The Girl from Felony Bay Read online

  I still wasn’t crazy about going into the big house, but I already realized that Grandma Em was a hard person to say no to. I nodded. “I’d like that. Thank you.”

  When we were dried off, we all walked up to the house. Rufus and I went last, and as I watched Bee with her metal cane, I could see that her limp was more pronounced than it had been earlier that morning. It was easy to see that our swim hadn’t done her injuries any good at all, but she didn’t complain.

  We entered the big house through the kitchen door, and right away the familiar sights made the memories come rushing at me like hungry horses heading for the feed trough. I felt hot tears at the corners of my eyes and blinked furiously to keep them from falling. Rufus didn’t seem to have any problems though. He curled up on the floor under the big kitchen table just like he’d lived there all his life.

  Fortunately the smell of bacon distracted me, as well as Grandma Em’s insistence that we both go upstairs and take showers before lunch. She handed us clean towels and gave Bee a clean Ace bandage to put on her knee. We hurried up the back staircase to what used to be my room but now had new wallpaper and Bee’s furniture rather than my own.

  Bee started to take off her clothes, but then she stopped and looked at me. “Was this your room?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a great room.”

  My throat felt thick. I nodded again because I didn’t trust myself not to cry. I could tell that Bee sensed how I felt, and it made her uncomfortable. We hardly said another word as we finished showering and dressing.

  I was wearing one of Bee’s T-shirts and my own shorts as we headed down to lunch. At the bottom of the stairs, instead of turning toward the kitchen, I walked the other way and stopped outside the old cypress-paneled library. Bee followed without asking why we were going this way.

  I stood staring into the room, and finally I sucked down a deep breath. “My daddy didn’t do what they say he did,” I blurted out. “And I’m gonna find a way to prove it.”

  Bee nodded, and I realized she must already know the story of the accident and the stolen loot. “How are you going to do that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  A moment later we walked into the kitchen. Waiting for us on the table were plates of toast, fresh garden lettuce, ripe tomatoes, and crisp bacon.

  “Are you girls hungry?” Grandma Em asked.

  I hadn’t been a bit hungry thirty seconds ago, but now I could hardly speak because my mouth was watering so hard. I just nodded. I hadn’t had a lunch with real food like this since Daddy’s accident.

  We helped ourselves to all the fixings and made the most delicious BLT sandwiches I’d ever had, each of us eating an entire one on our own and then Bee and I splitting another between us. Afterward Grandma Em served chilled slices of fresh watermelon.

  “What are you girls intending to do this afternoon?” Grandma Em asked as we finished eating.

  “I was just thinking about that,” I said. “Bee, if you’re up for it, we could take a walk to explore the plantation.”

  “That would be a dry walk with no falling in the river?” Grandma Em said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked at Bee. “Be mindful of the cane,” she said. “It’s harder to walk that way than it is to walk normally. Quit if you get sore.”

  We both nodded, and I could tell from looking at Bee that she was as eager to go exploring as I was to take her.

  However, neither of us had a clue that what was supposed to be a simple plantation walk was going to turn into something a whole lot bigger.

  Seven

  After lunch Bee, Rufus, and I walked out the back door and set off to explore Reward. I made Rufus walk at heel as I led Bee toward the corner of the backyard, where a path led into the undergrowth and ran parallel to the river. We followed the path along the old raised dikes that used to mark the boundaries of the rice fields that had been the original cash crop for the owners of Reward. To our left the marsh that had once been rice fields waved with bright green sea grass.

  After several hundred yards, the dikes ended and the path entered an area of wild Leadenwah Island undergrowth. It was shady and hot, without a breath of wind beneath the thick green canopy, and the air was even more humid and filled with faint, mingled fragrances of unseen flowers.

  We could still see the river through the trees off to our left, its brown water glittering like hot butterscotch. To our right the heavy shrubbery of palmetto trees, live oaks, hanging drapes of Spanish moss, and tangles of honeysuckle and wild oleander and river oats and plants I couldn’t begin to name cut off our view after only a few yards.

  “Where did you live before you came to Leadenwah?” I asked Bee as we walked slowly along.

  “Atlanta,” she said.

  “In a suburb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Leadenwah is real different from a suburb.”

  “Like how?” Bee asked.

  I glanced over. I was keeping a careful eye on her, already realizing that she probably wouldn’t complain even if her leg was really hurting. I made a promise to myself to suggest we go in if I saw her limp getting worse.

  “Well, snakes, for starters. Do you have snakes in Atlanta?”

  Bee laughed. “No, we have lots of houses, and in the city we have taxicabs and cars and buses, just like in New York.”

  “Well, down here we have every single poisonous snake that lives in North America. We have lots of rattlesnakes. We have copperheads. We have a few coral snakes, and we have tons of cottonmouths.”

  I was talking so much, I didn’t realize that Bee was no longer beside me. I turned to see her standing in the middle of the path, looking at me as if she half suspected I was putting her on.

  I held up two fingers, close together. “Scout’s honor,” I said.

  Bee made a face, then looked down at the ground, her eyes going to every root or dead stick that lay along the path. “I hate snakes,” she said with a shudder.

