Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff

by J. E. Thompson

  I glanced back toward Mrs. Middleton and Willie. “He’s my cousin,” Mrs. Middleton said.

  I hadn’t known the Smallses and the Middletons were related, but it didn’t surprise me, because so many of the people who lived on Leadenwah turned out to be related one way or another. I looked at them both a little closer, because I would have guessed that getting bailed out of jail would be a reason for happiness, but neither of them looked very pleased. Mrs. Middleton’s eyes were glassy and sad while Willie hunched with his elbows resting on his knees and popped his knuckles, one by one.

  “Stop that, Willie,” Mrs. Middleton snapped, after a few seconds. “If you are going to stay in my home, you are going to have to take that confounded habit outside.”

  “Yes’m, sorry,” Willie mumbled. He stopped popping his knuckles, but he kept clenching and unclenching his hands and staring down at the floor.

  Mrs. Middleton stood up and grabbed hold of her walker. “Thank you for your advice, Rutledge. We’ve taken enough of your time. I’ll leave you to have dinner with Abbey. Come on, Willie.”

  Willie stood up and then went over and shook Daddy’s hand. “Thank you, sir,” he said, then he gave me a wave and followed Mrs. Middleton out the door.

  I stood at the door beside Daddy as they climbed into the truck and drove away.

  “Willie didn’t look as happy as people should look when they just got out of jail,” I said.

  Daddy looked down at me. “Willie has decided that he needs to plead guilty.”

  “But . . . you said he didn’t steal anything!”

  Daddy shook his head. “The only thing Willie is guilty of is drinking on the job with a couple guys who brought a bottle and talked him into it. He’s guilty of that and of being a sucker. The problem is that Willie knows that what he did was wrong. He can’t understand the difference between being guilty of making a dumb mistake and being guilty of being evil.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m trying to get the charges either reduced or dropped.”

  “That’s good, right?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, Daddy just looked down at me and adjusted his glasses so they sat on the end of his nose. It was something he did when he was unhappy with me.

  “Those aren’t the only charges that need to be discussed,” he said.

  Daddy turned and walked back into the kitchen without saying another word. What he’d just said and the way he’d just looked at me gave me a bad feeling. I followed him into the kitchen, but rather than saying anything more, his attention was now on the TV. The sound was low, but local news was on, and the weatherman was pointing to a storm off the southeast coast. A name in big letters at the top of the screen said Tropical Storm Dominique. Daddy turned up the sound just as the man said there was a risk it would strengthen to a hurricane.

  The announcer said Dominique’s movement had stalled due to a high-pressure ridge coming out of the west, but it would probably start moving in another day or so. Whether it would weaken or strengthen, and where and even if it would make landfall, was anybody’s guess. He showed a big cone between northern Florida and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Dominique would most likely end up. South Carolina, and more particularly the area around Leadenwah, was smack dab in the middle of the cone.

  “If this storm suddenly strengthens and heads our way, it isn’t going to give us much warning because it’s already so close,” Daddy said. “Assuming it hasn’t died out or turned sharply north, on Saturday morning I’m going to close up our shutters. Then I’m going to help Mrs. Middleton and Grandma Em.”

  “You’ll need my help,” I said, thinking Daddy couldn’t do the things he used to do all alone.

  “I’m able to do more and more every day. I think I can handle that, but while I do the houses, I need you to get the barn secured. Saturday afternoon I’ve got a van coming to take the horses and ponies inland. Just a precaution, but better safe than sorry, right?”

  I nodded. Anyone who lived on a coastal island in South Carolina learned from a young age never to ignore hurricane warnings. As much as I hated to see a storm coming, I remembered the look Daddy had given me a moment earlier and felt relieved that at least he wasn’t upset about something I had done.

  He turned away from the TV and opened the oven door. Daddy always rubbed his chicken with olive oil then roasted it at a high temperature and basted the skin with the pan juices. It always came out crisp on the outside and juicy in the middle, just the way I loved it. While the chicken was cooking, Daddy put some broccoli in the other oven to roast, and of course we were also having steamed rice.

  As he finished with the broccoli, I remembered that I had asked him to check on any construction projects on Leadenwah Island. “Hey, Daddy,” I began. “Did you have a chance to—”

  He cut me off by letting the oven door slam closed loud enough to make me jump. At first I wondered if it had been an accident, but he was fixing me with that same dark look he’d had before as he wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. I had a feeling we were going to discuss the “other charges” he’d mentioned.

  “I got a phone call just before Mrs. Middleton and Willie arrived,” he began.

  I felt my stomach tighten but raised my eyebrows, trying for an innocent look. “Yes?”

  “Patty LaBelle said you were extremely rude to her and her daughter this afternoon. Is that true?”

  I thought about it for a second. “Partly true,” I confessed.

  “I asked you a yes-or-no question. Either it’s true or not true, so which is it?” he demanded.

  I thought about telling him that there were times when it would be better not to talk like a lawyer, but I didn’t. In the South being rude to another adult, even if that adult was a total jerk, was a crime, and it was even a worse crime if you were a girl. Girls were always supposed to be “ladylike.” Fortunately Daddy wasn’t as ridiculous about that stuff as most other parents were, but he still hated rudeness.

