but the idea of actually going back inside made me feel weird.

  I could close my eyes and see every single one of the rooms. They were comfortable and high ceilinged, the downstairs rooms paneled in warm cypress that had been cut and planed from trees on the property. The floorboards were wide and ancient and worn in places from hundreds of years of foot traffic. I knew the smells, the stairs that squeaked, the sound the wind made around the eaves on a stormy night.

  Thinking about it brought a lump to my throat, because it reminded me of the happiness I’d had there with Daddy. I started to feel a little bit of panic, wondering if I could really make myself go inside.

  Only right then Bee stopped. “You know, if we go inside, Grandma Em might see us.”

  “Who’s Grandma Em?”

  “My grandma. She sort of takes care of me.”

  “What about your parents?” I asked.

  Bee hesitated, just for an instant. Then she said, “My dad is out of the country.”

  “Where?”

  “India. He’s got a software company there, but they’ve had some problems. He’s had to spend a lot of time over there, so Grandma Em came to live with us.”

  “What about your mom?”

  Bee shook her head and looked away. “She’s . . . not around.”

  Once again, I had the feeling I’d said something wrong, but I didn’t know what. “So Grandma Em won’t let you go swimming?” I asked after a silence.

  “With a busted knee and my arm in a sling, you kidding?”

  I thought about Bee’s injuries, how the first thing we did together might end up getting her hurt. “You sure we should do this?”

  Another smile broke out on her face. “Heck yes.”

  Six

  Reward Plantation lay along a stretch of the Leadenwah River. The plantation’s dock was down behind the big house at the end of a long boardwalk built over the marsh, and it stuck out into the river where the water was deep enough for diving even at low tide. We went to the end, and I threw a stick for Rufus, who went sailing off and hit the water with a huge splash. He swam out into the current, grabbed the stick, and headed back to shore.

  Before Rufus could get back up on the dock and soak us by shaking himself, we stripped down to our shirts and underwear. I watched Bee take the sling off her right arm and then reach down and undo the straps on her leg cast. Even with the cast off, her knee was wrapped in some kind of tan bandage.

  “You don’t have any stitches or open cuts, right?” Even though I knew the river water was clean, there was no sense asking for trouble.

  Bee shook her head, but as she walked to the edge of the dock and looked down at the brown water, I could tell by the careful way she moved that whatever she was recovering from, she still had a long way to go.

  The plantation wasn’t far from where the Leadenwah dumps into the North Edisto River, which in turn dumps into the ocean, so the water was brackish, meaning that it was part salt water from the Atlantic and part freshwater from the river. The good thing about brackish water is that alligators and snakes generally don’t like the salt and tend not to show up. The bad thing about brackish water is that it’s not at all clear. Trying to see into it is like trying to look through a wall.

  “Probably a stupid question,” I said, “but you do know how to swim, right?”

  Bee looked down at the water as if she were mesmerized. She shook her head. “Nope. Sure hope it’s not deep.” With that, she jumped off.

  I rushed over to the edge and looked down. I could see the remnants of her splash but no sign of Bee. With panic surging, I looked downstream in the direction of the current. Nothing. I waited a few seconds, tried to gauge how far she would have drifted, and marked the spot against some trees along the bank.

  I was about to dive when Bee surfaced halfway out into the river. She was laughing. “Gotcha,” she said.

  I smiled down at her, thinking that was exactly the kind of stunt I would pull. “You scared me half to death.”

  She could swim at least, but the current had already grabbed her and started moving her downstream. Just as I had feared, her right arm seemed pretty useless, and probably her bad leg couldn’t do much kicking. That meant she was going to have to struggle to get to shore.

  I stood there and watched her fight the current. I could tell she was trying hard, but she was getting farther and farther from the dock. She glanced up at me a couple times, but she didn’t ask for help. Rufus looked at her and whined like he wanted me to do something.

  When it finally looked like she was getting tired, I jumped in and swam toward her. Rufus jumped in, too, and paddled beside me. “Grab my shoulder,” I said to Bee. When she did, I kicked and swam us into the pluff-mud shallows along the side of the river.

