The Girl from Felony Bay

by J. E. Thompson

  “Got it!” Bee shouted, and I realized my wrists were free. While I was watching Skoogie, she must have gone back to tearing away the tape on my arms. My knife was still in its sheath, because Uncle Charlie hadn’t even bothered to take it away once he got my hands bound. I used it to free my ankles, and then it took only another moment to cut the tape from Bee’s arms and legs.

  We clambered over the side of the canoe. Our legs sank deep into the mud, almost all the way to our hips, but we slogged as fast as we could up onto the bank and through the tall grass away from Alice and her nest.

  A few seconds later, Skoogie came up to us, leaving a tired Alice to guard the bank. Her jaws were wide open in a fearsome manner, but she no longer posed any threat to us.

  “I thought y’all wasn’t gonna get out,” Skoogie said.

  “I thought you were gonna get eaten,” I told him.

  Skoogie smiled and shook his head. “I’m the best gator dodger on Leadenwah Island.”

  “But what are you doing here?” I asked as my brain started to work again. “How did you know how to find us?”

  “My granny saw you go past in Mr. Charlie’s truck, and she said you looked real scared like something bad was happening. My granny don’t like Mr. Charlie, and she had some suspicions, and so she told me to stay outta sight but to see if anything bad was goin’ on.

  “I hid in the bushes by your house, and I seen plenty a bad stuff goin’ on, so I followed the truck to the pond. I stayed out of sight until they left, then got some wood and went around to the right side of the pond, where I could get that mama gator to pay attention to me.”

  Bee suddenly reached out and grabbed Skoogie and hugged him until I thought he might suffocate. “You are my hero,” she said.

  Skoogie was surprised for a moment, and then a smile broke out on his face, so big I thought it would never come off. Finally I cleared my throat. We might have gotten away from Green Alice, but our problems were still only just beginning.

  Twenty-five

  We moved to a spot about a hundred yards from the pond, our legs and clothes dripping pluff mud and pond water, and tried to gather our wits. Bee and I told Skoogie everything that had happened, starting with the previous night when we had snuck out and gone to Felony Bay.

  Skoogie listened without saying a word, but when Bee got to the part where Deputy Simmons wanted to shoot his gun into the bushes, his eyes widened in shock. “What’re we gonna do if the police are the bad guys?”

  Bee looked at me. “Can’t we just go find a phone and call Mr. Barrett or Custis, and tell them what’s happening?”

  I shook my head. “Uncle Charlie cut the phone line to the big house, remember?”

  “What about your grandmother?” Bee asked Skoogie.

  “We only got a cell phone, but Grandma broke hers a couple days ago, and she hasn’t been to town to get a new one.”

  “What about a car?” Bee insisted. “We can go get Grandma Em, and she can drive us out of here!”

  Skoogie shook his head again. “Not ’less you want to get your grandma shot. They got a tractor and a manure spreader parked across the plantation drive like it’s broke-down. It’s blocking anybody gettin’ in or out.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Bee asked.

  “My grandma’s got a truck,” Skoogie offered. “She could drive us someplace.”

  “First we have to make sure we can get off the plantation without being seen,” I said. “And that won’t be easy.”

  Skoogie walked a few yards to an ancient live oak with branches that drooped all the way to the ground. With a practiced motion, he grabbed one of the lowest ones, swung himself onto the limb, and climbed up to a place high up in the tree where he had a view around the plantation. After a few seconds he called down to us. “You’re right. That Deputy Simmons is parked on the drive near Mr. Charlie’s house. Gonna be a little tricky sneaking past him.”

  I shook my head. To get around Deputy Simmons, we would have to sneak through the cornfield and then crawl through the soybeans. Even though the corn was high, we would be putting birds to flight the whole way through, so any experienced hunter like Deputy Simmons would know right away that someone was trying to sneak past him. Skoogie and I could move fast enough to probably get away, but there was no way Bee could with her knee. She still wasn’t fast enough to take the risk.

