Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff

by J. E. Thompson

  Mr. LaBelle rolled his eyes and sighed. “They were excavating topsoil because I’ve been selling it. As you know I’ve owned Hangman’s Bluff for years.” Here he turned his head and gave Daddy a dirty look. “Since the land isn’t worth anything near what I paid for it, I’ve been trying to think of ways to recoup a portion of my investment. Selling the topsoil was one way.”

  I caught a flicker of something in Deputy Middleton’s dark eyes, but I was pretty sure Mr. LaBelle missed that, too. He was way too busy being offended at having to answer these questions.

  “How much topsoil you reckon you have on that land, sir?” Deputy Middleton asked.

  “I don’t know!” Mr. LaBelle snapped. “Do I look like I’ve been running the backhoe?”

  Deputy Middleton seemed to take no offense. “No, sir, but I’m curious just the same. How much topsoil? How deep does it go?”

  Mr. LaBelle shook his head. “Maybe a couple feet?” he said, making it more of a question than an answer.

  Deputy Middleton nodded his huge head. “We do have some of the best topsoil anywhere on these river islands.”

  “Yes, now are we done here?” Mr. LaBelle shot back.

  Deputy Middleton didn’t appear to have heard the question. “So how come you been having your men dig so deep?” he persisted. “Judging by this hole here, you musta dug down another six feet at least. Did you find somebody someplace who wants to buy all that fill? It’s just marl and clay under the topsoil. Had to be real expensive to truck it out of here.”

  I saw a pinched look come into Mr. LaBelle’s eyes, like maybe he didn’t like where all these questions were heading. “So, maybe it was,” he said. “Do we really have to waste time talking about my business decisions?”

  “I’m just curious why you’d do that. Seems like a money loser.”

  “Losing money on a bad deal isn’t a crime, is it?”

  Deputy Middleton didn’t appear to have heard him. “Did you find anything interesting in all that dirt?”

  By now the tension of the whole group had gone way up. The other policemen seemed to be hanging on the answers to Deputy Middleton’s questions. Bee’s shoulder was touching mine, and I felt her trembling, with barely controlled anger.

  Mr. LaBelle shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Liar!” Bee exploded.

  Mr. LaBelle swung his eyes toward her, his face pale with anger. “How dare you, young lady, I—”

  Bee paid him no attention. “You found an old slave graveyard,” she snapped. “But you didn’t want to stop your digging, so you didn’t report it. You just treated the bones like they were a bunch of old garbage.”

  Mr. LaBelle shot a glance at the policemen. “I . . . I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

  Grandma Em had moved over to stand right beside Bee and put an arm around her shoulder. Still, she didn’t try to shush her.

  “I don’t believe you,” Bee said in a much quieter voice. “The whole reason the judge’s dog got stolen was because she had found something that day that Lenny and Possum dug up. It was a human bone, wasn’t it? And Yemassee was bringing it home. Lenny and Possum knew that if Yemassee’s owner recognized the bone as human, and if he somehow traced it back here, that you’d all be in big trouble, so Lenny went to get the bone back. You just didn’t expect Lenny to steal the dog, did you?”

  My jaw was on the floor. Of course that’s what Yemassee had been carrying. Bee had figured it out—and faster than me, no surprise.

  Mr. LaBelle wrinkled his face as if that was totally ridiculous. “I didn’t know anything about the bones or the stolen dog or about any of the other things those men did.”

  I cleared my throat. “Why did you put in an old rice gate?”

  The policemen all turned to look at me, and their eyebrows went up. Mr. LaBelle looked at them, then at me, and seemed to take a moment to think about his answer. “Okay, I’ll admit I had another plan with this land. I was waiting for a big storm to breach that rice gate. When the hole flooded naturally, I thought I could make it into a marina for the boats. And with the land essentially underwater, nobody on the island could stop me.”

  Mr. LaBelle closed his eyes and shook his head. “I never meant for anybody to get hurt,” he said, after a moment. “I know it was wrong, but I just wanted to get back some of the money I’d lost.”

