The Girl from Felony Bay (5 page)

I really did get straight As, but I hadn't told Daddy that I was no longer going to Miss Walker's School for Girls. I also hadn't told him that Reward Plantation had been sold or that Timmy had been sold or that I was living with Uncle Charlie and Ruth and pretty much hated every minute of it. Daddy had always raised me to tell the truth, but there was no way I could tell him the truth about my life. I was afraid that if I told him what it was really like, he might never want to wake up.

I made up some happy stories about things I had done and places I had gone with old friends from Miss Walker's, and when I couldn't think of any more good lies to tell, I took out
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens and went to my bookmark and started to read from where I had stopped the last time.

From time to time, I would stop reading and look up at Daddy lying there so peacefully, and the picture in my brain would flash back to that day I found him on the floor of the library. I had called 911, and a police car came to the plantation along with the ambulance. While the medics took care of Daddy, the policemen looked at the jewelry that was scattered around the floor and at the secret hiding place, and then they went out to their car and came back and took pictures. Afterward, when Daddy was in the hospital, the police discovered initials on some of the jewelry that made them suspect that it had belonged to one of Daddy's clients, Miss Lydia Jenkins.

Miss Jenkins was very old and very rich and, according to everyone, very strange. Daddy never ever talked about any of his clients, but other people sure liked to talk about Miss Jenkins. They said that she didn't trust banks or paper money or insurance companies and that she kept all her wealth in the form of gold and diamonds in an old bank vault in her huge old house in downtown Charleston. According to the rumors, Miss Lydia Jenkins didn't trust her own family any more than she trusted banks. She had never married and never had any children of her own, but she thought her nieces and nephews were all just after her money.

She had been Daddy's client for many years, and he was apparently the only person in the world she trusted. Two years earlier Miss Jenkins had suffered a stroke that had left her almost completely paralyzed and unable to talk. Sometimes when I went to downtown Charleston, I would catch sight of her in her wheelchair being pushed along the sidewalk by her nurse.

The police went to Miss Jenkins's house to ask about the jewelry. Miss Jenkins's nurse identified all the pieces. And when they went to the big safe that only Miss Jenkins and my father supposedly knew the combination to, they found the safe door unlocked and the safe totally empty.

Miss Lydia Jenkins, who had hardly spoken a syllable since her stroke, got extremely upset. When the police asked if my father had stolen her gold, all she managed to say was “Stole it.” She said it over and over.

About an hour later, I had finished reading to Daddy and I was walking down the corridor on my way to the elevator when I saw a familiar face coming toward me and recognized Mr. Crawford Barrett, Daddy's law partner.

“Abbey!” he said, when he caught sight of me.

Mr. Barrett was tall and thin with a straight nose, sculpted chin, and longish gray hair that he combed straight back. Daddy liked to say that Mr. Barrett was the picture everyone had in their head of an upper-class, intelligent, and honest lawyer, like the kind of person you'd see playing a lawyer on TV.

“Hi, Mr. Barrett,” I said.

“Visiting your dad?”

“Yessir.”

“I had some time between appointments, so I thought I'd look in on him myself. Any change?”

I shook my head. “Maybe he'll wake up for you,” I said.

“I can only hope. You know, sometimes when I get stuck on something in a case, I like to come and talk to your dad just the way I used to when he was in his office. I tell him what my problem is and pretend he answers me and tells me what I should do. Maybe one of these days, he will.”

“Yessir, I hope so, too.”

I appreciated that Mr. Barrett would still come to visit Daddy after all these months—goodness knows it was more than Daddy's own brother would do—but at the same time I was angry at him. I realized my reasons for being angry probably weren't his fault at all, but I couldn't help it. Mr. Barrett had been the one who took over everything right after the accident, when the police formally accused Daddy of stealing Miss Jenkins's gold and jewelry. Daddy was in a coma and couldn't appoint an attorney now, but Mr. Barrett had a power of attorney that let him act for Daddy if he ever couldn't act for himself.

He talked to Miss Jenkins's lawyer and got her to agree that they would not press charges against Daddy for something called grand larceny if Reward Plantation was sold and that money, along with everything else Daddy had, was given to Miss Jenkins. I told Mr. Barrett it was wrong to sell anything until Daddy woke up and had a chance to tell us what really happened, but he said the courts wouldn't wait. And he said that the law firm, and all their partners, would be ruined if we didn't settle and sell Reward to pay back Miss Jenkins. He also said it looked to the whole world like Daddy had done a very bad thing, and while he remained certain that Daddy would be able to exonerate himself when he woke up, the town's opinion wasn't going to change one bit until that happened. He said selling the plantation was the only way of salvaging our family's honor.

I knew all his reasons, and I realize that adults probably knew a lot more about money and laws than a twelve-year-old girl, but I still thought that he was just giving up, letting everyone in the world think that Daddy had committed a terrible crime. The police and Mr. Barrett hadn't been able to come up with a single other explanation of how that loot came to be on Daddy's library floor, and, so far, I hadn't been able to come up with any answers either.

But as I watched Mr. Barrett continue down the hall and turn into Daddy's room, I made yet another promise to Daddy and to myself that I would prove he was innocent before the summer was out, or I would die trying.

T
he next morning I woke up
early again, grabbed a quick bite, and fed Rufus, and then the two of us headed out of the house and over to the horse pasture. I gave a carrot to each of the horses. Then I hopped up on Timmy's back and we spent about twenty minutes cantering around the pasture and about ten more practicing the stunt-riding move I had been working on for the past few days.

