Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff

by J. E. Thompson

  She was over a hundred yards off, and it looked like she was half dragging, half carrying something that was long and awkward, because she would stop every fifteen or twenty yards, drop it, then pick it up again.

  “Looks like she dug up a dinosaur bone,” Bee joked.

  “Must be quite a prize,” I said with a laugh. Yemassee looked so dusty and tired that I guessed she must have taken a long jaunt to get that thing.

  Then another motion caught my eye. A vehicle was coming up the driveway at a fast enough clip to throw a big rooster tail of dust. At first I thought it might be Judge Gator rushing back from Charleston, but when it got closer I knew it wasn’t, because Judge Gator had an old Mercedes station wagon, and this was a white pickup. The driver had to be an idiot, because even from where we stood on the porch I could hear the wheels slamming hard in the ruts.

  “That truck’s going to hit Yemassee!” Bee cried.

  I stared, realizing she was right. The Boykin spaniel was in the middle of the drive, and the truck was coming up on her real fast. It appeared that the driver didn’t see her. I opened my mouth to scream, but at the last second the driver slammed on his brakes and slid to a stop just behind Yemassee.

  Two men jumped out of the truck. I couldn’t see them well because of all the road dust they had kicked up, but the driver looked sort of short and thick. The passenger was taller and a good bit skinnier.

  “Here, doggy,” one of the men called, but not the way a person calls a dog. It was more of a I’m going to beat you when I get my hands on you voice.

  Something about the man’s tone sent a shiver down my back, and I grabbed Bee’s shoulder and made her squat down with me behind a couple big pots of geraniums.

  Yemassee totally ignored the man, and both of them started to chase her. Right away I realized that they had to be after the thing she was carrying. I would have laughed at the sight if the men hadn’t looked so angry.

  As we watched, the fat man stayed behind Yemassee, while the skinnier man veered off to one side and ran sort of parallel to her. He seemed to be trying to head her off so she couldn’t reach the house.

  Yemassee wasn’t fooled. She changed direction, managing to hold the thing in her mouth as she trotted off between several of the live oaks that lined the drive. I was about to call out and tell the men to stop chasing her, tell them I could get her to drop the thing by offering her a treat. I opened my mouth, but then I saw the rifle in the taller man’s hands, and the words froze in my throat. All I could do was watch in horror. A voice in my head kept telling me that this could not be happening, but it was.

  Yemassee was about to duck under the pasture fence when the man raised the rifle to his shoulder.

  That broke my paralysis. “No!” Bee and I shouted at the same instant. We stood up and leaped off the porch, running toward Yemassee. The fat man glanced in our direction then said something to his partner. I never heard any sound from the gun, but in the next instant I saw Yemassee sit, then collapse onto her side and lie still.

  I was already in tears, crazy with anger. I was going to run up to the man with the rifle and kick him in the crotch as hard as I could and then keep on kicking until he cried like a baby. My tears were coming so fast, I couldn’t see. It was like driving in a car through a rainstorm with the window wipers off.

  Bee was running beside me. I could hear her crying and yelling something, but I paid no attention. I didn’t know she was telling me to stop until she tackled me and we both fell in the dirt.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. “Get off!”

  But she wasn’t getting off. She was keeping me pinned with all her strength. “Stay down!” she kept saying.

  I got an arm free and was about to pull a good handful of her hair when I paused for half a second and looked at her face. She was a teary, snotty mess, but she kept telling me to stay down like it was the most important thing in the world. It finally got through to me.

  “We can’t help Yemassee if we get shot too.”

  I raised my head and blinked through the dust at the two men. The one with the gun sidestepped over, dropped the gun to his hip but kept it aimed at us, and picked up whatever Yemassee had been carrying.

  Then the fat man did something that surprised me. He walked over and picked up Yemassee, then backed toward the truck.

  “What are you doing, man?” the tall man said, loud enough for us to hear.

  “This is a Boykin spaniel!” the fat man said.