  He raised his head and gazed toward where Mrs. LaBelle and Donna were standing a few feet away. “I’m just so sorry to cause my family more heartache.”

  Deputy Middleton asked a few more questions, but after everything we’d been through, everyone seemed pretty exhausted. The small group of us stood around as if we didn’t know quite what to say or what to do next. Judge Gator broke the silence by asking, “Where’s Yemassee?”

  Bee and I pointed at the construction trailer, and the judge started walking fast through the mud toward it. I was getting ready to follow, but I didn’t move right away. I found myself actually feeling a little sorry for Mr. LaBelle. He had done a really bad thing, digging a hole and waiting for a storm to fill it in so he could have a marina and try to get around all the zoning laws . . . again. But I actually thought he might have learned his lesson this time, since it had almost cost him his life along with the lives of his wife and daughter.

  The rain had stopped completely, and the air was cool. Daddy had his arm around my shoulder, and Grandma Em had her arms around Bee. It reminded me of one of those happily-ever-after movie endings, with everyone smiling and the sun coming out just as all the bad guys have been beaten.

  I was feeling about as tired as I’ve ever felt, but also good. Bee and I had faced down a couple of really bad men, and also saved a bunch of other people and we had found the old slave graves and Yemassee. I didn’t think there were a lot of twelve-year-old girls who could’ve done all that. Force & Force Investigations had really come through. I have to admit that I was feeling a little cocky right about then.

  All those prideful feelings changed when I swung my gaze over to Daddy and noticed the dark bags under his eyes. Grandma Em’s eyes looked the same, and it reminded me that Bee and I had done something good, but before that we had done something really, really stupid. Kayaking up to Hangman’s Bluff right in front of a major storm when we should have been home helping Daddy and Grandma Em had been dangerous and irresponsible and selfish and cruel.

  I flashed back to how I had felt a year earlier when Daddy had been in a coma and I thought I had lost the last person in the world who I really cared about. I remembered how horrible and alone I felt then, and Bee and I had just put the people we loved the most through those same horrible feelings.

  That’s when I started to cry. It wasn’t any secret that I hated crybabies, so when I started sobbing, Daddy looked at me in alarm. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  I threw my arms around him and just stood there sobbing. When I could finally get enough of a breath to talk, I managed to say, “I’m so sorry.”

  By that point Bee was crying, too, because she realized exactly why I was crying, and because kayaking to Hangman’s Bluff had been her idea in the first place, she felt even worse than me about what we had done. Probably Daddy and Grandma Em had felt like spanking both of us before all the tears started, but they both seemed to feel sorry for how incredibly bad we felt, and they hugged us and gradually got us calmed down and cheered up a little.

  Judge Gator cheered us up when he called down to us from the construction shed and got everyone’s attention. “Come on up here. I got a little surprise for y’all.”

  I turned away from Daddy’s tear-stained chest, and all of us walked toward where Judge Gator stood in the open door of the double-wide.

  “In all this craziness, you girls managed to find my dog,” he said with tears in his eyes and his voice hoarse with emotion. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough.”

  Bee and I looked past him at where Yemassee lay on the floor, wagging her tail with five little balls of fur bunch
ed around her tummy.

  Seeing them made me feel like the sun had finally come out again, because even though I knew Bee and I were about to get the worst punishment of our lives, I was so happy that Judge Gator finally had his family back.

  That afternoon Bee and I helped Daddy and Grandma Em open shutters and clean things up around Reward. We still didn’t have power that night, so Daddy went down to the freezer and pulled out a couple of venison backstraps that he defrosted and then broiled on the grill in the backyard. He also got our generator and Grandma Em’s generator running, so we had enough electricity to keep the lights on, and we invited Grandma Em and Bee and Judge Gator over for an early dinner.

  The sky was perfectly clear, and the clouds from the storm had totally disappeared up the coast, leaving us with a beautiful sunset and a light, cool breeze. Even the mosquitoes and gnats had been blown away by the storm.

