Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff

by J. E. Thompson

  We squatted down below the library windows, put our ears to the clapboards, and held our breath. Even with my hand over my other ear, all I could hear was the wind whipping and screaming at the corners of the house and the rain hissing and spattering on the wet ground. Inside the house was as quiet as a tomb. Maybe we had panicked; maybe Grandma Em was with Daddy down at our house.

  We crept around the side and along the front of the house, moving from room to room as I kept putting my ear to the clapboards, trying to hear any sounds coming from inside. There was nothing. When we got close to the far end, I was pretty sure no one was there after all. I was about to sneak up onto the squeaky, old front porch and look through the curtains when Bee tapped me hard on the shoulder.

  I swung my head around, and she pointed off toward the place where Grandma Em liked to park her car beneath one of the live oaks. Beside it was a pickup truck that didn’t belong to anybody in my family or Bee’s family.

  A cold chill went up my spine. It was one of the trucks we had seen parked at Hangman’s Bluff.

  Lenny really was here, and Grandma Em and Daddy might be his prisoners. I felt so much guilt and panic and fear that I thought my knees might buckle.

  Bee was moving away from the house. She had a strange, empty look on her face, and she was staring down at the ground.

  I forced myself to move and went after her. When I finally caught her, I grabbed her arm. “Bee? Don’t go zombie on me!” I whispered, worried that she was so cold and wet and overwhelmed by everything that she might collapse. I was right on the edge, myself. I wanted to give up and feel sorry for myself, but there wasn’t time.

  Bee let out a big breath and looked up at me as if I was annoying her. “I’m not going zombie. I’m thinking!”

  “Thinking what?”

  “We’re going to go to your house and see if your dad is there. If he isn’t, we have to assume Lenny has both Grandma Em and your dad. We can call the police from your house if the phones are still working, but if they’re not, we have to make a plan. One way or another, we’re going to get them out of there, Abbey.”

  In spite of how bad everything seemed, I felt a small surge of hope, because no matter how wet and upset and exhausted she was, Bee’s brain was still working. She was smart as a whip and better at figuring out the complicated stuff than I was. If it came to making a plan to rescue Daddy and Grandma Em, Bee’s smarts might make all the difference.

  With the wind pushing against our backs and the rain hammering us with millions of little pellets, we splashed up the plantation drive toward my house. When we neared it, we moved off the road and into the field. Even though the rain made it hard to see, we were taking no chances in case Lenny or Possum were waiting there.

  The shutters were closed tight, just like at the big house, and as we came around the side, I spotted Daddy’s car parked near the back door. It looked as if he had left right in the middle of loading the car, because the screen door that led to the kitchen was propped open and sitting on the porch there was a cooler with the top raised.

  There was a loud bark. Rufus had been closed up in the Suburban. The windows were all steamy from his breath, and there were paw marks on the windows, as if he had been trying to claw his way out.

  Even if I hadn’t been sure before, now I was positive that Daddy wasn’t here. He would never have left the screen door open like this or left Rufus shut in the car. Even so, before I let Rufus out, Bee and I crept up to the side of the kitchen and took a long listen. The house was absolutely silent, so after a minute I risked a peek inside.

  There were apples and oranges and cans of soda out on the counter beside the refrigerator as if Daddy had been about to load them in the cooler when he’d been interrupted. I imagined that the interruption had been Lenny coming to the door with a gun in his hand. Daddy had probably stuck Rufus inside the Suburban to keep him from biting Lenny and getting shot for his trouble.

  I put my hand on the knob of the inside door and was starting to turn it when Bee grabbed my arm.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “We have to go inside,” I said.

  “What if one of them is in there?”

  I thought for a moment and then went to the Suburban and let Rufus out. I let him lick my face for a few seconds, and then I grabbed his collar and pulled him toward the back door. He went up on the porch, sniffed the cooler, then wagged his tail like he wanted to be let in.

  “They’re not here,” I told Bee. “Rufus would be growling if they were. Besides, their truck’s at the big house. They must have everyone there.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “You stay out here in case I am.”

  Bee rolled her eyes, but she didn’t argue. I waited until she was out of sight in the bushes, then I opened the door and let Rufus in ahead of me. I tensed, afraid that any second he’d start barking or that somebody would jump out from around a corner, but nothing happened.

  I hurried over, picked up the kitchen phone, and listened, then I went out and waved Bee inside.

  “Phone’s dead,” I told her, when she came inside.

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “First we need to get dry,” I said. “Wait here.”

  With the shutters all closed, it was dark as a moonless night in the house. I moved by feel from the kitchen to the staircase, listening to the roar of the wind around the roof outside. Up in my bedroom, I went into my closet and got two sets of dry clothes, including some too big sweatpants for Bee and blue jeans for me, and also a couple of towels. Back downstairs I took my rain poncho and one of Daddy’s out of a closet, along with two rain hats.

  I handed a towel and dry clothes to Bee, and while we dried off and changed, she asked, “What about Judge Gator? Maybe he’s still at his house. We should find out before we do anything else.”

  To tell the truth, finding Daddy gone had put me in a state where I was just about to lose it, and Bee’s clear thinking helped me focus. “Good idea.”