  The first man grumbled as he hurried back to the truck, but the other man put Yemassee gently on the floor of the cab, then climbed in over her and slammed the door. The driver spun the wheel hard, spinning his tires and kicking up another huge cloud of dust, and the truck skidded and fishtailed in a turn and roared back out toward the county road. There was so much dirt in the air that Bee and I couldn’t see a thing.

  When I finally managed to get out from under Bee, I jumped up and started to run back toward where we had tied the ponies.

  “What are you doing?” Bee demanded as she ran behind me.

  “I’m going home to get Daddy’s bullwhip,” I panted.

  “Your dad doesn’t have a bullwhip,” Bee said.

  I stopped and spun on her. I hated the way she is totally rational at times when I wanted to go totally crazy. “Well, we have to do something!”

  “Did you even see which way the truck turned when it got out to the road?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, if we don’t have any idea who they were or which direction they turned, there’s no way we’re going to catch them, is there?”

  I threw my hands in the air. “So what are we going to do?”

  “Go back home and tell Grandma Em.”

  “And what’s she going to do?”

  “Call the police.”

  I scowled. Even though I saw the sense in what Bee was suggesting, I liked my idea of crotch kicking and bullwhipping a whole lot better. Still, we did what she suggested, meaning that we jumped on the ponies and raced back toward Bee’s house.

  Bee’s dad owned a lot of companies, but his newest one was in India. He was over there a lot of the time, making sure everything was set up right, and Bee’s grandmother took care of her at home. Grandma Em was a big deal in both our lives, because neither Bee nor I had a mother. Bee’s mom and brother died in a terrible car accident just about a year earlier, and my own mother died of cancer when I was very young. Grandma Em was always there for us, and she always knew what to do when something would go wrong.

  We barreled back along the dirt path and up the plantation drive, and the ponies were slick with sweat as we skidded them to a stop in back of the big house. We tied the ponies by the fountain, where they could get a drink, and we went boiling up the back porch steps and into the kitchen. Grandma Em was at the stove making meatballs in tomato sauce for dinner.

  “Whoa, there,” she said as we threw open the door and let it slam behind us. “Take off those dirty boots before you go another step.”

  “Forget the dirt!” Bee cried. “We were over at Judge Gator’s and we saw two men in a truck drive up and shoot Yemassee!”

  Grandma Em was tall and imposing. My father said she had a regal bearing, meaning that something about her reminded him of a queen. She was very kind and loving most of the time, but when Grandma Em got angry, her voice was as hard and scary as a marine drill sergeant’s. Also, when people didn’t do what Grandma Em wanted, her eyes got a steely glint that could make an alligator turn tail and run away. I think Grandma Em got that way from being an elementary school principal for all those years when she lived in Atlanta.

  Right then her eyes went ice-cold. “They shot his dog?” she asked in disbelief. “Are you girls making this up?”

  “No! We have to call the police!” Bee insisted. Her face was slick with a combination of smeared tears and sweat from the afternoon heat and our hot, dusty gallop back from Judge Gator’s. “Tell them to come right out.”


  Grandma Em never panicked or got rattled. Even then with Bee racing off at the mouth about a pickup truck and a gun and Yemassee getting shot, she just held up a hand to quiet us down.

  “Exactly what did you see?” she asked.

  “We told you what we saw!” Bee’s eyes were starting to spill tears again. “Yemassee got shot!”

  “Okay, okay,” Grandma Em said in a soothing voice. “Is that what you’re going to tell the police?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed.

  “Now, girls,” Grandma Em said, “didn’t you two start a business sometime early in the summer?”

  I threw up my hands. What did that have to do with anything? “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  “And what was the name of that business?”

  “Come on, Grandma!” Bee cried. “Just call!” She rolled her eyes in frustration.

  “Answer the question, please.”