  Pluff mud is the dark, gushy stuff that lines the banks of many Lowcountry rivers and smells a little bit like dead fish. It’s usually deep enough that you can sink down into it all the way to your hips, which makes walking in it really miserable, even if you have two good legs. Since Bee had only one, we stayed in the shallows and half crawled back toward the dock. Rufus slogged through the mud beside us, his legs and belly covered in black goop.

  When we finally reached the dock’s swim ladder, Bee looked at me, a little shy. “I had no idea the current would be so strong. Thanks.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “You owe me one. Just remember that the next time I go off half-cocked.”

  She beamed. “Deal.”

  We went up the ladder, and when we were back on the dock we looked at each other and started to laugh. We were covered from our faces to our toes in thick, black pluff mud.

  “Now we really could be the Force sisters,” Bee said as she looked down at what had been her white T-shirt. “Grandma Em is gonna kill me.”

  “Here,” I said, pulling up a rope that was tied to one of the dock pilings. I tied a loop in the end and held it out to Bee. “Keep a grip on the rope when you jump off. It will keep you from drifting, and the current will wash off most of the mud.”

  Bee limped to the edge. I could tell by the way she favored her bad leg that the swim and the crawl back had been painful, but she took the rope and jumped off. I stood there until I saw Bee’s head break the surface. She flashed me a grin, then let herself relax and lie flat, held in place by the rope against the current.

  I walked to the upstream end of the dock, jumped off, and grabbed Bee’s rope as I swept past. We lay there side by side, feeling the sweep of the river’s warm water against our bodies as it cleaned off the mud.

  “So, Bee Force,” I said, “are you gonna come here for vacations or live here year-round?”

  “Year-round.”

  “So you’ll go to school here?”

  “Grandma Em says I’m going to go to a place called Miss Walker’s. You know it?”

  I felt a twinge of sadness but tried not to let it show. “Yeah, it’s a good place. I used to go there.”

  “Not anymore? How come?”

  “It was time for a change,” I told her.

  We were laughing as we climbed up the swim ladder onto the dock, but it only lasted until we heard the sound of someone clearing their throat. It wasn’t an I-have-dust-in-my-throat cough either. It was the other kind.

  A booming voice followed. It was female, deep, and full of authority. “What do you girls think you’re doing?”

  We both spun around. The woman was smaller than I would have guessed. Judging from that voice, I had expected som
ebody as big as a marine drill sergeant, but the woman waiting for us was tall and thin and dressed in a pair of navy blue slacks, a striped shirt, and nice flats. Her hair was going gray, but I sensed that she had enough energy to power Charleston for a week. I could tell that she would be pretty when she wasn’t angry.

  “We . . . got muddy,” Bee said. “And we jumped in to wash off.”

  “Uh-huh. And you never heard of a garden hose or a shower?”

  “Well, we just thought—”

  “You didn’t think anything. If you’d thought, you’d have remembered what the doctor said: ‘Take it easy. No unnecessary activity. Let the joints heal.’”

  With that the woman turned her attention to me. Her eyes were dark and as hard as marbles. They seemed to bore down into me and take me apart and sift through all my pieces to see what I was made of. After a few seconds, they appeared to reach a conclusion. Then, suddenly, they thawed and became as kind and warm as a gentle sunrise.

  “You must be the girl who lives in the other house,” she said, her voice just as deep as before but now soft and gentle as well.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Abbey, ma’am. Abbey Force.”

  She held out a hand, and we shook. Her fingers were long, her skin dry and smooth, and just like everything else about her, her grip had a surprising amount of strength. “I’m Bee’s grandmother. You can call me Grandma Em. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Just at that moment Rufus came up onto the dock and shook himself off, splattering water on everybody.

  “Who is this?” demanded Grandma Em.

  “That’s Rufus,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you, Rufus,” Grandma Em said. “But next time do your shaking farther away.”

  Her eyes hardened again as they flashed over to Bee, who was now strapping on her fiberglass cast. As Bee bent over her knee, Grandma Em gave her a light whack on the behind. “And next time,” she said, “don’t be thinking that swimming without a proper bathing suit is going to keep me from figuring out what you’ve been up to.”

  Bee mumbled a reply, and Grandma Em gave a tight nod, as if things had been taken care of. “Well, Abbey Force, what are you doing for lunch? Would you like to come join us?”