  We went back outside, where the whole of nature seemed to be going insane, but at least we weren’t shivering like a couple of drowned rats. The wind screamed and whipped the treetops like a crazy woman waving her hair. The rain came so hard that it stung our skin wherever we weren’t covered up. I paused and thought about the distance to Judge Gator’s, then I looked inside the Suburban to see if the keys were there. They were gone.

  “You think we should ride the ponies?” Bee asked.

  Before I could get a word out, another big gust snapped a tree in half with a crack like a cannon shot.

  I shook my head. “They’re gone. Even if they weren’t, they’d panic out here.”

  Bee nodded. We put Rufus in the house, and then we set off running through the pasture and took the shortcut to Judge Gator’s.

  Fifteen

  We reached Judge Gator’s house and went around to the back, because it was out of the wind. I hammered on his kitchen door, but there was no answer, so I tried the latch. It was unlocked just the way it always was, and we walked inside.

  First we went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up, just in case the judge hadn’t heard the knocking, but the house was empty. We tried his phone to see if it might be working even though ours wasn’t, but it was dead, too.

  “Okay,” I said. “Judge Gator isn’t here. He’s probably already left the island because of the storm. Probably most everybody has.”

  Bee lowered her head. “The only reason Grandma Em and your dad are still here is us.”

  “I know, but we can’t worry about that now,” I said I felt a fresh blast of guilt that left me almost unable to think, and I couldn’t let that happen. “We need to get Grandma Em and Daddy out of the house before Lenny does something crazy.”

  “Like starts shooting.” Bee shivered. “But you said it was riskier if we went back there.”

  “It’s not my first choice, but we can’t wait for the phones to start working to call the police, w
e can’t get to anyone else’s house in this weather, and we can’t leave them there. We’re their only hope.”

  “Then we need a plan.”

  “Got any ideas?” I asked.

  “We could always go back to the house and yell and let Lenny know we’re alive,” Bee suggested. “Maybe he and Possum would come out and try to catch us. Then we could knock them out or something.”

  I shook my head. “If Lenny knows we’re alive, all he’s got to do is threaten to shoot Daddy or Grandma Em unless we give ourselves up. If he did that, I’d do whatever he wanted. You would, too.”

  Bee threw her hands in the air and started pacing the room. “Then how do we do it?”

  “What if we could figure a way to scare them out?”

  Bee started nodding. “Okay, but how?”

  I ran to the counter, spotted a pen and pad of paper lying by the phone, and brought them back to the kitchen table. I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to push back my guilt and fear. “Let’s figure it out.”

  Over the next ten minutes, we came up with several different plans. They included starting a fire in one end of the big house. disguising our voices and shouting for help, and pretending we were the police. I liked every one. I was chafing to run out and get started on all of them, but Bee insisted that we compare the risks.

  I forced myself to sit, and in the end, with each of us doing what we did best, we put together the best plan and then made a list of all the things we would need. I wrote everything down on the sheet of paper just the way Bee wanted. When we finished and reviewed the list, we jumped up and rushed to the back hall closet, where the judge kept a lot of his hunting and fishing gear. We rummaged around and spotted several things: a four-piece fly rod in its tube, a reel, and a day pack. The day pack was filled with fly boxes and fishing lures that I dumped out on the kitchen table. Then we went to the closet where the judge kept his utility stuff and tools. We found duct tape, an X-acto knife with a razor-sharp edge, a tube of fast-drying glue, electrical tape, and a couple of screwdrivers. We took two of the judge’s flashlights from under the kitchen counter. Bee tested them to make sure the batteries were fresh. We found an ice pick in a kitchen drawer, and we tossed everything along with the fishing-rod tube and reel into the day pack.

  “We also need a candle,” Bee said, reading down our list. “And some of those wooden kitchen matches.”

  I ran into the dining room, pulled a couple candles out of a silver candelabra, then went back to the utility closet and looked for wooden matches. I didn’t find any, but I did spot one of those cheap, disposable plastic lighters. “Will this do?” I asked. “Better than matches in the rain.”

  Bee nodded, checking the list. “Now we need plastic sandwich bags.”

  I went into the judge’s pantry and found some. Following Bee’s instructions, I put the candles and lighter in one bag, then squeezed out the air and sealed the bag. I rolled that bag up, put it in the second bag, then squeezed out the air and sealed that one up as well. Bee nodded in satisfaction. Double bagging meant we ought to have dry candles and a working lighter, even in a hurricane.

  While I was finding stuff and loading the day pack, Bee took the skull she’d been carrying in both hands and looked at it.

  “You okay?” I asked, knowing what those bones meant to her.

  Bee gave me a sad smile. “Whoever they were, I know they would have wanted us to bring those guys to justice.”

  I nodded, because I knew Bee was right. Checking the list again, I went to the refrigerator and found a package of ground beef perfect for what we needed. I took it out and then went upstairs, to the judge’s bedroom, and found where he kept his pills on the bedside table.