  We didn’t dare leave Bee here alone, because sooner or later Uncle Charlie or Deputy Simmons was liable to come back out to the pond to make sure their little plan had worked. If they spotted the canoe over by the shore, they’d know right away that it hadn’t.

  As I struggled to puzzle things out, Skoogie dropped to the ground. “Might be that you don’t need to sneak out,” he said. “Might be that you want to be right here.”

  I looked at him in amazement. Skoogie had always been quiet and cautious. “What are you talking about?”

  “When I come in this morning, I seen a couple a them news trucks with them satellite dishes on top.”

  “Coming here?” I asked.

  Skoogie nodded. “Going down the dirt road toward that little cabin where Grandma used to live.”

  I understood what Skoogie was suggesting, and I looked at Bee. Her eyebrows were already up like she was reading my mind and didn’t like it a bit.

  “Abbey, we need to get out of here. Please, no crazy ideas,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Skoogie’s right. If we all get caught again, we’re dead. We need to do something they don’t expect.”

  I told them my Idea. It was going to be a huge gamble, but it was better than getting caught trying to sneak out. In the end Bee agreed there was no better choice.

  Skoogie had to sneak back to his grandmother’s trailer, because a single person sneaking has a way better chance than three. In case Bee and I failed, he would find a way to make a call to Mr. Barrett and the state police and hopefully convince one of them, as crazy as it sounded, about what Uncle Charlie and Bubba Simmons were doing. Skoogie didn’t like the idea of leaving us, but he understood the sense of it and in the end he went along.

  We watched him head off; then Bee and I started through the thick undergrowth that bordered the pond, heading toward the trail we had used that first day I took Bee to see Felony Bay.

  I used my knife to cut another forked stick in case we ran into more cottonmouths, and I led the way. We went slow, staying low and making sure to make no noise.

  As we drew close to Felony Bay, I was trying so hard to stuff my fear back down inside and not let Bee see how scared I was that I almost didn’t notice that the No Trespassing signs were gone. I walked up to one of the trees where I was sure there had been a sign, but all I could see were the four staples that had been used to fix it in place.

  “Somebody tore down the signs,” I said.

  “They’re cleaning up,” Bee said. “Just like they tried to clean us up.”

  “But they didn’t,” I said. Reminding myself that we were still alive and free and able to fight back brought a fresh burst of hope that helped calm the fear that bubbled in my stomach.

  We started walking again, moving slower. Up ahead we began to hear the sound of machines. They made a low hum, much softer than the excavation machine we had heard the last time. As we came closer, we started to see light through the trees and the glimmer of sunshine reflecting off metal surfaces.

  “Those are the satellite trucks,” Bee whispered.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve heard them before.”

  This was good. Satellite trucks meant people and cameras and microphones. With all those things around, Uncle Charlie and Deputy Simmons wouldn’t be able to do anything to us. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself.

  We crept forward, staying behind the thick layer of undergrowth that walled off the beach. When I pushed some branches away and looked out from our hiding place, what I saw nearly made me cry out with anger.

  A little wooden platform with
a speaker’s podium stood in front of the hole where the crate had been “buried.” Uncle Charlie was standing on the platform looking almost respectable in a navy blue pin-striped suit with a red bow tie. He wore a big, happy smile like a person who had just won the lottery. A microphone was in front of his face, and I saw two big loudspeakers set on either side of the hole.

  Ruth was standing in front of the platform beside Bubba Simmons, but rather than looking like it was the happiest day of her life, she looked like she was going to be sick. Anyone watching probably thought she was nervous about being onstage, but I thought the real reason she felt sick was that her husband had fed Bee and me to an alligator.

  On the other side of the hole, behind a line of plastic tape, stood four different television cameramen along with their helpers. There were also photographers as well as several newspaper reporters, including Tom Blackford, all of them scribbling in little notebooks.

  Uncle Charlie must have just started talking, because he was thanking everyone for coming to what he called “one of the greatest treasure finds in the past hundred years.”

