Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff Read online

  I focused back on the game as Mary Louise served. I waited until Donna started to swing, then I darted to the center of the court and volleyed her return for a winner.

  With the score 15–15, Zoë got the next serve, and she and Mary Louise hit a few gentle puffballs back and forth until Mary Louise sent another one short.

  I watched Donna move in, once again aiming toward Mary Louise’s corner. She let the ball bounce, moved beneath it, and just as before, she turned at the last second and fired her smash right at me. The shot came at my face, but I dodged, so it hit my shoulder. It hurt less than the first time, but I knew it was no accident. I was so angry, I could barely see as I charged the net, intending to slug Donna in the nose, definitely not a ladylike move.

  Donna saw me coming and danced back a few feet. “I am so sorry,” she said, her voice all fake sugar. “I just don’t know how that happened.”

  “Why don’t you come a little closer?” I said in a low growl. “I’ll show you what else can happen with a tennis racket.”

  “I already said I’m sorry.” Donna turned and started to walk away, but as she did her head swung toward her father. Mr. LaBelle nodded again and gave her another thumbs-up.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the two coaches watching us. I didn’t know if either had seen the first body shot because they were trying to monitor five matches at once, but I could tell they had at least seen the last one.

  Donna looked over at them and gave an embarrassed wave. “I hit Abbey by mistake. I feel so bad!”

  Donna’s coach nodded and waved for her to keep playing. My cheeks were flaming as I glanced at my coach, who just gave a scowl and a shrug, as if telling me she knew it wasn’t an accident but there was nothing she could do.

  I stayed at the net for a few more seconds and struggled to get my anger under control. When the coaches turned away and started to focus on other matches, Donna took a step toward me and said in a voice that only I could hear.

  “You think you’re such a big shot because your family’s been around for a few hundred years, but you’re not. In spite of everything your father did to try and ruin us, my father is going to be rich again. I’m going to go to Miss Walker’s again next year. You and I will be on the same campus, and I am going to get back at you, Abbey Force. My whole family is going to get back at your family. Also you and your little friend are going to pay for what you did to me and my mother yesterday.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Don’t play stupid,” Donna hissed, her face contorting. “You humiliated us. You know you did, and you meant to!”

  I opened my mouth to say something mean, but then I remembered the flask and her mother’s crooked lipstick and the way she staggered. Donna was horrified that Bee and I had seen her mother drunk. “Play tennis,” I mumbled, and went back to my position.

  After the match my coach gave me a ride downtown to Daddy’s office. Daddy hadn’t been able to watch me play because he was tied up with his load of new cases, and while I normally would have been excited to tell him about how we’d won tonight I had two horrible things on my mind: the plantation journals and Cotillion.

  The receptionist buzzed Martha, Daddy’s longtime assistant, who came out, gave me a big hug, then stood back and said how much bigger I looked. As Martha and I were talking, Bee came into the office from her soccer game, and then a second later Daddy came out from the back.

  “Ready, girls?” he asked as he led us to the door. I wasn’t ready at all, but I smiled and fell in behind Bee as we followed him outside and around the block to the Historical Society. My stomach was already starting to bubble as we walked.

  Daddy’s friend was waiting for us just inside the doors, and he took us straight down to one of their reading rooms. Ten minutes later Bee and I were sitting at a table with seven or eight very old leather-bound journals in front of us. They were business and personal records of my family, the owners of Reward Plantation, from the time it was first settled in 1672, through to the time it ceased being a working plantation in 1910.

  The journals told how my ancestor François Philippe Force acquired his land; how many board feet of timber he had cut to build his first house and slave cabins and barns; how many hammers, saws, and kegs of nails he had bought; how many pounds of seed he had bought to plant his first crops; and of course, how many “Negroes” he had purchased to start the work of clearing his fields, preparing his rice impoundments, and constructing his buildings. He was especially pleased with the fact that his slaves had come from the Windward Coast, the area of Africa where people knew about growing rice.

  The journals recounted how François Force’s first crops had been highly profitable, how he had bought more land to add to his holdings, added onto his house, and bought furniture and paintings imported from England. They also recounted how, early on, he had added to his holding of captive humans by purchasing more slaves at the Charleston slave auctions.

  The old-fashioned writing was hard to read. It took a long time to figure out some of the words, but there was no mistaking the part that said, Bought 4 boys and 2 girls—their ages as near as I can judge Lucy=10 years old, Hannibal=9, Billy=7, Peter=12, Priscilla=10, John=8 for £650. It sounded like he was talking about dogs or horses, and it made me want to get up and run away. But I stayed.

  I was reading over Bee’s shoulder, and as she read that passage, I saw her hands tighten on the journal. A second later she let out a breath that sounded almost like a sob, and she turned to me.

  “Seven- and eight-year-old boys? Ten-year-old girls?” Her expression was a mixture of hurt and disbelief. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “What happened to their parents?”

  I shook my head. There was no information about them in the journal; however, I knew the most likely answer was that the parents had been sold to some other plantation owner, or maybe they had died in the ships on the way over from Africa.

  “How could people do that to children?” she asked in a soft voice that carried more accusation than a shout.

