Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff (14 page)

“Name was Jimbo.”

“You know Lenny killed him, right?” Of course I didn't know for absolute certain that Lenny had killed Jimbo, but I was also pretty sure it was the right guess.

“No, he didn't.”

“Did so. We found the body.”

“No. Jimbo quit.”

“Lenny tell you that?”

“Yeah, he said Jimbo got scared when his face was on TV and he lit out.”

“He may have tried to quit, but Lenny killed him. I'm sure it's been on TV.”

“We ain't got no TV since Jimbo left. Lenny got mad and shot it.”

“He probably shot it so you couldn't see the news.”

Possum looked unsure, but he just gestured with his shotgun. “No more talk. Just keep walkin'.”

I didn't move. “Lenny killed Jimbo, and once he's killed all of us, you think that's the end? Why do you think he's gonna let you live? You're his last witness.”

Hearing this Mrs. LaBelle began to whimper, and Donna started to sob louder. I glanced back at Mr. LaBelle and caught him giving me a strange look.

“Y'all shut up,” Possum growled.

“You know Lenny's going to kill you so you can't testify against him. Tell me you know that, mister. Tell me that you're not so stupid that you don't know what Lenny's gonna do.”

“Close your trap, girl, or I'm gonna knock you on your butt. I ain't jokin'. Don't make this worse on yourself.”

I threw a glance at Bee. Her eyes looked clearer, like she was starting to think as well as she normally did. I felt a small swell of hope.

“What did you do with the dog?” Bee asked Possum.

“What dog?” Possum asked. I could tell that he was rattled, and that gave me a little more hope.

“The Boykin spaniel Jimbo and Lenny stole.”

Possum's eyes went toward the double-wide.

“She had her puppies yet?” Bee asked.

He screwed up his face as if he couldn't believe she was stupid enough to ask about puppies when we were a couple minutes away from getting shot.

“Yeah.”

“We all know what Lenny's gonna do to us,” she said, sounding genuinely terrified. “Would you let us at least see the puppies? Just for a second? Please?”

Possum closed his eyes and swallowed. When he opened them again, he looked miserable. He glanced back, but Lenny had driven the Mercedes somewhere out of sight.

“Please?” Bee said again.

“Please?” I echoed.

“One look,” Possum growled. “That's it. No touchin' 'em. Real quick.”

“What are you talking about?” Mr. LaBelle mumbled. “Puppies?”

Bee and I ignored him. As we turned toward the double-wide Bee said to Possum, “Thanks, mister. We promise we won't touch 'em.”

Bee glanced at me, and I just hoped we were thinking the exact same thing. As we got to the trailer two things had to happen, and they had to happen really, really quick. One of them I couldn't control at all. I just had to hope I got lucky, but in order to get lucky, I had to be standing in the right spot.

We walked up to the trailer and stopped. Possum stepped up close and motioned toward the door. “Go on. Open it.”

I stepped on the front step, which consisted of a board set on top of two cinder blocks. I grasped the handle and pulled the door against the wind, which tried to hold it closed. With the door open a crack, I could see Yemassee behind some wire in the far corner, surrounded by a ball of little puppies.

“Go on in and see 'em. That's what you wanted,” Possum said.

I shook my head and pretended to pull the door as hard as I could. “I can't get it open.”

Possum got up onto the step beside me, grabbed the door, jerked it open, and tried to push me farther inside. I grabbed the doorjamb, causing Possum to take a step past me, up into the double-wide. “They're right in that there corner,” he said, pointing.

Leaper did exactly what I had been hoping. Just like any other dog, he was curious about other dogs, so he nosed inside behind Possum. As soon as she saw Leaper, Yemassee let out a warning growl, but I couldn't worry about her yet. Bee gave Possum a shove, and I slammed the door hard behind him.

“What are you doing?” Mr. LaBelle demanded.

“We're running,” said Bee, “and you better run, too.”

“No, you can't run. They'll shoot us.”

I realized he must have had all the sense knocked out of his head when Lenny had hit him, and I looked back at the others. “Run!” I said.

“Why you—” I heard Possum say from the other side of the door.

Instead of running, I signaled to Bee and we reached down and jerked the board step off the cinder blocks. When Possum jerked open the door and stepped out, I knew I'd guessed right. He had the shotgun in one hand and the door handle in the other and he put his foot down, expecting to find the step that wasn't there. He fell onto his face in the mud, and the wind slammed the door shut behind him, locking Leaper inside.

I darted behind him while he was still down and kicked as hard as I could, right up between his legs. Daddy always told me that if I ever needed to do it, I should kick “like a placekicker trying to hit a fifty-yard field goal.”

Possum's head shot up out of the mud, like he'd just gotten the biggest surprise of his life, which maybe he had. A second later it seemed like the pain hit, because he made a little high-pitched noise that sounded like air leaking out of a balloon.