  It was windy on the beach, and the satellite trucks made a constant roar, but Uncle Charlie’s voice came booming over the speakers so loudly that nobody could miss a word.

  He went on to say how for many years he had been a great student of local history in general and of tales of buried treasure in particular. He told how many people, including his own family, had pooh-poohed him, but how his belief and interest had never faltered. When, through tragic circumstances, his family’s legacy, Reward Plantation, had been put on the market, he had scraped together enough money to buy a small parcel of the original plantation that he believed contained a significant store of buried treasure. According to Uncle Charlie, his “intense and in-depth scholarly and historical research” had attracted several other investors. I had known there was no way Uncle Charlie and Ruth and Bubba Simmons could have afforded to purchase the land on their own. I was reminded of the mysterious man who had been with them the night before.

  Uncle Charlie went on to say that the exploration had been “arduous,” as people could see from all the holes that had been dug on the beach. “We did not hit pay dirt right away. It took us some months and much more research and excavation. But ladies and gentlemen, we kept at it with diligence, and today we are going to show you the exciting results.”

  He went on to tell the story of the Lovely Clarisse. “Up until today,” Uncle Charlie said, “no one has known whether the legend was true, because on its second attempt to make Havana, the Lovely Clarisse was sunk with all hands. Over the years many have tried to find the gold, but no one succeeded. Until now.”

  Uncle Charlie had made himself sound like some kind of workaholic rather than your basic bum, and now he pointed down at the hole where he and Deputy Simmons had placed the crate. Uncle Charlie stepped down off the stand, grabbed a shovel, and jumped into the hole. The newspeople followed with their cameras, and the photographers popped off pictures as he threw out several shovelfuls of dirt and exposed the crate. Then he grabbed a crowbar that was lying on the ground beside the hole and used it to break the rusty padlock he had put on the crate the night before.

  Moving to one side of the hole, he pried up the crate’s lid. The crowd made an oohing sound, and Uncle Charlie smiled up at them as the piles of gold ingots and small cloth bags became visible.

  “I present the treasure of the Lovely Clarisse,” he said to the cameras.

  I knew that this was probably the only chance we were going to get. “Come on,” I whispered to Bee. We moved to our right, until we were around the back of the cabin. There, safely out of sight of the crowd watching Uncle Charlie, we slithered out through the vines and brambles and into the open.

  Our legs and shorts were caked with pluff mud to midthigh. We were bleeding from lots of tiny scratches and cuts from all the thorns. Our shirts were ripped, and our hair was a tangled mess with burrs and bits of twig that had caught there as we crept through the bushes. If we wanted people to believe our story, we needed to look more like young ladies and less like wild savages.

  I was pulling scabs of pluff mud from my legs and brushing off the burrs when I heard someone rasp out my name: “Force!”

  My blood froze in my veins, and I turned. Jimmy Simmons was standing a few feet behind me. He had just come around the back of the cabin, and he had a cigarette he must have stolen from somebody in one hand and a pack of matches in the other.

  “You’re dead,” he hissed, tossing the cigarette and matches onto the ground and stepping forward.

  My mind was racing as I struggled to think. I had no time for Jimmy Simmons right now, but I also knew he wasn’t going to let me walk away without a fight. The only good thing was that he wasn’t shouting out our names. It meant he probably didn’t know his father and Uncle Charlie had been looking for us. Which probably also meant that Jimmy didn’t know about the stolen gold. I had to hope that was the case.

  Jimmy had already closed the distance between us. I glanced at Bee and saw the panicked look on her face. “We have to run,” she hissed.

  I gave my head a little shake.

  “Jimmy,” I whispered, turning to face him, “I know you think this is a chance to get back at me, but we don’t have time right now. There’s something a lot more important going on.”

  He cocked his head and looked at me with his mouth open. His big hands hung at his sides, the fingers tensed as if eager to grab my throat. “What’re you talkin’ about?” he asked with a sneer.