  The question for me was: How could my ancestors have done that to children?

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. My shame felt so heavy that I was surprised I didn’t sink right into the floor. I had no more answers than Bee did, because I also wondered how my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandparents had come all the way to America to escape people picking on them for their religion, yet at the same time they made other people into slaves. How did that make sense? I couldn’t answer, but I knew those same genes had been passed on down to me. Was it possible that I could have done the same things they had? I didn’t think so, but how could I ever be sure?

  Afterward we walked back around the corner to Daddy’s office. I looked at Bee as we walked and saw that she had her back straight and her chin stuck out as if she were spoiling for a fight. I assumed the person she wanted to fight with was me, and I couldn’t blame her a bit.

  If we had switched positions at that very moment, I think I would have hated Abbey Force and her whole family. However, Bee was also my best friend, and even though I totally understood how she felt, I didn’t want to let this linger between us.

  “Bee, I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know my family did bad things. It makes me angry and ashamed.”

  Bee looked at me. “I know you feel that way,” she said. “I’m not angry at you.”

  “What can I do to make things better?”

  Bee was quiet for a moment. “Let’s write the paper together. You write about your ancestors, and I’ll write about mine.”

  “But we don’t know which of those people were your ancestors, do we? We don’t really know much about them at all, right?”

  “That’s the point. They’re anonymous, like horses or mules. I want to write about that. It’s important.”

  “That’s not really the assignment, is it?”

  “I don’t care if the teacher gives me an F.”

  I nodded. “I don’t care
, either.” If the teacher really gave Bee an F, it would probably be the first one she’d ever gotten in her life. Not so in my case, but that didn’t really matter. Bee’s idea was a good one.

  When we walked back into Daddy’s office, the reception desk was empty, and we took the long way around the corridor so that on the way to Daddy’s office I could peek inside Custis Pettigrew’s office. Custis was Daddy’s partner and one of his best friends. He was also a friend of mine.

  I stuck my head into the open door. Custis’s blue eyes were staring hard at his computer screen, and he was typing away on his keyboard. A lock of his black hair had fallen down over his forehead.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He glanced up, and his face broke into a warm smile. “Hey, yourself. You guys here to see me?”

  “I wish,” I said with a laugh. I always felt better when I saw Custis. “It’s Cotillion night, and I’m being punished. We’re here to take showers and put on our stupid dresses.”

  Custis sat up straight and raised his eyebrows. “Do you feel as strongly as Abbey?” he said to Bee.

  She shrugged. “I kind of like dancing.”

  I glanced at Bee. She already wore a bra. I didn’t. She looked good in one of those flouncy dresses. I looked like somebody stuck a boy with moppy hair in an upside-down Dixie cup.

  Custis stood up from his desk. He was tall and lean and towered over me, but one of the things that made us such good friends was that he never talked down to me in that way that so many adults tend to do with kids. He walked over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry to hear you hate it so much. Is it dancing or boys?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m guessing that will change, but maybe it won’t. Should we go appeal to the barrister to cut you a little slack?”

  The barrister was Daddy. “I would love it, but it’s not going to do any good,” I said.

  As all three of us started toward Daddy’s office, Custis glanced at me. “Understand you and Bee made a pretty ugly discovery the other day.”

  I nodded, and the picture flashed in my head again of the dead man lying on the stretcher, his skin white and pasty and raw from where the flies had been eating. I gave an involuntary shiver. “It was pretty gross.”

  We got to Daddy’s office, but he was on the phone, so we stood outside until he finished.

  Custis glanced at me again. “You’re not looking for Judge Gator’s dog anymore, right?”

  I shook my head. “You probably know that’s why I’m going to Cotillion,” I said.

  “Just be careful,” he said. “Leadenwah is normally about the most peaceful place there is, but there’s somebody very dangerous running around.”

  “Bee and I are both grounded.”

  “Right,” he said, like he wasn’t buying it. “I also understand you ran into the LaBelles.”

  “Boy, you sure are keeping tabs on me.”

  Custis smiled. “I keep tabs on all the pretty girls in this town.”

  I could feel my cheeks start to burn. “Speaking of keeping tabs, do you know if Mr. LaBelle is maybe trying to build something out at Hangman’s Bluff?”

  “I don’t think it would be David LaBelle. As far as I know, he’s been trying to sell the property. From what I heard, he pretty much went broke after your dad blocked his condo project.”

  “Donna LaBelle says Daddy ruined her family.”

  “Not true, your dad just made sure the zoning laws and environmental laws were enforced. It’s not his fault that Mr. LaBelle tried to ignore them.”

  “Donna says they’re going to be rich again.”

  Custis shook his head. “You seem to know more about the LaBelles than I do, but I don’t know where’d they’d get the money. Anyway,” he said, changing the subject and nodding at my tennis clothes and Bee’s soccer uniform, “did y’all win?”

  “Yessir,” Bee said.

  It was my turn to smile. “Duuhhh. And I beat Donna LaBelle in a doubles match.”

  “And now you two are about to transform yourselves into visions of loveliness for Cotillion.”