Inside the double-wide Leaper was going nuts, barking and scrabbling his claws on the door, but I was pretty sure he couldn't get out. I saw that Bee had already started to run toward the water, but the LaBelles were standing there like statues.

Behind them, through the curtains of rain, I could make out Lenny as he trudged back from hiding the car. He caught sight of us at the same time, and he took out a gun from his belt and started to run.

In the next instant he partly disappeared, because the wind gusted even harder. The rain started coming down like a waterfall, the kind of rain that is so heavy, you can't see more than a few feet.

“Come on!” I said, but the LaBelles still stood there. There was no more time, so I took off as fast as I could in the direction of the river. “I'm right behind you, Bee,” I shouted, but my voice was pretty much drowned out by raindrops spattering into the dirt all around me. Rain was streaming in my eyes, nearly blinding me, but up ahead I caught sight of Bee's cloudy shape as she slipped and stumbled on the rain-slicked embankment.

Behind me, so faint I could barely hear it, Lenny was yelling at Possum. “You idiot! Now look what ya done! We can't do anything until we got all of 'em. Those two girls are witnesses!”

“Stop or I'll shoot,” he cried a second later.

I knew he meant Bee and me, but he couldn't see us through all the curtains of rain, so I kept going. I didn't have any idea what the LaBelles had done, but I figured they had probably just stood there. I slipped and fell every few yards, but each time I got back up and kept running. When I reached the corner of the embankment, I turned and started toward the rice gate.

I caught the sound of Bee's feet splashing in the mud ahead of me, and then I heard another sound. The rain dampened it, but there was no mistaking a gunshot.

“Stop!” Lenny shouted again, his voice even fainter than before.

“Get down,” I shouted to Bee as we both slid down the sides of the embankment.

I heard two more shots, but I didn't care, because the dirt protected us. A second later Bee reached the rice gate and leaped all the way down to the mudbank where we'd beached the kayak. We waded out until the water deepened, then dove in and swam straight out into the river with the rain popping and hissing around us, making the water look like it was boiling. When I got close enough, I saw that Bee had managed to hang on to the skull. She was swimming with it stuffed in the back of her shirt, looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Fourteen

W
e headed out from the
shore, putting as much distance between Lenny and ourselves as possible. As I looked up- and downstream, the bad news was that there was no sign of our kayak. The good news was that there wasn't any other boat Lenny could use to come after us.

That meant we just needed to stay invisible out here on the water. I was banking on what Lenny had shouted to Possum, namely that they couldn't risk shooting any of us until they captured all of us again. If they killed the LaBelles, Bee and I could identify them as the murderers. That meant if we could keep from getting captured, we just might be able to save the LaBelles as well.

We swam farther into the river, the rain falling around us like layers of gauze. After several seconds I heard something smack the water far off to our left and then something else to our right. At first I was afraid it might be oars, but then I realized it was the splash of fish, and that crazy mullet were jumping out of the water the way they always do, even in a storm.

As we moved out of the bay formed by the two points of land, the wind was whipping the main part of the river into big whitecaps. The waves made it even harder for anyone to see us from shore, but the wind was blowing so much water from the ocean into the river that it was overwhelming the current that should have been sweeping us toward Reward. That meant we were going to have to swim all the way home or go ashore and walk. Either way it was going to take us a very long time.

I thought about Daddy and Grandma Em and knew they must be worried sick by now. Would it even enter their minds that we'd been dumb enough to go out in a kayak? I doubted it. I squeezed my eyes shut, realizing how stupid and wrong and selfish we had been. I wanted to go straight back and beg Daddy's and Grandma Em's forgiveness, but first we had a whole lot of swimming ahead of us.

We swam steadily for a time, and then we stopped to tread water and catch our breath. I looked up and saw the live oaks waving frantically in the powerful gusts. The wind was coming so hard off the ocean now that I was pretty sure the weatherman had been wrong and Mrs. Middleton's bones had been right. This had to be worse than a tropical storm.

The whitecaps made it hard to take breaths without getting water in our mouths. We were in a rush to get home and warn people about what was happening to the LaBelles, but all we could do was swim and then rest, swim and then rest.

Even so we both grew tired, and our teeth were chattering hard from the cold. On the shore of Bishop's Point, through the swirling curtains of rain, I spotted a dock, and beyond it a large house. Bee saw it, too. “You think we should get out here and try to use their phone?” she asked.

We swam toward shore and looked carefully at the house. “The shutters are closed up tight,” I said. “But maybe we could find a way to break in.”

“What if Lenny expects us to try something like that?” Bee asked.

“I think we have to risk it,” I said, and started toward the dock.

That was when I heard Bee start to make strange sounds. I swung toward her in alarm, afraid she might be in trouble. “What's the matter?” I asked. “You need help?”