We both had a good sweat by the time we rode up to the gate that led to the barn. I slipped off Timmy's back and froze.

A girl I had never seen before was leaning up against the fence. She was slender and pretty with skin the color of coffee with cream and long black hair, and probably an inch or two taller than me. I noticed she had her right arm in a sling and her right leg in what looked like a removable cast. A metal cane hung by its crook from the top fence post.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said back. Her voice was flat, her eyes dull. She seemed angry or surly or something I couldn't put my finger on. Right away I assumed that it was because she had seen me riding Timmy. I wondered how much trouble I was in.

“I'm Abbey Force,” I said, hearing the hesitation in my voice. “I take care of the barn.”

I paused for a moment, waiting for her to say something. She just gave me a blank look, as if she had little interest in anything I might say.

“This pony used to belong to me,” I said, filling the silence.

“Yeah, I know,” she said in the same flat tone.

“That's why I was riding him.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, as if I was soooo boring. “I don't care if you ride the stupid pony.”

I felt my temper flare and took a breath, ready to tell her that Timmy was probably a lot smarter than she could ever hope to be. But then she opened her eyes, and what I saw there stopped me. I realized that this strange girl wasn't being a snobby jerk. She was sad, maybe even sadder than I was, and she didn't seem to care about anything.

I felt my anger loosen and drift away on the wind. “Who are you?” I asked.

“I'm Bee.”

I waited for her to say her last name, and when she didn't I asked, “Bee who?”

“Bee Force.”

On hearing her last name, several things clicked. Bee was the daughter of the new owner of Reward. But that wasn't all. In the same instant I thought of something else, something that was a whole lot more complicated. I remembered a book Daddy had told me about one time. I think it was called
Slaves in the Family
, and it had been written by a man named Edward Ball, whose family had lived around Charleston for a long time and had once owned a lot of slaves, just like my family had.

Daddy said the book had hit him like “a ton of bricks,” because it could have been written about our own family just as easily as about the Balls. In 1865, when the Civil War finally ended and the freed slaves went off to make their way in the world, one of the many things they lacked was a last name. Because of that, many ex-slaves took the last names of their old owners. Edward Ball's book was about how he had set out to meet the descendants of those original exslaves. Daddy said the book made him think about the African Americans our family had owned. While we might not be blood relatives, he said, we were certainly relatives in terms of having come from the same place, living together and having an important connection. He thought Mr. Ball had done a great thing.

Now standing in front of me was an African American girl with my last name. Force. It was a rare enough name, and now the idea that my ancestors had probably kept Bee's ancestors in slavery made my face go bright red in shame.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

I could tell that my embarrassment momentarily startled Bee out of her melancholy. She seemed to understand why I had apologized and why my face was beet red. “It was a long time ago,” she said softly. “Had nothing to do with the two of us.”

“No, but . . .” I didn't know how to finish the thought.

Bee rescued the situation. “What's your real name?” she asked.

“Abigail,” I said. “But I generally punch anybody in the nose who calls me that.”

Bee's eyes brightened, and she laughed. She had a smile that made it seem like the sun had come out from under the clouds, and her laugh sounded nice and easy. “Mine is Beatrice, and I do the exact same thing to anybody who calls me that.”

I held out my hand, and she took it. “Nice to meet you, Bee.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Abbey.”

I glanced at her sling. “What happened?”

“Car accident,” she said, the pain coming back into her eyes.

“Well, I guess it could have been worse,” I said.

“Um, right . . .”

I realized that was a lame thing to have said. Breaking your arm and leg couldn't have been any fun. I let my eyes wander around the pasture, watching the morning mist rise from the grass and the sun coming up over the live oaks, and I tried to think of something else to say so I didn't look like such a dork. “Good place to get healed up,” I said at last.

Bee gave me a flicker of a smile. “I guess.”

I was thinking that Bee Force seemed a lot like me. I could see that she was very sad about something, but underneath that sadness I was betting that she was smart and tough, had a good sense of humor, and maybe even a little bit of a wild streak. Suddenly I thought my horrible, boring summer might actually be looking up. Out of nowhere, it seemed that I had found someone who had as many problems as I did.

Bee stayed down at the barn while I did chores. She watched for a time, and when I started mucking out the stalls, she grabbed a spare pitchfork and tried to help. But she was pretty useless at that, with one arm in a sling, so I showed her how to clean and oil tack.

“What's your dog's name?” she asked as she lathered a bridle with saddle soap.

“Rufus.”

“So where do you guys live?”

I dumped a forkful of straw in the wheelbarrow and hooked my thumb in the direction of the tenant house.

“Is Charles Force your dad?”

I had caught something in Bee's tone that told me she already knew Charles Force was a jerk, and I barked out a laugh. “Uncle,” I said.

“Oh.” She sounded relieved, but then the silence stretched, and I felt her unspoken question hanging.

“My dad's in the hospital,” I added.

“Oh.”

“Well, thanks to your help, I've done everything I need to do today,” I said, wanting to change the subject. “Want to get out of here? You okay to walk with that cast?”

She looked up from soaping the bridle. “Kind of hot for a walk. Where do you swim around here?”

Now she was talking. A swim sounded perfect. But then I thought about Ruth. “I need to get a suit, but if I go home my aunt will probably give me more chores to do.”