  He had about ten kinds of pills, and I looked through them and found the one called Ambien. It was the same stuff Daddy took on nights when an upcoming trial made it hard for him to sleep. Taking the bottle downstairs, I ground up two of the pills with the handle of a knife then mixed them with the ground beef. I made two nice, big meatballs that we sealed in two more sandwich bags.

  I checked the list once more. We were finished in the house. I prayed we had thought it out right and had everything we were going to need. But how do you really know when it’s something you’ve never tried before?

  Bee watched with a worried expression, but she never said a word. I felt a huge rush of gratitude that she was my best friend and that she had the strength to be silent, because if she had voiced the doubts and fears I was feeling, I didn’t know if I would have had the guts to do what we had to do next.

  A second later Bee and I were at the back door in the judge’s kitchen.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you forgetting one little thing?” Bee said.

  I gave her a blank look.

  “A note?”

  I slapped my forehead, realizing that in my rush I was about to forget the most important thing. The note might be the one that could save us if everything else went wrong. I pulled out a clean sheet of paper from the pad and started to write.

  Dear Judge Gator,

  The bad men from Hangman’s Bluff have got Daddy and Grandma Em as prisoners in the big house. Bee and I had to take a bunch of your stuff, even one of your fishing rods and a reel. I’m real sorry about that. I promise we didn’t have any choice. We have to save Daddy and Grandma Em. Please call the police and please forgive us.

  Sincerely,

  Abbey and Bee

  P.S. We found Yemassee. She’s at Hangman’s Bluff, and she’s okay. She’s also had her pups.

  I put the note in the center of the kitchen table, where the judge would see it when he walked back inside, and then I looked at Bee. “Ready?”

  She nodded, and I shoved open the door, the wind sucking it outward and nearly jerking the handle out of my hands. We ran out into the hurricane, and Bee helped me push the door shut.

  The wind was even stronger than before. It screamed around the corners of the house with a sound like animals in pain. As soon as we stepped out from the shelter of the house wall, it tore at our ponchos with enough force to nearly rip them to shreds. The sky was almost black, even though it was daytime. The rain was coming sideways, so hard that it hurt my cheeks and banged into my eyes, making me almost blind. There was probably an inch of standing water on the ground, and we splashed and slipped as we made our way to the barn.

  The barn’s front doors were right in the face of the wind. Sliding them open would have let the wind inside where it would have put terrible pressure on the roof, so we ran around to the side and managed to open another door. We stepped in, out of the wind, but the gusts scraped and tore at the roof and the walls like wild beasts trying to get inside.

  Over the howls of the hurricane, we could hear the farm animals moving around in their stalls, pacing and kicking and making nervous nickers. The judge had one horse and two mules, all of them ancient. He had adopted them to provide a good home in their old age and keep them from being put down.

  Past the stalls and the area where the judge kept his mowers and tractor stood a workbench covered with tools, clamps, paint, and other stuff. It was the other stuff we were after.

  I scoured the top of the bench while Bee looked underneath. She spotted a crumbling cardboard box on a lower shelf, pawed inside for a second or two, and came up with a three-foot length of rusty steel chain. She gave it a good shake. “How ’bout this?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  I stuffed the chain into the day pack while Bee checked our list. “We need rope,” she said. “How much you think we need?”

  “This should be enough,” I said, reaching above the bench to grab a coil of thin but strong-looking rope from a hook. It was about fifteen or twenty feet long. I stuffed it into the pack.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “A piece of wire.”

  While I rummaged through the toolbox, Bee found another box on the lower shelf and came up with a length of plastic-covered wire
. “This work?” she asked.

  It had a good stiffness but was also pretty thin. “Good,” I said. I wrapped the wire around my left wrist and tucked the ends under so it wouldn’t come loose.

  “I think we’re ready,” Bee said, checking our list. I gave her a nod as if I felt confident about our plan. She looked at me, and I could see that she was trying to hide the same fear I was feeling. With that, we nodded at each other and walked out of the barn.

  Back outside we tilted our bodies into the wind and slogged along the shortcut back to Reward, then up the drive toward the big house. It didn’t seem possible that the wind could have gotten stronger in the time we had been in the barn, but I was pretty sure it had.

  I kept one hand gripping the day-pack strap so it didn’t blow off, and my other arm up in front of my face to protect my eyes from all the flying debris. At one point a huge branch snapped off a live oak and went sailing past us, about twenty feet to our left. The branch hit the split-rail fence that ran along the drive and broke two of the rails as if they were matchsticks. Another time we heard a massive crack off in the woods, and I knew it had to be another tree snapping under the force of the gale.

  “You sure we can do this?” Bee shouted, her words nearly drowned out by the keening wind.

  I looked over at her. She was keeping her hands up in front of her face just like I was. Even so I could see how frightened she was.

  “I’ve done it all my life,” I shouted, trying to reassure her.

  The old coal-chute door had always been a great way for sneaking in and out of the big house when I was playing games or when I didn’t want anyone else to see me. The house hadn’t been heated with coal for many years, but the coal chute was still there. It was right next to the outside basement door, which was always locked, but the coal door was small and sort of forgotten. I had tried to get Bee to go down it during the summer, but she had refused, telling me she hated small, dark spaces.