  “I’m not so fond of them myself,” I said. “But just make some noise when you walk around in the woods and don’t go too fast. Rattlesnakes and copperheads will get out of your way if they possibly can. Coral snakes are very rare.”

  “You didn’t say anything about cottonmouths.”

  “They can be a little uglier,” I admitted.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, they’ll come after you if they feel threatened. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they tend to live in swamps and around freshwater.”

  “Why is that good news?”

  “Because we’ll mostly stay away from swamps and freshwater.”

  “Because of the cottonmouths?”

  “And the alligators.”

  “Next thing you’ll be talking about tigers.”

  “Well, we do have Carolina panthers.”

  “The football team?”

  “No, the wildcats.”

  “Really?”

  “People say they’re still around. I’ve never seen one.”

  “But you’re not kidding about the snakes and the alligators?”

  I heard the challenge in Bee’s voice. “Nope,” I said. I knew she didn’t quite believe me, so when we came to a place where a narrower path branched in from the right and joined our path, I said, “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Change of plans.”

  I didn’t look back, but I could sense Bee’s tension. We walked up the new path until the undergrowth started to thin out and give way to lines of graceful longleaf pines. Ahead of us a pond glittered, its water silver and broken into small shards of light by the wind.

  The pond was large, probably a hundred acres in area and longer than it was wide. A small dock stood along the near shore, and on it was a small fiberglass fishing canoe that had belonged to Daddy. I realized suddenly that no one had bothered to come to collect it and store it before the plantation had been sol
d, and I felt a blast of shame that I hadn’t thought of it myself.

  “It’s pretty,” Bee said, holding one hand over her brow to shade her eyes from the sun. “Does it have a name?”

  “One Arm Pond,” I told her.

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “It was named for one of my great-great-great-uncles who lost his arm to an alligator here.”

  “Sure,” Bee said. From her tone she was certain I was pulling her leg.

  I grabbed Rufus by his collar and held on tight as I led Bee out onto the dock. Rufus was pretty well trained, but he was a Labrador retriever and there was no way I could trust him to stay out of the water.

  “Look over there,” I told Bee.

  She squinted for nearly a minute at where I was pointing along the far bank of the pond. “I don’t see anything.”

  As she spoke, something small wriggled from a dark spot beside the bank and slid into the water. A second small thing followed. They were nearly a hundred yards away, and it was very hard to see them in the glare.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Those are alligators.”

  Bee laughed. “They’re barely as big as my foot. They couldn’t eat my little finger.”

  “Those are the babies,” I said. I pointed to their left at a pair of bumps in the water that were the eyes and another bump that was two close-set nostrils. About ten feet behind the nose, the tip of a massive tail gently moved.

  “Right there you can see the mother.” I pointed at where the tail, moving just beneath the surface, pushed up a small swell.

  Bee looked at where I pointed for several seconds. “Is that little thing her nose?”

  “Yes. We call her Green Alice. She’s about ten feet long and probably weighs around eight hundred pounds. If we went out in the canoe right now and got close to her nest, she would attack us, because she’d think we were threatening her babies. If Rufus went in the water, she would eat him for a between-meal snack.”

  “That’s why you’re holding his collar?”

  “Darn right. If Rufus got in that water and Alice started coming for him, he wouldn’t be safe even if he made it to shore. A lot of people don’t know it, but a gator is even faster than a dog on dry land for about thirty yards or so.”

  “Faster than a dog?”

  I nodded. “Gators can’t turn and they can’t run very far, but over a short distance they’re really, really fast.”

  Bee turned to look at me and nodded. “You’re serious. You’re not pulling my leg.”

  “Not a bit. I’m trying to tell you things you have to know here.”

  “Thanks,” she said. I watched her hurry off the dock, limping as quickly as possible back toward the relative safety of the path.

  We retraced our steps to the original path and turned right to keep exploring. The river was visible on our left, and every few yards we would get a peek through the thick vegetation on our right and see One Arm Pond glimmering fifty yards away. Every time we caught sight of the pond, Bee must have started thinking about Green Alice, because she moved a little faster.

  When we were past the pond, the undergrowth began to thin as it gave way to several hundred acres of pine forest. Ahead of us the path begin to curve to the right, following the gentle bend of the river. I smiled in anticipation of what was ahead, just around the turn in the river. It wasn’t really a secret, of course, but it was almost invisible to anyone boating on the river who didn’t know it was there. Felony Bay tucked into the plantation in the shape of a huge teardrop. Also, unlike the pluff-mud banks that ran along almost the entire riverfront, the bay had a sand beach all the way around it.

  From the Leadenwah River, the bay’s entrance looked like nothing more than a narrow creek, because its sides were overgrown by aquatic plants that moved aside when a boat came through, then immediately sprang back to cover up the passage. What looked like a shallow creek was more than ten feet deep at the center. The bay itself probably didn’t take up more than three or four acres. However, just like the entrance, the water was uniformly deep, which made it an excellent and totally protected anchorage, especially for people who wanted to stay hidden. It had gotten the name Felony Bay because most of the people who put their ships there over the years had been criminals.

