The Girl from Felony Bay Read online

  “He did not!” I managed.

  I was about to throw my whole body into jerking free when I felt Mrs. Simmons’s fingers trying to pry me loose.

  When the talons finally let go, I looked down at Miss Jenkins, but my eyes were so blurred that I could barely see. I turned and stumbled down the hallway in the direction of the exit. I lost track of Bee as I pushed through the doors and went outside, where I sucked the hot, humid air into my lungs and tried to stop shaking.

  I started to calm down, enough to think anyway, and I turned to find Bee standing right behind me. She didn’t say a word, but the look in her eyes told me that she understood.

  Eleven

  As Bee and I headed down the block to the bus stop, I could feel her gaze on me and the weight of her unspoken questions. We reached the stop and stood there, watching the traffic pass. Finally, knowing I had to say something, I turned.

  “That lady, Miss Jenkins, thinks my father stole her money,” I said. “I don’t care what she said. He didn’t steal anything from her, but he can’t defend himself. And I don’t understand how she just grabbed me like that. I thought she was paralyzed, but she held on like a monkey.”

  Bee looked at me, her expression serious and thoughtful, as if she had something she wanted to say but was holding back. Finally she gave a nod. “Is she in that wheelchair because she had a stroke?”

  I nodded.

  “But she managed to tell the police that your dad stole her money?”

  I shook my head, then paused. “Well, sort of. When my dad had his accident, the police found some of her jewelry in our house, and when they’ve asked her about it, all she’s ever said are those two words, ‘Stole it.’ Everyone assumes she means Daddy.”

  “Sometimes, when people have strokes, it messes up their brain. It happened to my grandfather before he died, and Grandma Em explained it to me. People who’ve had a stroke might forget how to talk or eat. It might mess up the connection between what a person wants to say and what actually comes out of their mouth. Could be the same story with Miss Jenkins.”

  “I think she’s a mean old witch.”

  “I watched her eyes. They weren’t angry. I think she was struggling.”

  I wasn’t so certain, but I didn’t want to argue about it. It would have been nice to believe that she was right, but for Miss Jenkins to finally be able to say what she meant and for Daddy to miraculously wake up and be able to prove his innocence . . . it was a fairy tale.

  Bee didn’t say anything else, just put her arm around my shoulder. She seemed to be telling me that she believed in me, and in my father, no matter what. Maybe I didn’t believe in fairy tales anymore, but it sure was nice to be able to believe in my friend and have her believe in me.

  Twenty minutes later Bee and I were on Broad Street in downtown Charleston, heading toward Daddy’s law office. Broad is one of the main streets in the city, and the corner of Meeting Street and Broad is called the Four Corners of Law. That’s where the old post office, the county and federal courthouses, and City Hall are located. Like most of Charleston, nearly all of the buildings date back to the late seventeen hundreds or early eighteen hundreds, and they are almost all perfectly restored with polished brass and fresh paint.

  Bee and I got to the four-story stucco building with the brass sign that said Force and Barrett, Attorneys at Law. Those names, of course, stood for my dad and Mr. Barrett. The building looked the way it always had, with its tall windows and mahogany door. I led Bee into the waiting room expecting to see Ms. Leland, the white-haired lady who had been the receptionist ever since Daddy had opened the office. To my surprise another lady sat behind the desk. She had red hair and bright red lipstick and a smile that wasn’t anywhere near as friendly as Ms. Leland’s.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, looking at me as if a kid my age could not possibly have any reason to be there.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Custis Pettigrew, please.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Does he know you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m Abbey Force.”

  The woman’s eyebrows shot up. “The daughter of Rutledge Covington Force?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” she said, sounding slightly more polite but no happier than she had at the beginning.

  “And this other young lady is with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And her name, please?”

  Bee took a step forward. “Bee Force.”

  The woman looked back and forth between us, clearly curious, but I wasn’t about to explain. I just looked at her and waited.