  “Force and Force Investigations,” I said. It was the business Bee and I had started in June, after we solved the Mystery of Felony Bay. It had seemed like a fun idea at the time, but as the summer wore on and Bee got a pony and we rode together every day and swam in the river off the plantation dock, we hadn’t thought about investigating a single thing, other than spying on some baby ducks that lived on one of the plantation ponds.

  Grandma Em went on. “So, if an investigator calls the police to report a crime, what kind of information would the police expect them to provide?”

  Bee and I shrugged.

  Grandma Em threw up her hands in frustration. “What were they driving?”

  “A pickup truck.”

  “What color?”

  “White.”

  “What make?”

  Bee and I looked at each other then shook our heads.

  “Any lettering on the side?”

  “It kicked up too much dust to see,” Bee said.

  “Was there anything else unusual about the truck that you can recall?” Grandma Em prodded. “Light bars on top? Rust? Dents?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture the truck, and after a second I nodded. “It was one of those trucks that have double back tires on each side.”

  “That’s good,” Grandma Em said. “There aren’t as many of those as there are regular pickup trucks. What about the men in the truck? Had you seen them before?”

  I shook my head.

  “Were they Caucasian, Hispanic, African American . . . ?”

  “White,” Bee said.

  “How old?”

  Bee and I looked at each other. “One was maybe forty or fifty,” I said.

  “He had dark hair and a big belly,” Bee said. “I could see that much.”

  I nodded, remembering how the man’s navy-blue T-shirt bulged out over his belt like he had a watermelon in there.

  “What color hair?”

  “Black,” Bee said.

  I closed my eyes. “But shiny bald on top,” I added.

  As we were answering her questions, Grandma Em had grabbed a pad of paper and was jotting everything down. “What about the second man?” she asked.

  “He was younger,” I said. “Maybe in his twenties or thirties.”

  “Tall and thin with lousy posture,” Bee added.

  “He was the one who shot Yemassee,” I said.

  “Hair?” Grandma Em asked.

  “I think it was blond,” I said. “But it was hard to tell for sure, because he wore a baseball cap.” I closed my eyes and recalled a pair of wraparound sunglasses on a narrow face. I fixed both of the men in my mind, and I imagined having a bullwhip in my hands when I ran into them again.

  Three

  Cyrus Middleton was our new Leadenwah Island deputy, since the old deputy, Bubba Simmons, was in prison. Cyrus was very tall, with shoulders that reminded me of big fence posts. He had a dark face, as round as a full moon, and not a bit mean like Bubba’s had been. He had huge hands, and he moved slow and talked even slower, so it would have been easy for someone who didn’t know him very well to think Cyrus wasn’t very smart. That would have been a big mistake. Cyrus might have moved slowly, but he didn’t miss anything that went on around him.

  Cyrus was on the front porch of the big house interviewing Bee and me and taking notes when Daddy and Judge Gator drove up the plantation drive. Daddy must have called him after I told him what happened. Judge Gator jumped out of his old Mercedes station wagon and strode up onto the porch, looking like someone I’d never met before. With his gray hair, bright blue eyes, his easy way of talking, and his deep, gravelly laugh, Judge Gator is one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. Today his mouth was a hard line, and his blue eyes were flashing so bright, they reminded me of sunlight glinting off the blade of a freshly sharpened knife. Today he looked as mean as his nickname.

  Daddy came limping behind the judge, moving a lot slower, still using a cane to walk and looking as if his day at the office had tired him out. Bee and I stood up, and Cyrus also stood.

  “They shot my dog?” was the first thing out of the judge’s mouth.

  “Yessir,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as they’re gonna be,” he growled. He glanced at Cyrus. “Excuse me, deputy. I apologize if you have already covered all of this, but I need the girls to tell me everything.”

  Grandma Em had written down all the details she’d made us recall, and Bee had typed them up on the computer and printed them out. We handed our report to Judge Gator, and he read it over fast, then pointed his finger at one line in the report and raised his eyes to us.

  “You said their gun made some kind of funny noise. What kind of noise?”