  Before Daddy’s accident, whenever I had been in a really dreamy mood, I used to come down and sit on the beach at Felony Bay and think about some of the tales he had told me about it. I would close my eyes and imagine Indians slipping into the bay in their canoes to hide from enemies, or some big old sailing ship anchored there with a crew of pirates who were hiding from the British navy. Other times I would imagine the dashing captains of Confederate blockade-runners, who had brought damaged ships into Felony Bay for secret repairs.

  I knew that Bee would find Felony Bay fascinating, too. I wanted her to lie in the sand right on the edge of the bay, close her eyes, and try to imagine the sights and smells and sounds as I told her its stories.

  I was so busy thinking about how I wanted to tell those stories that I didn’t see the signs. It was only when Bee asked, “What are those?” that I looked up and noticed them.

  I felt my breath catch in my throat as I stared in utter surprise. Just ahead of us, a line of brand-new yellow signs that said No Trespassing ran from tree to tree as far as I could see, cutting us off from Felony Bay.

  I stopped and stared. What I was seeing made no sense. “No Trespassing?” I said. I walked over to one of the signs and read the smaller print underneath. “Trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. FB Land Company, LLC, owners.”

  I shook my head. “That’s crazy. This land is part of Reward Plantation. This belongs to your family.”

  I turned to look at Bee. She shrugged. “If my father had sold part of the plantation, he would have told Grandma Em.”

  We stood there looking at the signs, neither one of us saying anything. Finally I said, “Even if your dad had somebody put these up, he wouldn’t mean for you to keep out, would he?”

  “No.”

  We nodded to each other and stepped inside the line of No Trespassing signs. As we went a little farther, we began to hear the sound of machinery. It sounded like a truck or bulldozer growling back and forth, or like somebody using an excavator to dig a hole.

  We continued up the path another hundred yards until we could see light coming through the trees, and beyond that the warm glow of Felony Bay’s mud-colored water under the early-afternoon sun. The machinery sound was much louder here, and as we went forward, I could see something moving down the beach.

  For a few seconds I thought that Bee’s father might have hired contractors to build something here, maybe a guesthouse or a boat shed, and maybe the contractors had put up the signs to keep people out while they worked. It seemed like there had to be a normal explanation, so we started to walk out of the undergrowth and into the open.

  The first thing that came into view was the old, abandoned cabin. It was off to our right, and it was in bad shape. Its roof had started to sag in several places, and the walls of the rear section were starting to lean to one side.

  “What’s that?” Bee asked.

  “It belonged to the family of a friend of mine, Skoogie Middleton. His grandparents used to live there, but then his grandpa died, and his grandmother moved out. It was a long time ago.”

  “But you said this was part of Reward.”

  “It is, but . . . I don’t really understand much about it,” I admitted. “All that stuff happened before Daddy and I came here to live. Skoogie and his grandma live in a trailer down the road now.”

  “Did she move because the house was falling apart? That seems kind of crummy to let that happen.”

  I glanced at Bee, wondering if she was accusing Daddy of something. “It happened back when Uncle Charlie was running things on the plantation. My grandfather was still alive, but he was sick and in the hospital. Daddy was a lawy
er in New York City then, so he didn’t have anything to do with Reward. Besides, I was really young and my mother was sick with cancer.”

  Bee scrunched up her face. “I wasn’t saying your dad did anything bad, but from what I hear from Grandma Em, your uncle Charlie sounds like a jerk.”

  I let out a laugh, and I might have told her a whole lot more about Uncle Charlie, but at that point the machine we had heard a minute earlier suddenly belched out a loud roar that made us look to our left. We stepped farther into the open to get a better view, and I spotted one of those small digging machines with a bulldozer blade on one end and a little steam-shovel bucket on the other. It was digging a hole in the sand a few yards from the water, one of about twenty holes that dotted the shoreline of Felony Bay. Maybe the foundations for a bunch of boat docks? I wondered if Bee’s dad was trying to start a marina and hadn’t bothered to tell her. Whatever was happening, it was a lot of development.

  Just about then the man who was driving the machine spotted us. He brought the bucket to a sudden halt, jumped out of his driver’s seat, and ran toward us. “Hey!” he yelled. He was big, with powerful-looking arms and a dirty T-shirt. His hair was short but still managed to look messy, and a couple inches of scraggly black beard covered his cheeks and chin. I recognized Bubba Simmons, Leadenwah Island’s part-time deputy sheriff. Not to mention the father of Jimmy Simmons, the kid who had tried to choke me to death.

  “What y’all think you’re doin’ here?” he demanded. His voice was low and full of menace. “Can’t y’all read signs?”

  Rufus was on my left, his neck hair bristling, a low growl coming from his throat. I grabbed his collar to keep him from doing anything I’d regret. Bee came up on my other side and pulled herself erect. “We can be here if we want. My father owns this land,” she said.

  “Like heck he does. This ain’t part of that plantation,” he said, pointing in the direction of Reward. “Y’all, git!”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Simmons,” I said.

  “Yeah, and I know you, too.”