The Girl from Felony Bay (31 page)

But for Bee and me, the huge surprise came when the backhoe operator got ready to fill in the hole. We were standing alone near the edge just watching, and both of us caught sight of it almost at the same time. Along one side of the hole it looked like the backhoe bucket had scraped some other object, and whatever it was had partly crumbled into the hole.

Bee and I could see that it wasn't dirt or rock, but more as if the backhoe had sheared off what looked like a couple rotten boards. They must have been so soft and crumbly that they had made no noise, and unless a person was standing right where we were, they were invisible. It wasn't the rotten boards but rather what had been behind them that made our eyes go wide.

Bee sucked in a deep breath. I knew she was about to shout something out to the backhoe operator, but I grabbed her arm.

She turned and looked at me like I was crazy, but I shook my head. A second later she totally got it and nodded.

We backed up, and both of us watched in silence as the backhoe quickly filled the hole. I marked the location exactly in my brain, and once the police left, I paced it off and wrote down the exact number of paces from the cabin and from a nearby pine tree.

Daddy would be exonerated. Uncle Charlie, Bubba Simmons, Ruth, and Mr. Barrett were going to jail, where they belonged. But there was one more job left to do. And I was finally going to do it, just the way Daddy would have wanted.

I
t is early morning, mid-August.
Seventh-grade classes at Miss Walker's begin tomorrow, and even though it's the hottest time of the year, for Bee and me summer is coming to an end. I am leaning against the fence watching Clem and Lem and Timmy and Bee's new pony, Buck, graze in the pasture. Mist is rising off the grass; the air is humid as a shower stall and already heavy with heat. The sky is the deep blue that comes just after sunrise as the color slowly comes into the world.

In a few minutes the sun will be over the live oaks, and the sky will be the same hard blue as a robin's egg. This is the perfect time of day to wonder how it would be possible to live anywhere as good as Leadenwah Island.

When I look back, I can see Bee following slowly out the plantation drive. There is no longer even a trace of a limp when she moves, and the doctor has told her she can play on the middle school tennis team this fall. She is rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, but at least she is awake. Bee definitely likes to sleep more than I do, but I am trying to make her understand how great it is to be up before the rest of the world. This morning at least I have succeeded.

“Last day of summer vacation. What are we going to do?” she asks as she comes up to me.

I hold up my hand and pop up my fingers as I list off the ideas. “First we ride, then we swim, then we make eggs and bacon,” I say, knowing Grandma Em still won't be in the kitchen when we finish our swim.

Bee nods. “What about eggs first?”

“Forget your stomach. We have to ride before it gets too hot.”

Grandma Em says Bee is going through another growth spurt. I think it may be true, because I think she is even taller than she was a month ago. In any case, all Bee can think about other than sleeping is getting more food in her stomach. I'm just hoping that one of these days I go through a growth spurt, too.

Of course, that's not the only thing I'm hoping for. Daddy is still in his coma, but I haven't lost hope—well, at least I haven't lost hope too many times. The doctors have told me that if he does wake up—they don't understand that he
is
going to wake up—he's not going to just jump out of bed and be his old normal self. Doctors are smart people, but they're not right on everything.

In the barn we put some oats into two buckets, then walk into the pasture and catch our ponies. We saddle them fast and take a fairly short ride, not wanting to get them overheated in the August sun. On our way to the barn we take a detour out to the township road, where we grab the morning paper from the mailbox. Back in the barn we bathe both ponies, put their fly coats back on, and leave them in their stalls, where it will be cooler than out in the hot sun of the pasture.

“Last one in the water has to do the dishes,” Bee says. She is closer to the barn door than me, and she takes off as fast as she can. I start about twenty yards behind, but even though Bee's legs are longer, I start to gain on her right away. My lungs are burning after the first few hundred yards, but neither one of us wants to clean up egg yuck from the dishes, so we keep running.

Rufus has been hunting in the soybeans across the drive from the barn, and when he hears us running, he gives a happy bark and comes racing after us.

All three of us are basically in a tie when we reach the dock. Bee and I tear off our jeans and shirts as fast as we can because we've got our suits on underneath, while Rufus barks and turns happy circles because he knows we're going swimming. We race down the dock, and I can feel a big splinter go into my right foot, but I don't care. I jump and manage to hit the water just a half second before Bee, but we both come up laughing. Rufus stands above us still on the dock, wagging his tail like crazy and finally jumping between us to make a huge splash.

Back in the kitchen of the big house a little while later, I crack the eggs into a bowl and stir them up and afterward toast some bread and then smear on butter. Bee cooks the bacon, which takes the longest time, and that gives me time to read the paper. Grandma Em says that Bee and I have become “news junkies” over the past month or two.

The reason is that Tom Blackford, the reporter at the
Post and Courier
I went to visit a couple months ago, has once again taken a big interest in everything that happened with Daddy and Uncle Charlie and Mr. Barrett and Miss Jenkins's gold. He has been out here a bunch of times to interview Bee and Grandma Em and me, as well as Mrs. Middleton and Skoogie. He has also gone to the jail and interviewed Uncle Charlie and Ruth, who have basically been blabbing pretty hard to try to get their jail sentences reduced when they come to trial, even though Mr. Barrett has refused to talk.

Over the past month and a half Tom Blackford has written a bunch of articles about what he now calls “The Mystery of Felony Bay.” Obviously Bee and I knew a lot of those facts already, but there are some things both of us wondered about but had never been able to explain. First off, according to what Uncle Charlie and Ruth told Tom Blackford, Mr. Barrett was the one who put the whole plot together after he managed to get the combination to Miss Jenkins's safe. The whole question of how he'd gotten that combination really bothered me, because I didn't think Daddy would
ever
have told anyone, and I also knew he was way too careful to let it slip out in some careless mistake.