  “Your father, for one. He’s in big trouble.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  Jimmy’s voice carried no conviction, and for a second I could swear I saw something in his eyes that was far more than the stupidity I’d always thought was there. I actually thought it was the glimmer of understanding, maybe even intelligence, and it dawned on me that in the back of his mind Jimmy might have known for a long time that his dad was a crook. In that same instant I realized that I felt sorry for him, and I decided that telling him the truth was my only way out.

  “Yes. Your dad and Uncle Charlie are in a whole lot of trouble,” I said. “That gold they said they found, well, they didn’t. They stole it from Miss Jenkins.”

  Jimmy’s eyes squinted, and his face bunched up. For a second I thought I’d totally done the wrong thing and that he was about to go crazy and attack me. In the next moment, I watched his shoulders slump and the tension go out of his hands, and I knew the expression on his face was sadness more than anger.

  “What’re you talkin’ about?” he said again, but this time there was no energy behind his words. What I heard was almost a pleading tone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I glanced at Bee. I wanted to turn and run, but I knew Jimmy would never let me go. Time was passing, and our window was closing fast. I had to do something.

  “What about my mom?” Jimmy said, pulling my attention back. “She’s not in trouble, is she? She works for Miss Jenkins.”

  I tried to think of the right answer, but my brain was a puddle. “I don’t think she knows,” I said, hoping desperately that I was right.

  Jimmy lowered his head. He spoke in a dull voice that was so soft, I could barely hear the words. “She always told me that he’s a loser but that he’s also my dad. She makes me spend time with him.”

  “Abbey!” Bee whispered.

  I glanced at her and shook my head again. Jimmy was still too dangerous to risk turning my back on.

  “You and your mom don’t live with him?” I asked.

  “Not since school got out. Ever since that thing with the teachers.”

  “What thing with the teachers?”

  He gave a self-conscious shrug. “You know how everybody thinks I’m stupid? And don’t say you don’t, ’cause I know you do. Well, one of my teachers said I was this thing called dyslexic. It means I read backward, sort of. The teacher wanted me to go to special classes for dyslexic kids. My mom wanted
me to. She said I could do good in school if learned to read right, but Dad said no way. He said that being dyslexic is being stupid, and no son of his was going to ride the blue bus for the retards. They had another one of their big fights, and Dad hit her pretty good. Afterward my mom packed us up, and we went to live with my aunt.”

  I looked at him, conscious of the seconds ticking past but also that this kid who I had always thought was nothing but a dumb bully might actually be something different.

  Jimmy’s eyes flashed up, and he seemed to have recovered a little bit of spirit. “You better not be lying about this, Force,” he said. “If you are, I’m gonna double kill you.”

  “If I’m lying, I’ll let you double kill me,” I said. “I promise.”

  “You guys!” Bee hissed. “Come on!”

  I glanced at Bee, then back at Jimmy. “If your father and Uncle Charlie stop us, we may need you to call the police. I’m not joking. Would you do that?”

  After a second or two, Jimmy shrugged, seeming to say that maybe he’d help and maybe he wouldn’t. “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Forget your cigarette and go on around the other side. You can watch.”

  Twenty-six

  As Bee and I stepped through the cabin’s back door, I tried to shut out any thoughts of snakes and spiders. I know Bee did the same as we moved quickly through the ruined kitchen and into the main room. Once there, we crept up to the front door, taking care to stay out of sight.

  My heart was in my mouth as I searched the crowd in front of the platform for Uncle Charlie. What if we had taken too much time and he was back at the microphone? What I saw gave me a surge of hope. Uncle Charlie was still down in the hole showing off some of the gold pieces. The press and television newspeople were standing near him, holding microphones out to catch his words as their camera people continued to shoot pictures.

  “Ready?” I whispered to Bee.

  “Yes.”

  No one seemed to notice when Bee and I bolted out of the cabin’s doorway and jumped onto the platform. I stood on my toes at the podium, grabbed the microphone, and tipped it down so it would pick up my voice. A loud squealing sound came over the loudspeakers, so I knew the microphone was still on.