  I gave him his hard look right back. “I was rude,” I admitted. “But before I was rude, I tried to help Mrs. LaBelle. I offered to change her tire and started to reach into her trunk to get the spare. She told me not to do it and tried to slap my hands away.”

  I paused for a second, just the way Daddy had taught me in order to get the maximum bang out of what I planned to say next. “Only she dropped her purse, and I saw the liquor flask she keeps in there. Also her lipstick was on crooked, and she staggered a little when she walked.”

  Daddy didn’t react. He just kept looking at me without any expression on his face. It was another of his lawyer tricks. He was thinking that if he just let the silence hang, it would cause any guilt I might be feeling to begin to fester. When I was a little kid, it used to work every single time.

  “You still need to be respectful toward adults,” he said, after the waiting didn’t do any good.

  I felt my eyes narrow. “You’re the one who always tells me, ‘As ye sow so shall ye reap.’ I don’t think I need to respect somebody just because they’ve managed to live for a certain number of years. That’s not sowing much, is it?”

  Daddy’s eyes narrowed even more. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. After a second he threw a little more kindling on the fire. “You know the LaBelle family has had a hard time. You and I were in that same position not too many months ago. Maybe a little compassion on your part would be appropriate.”

  Once again I didn’t say anything. The silence stretched and soon became a contest of wills. I was not going to be the one who gave in.

  “I still don’t think you’ve told me the whole story,” he said at last.

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. “I was rude because Mrs. LaBelle was rude first. She said you talk trash.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What did you do then?”

  “She had thrown her cell phone in the dirt ’cause she was mad, and I told her there were laws against littering.” I glanced at the ceilin
g. “Well, maybe I said that before she called you a trash-talker. I don’t really remember.”

  I could tell that Daddy was doing his best not to smile. He bunched his lips hard and bit down on the insides of his cheeks, but the corners of his mouth still curled upward. Finally he stopped fighting it and gave me a grudging nod. “I know I’m not supposed to tell you this, but good for you.”

  I thought I was off the hook, but in the next instant his brows clouded over and he let the other shoe drop. “But we also haven’t discussed exactly where you were when you happened to run into the LaBelles.”

  I took a deep breath and told him the truth, and his eyes got as hard as stones. “I thought I could trust you to make reasonable decisions,” he said in a quiet, disappointed voice that hurt worse than a yell. “Clearly I was wrong. Because of your disobedience, you are now grounded. Other than school activities, you may not leave the plantation.”

  He looked at me and seemed to think. “And one more thing. Because I thought you were growing up, I was giving you the right to make some decisions about certain social activities.”

  I knew where he was going. I wasn’t going to fight him on my grounding, but I would on this. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Please.”

  Daddy nodded. “Yes,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument. “You are going to Cotillion.”

  “I can’t! It’s tomorrow night and I don’t even have a dress that fits.”

  Daddy looked at me with a steely glint. “When you make bad choices, you lose other choices. I’ll buy you a dress tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll love my taste.”

  We ate dinner at the kitchen table the way we always did during the week, and even though I’d been grounded and was being forced to go to horrible Cotillion, probably in the ugliest dress in the world, Daddy’s chicken, roast broccoli, and steamed rice were just as good as they had ever been, and they managed to cheer me up. When we finished, we even had ice cream for dessert, and then in that peaceful time when my stomach was stuffed and I was resting before I went up to start my homework, I remembered the other thing I needed to ask Daddy.

  “Remember those plantation journals you showed me one time?” I asked. “The ones you gave to the Historical Society?”

  Daddy had been watching a news show on TV and he turned to look at me. “Sure, what about them?”

  “Bee and I would like to look at them.”

  Daddy blinked. “May I know why?”

  I explained about the biography we had to write for history and how Bee wanted to write about her earliest ancestors in America.

  Daddy’s eyebrows went up. “I understand why Bee wants to do this, but I have to warn you, it’s going to be a tough experience. You think you can handle it?”

  I shrugged. “You’ve always told me that a person can’t run away from the truth.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “You’re right, but are you really that brave? If you are, you’re far braver than I would have been at your age.”

  “I don’t feel brave, but Bee really wants to do this,” I said. “I don’t think I have a choice.”

  In truth I was scared of what those journals might say, and even worse, of the way they might say it. I was scared that they might make my best friend decide she wanted nothing to do with me.

  Nine

  I woke up the next morning with so much anxiety about the plantation journals that I had an upset stomach and barely touched my breakfast. Once I got to school, I realized that yet again I had forgotten to ask Daddy if he’d had a chance to find out about new construction on Sinner’s Point, and I wondered when I would be able to do it.

  It was Friday, and that afternoon my middle school tennis team had our first match against one of the local public schools. Since Miss Walker’s was the only girls’ school in the city, we had to play all our matches against coed teams. I played number two singles on our team ladder, and that afternoon I was matched against a boy a year older than me.

  He was taller and stronger, but I had already figured out that if boys thought a girl might beat them they tended to get angry and hit the ball way too hard. This usually led to a lot of missed points, so my strategy was to hang in there and look for a chance to give this guy a scare.