  Several long seconds of silence went by while the woman stared and tried to wear me down. Finally I raised my eyebrows as if to say, Let’s get this show on the road.

  The woman’s nostrils widened. She cleared her throat. “Let me see if he is in,” she said. There was enough ice in her voice to cool a drink on a hot day.

  She picked up the phone and dialed an office extension. When someone answered, she said, “Two young ladies named Abbey Force and Bee Force are here to see Mr. Pettigrew. Is he available?”

  She listened for a second, then put down the phone. “Someone will be right out.”

  I recognized the next person who came into the room. Her name was Martha, and she had been Daddy’s legal secretary for years. She was thickly built, with dark hair that was starting to go gray, soft brown eyes, and a face that seemed to fold naturally into a smile.

  “Abbey!” she said, hurrying across to enfold me in a big hug.

  After we hugged and said hello, I introduced Bee. Martha shook hands with Bee, then asked, “You need to see Custis? Is it urgent? He’s got a pretty busy day.”

  I nodded. “I promise we won’t be long, but we’re not just here to say hello. We need to ask him about something.” I nodded toward Bee. “Bee’s father bought Reward Plantation, but part of the plantation got sold to somebody else. We need to ask Custis about it.”

  Martha raised her eyebrows. “I see. Well, come on back.”

  We followed Martha through the mahogany door on one side of the waiting room and down the hallway to the lawyers’ offices. We passed several open doors, where young lawyers were either typing on their computers or reading thick stacks of documents.

  At the end, where the hallway turned to the left, Martha and Bee kept going, but I stopped and looked inside the open door at the empty corner office. The lights were turned off, but you could see enough in the sunlight coming in through the slats of the half-closed venetian blinds.

  My heart caught in my throat as I looked at Daddy’s desk, the blotter now clear of the big piles of legal folders that used to be stacked there. His pens and a few perfectly sharpened pencils were sticking out of his University of Virginia mug the way they always had. On the credenza behind his desk I could see the pictures that had always been there. There was one of my mother taken at their wedding and another of her holding me as a baby. There she was skiing, just a year before she died. Then there were lots of pictures of me swimming, playing tennis, and riding Timmy.

  Right there, seeing his office as if nothing had ever changed, I could imagine that he had just stepped away and that any second he would come striding down the hall. I could imagine that he and I would get in his car and drive home to Reward and have dinner together the way we had almost every night.

  My thoughts were interrupted when I felt Martha’s hand on my shoulder. “You okay?” she asked softly.

  I nodded.

  “I miss him, too,” Martha said.

  “I know.” Then I turned and looked up at Martha. “He’ll be back,” I said. “He didn’t take anything.”

  Martha looked at me, and her expression hardened. All her softness seemed to bleed away, and she nodded. “I know he didn’t,” she said, her voice very firm.

  “Thank you for believing in him,” I said.

  Martha shook her head. “Don’t thank me. I know what your daddy’s made of.”

  Bee was
waiting a few steps farther down the hall, and when Martha and I caught up, she gave me a smile. Whatever was going on with her family, it seemed to help her understand what I was going through with mine. I was grateful for that.

  Martha knocked on the door of an open office and stuck her head inside. “Two young ladies to see you about some free legal advice,” she said.

  I heard Custis’s voice boom out, “Send them in, Martha.”

  By the time Bee and I stepped into his office, Custis was already up out of his chair and coming around his desk. He was tall and lean, with black hair that curled just over his ears and twinkly blue eyes. He had his coat off and wore a white shirt rolled up to the elbows and a bow tie.

  “This is a great surprise,” he said, giving me a big hug.

  I introduced Bee, and he shook hands with her and waved us to his couch. Martha asked if we would like anything to drink, then walked away to get two Cokes for us and a water for Custis.

  Custis sat in a chair across from us and crossed his legs. “I understand you need a little help with some problem,” he said.