  When Grandma Em made us think hard about all the details, Bee and I remembered that we had never heard a gunshot. “I didn’t hear anything,” I said. “But Bee said she thought it sounded like somebody spitting.”

  The judge frowned. “Was Yemassee knocked backward by the shot?”

  Bee shook her head. “No, sir. She just sat down and then keeled over.”

  The judge rolled his jaw around, and his eyes got very small. “Sounds like it was some sort of tranquilizer gun,” he said quietly. He looked at Daddy and at Cyrus. “I bet they wanted my puppies.”

  Cyrus nodded. “Last year we had about five Boykins stolen right here on the island. I wonder if it could be those same people stealing dogs again.”

  The judge nodded. “I think that’s got to be it. And I’m betting it’s somebody local.”

  A few minutes later, having promised to put out a notice to all the local police departments to be on the lookout for a heavy-duty white pickup with the two men we had seen, Cyrus left. Grandma Em invited Judge Gator, Daddy, and me to stay for dinner and share the spaghetti and meatballs she had made earlier. We accepted in a blink, even Judge Gator, because nobody, and I mean nobody, turns down a chance to eat Grandma Em’s cooking. Not even somebody whose heart is breaking because his best friend has been stolen.

  While the grown-ups sat on the front porch and had cocktails before dinner, Bee and I walked out onto the dock and watched the tide go out and the fiddler crabs scooting across the pluff mud. For a time neither of us said a word. I kept thinking about what it was like for me when I almost lost Daddy, and I knew Bee was probably thinking the same thing, maybe what it was like when she lost her mom.

  “The judge’s wife died a couple years ago,” I finally said. “Now Yemassee is all he’s got.”

  Bee nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. I mean, losing a relative is terrible, but if you lose the only living thing that helps fill an empty house, is it any less bad because it’s a dog?”

  “Know what I think?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Grandma Em said there aren’t nearly as many six-wheeled pickups around as standard ones. And Judge Gator said he was sure someone on this island stole Yemassee. There are only so many places where someone could park a truck like that . . .”

  Bee scowled and nodded and threw a stick in the wa
ter and watched it float out of sight. “Force and Force,” she said, after a long silence.

  I looked at her, and suddenly I got it. My eyes widened, and I snapped my fingers. “Yes!” I said. “Force and Force Investigations. We’ll find Yemassee.”

  Nobody said much at dinner because, in spite of how good the food was, we all felt the judge’s sadness. Afterward the judge drove Daddy and me home to our tenant house, and when we got out of the car we stood outside and watched the judge’s old Mercedes disappear down the drive.

  “I feel terrible for him,” Daddy said.

  “Me too,” I said, but I kept the news to myself that Bee and I were going to find Yemassee and get her back. If I’m being honest, I had a feeling Daddy wouldn’t want me poking around in strange backyards, and I didn’t want him to squash our investigation before it even got off the ground.

  When the judge’s car finally disappeared, I looked up. It was one of those clear nights when the stars lay bright in the sky and seemed closer than they really were.

  “I’ll let Rufus out, and then we can spot constellations,” I said as I ran up on the back porch.

  Rufus is our black Lab, and he was standing right at the door, whapping his tail against the wall and the refrigerator. When I opened the door, he bounded out, racing around and watering the trees, the tires of Daddy’s Suburban, and all the corners of the house. Just in case anyone forgot exactly which dog owned the property.

  “In a few minutes,” Daddy said. “I have some work I have to do.”

  “It’s Saturday night,” I said. “Today was only your first day back at work.”

  He nodded. “And I’m already busy, honeybee.”

  I didn’t want to hear that. Before Daddy’s coma we used to play a game to see which one of us could identify the most constellations. Daddy always used to win, but I had been getting better.

  Before he could go inside, I lay on my back in the grass and looked up at the sky. “There’s Aquarius,” I said, pointing at some stars that ancient sky watchers thought looked like a man pouring water on the ground. To me Aquarius looked more like a sad dog with a big head. Rufus came over to me for a scratch, and I pointed his head up at the sky.