  I turned at the sound of Daddy’s voice to see that he was off the phone and standing in his office holding up a plastic garment bag with two long dresses inside. He also had a menu from a nearby Thai restaurant. My expression shifted to a scowl.

  “Do I really have to go?” I asked. “That dress probably doesn’t even fit. Isn’t there some better way to punish me?” Given a choice, I would rather have gotten branded like a steer than go to Cotillion, the annual Charleston dance for “Young Ladies and Gentlemen.” “I played two matches this afternoon. I’m tired. I just want to go home.”

  Custis raised his eyebrows. “Surely you’re not going to spoil your father’s attempt to make you into a lady?”

  “I thought you were on my side.” I made a choking sound. “I hate dancing. And I hate boys.”

  Probably if I ever met a boy my age who was like Custis, I might not feel that way, but boys my age were stupid. They smelled bad, and they thought their burps and farts were the funniest things in the world. My pony was smarter than almost all the boys I had ever met.

  “We discussed this last night. You no longer have a choice in this, and you’re not going to weasel out of Cotillion this year,” Daddy said. He waved the menu. “Tell me what you want to order, and I’ll go pick it up while you girls shower.”

  Daddy was the head partner of his firm, which meant that he had his own bathroom with a shower. Unfortunately it also meant that Bee and I could get cleaned up and dressed there and make it to Cotillion, which we would never have been able to do if we had to go all the way out to Reward after my tennis match.

  Twenty minutes later, with our hair dry and combed, Bee and I walked into Daddy’s conference room in our long dresses. Daddy had already picked up the food, and he and Custis both clapped when they saw us, and Custis whistled. It made my face get all red again.

  “Haven’t you ever seen anybody in a dress before?” I snapped, even though I wasn’t as annoyed as I pretended to be. To my amazement, the dress Daddy had bought for me fit perfectly, and it might even have been one I would have picked out myself.

  “Hardly anyone as lovely as you two,” Custis said.

  I grabbed the bag of food and pulled out my curry and satay and kept my head down as I ate. I absolutely hated the way Custis could make me blush at the drop of a hat. It made me want to slug him. Someday I was going to do just that.

  A half hour later I was standing beside Bee in a line of other girls inside South Carolina Hall. Just like every other girl there, I was wearing my long dress and my ridiculous white gloves, and in the short time we’d been there, things had gone from bad to worse.

  Hearing some too loud laughter, I had looked over to find Donna LaBelle in a dress that looked like it must have cost five times more than Bee’s and mine put together. Donna had been laughing ever so gaily as she talked to several boys, as if something one of them had said was the funniest thing she had ever heard. When she realized I was looking her way, she whispered something to the boys and they both glanced at me and sniggered. I was starting to head over to pay Donna back for her tennis body shots when the lady who ran the Cotillion made us stop whatever we were doing and line up for another dance.

  A minute later all the girls were in a long row, waiting for the boys who were lined up across the room to come over and ask us to dance. It wasn’t a choice thing. There were even numbers of boys and girls, and the boys were supposed to walk straight across and dance with whoever was in front of them. I counted down to see which boy matched my place in the line.

  Unfortunately it was Arnie Snowdon. As I watched him he slipped a finger into one nostril, rummaged all around, pulled it out, and squinted at whatever he’d discovered.

  “Oh, God,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What?” Bee whispered.

  “Arnie Snowdon is going to be my partner, and he’s digging for treasure in his nose.”

&nb
sp; Bee made a soft choking sound. “He find any?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  I watched Arnie as he flicked something on the floor and wiped the finger on his pants then started across the room with the rest of the boys. Was it any wonder why I couldn’t stand boys when they did things like that and didn’t wash their hands? For once I was actually glad for my stupid white gloves.

  The look on Arnie’s face told me he wasn’t any happier about dancing with me than I was with him. The music started, and I put my hand on his shoulder. His face was full of red zits, which he probably couldn’t help, but his hair had a greasy shine and smelled like he hadn’t washed it in about three weeks. I was trying to decide how to tell Arnie about the fantastic uses of something called shampoo when he started talking.

  “You go to Miss Walker’s, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t Donna LaBelle used to go there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?” Hearing Donna’s name creeped me out. After the flat tire and the tennis match, she was suddenly like a bad itch that I couldn’t get rid of.

  Arnie shrugged. “She was outside when I first got here, and I’m just telling you she said a bunch of really nasty stuff about you. It was, like, all she could talk about.”

  “We’ve had several unpleasant encounters in the past few days,” I told him. The second I spoke I realized how idiotic I sounded, like I was trying to be some kind of phony Southern Lady. It made me mad, and I wondered if Donna was the reason I wasn’t even able to talk like myself.

  “What happened?” Arnie asked.

  “Donna and her mother were rude jerks when my friend and I tried to help them with a flat tire. I called them on it.”

  Arnie pulled away, blinked at me, then laughed in surprise. “Donna said you dissed her mom real bad. Isn’t she supposed to be, like, the original Ice Queen?”

  “She deserved it.”

  To my surprise Arnie laughed a second time. “I bet her mom did deserve it,” he said. “If it makes you feel any better, Donna always treats me like dirt.”