  One of the many things I have always liked about Custis is that he never talked to me like I was a little kid. Another reason I had come to see him was because Daddy always liked Custis the best out of all the lawyers in the firm. He and Custis used to go fishing for redfish and hunting for doves and wild turkey and quail on the weekends, and Custis used to come over to our house for dinner a couple times every month.

  Daddy and Custis had both gone to the University of Virginia, and when they talked about it, they called it The University, as if there wasn’t another university in the United States that was worth mentioning. In the fall Custis would usually come over on Sunday afternoons when the Cavaliers were playing on television, and in the winter he would come over on nights when he and Daddy could watch basketball. They would laugh and cheer together when the Cavaliers occasionally won a football game or had a good basketball season, and they would mope around when they lost.

  I knew Custis well enough to know that if I ever decided I liked boys enough to marry one, I wanted him to be like Custis—handsome, funny, honest, and a good friend. I started out shooting straight because I trusted him.

  “You’ve heard of Felony Bay, haven’t you?” I asked.

  Custis nodded immediately. “Of course. I mean, I know it by name. It’s part of Reward, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Well, it was part of Reward. Apparently it’s not any longer.”

  Custis cocked his head and gave me a confused look, so I went on. “Bee’s father now owns Reward.”

  Custis looked at Bee and nodded. “You’re lucky. It’s a very beautiful place.”

  “Yessir,” Bee said.

  I went on. “When I was giving her a tour of the plantation, we found a whole line of No Trespassing signs over by Felony Bay. We thought it was some kind of mistake, so we ignored them and kept going. Then Bubba Simmons spotted us. He’s the Leadenwah deputy, but I guess he was off duty. He threw us off the property.”

  “That’s odd,” Custis said when I finished. “Our firm handled the closing on the Reward sale. I didn’t work on it myself, but I think if the property had been broken up, somebody would have said something, just because it’s so historic.”

  “Is it even legal to break up a place like Reward and not tell the new owner?”

  He looked at me for a few seconds, then stood, went to his desk, and typed a series of search terms into his computer. As he read what came up on his screen, he raised his eyebrows.

  “Interesting,” he mused. “It says the Felony Bay tract wasn’t actually a part of Reward. It was held under a separate deed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That Felony Bay could be sold separately without affecting Reward Plantation. Technically it’s a separate property.”

  “Since when?” I asked.

  Custis was quiet while he typed some more. “Huh!” he exclaimed as he read what came up on his screen. “Apparently it’s been that way since your father put it into a separate holding.”

  “Daddy? When?”

  Custis looked at the screen again. “Ten months ago.”

  I tried to hide my shock. I couldn’t imagine a reason Daddy would have broken up Reward and not told me about it. “Do you remember why he did that?”

  Custis screwed his eyes closed and scrunched up his face as he tried to think. “I should, but your dad and I were working on so many other cases around that time.” He opened his eyes and rapped his knuckles on top of his desk. “Was there a lady who had lived on that piece of property for a long time but then moved off?”

  I nodded. “Her name is Mrs. Middleton. She moved when I was really little, and now she lives up the road.”

  Custis nodded. He looked back and forth between us. “I remember now. Have either of you ever heard of something called heirs’ property?”

  We both shook our heads.

  Custis went on. “Okay, a little history lesson. At the end of the Civil War, the Southern economy had been destroyed. The slaves had been freed, but they had no money, no education, and no business skills, and the plantation owners didn’t have much money after the war either, so they couldn’t hire them to do the agricultural work they had always done. So the plantation owners developed a barter system where they offered their ex-slaves plots of land so they would have a place to live and raise their own crops. In return the ex-slaves would help the plantation owners farm their land.