  Both houses had come through without any damage, and with the shutters open once again the slanted evening light flowed in through the windows.

  Outside the grill was smoking in a yard that was littered with tons of leaves and blown-down limbs. It was going to take days to get all that stuff cleared away. Rufus was wandering around, sniffing all the strange new things. When Bee and I wandered out on the porch, I could see that the side of the house was still plastered with wet leaves that had been blown hard against the clapboards by the hurricane.

  Everybody was happy to be together, but we were quiet and thoughtful and totally exhausted from all the things that had happened that day. After we ate, Daddy brought a watermelon onto the porch and cut it into pieces, and everybody sat and enjoyed the first truly cool evening of the season.

  Judge Gator and Daddy had spoken further to the police, who had told them that Lenny and Possum were ex-cons who had done time in the state penitentiary for armed robbery. The police also said that just like seasoned criminals neither one of them had said a word other than to insist that the whole situation had been the result of a dispute caused by Mr. LaBelle refusing to pay them for all the work they had done. They also claimed that Mr. LaBelle had been the one who insisted on not reporting the grave sites. So far they had both been charged with home invasion, which would put them back in prison for sure, but the police were waiting for ballistics tests to come back on Lenny’s gun, because they suspected it had been used to kill the man named Jimbo.

  Bee and I tried to keep listening to what the judge was saying, but I caught Bee yawning a couple times. As for me, I could barely keep my own eyes open. I was dead tired and needed to go to bed before I fell asleep in my chair.

  Just when I thought the talk was finally dying down and I was about to excuse myself, Daddy sat forward in his chair and shook his head. “I still don’t understand why Lenny and Possum were prepared to kill people. What were they hoping to achieve?”

  Judge Gator shrugged. “They’re not very bright. They probably figured they’d go back to prison for desecrating the graves.”

  “Even so, they wouldn’t have gotten more than a few months. You think those stakes are high enough to commit murder?”

  Grandma Em nodded. “For Lenny I think they were. I’m not so sure about Possum.”

  Judge Gator scowled. “I agree with you, Em. If I were still on the bench and the jury found that bum guilty, I’d want to put Lenny in a cell and weld the door shut.”

  I had been slumped in my chair, only halfway listening. Even so, something had been bothering me, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it. But what the judge said sent a charge through my body. I sat up, and my tiredness fell away.

  “Weld the door shut,” I repeated. I was suddenly picturing the two dirt piles and the hollowed-out places where we had hidden when we were trying to get away from Possum and Leaper. I looked over at Bee, who just a few seconds earlier had been about to fall asleep like me but who suddenly looked wide-awake.

  “You remember that mask I threw?” I asked, even though I could tell she was thinking the exact same thing as me.

  Bee nodded. “I was too scared to focus on it when we were hiding, but now I’m remembering that stuff we saw.”

  “Those tanks?”

  Bee turned to Daddy. “What kind of gas was on that truck that got stolen?”

  Daddy’s brow wrinkled like he wasn’t sure why she was asking, but he said, “It’s called acetylene. It’s used for welding.”

  “Remember all those hunks of metal on the ground in the second place we hid?” Bee said to me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can’t a person use a welding torch to cut metal?”

  “Yes,” Daddy said.

  “They weren’t going to kill us because of the graves,” Bee said, and we both jumped to our feet.

  I remembered what Possum had said. They been lookin’ around. At the time I’d thought he’d been talking about the bones, but I’d been wrong.

  “We need to go to Hangman’s Bluff,” I said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Grandma Em said in a no-nonsense voice. “It’s dark outside, and everyone is exhausted.”

  “No,” Bee shot back. “Abbey’s right. We need to go there, and we need to go right now!”

  “What are you girls talking about?” Judge Gator demanded.

  We don’t have time to explain,” I told him. “But call the police. We really need to hurry.”