She shook her head, and I realized what I had heard were sobs.

“It's all my fault that we're in this trouble. If I'd kept my mouth shut, we might have gotten away, and we and the LaBelles would be okay. I was just so angry about those graves, I couldn't think straight.”

“You thought straight, but different,” I said, trying to calm her down. “For once in your life, you acted more like me.”

Bee nodded. “I was so angry, I didn't care about
anything
. I just wanted to get those people.”

“I know, Bee. I understand. The thing is, it's a really bad idea to bawl when you're trying to swim. It's a great way to drown.”

She laughed and nodded and managed to stop crying. We started swimming again, breaststroking so we could talk. “What do you think happened to the LaBelles?” Bee asked.

“I'm betting Lenny got them.”

She shook her head. “It's crazy what they tried to do to us. I mean, the graves are bad, and they can probably go to jail, but it's nothing like kidnapping or killing people.”

“I think Lenny's crazy.”

“Yeah.” She slapped the water in frustration. “It's going to take us an hour to get home.”

“Don't think about that,” I said. “Just get to the dock.”

We were nearly there when Bee pointed ahead of us. “Look!”

My heart jumped into my mouth, afraid maybe Lenny had managed to find us. I quickly eyeballed the dock and yard but saw nothing.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“Underneath.”

I looked again, and this time I spotted something yellow that had drifted between the pilings and become trapped. I felt a surge of hope and let out a whoop. It was our kayak.

We swam around the side of the dock. The kayak appeared to be undamaged, and even better, our life vests and paddles were still inside where we had left them. I pulled the stern out from under the dock and held the kayak in place while Bee climbed the dock's swim ladder, put on her life vest, and slipped into the bow.

Next she held the kayak to the dock while I climbed out and took my place in the stern. We were shivering, our teeth chattering like mad, but we shoved out into the river and began to paddle hard through the curtains of rain. The rest of the trip went much faster as we worked hard on the paddles with our arm muscles burning.

Finally the Reward dock came into sight. The wind was ripping across the water in sharp gusts, and the rain pounded down the way it had for the past hour. Overhead the sky was so dark that it seemed more like dusk than late morning. I had been harboring a vague hope that, regardless of how mad they would be at us, Daddy or Grandma Em would be waiting there, but the dock was deserted.

They had to be so upset that we were missing, and they would be howling mad when we told them what we had done. They could punish us both later—and I had no doubt they would—but for now we needed them to listen to our story about what had happened at Hangman's Bluff.

We pulled the kayak out of the water and stowed it on the dock, tying it down tight so it wouldn't blow off in the wind. We threw the life vests and paddles in the equipment storage locker, then started running toward the big house to tell Grandma Em that we were okay.

Up ahead of us, through the pounding rain, the window shutters were all closed, giving the big house a lonely, deserted look. For half a second I felt a wave of panic that Daddy and Grandma Em had given up on finding us and had evacuated, or that something bad had happened to one of them in the storm and we hadn't been here to help.

Maybe it was my fear, or maybe something else, but I slowed down and Bee slowed, too.

“Look,” Bee whispered. “Doesn't Grandma Em always have those curtains open?”

She was pointing to the back kitchen door. It had lace curtains over its glass window, but Grandma Em liked to look outside when she cooked, so the curtains were always wide open. There was no light peeking through any of the closed shutters, so the house had to be dark as a cave inside. Even more reason to keep the curtains open, I thought, yet somebody had pulled them tight over the window.

“Yes,” I said, and I grabbed Bee's arm and pulled her to one side, behind the trunk of a huge live oak. “What if Lenny made the LaBelles tell him where we live? What if he came here looking for us, and now he's up there waiting to see if we make it back?”

“Oh, my gosh,” she said as she put her hands to her mouth. “That means he's got Grandma Em!” She started toward the porch steps, but I grabbed her again.

“And he's gonna have us again, too, if we make a lot of noise and let him know we're here. However many hostages he's got, we're the only thing keeping them alive.”

Bee looked close to panic. I held up my hands to calm her. I was rattled, too, but it didn't matter. We needed to think.

“We can't jump to any conclusions,” I said. “Let's sneak around and try to figure out who's inside without letting them know we're here. Then if there is a problem, we can sneak down to my house and get Daddy.”

Bee's voice started to crack. “What about your dad?” Bee asked. “He could be in there, too!”

I looked at her, and my mouth dropped. It made perfect sense that if Lenny had found out where Bee lived and if he'd taken Grandma Em prisoner, he'd taken Daddy prisoner, too.

I felt panic and guilt well up inside me, and I tried to shove them down, telling myself we needed to think and make a plan. Bee grabbed my arm and pulled me along, and we crept as quietly as possible to the far end of the house, where the old cypress-paneled library was located. With the shutters all closed, nobody inside could see us, but we couldn't see inside, either.

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.