  “In many cases, it wasn’t really clear who owned the land. The legal title to the land remained in the plantation owner’s name, and there was no formal paperwork showing that it had been given to the ex-slaves. However, that land was very often handed down from the ex-slaves to their children and to their children’s children and so on. In a lot of cases, it’s still happening. Because that land has been handed down over and over from generation to generation, it’s called heirs’ property. In most cases that land still doesn’t belong to the occupants in a strictly legal sense, because there has never been a formal title. However, when cases have come up, the courts have tended to rule that the land does in fact belong to the heirs of the ex-slaves, and they have been granted legal title.”

  “Is that how Mrs. Middleton’s family lived at Felony Bay?”

  “Yes,” Custis said, nodding his head. “Now it’s all coming back to me. Your dad found out that Mrs. Middleton had been born in that little cabin on Felony Bay and lived there for almost her whole life, and that her ancestors had lived there, too. Like a lot of people who have heirs’ property, Mrs. Middleton was never certain whether she owned the property. And if my memory serves me correctly, everything that upset your dad happened at the time when your grandfather was still alive and still owned Reward. Your grand-father was very sick and in the hospital, and your uncle Charlie was running the plantation for him. You would have been maybe a year old, and your mom was sick and your dad was still lawyering up in New York City.

  “Now, I wouldn’t swear to this in court, but if I’m remembering correctly, your dad found out that your family had never charged the Middletons rent, but your uncle Charlie started to when your grandfather went into the hospital. Mrs. Middleton couldn’t afford what he was charging, and since she probably figured she didn’t actually own the land, she moved out.”

  I glanced at Bee, because she was the one who’d asked why Mrs. Middleton left her old cabin and moved into a trailer. “Typical Uncle Charlie,” I said. “When did Daddy find out about it?”

  Custis shook his head. “Not till years later, and that’s when he decided to break Mrs. Middleton’s old land into a separate parcel. If I had to guess, I’d think he was planning to give the land to Mrs. Middleton, because he thought it was rightfully hers.”

  “And that was just before his . . . accident.”

  Custis nodded. “Pretty close.”

  I was already starting to see red. I wanted to go back to Reward and kick Uncle Charlie in the kne
e or maybe even a little higher.

  “But that never happened?” I asked.

  “No,” Custis said. I could tell by the way he closed his lips and squeezed them together that he had more to say.

  “Why not?” I asked. “If Daddy thought that Mrs. Middleton should have gotten that land, then it shouldn’t have been sold to anybody else, right?”

  “Well,” he said with a shrug. “Not in a perfect world, but things happened.”

  I could tell he didn’t want to say any more. “You can say it,” I told him. “Bee knows about everything that happened.”

  Custis looked at Bee, but when he turned his eyes back to me, I could tell that he was still struggling with how much he could say. “The firm had to repay Miss Jenkins for all her lost gold and jewels.”

  “But Daddy didn’t steal them.”

  “I agree with you, but since your dad was the legal guardian of Miss Jenkins’s wealth, and some of the jewels and gold were found in his possession, he and the rest of this law firm were legally responsible for the loss. Because your dad hasn’t been able to help us figure out who did commit the theft, Mr. Barrett felt he had no choice but to raise the largest possible amount of money from the sale of Reward. I’m certain he felt as badly about it as I did.”

  “In other words, the land that my father wanted to be given to Mrs. Middleton because he believed it was hers got sold to somebody else?”

  Custis shrugged. “Mr. Barrett is the managing partner now, and he handled everything. I’m not familiar with the details, but yes, from what you’re saying it sounds like that’s what happened. I’m sorry. But you need to understand that it was all done in the hopes of preserving as much of your father’s name and standing as possible.”

  I sat back and thought about this. I guessed maybe it was true that Daddy would have been in even more trouble without the entire plantation being sold, and I also knew it wouldn’t have been fair for the other lawyers in the firm to have to pay for a crime they didn’t commit. I didn’t know what Bee and I could possibly do to make things better, but it just felt so wrong, I couldn’t stand it. I tried to calm down and think about the problem the way Daddy would have. I knew the first thing he would have done would be to get as many facts about what had actually taken place as possible.