Mr. Barrett hasn't admitted a single thing so far, but Tom Blackford interviewed Martha, Daddy's legal secretary, and she said she was pretty sure she knew exactly how it happened. She told Tom Blackford that just a few weeks before the robbery and Daddy's “accident,” Mr. Barrett had gone into Daddy's office one day with a very sad expression. Mr. Barrett had closed the office door, but Martha sat right outside the office, and she had overheard Mr. Barrett tell Daddy that he'd just found out he had cancer. He said he hoped it was treatable, but that just in case he got really sick, really fast, he and Daddy needed to share the passwords to their computers “just in case.” That way, no matter what happened, either one of them would be able to take care of the other partner's clients.

When I read that in Tom Blackford's column, I knew right away that had to be
exactly
how Mr. Barrett got the combination. Daddy lost my mother to cancer, and when he heard that his law partner had the same terrible disease, he would have been too upset to even consider turning down Mr. Barrett's suggestion. Once he had the computer password, it would have been a piece of cake for Mr. Barrett to stay late one night and then go into Daddy's office after the last people had gone home for the night and snoop the combination off the computer. Daddy would have been so worried about Mr. Barrett's health, he would never have suspected that anything like that might happen.

Martha told Tom Blackford that she had wondered about Mr. Barrett's cancer ever since she'd overheard that conversation, but that he'd never mentioned it again and pretty much acted as healthy as the day he'd been born. She said she'd tried to figure out if he was having cancer treatments like radiation or chemo that usually leave somebody feeling sick and very tired, but she was pretty sure he wasn't. She also said she'd kept her questions to herself because by that time Daddy was in a coma, and with Mr. Barrett running the firm, there wasn't really anybody else she could talk to.

Another thing I'd wondered about for a long time was just how Mr. Barrett came to be so friendly with Uncle Charlie and Bubba Simmons, because on the surface that just didn't seem to make any sense. Mr. Barrett was supposed to be smart and high class, which Uncle Charlie and Bubba Simmons certainly weren't. Tom Blackford found out that Mr. Barrett loved to gamble as much as those other two. which most people didn't know but which pretty much explains how those three knew each other. Tom Blackford also found out that Mr. Barrett was a lousy gambler—he owed big money to some other gamblers and was desperate to find a way to pay it back. Miss Jenkins's safe must have seemed like the perfect thing to him.

Another thing that Tom Blackford wrote about was that Bubba's wife, Esther, who was Miss Jenkins's nurse, had no idea of the robbery plan. About the only thing she did wrong was to tell her jerk husband that the doctors were pretty sure Miss Jenkins wouldn't ever be able to move or speak again. Bubba mentioned that to Mr. Barrett and Uncle Charlie one night during a poker game, and their plan began to take shape. After all, even if she saw them steal her stuff, how was some paralyzed old lady ever going to testify against them?

According to Tom Blackford, Mr. Barrett cooked up the idea of “finding” the treasure at Felony Bay because he knew that Uncle Charlie had been a treasure hunter years earlier. Mr. Barrett also decided that Daddy was the logical choice to take the blame because he was supposedly the only one besides Miss Jenkins who knew the safe combination. If Mr. Barrett ever felt bad about framing and killing his partner, he never let on. Uncle Charlie had always resented Daddy for working hard and being smart, so he went along with it, too. Bubba just wanted the money and didn't care who got blamed. Tom Blackford also wrote that from the very beginning Ruth had seemed to feel worse about it than the others.

Custis says that Uncle Charlie and Ruth's blabbing strategy isn't going to keep them out of jail once the trial gets started. He says that it's an “open-and-shut case,” and that Uncle Charlie and Ruth, along with Mr. Barrett and Bubba, are going to be “breaking rocks in the hot sun.” Custis says Ruth probably won't go to jail for as long because when Bee and I testify at her trial, we'll both say that she seemed to feel bad about what was happening. However, Custis is pretty sure the other three will each get convicted of three counts of attempted murder—one count being Daddy and the others being Bee and me—which means they won't be out of jail for a good long time. That is just fine with me.

Custis says that another thing that's going to make it an “open-and-shut case” is that Miss Jenkins is going to be able to testify, because she's been getting better and better and can actually talk a decent bit now, and she's known the truth about who stole her gold the whole time. It turns out that Bubba had called Esther one day; he suckered her into thinking he had an emergency and that she had to leave Miss Jenkins's house to help him. While she was gone, Mr. Barrett and Uncle Charlie snuck in and cleaned out the safe.

They thought Miss Jenkins was asleep in her wheelchair, but she was actually wide-awake and saw them take everything. Because of her stroke all she'd ever been able to say was “Stole it.” Everyone assumed she meant Daddy. They had no idea she meant Uncle Charlie and Mr. Barrett, but now that she's better, she'll get that across loud and clear in the trial.

Another thing Tom Blackford wrote that I hadn't known about: According to Uncle Charlie and Ruth, right after they finished cleaning out Miss Jenkins's safe, Mr. Barrett called my father and said he had a big problem and needed to have a private conversation. He asked if they could meet at Daddy's house rather than downtown in their offices. Thinking it was probably more bad news about Mr. Barrett's cancer, Daddy wouldn't have been suspicious. I was off at school, which meant the house was empty. They went into Daddy's library, and when Daddy's back was turned Mr. Barrett hit him over the head with a lead pipe. Then he tossed a bagful of Miss Jenkins's jewelry around the room, got the stepladder from the kitchen, put it up, and loosened some panels in the ceiling that Uncle Charlie had told him about. Custis says Mr. Barrett's going to claim that he never meant to kill Daddy, but I don't think the jury's going to buy it any more than they're going to believe he wasn't trying to smother Daddy the day the police caught him in the hospital.