  Twenty-two

  We piled into Daddy’s Suburban and headed toward Hangman’s Bluff. Bee and I both refused to explain what we thought we’d find, because we were both afraid that nobody would believe us.

  Judge Gator followed in his own car, but first he put in calls to Cyrus Middleton and the state police, explaining where we were going and asking them to meet us there.

  When we took the turn toward Hangman’s Bluff, Daddy had to go slow because of the huge puddles that had turned the dirt road to soup and the downed branches that nearly blocked our way in a few places.

  Daddy’s headlights lit up the road ahead, and there was what looked like a fresh set of tire tracks in the soft dirt. When we reached the end of the road, we found that the chain from the gate had been unlocked and left in the dirt.

  “You think Cyrus could have gotten here ahead of us?” Daddy asked.

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” Grandma Em said.

  “I agree,” Daddy said. He shut off his lights, and we crept forward using the soft glow of the moon to see our way. When we got up near the construction shed, I spotted the outline of a car up ahead, and Daddy stopped and turned off the Suburban’s engine. We had the windows down, and in the sudden silence we could hear the growl of a bulldozer’s engine.

  Daddy said to be as quiet as if we were turkey hunting, meaning that instead of slamming doors, we pushed them until they touched the locks, then gave them a final harder nudge to click them closed.

  As we were getting ready to check things out another darkened car came snaking toward us and Judge Gator climbed out. “Cyrus is on his way,” he said. “So are the state police.”

  Daddy, Judge Gator, and Grandma Em led the way as we walked toward the sound of the bulldozer. When we were about fifty yards away, Daddy held up his hand as a sign for us to stop, and we watched as the bulldozer shoved a bunch of dirt to close up one of the openings where Bee and I had hidden earlier that day.

  It took only a couple minutes for the bulldozer operator to finish, and then he backed up the dozer and shut off the engine.

  The silence fell in around us, the night being much quieter than normal since the frogs and crickets weren’t singing the way they would have been if there hadn’t been a storm.

  The man started walking toward us, but he came to a sudden stop when he saw us standing there in the moonlight.

  “Evening, Mr. LaBelle,” Judge Gator said in a calm voice.

  “Wha—? Judge DeSaussure? What are you doing out here?”

  “I might ask you the same question.”

  “Who have you got with you? Why are you on my land? You�
�re trespassing, you know.”

  “I’ve got Rutledge Force and Emma Force and the two girls. They apparently saw something earlier today that they didn’t understand at the time, but it makes sense to them now.”

  I saw Mr. LaBelle’s right hand drift down to his pants pocket, and I suddenly wondered if he had a gun in there. I was about to shout something to Daddy, but then I heard the unmistakable click of the judge’s shotgun as he closed the chamber. In the dark I hadn’t even noticed that he had it with him.

  “You need to keep your hands away from your pockets,” he said to Mr. LaBelle.

  “This is an outrage!” Mr. LaBelle snapped. He was doing his best to sound angry and offended, but there was fear just beneath.

  “What was so important that you had to run the bulldozer in the dark?” Daddy asked.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  I saw Mr. LaBelle’s eyes go to either side, as if he was getting ready to make a run for it. It was pretty dark, even with the moon, and he might have had a decent chance of getting away. Only, right at that moment, three more cars came zooming up and stopped behind us. Their headlights lit the whole area like a football stadium during a night game.

  Cyrus Middleton came walking right past us with a state police officer on either side of him. The officers all had their hands on their weapons, and it was pretty obvious that if Mr. LaBelle intended to run, he didn’t have a chance.

  “What are you doing here?” Mr. LaBelle demanded, still trying to pretend he was totally mystified. I had to give him credit for being a really good liar.

  Before the officers could say anything, I spoke up. “He stole the gas truck and also the armored car. They’re in the dirt piles.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you people listening to these . . . children?”

  “They’re in the dirt pile,” Bee said. “We both saw them, but we didn’t realize what they were. That’s why Mr. LaBelle is here tonight. He was filling in those hollows so if the police came out here over the next few days, they wouldn’t find them.”