  I managed to break his serve in the first set, and just like I hoped, he got mad. From then on he began smashing his racket against the fence every time he made a bad shot and hitting the balls so hard that most of them sailed out of bounds. I just concentrated on getting the ball back in the court and letting my red-faced opponent go down in flames as he made all the mistakes.

  I was pretty beat by the end of my match, but our coach came over and asked if I would also play a doubles match because two of our other players had called in sick. I said yes, but when I walked onto the court and saw Donna LaBelle on the other side of the net, I realized my mistake. I skidded to a stop and looked for an escape, my first instinct being to go back to my coach and ask her to put me in a different match. Unfortunately it was too late because Donna had already spotted me.

  She strolled to the net and gave me a nasty smile. “Abbey Force,” she said, all fake sweet. “What a surprise to see you again after our pleasant little meeting yesterday.”

  “You must have a funny idea of pleasant,” I said.

  “Well, it’s going to be pleasant to beat you and your little partner into the ground,” Donna said.

  “We’ll see who beats who into the ground,” I shot back. Once she’d opened her big mouth, there was no way I would have played in a different match. I wanted nothing more than to see Donna LaBelle in tears.

  I remembered Donna as a decent athlete from when she had gone to Miss Walker’s. But I also remembered that she was like a lot of the boys, in the sense that her temper often got in the way, and if she didn’t win she was likely to fly into a rage. As I recalled it was never Donna’s fault when she lost, but always a bad call, a crummy racket, a lousy partner. I stowed all that away as we got ready to warm up.

  Donna was wearing a perfectly pressed white tennis skirt and matching shirt. Her blond hair was tied up in a pink ribbon. She looked like she was being paid to model tennis clothes, and that didn’t make me like her any better.

  My own curly hair probably was a damp mop next to Donna’s perfect locks. My white tennis skirt was a little dirty, which was nothing new, because I hadn’t had time to run the washing machine and I didn’t trust Daddy to wash my white things because he always put his dark stuff in along with them and made them a different color.

  To tell the truth, a little dirt never bothered me unless I was around somebody like Donna. Knowing Donna looked like a Vogue model while I looked like a mechanic made me even more determined to put her into a total temper tantrum.

  Donna’s partner, who introduced herself as Zoë, made me feel better because she wore the only goth tennis outfit I had ever seen. She had purple hair, heavy black eye makeup, a black T-shirt with some tie-dye colors swirling around in a big mess, black shorts, knee-high black socks, and black shoes. A line of Band-Aids ran along the side of one nostril, with a couple on top of each ear and one over her eyebrow. They probably covered Zoë’s piercings.

  My own partner, Mary Louise Gardner, a fellow seventh grader, was a nice girl but a little slow and out of shape. In fact, I was pretty sure there were eighty-year-olds who could move around the tennis court faster than Mary Louise. When she actually managed to get to the ball, her high, loopy shots were like marshmallow puffballs.

  Whenever Mary Louise hit one of her puffballs short, it was going to give Donna a chance for an easy smash. However, as we warmed up and I saw how weak Donna’s partner was, I began to feel better. I even started to think that we had a chance.

  We lost the spin. As Zoë got ready to serve, I was thinking about what jerks Donna and her mother had been and how much fun it would be to win this match. In the next moment my brain betrayed me, and I thought about how miserable it would be to have a mother who was drunk
in the afternoon and how Donna’s father had looked at Mrs. LaBelle like she was some kind of massive disappointment. I remembered what Daddy had said about trying to show Donna a little compassion.

  A second later Zoë’s first serve came across the net in slow motion, and Mary Louise actually managed to return it for a winner. The first three games went just like that, with Mary Louise and me winning nearly every point and Donna even double faulting a couple times on her serve.

  By the time we got to Mary Louise’s serve, I was actually starting to feel like I needed to lose a couple points and make Donna and Zoë feel a little better. That was when we got into a longer-than-usual point and Mary Louise hit one of her short lobs. Right away Donna moved. She let the lob bounce then stepped under the ball, cocked her racket over her shoulder, and prepared to hit an overhead smash.

  I was at net, but Donna was aiming into Mary Louise’s corner. It was the smart play, because Mary Louise was, as usual, out of position and would never get to the ball. However, at the very last second, Donna shifted, turning her shoulder toward me, and when she blasted her overhead, the ball slammed me in the stomach, stinging like a giant hornet and knocking the air out of my lungs in a big whoosh.

  I managed to raise my head to find Donna holding her hands over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!” she cried. “I so didn’t mean to do that!”

  I forced a smile and pretended I could breathe. I couldn’t be sure she had hit me on purpose, and I remembered Daddy’s words about giving her the benefit of the doubt. “No problem,” I said. “Barely felt it.”

  I turned to Mary Louise. “Try to keep the lobs a little deeper,” I whispered. Then as I took my position on the other side of the court I saw Donna turn her head and look over at the bleachers for a long second.

  I followed her eyes and found Mr. LaBelle. His face was set in a scowl, and as I watched he gave her a big nod and a thumbs-up. I felt the blood rush to my face.