Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff (22 page)

The judge handed Bee a little girl puppy, saying, “I picked out a boy for Abbey, because I think she and her daddy would like a hunting dog, but I picked out a nice little girl for you.”

Bee put out her arms and held her future puppy and beamed at the judge. “Thank you,” she said.

“It'll be six weeks at least before they should be taken from Yemassee,” the judge said. “But after that she'll be yours to take care of and train. And if you ever decide you want her to hunt, I'll show you some things about training a good bird dog.”

The judge turned and looked at Donna and her mom. “Now, there's just one more thing. Donna, why don't you look in there and see if there might be a puppy you'd like to have.”

Donna's eyes went wide with surprise, and she walked over to look in at the remaining puppies. She stood there for a moment, eyeing them; then she pointed to the smallest one. The judge reached back inside the car and came out with it.

“In almost every litter there is a small, special puppy that we call the runt. Runts normally don't become great hunting dogs, but they make wonderful, loving pets. Now, I'm guessing you and your mother aren't avid hunters. Is that correct?”

Donna was staring at the judge with amazement and hope and maybe even a little bit of happiness in her eyes. She nodded. “Yessir,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Well, since what you did was just as brave as what Abbey and Bee did, I want you to have that puppy. Do you think you and your mother could give this little girl a home?”

Donna looked up at her mother, who smiled and nodded.

The judge put the smallest Boykin into Donna's arms, and I swore I could actually see something warm and friendly come alive in her eyes. It almost made me think there might be some hope for her yet.

Twenty-three

T
he reason the big hole
at Hangman's Bluff never flooded was thanks to Deputy Middleton's quick thinking. When he went to check the rice gate, he realized it was just about to give way, so he started up the bulldozer, drove it down into the hole, and pushed a bunch of marl up against it. The marl was heavy and full of clay, and it kept the old wood from giving way under the force of the river.

Because the hole didn't flood completely, it meant the bones from the broken graves weren't washed away and lost, and the police gave Professor Washburn permission to gather them up and move them to a different place. Over the next week, Bee and I rode our ponies over several times to watch Professor Washburn and his team of archeology students from the College of Charleston as they carefully sifted through the mud and dirt for more remains. In their digging they had identified the bones of at least twenty-five people.

The police were also digging, but but not for bones. Out of one of the big dirt piles, they unearthed the stolen gas truck and a whole bunch of silver tanks that said Old South Bottled Gas. In the other pile, they found what was left of the armored car. It looked like our hunch was right, and that Lenny and Possum had been using the welding gear and the stolen gas to cut up the armored car into pieces that they hauled away with all the marl Mr. LaBelle was trucking off the island.

The last day we were there was after school on Friday. That morning Bee and I had presented the joint project that we had done for our history assignment. It was titled “How the History Sisters Came to Be: The Story of Two Families.”

The report started:

 

Our families came together nearly three hundred years ago. A rice planter headed one family. He had come to this country from France to find religious freedom and seek his fortune. He bought a plantation on Leadenwah Island and named it Reward.

We don't know much about the other family. We don't know how old they were, how many children they had, or even their names, because they had been imprisoned and brought here from Africa. They did not speak the language or share the culture or religion of the planter family. They were slaves, and coming to the plantation was anything but a reward for them.

Our report examines what happened over these three hundred years, to acknowledge the wrongs and the suffering but also to recognize that, in some cases, quite by accident, unbreakable bonds were formed, bonds that are very much like traditional family ties between blood relatives. We aren't trying to say that those bonds in any way justify what came before; only that sometimes, very unexpectedly, very good things can come from very bad things. We believe that is a reason for us to try to practice forgiveness and to have hope for our futures.

 

We got an A+, thanks to the fact that Bee wrote most of it.

That afternoon Bee and I were both still tired out from the craziness of the past week and the work involved in writing our paper, so we were moving slowly. By the time we finally got to Hangman's Bluff, all of Professor Washburn's student diggers had quit for the day, and the place was deserted.

The big piles of dirt were still where they had been, but the trucks and tanks of gas had been taken away. Strips of orange tape that said
POLICE CRIME SCENE NO TRESPASSING
fluttered in the wind.

We ignored the tape, tied up our ponies, and walked over to the edge of the huge hole that Mr. LaBelle had dug into what had once been beautiful old farmland. Even though the students were gone, we could see where they had driven wooden stakes into the ground and broken up the entire area into squares lined out with white string.

Down below us were the tools the archeologists used. There was a long wooden table, a group of large shovels and small hand trowels, and brushes and boxes with mesh screening on their bottoms. The boxes were used to sift through the loose dirt to trap bones, or perhaps coins or shards of pottery that had been buried with the dead slaves to help them in their journey to wherever their spirits were headed.

Out beyond the trenched ground, the lowering sun glinted hard off the Leadenwah River, forcing us to shield our eyes. A steady wind blew off the water, and the humid, warm air brought with it the familiar scents of pluff mud, shellfish beds, and the distant ocean.

Bee seemed to be lost in thought as she stared out at the river with a faraway look in her eyes, but after a few seconds she sensed me watching her.

“Can you hear it?” she asked.

“Hear what?”

“The spirits, the ones Mrs. Middleton was talking about. I don't think they're angry any longer.”

“Bee, there's no way—”

She held up a hand, shushing me. We stood there with the sun dying slowly in the west and the breeze ruffling our hair. At first the only sound I heard was the splash of a distant mullet and the low whistle of wind as it whispered through the marsh grass. But then, after a few seconds, I heard something else. Singing.

The sound was so low and so soft that I really couldn't be certain, but up from the ground all around us came what sounded like low voices raised in some kind of gospel song.

When I glanced at Bee again, I saw that a tear had broken loose from her eye and was trickling down her cheek. She made no move to wipe it away.

“You hear it?” she whispered.

As I nodded I was thinking about families, all kinds of families—about my family and Bee's family, not just now but going back over the centuries. I thought about all the wrongs and all the pain that had been inflicted by my family onto hers. I thought about how neither Bee nor I could do anything to change what had come before, but if we could remember that we were bound together not only by our common past but also by our friendship, we could take that whole ugly stew of history and make something good from it. Heck, who knew for sure, but maybe we could even make that same idea work where Donna LaBelle was concerned. Maybe.

I put my arm around Bee's shoulder and gave her a hug. A minute later we turned around, the sun to our backs now, making our shadows huge, much bigger than we would ever be. We mounted our ponies and headed for home.

 

Acknowledgments

There are many people without whose help this book would never be what it is. I would like to thank John Rashford, professor of anthropology at the College of Charleston, for his patience and generosity in educating me on many aspects of slave graveyards and the burial customs of enslaved people. I would also like to thank Edward Bennett, Esq., for his friendship and his apparently inexhaustible willingness to guide me through the legal complexities touched on in my books. Thanks always to my wife, Julia, whose love, patience, and encouragement keep me on course, and to my daughter, Liza, for her willingness to read the early drafts and provide honest criticism. Thanks to Jordan Brown, my editor, without whose high standards and remorseless editing this book would have fallen far short, and to Kellie Celia and all the other folks too numerous to be named at HarperCollins/Walden Pond Press for their expertise and rigorous attention to so many details that help transform a pile of words into something truly special. Thanks to Brett Helquist for yet another amazing and evocative cover. And, as always, thanks to Stephen Barbara at Foundry Literary and Media, without whose tenacity, guidance and tireless support none of this could have happened.

 

About the Author

J. E. Thompson
is the author of
The Girl from Felony Bay
, along with a number of books for adults. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, not too far from the bays and plantations that inspire the Felony Bay Mysteries.

 

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

 

Books by J. E. Thompson

The Girl from Felony Bay

 

Credits

Cover illustration © 2014 by Brett Helquist

Cover hand lettering @ 2014 David Coulson

Cover design by Michelle Taormina

 

Copyright

Walden Pond Press is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Walden Pond Press and the skipping stone logo are trademarks and registered trademarks of Walden Media, LLC.

 

Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff

Copyright © 2014 by J. E. Thompson

Map illustration copyright © 2013 by Brett Helquist

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.harpercollinschildrens.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thompson, J. E.

    Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff : a Felony Bay mystery / J. E. Thompson. — First edition.

        pages  cm

    Summary: “When Abbey and Bee's neighbor's dog, Yemassee, is kidnapped, they decide it's their job to find the men who took him”— Provided by publisher.

    ISBN 978-0-06-210449-6 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-0-06-210449-6 (hardcover)

    EPUB Edition JULY 2014 ISBN 9780062104519

    [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Robbers and outlaws—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Charleston (S.C.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.T3715957Dis 20142014001882

[Fic]—dc23

CIP

AC

14  15  16  17  18    CG/RRDH    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

FIRST EDITION