Knowing we couldn’t ride to Hangman’s Bluff, Bee and I headed home at a fast trot and put the ponies in their stalls so we could get them again quickly when the horse van came. When we walked back out of the barn and looked at the eastern sky, the sun was still just a dull blur behind the growing wall of clouds. Even so, the increasing light showed the clouds for what they were: green and black and yellow, clouds that looked like pus, clouds that would kill dogs and puppies that weren’t protected.
The storm was like a cottonmouth or a big mama gator, something I wanted to stay away from. At the same time, I kept seeing Yemassee in my head, a brown ball curled around a squirming mass of frightened, hungry puppies.
Bee must have been seeing the same things in her head, because she glanced down at her watch. “It’s barely seven o’clock. We can’t ride the ponies over there . . . but how long would it take us to kayak to Hangman’s Bluff?”
I blinked, not quite believing what I had heard. It took me a second to think about it. “Maybe a half hour.”
“So if we hurry, could we get there, maybe find Yemassee, and be back by nine o’clock or a few minutes after?”
I nodded, my eyes going wide as I thought about what she was suggesting. Even though they were getting ready for the storm, both Daddy and Grandma Em would probably sleep a little longer. If we were wrong and they got up early, they would be worried and angry, but I thought again about Yemassee and the puppies and poor Judge Gator if something happened to them. “Yes,” I said, doing my best not to think about Grandma Em and Daddy. “And even if that guard and Leaper are watching the gate, they won’t be looking for anybody coming by water!”
I held up my hand, and Bee gave me a high five. “I know Yemassee is there!” I said. “I feel it in my guts.”
I glanced upward at where the wind was starting to tear at the tops of the live oaks. I thought again of Yemassee, locked in a dark shed or tied to a tree, looking at the sky and feeling the coming storm the way animals can feel those things. “We gotta hurry,” I said.
Down on the dock, Bee went to get us life vests and paddles while I went to the two-person kayak that lay upside down on racks and slapped the bottom all the way from the bow to the stern. It was a precaution, in case a snake or a big spider had managed to get inside or some wasps had started building a nest.
When nothing hissed or buzzed out or dropped out, I turned over the kayak and carried it to the edge of the dock. It was going to be a tight fit if we had to bring back Yemassee and a litter of pups, but I thought we could make enough room down by our feet to fit the dogs. Bee had pulled out life vests and paddles from the equipment chest, and we both zipped into vests and chose a paddle. Just before we slipped the kayak into the water, she gave me a look that told me she was having second thoughts.
“What if Grandma Em or your dad wake up early and come looking for us?”
I was working to smother the same guilty thoughts. “Which is worse,” I said, “maybe scaring them or letting Yemassee die?”
Bee nodded. “I guess when you put it that way . . .”
We lowered the kayak into the river. I steadied it to the dock while Bee climbed into the bow seat, and then she held us in place as I slid into the stern.
The tide was coming in, moving in the right direction so it would help us make a fast paddle out to Hangman’s Bluff. That was a good thing, because the day was starting to feel different, as if the air pressure was changing and something big and ugly was coming at us from behind the trees to the east.
“Ready?” I asked.
Bee nodded, seeming surprisingly certain.
I shoved my guilty feelings down one last time and pushed us out from the dock. Right away the current grabbed the kayak and started to move us upriver. We paddled to add speed as we let the river take us.
Noting the current’s speed and the strength of the gusts in the branches of the live oaks, I had an unsettling thought that the storm was already moving toward us and pushing water inland as it started to come ashore. I sure hoped that wasn’t the case, but one unmistakable sign of the storm’s approach was the absence of shore birds. Herons and ibis would normally be stalking the mudflats while anhingas would be perched on branches that arched out over the water with their black wings stuck out to either side. This morning there wasn’t a bird to be seen.
We paddled hard for about twenty minutes and finally came around a bend in the river that gave us our first glimpse of the end of the island. We dug harder on the paddles and swung around the end of Bishop’s Point then paddled hard again as we made our way toward Hangman’s Bluff on the end of Sinner’s Point.
I could feel the current beginning to slacken, and I let out a sigh of relief, taking it as a sign that it hadn’t been storm surge after all, and the tide was operating by its usual rules and would soon reverse course and begin to flow back out toward the ocean. Just like it had helped bring us inland, I hoped it would give us a fast paddle back to Reward.
By now we could see Mr. LaBelle’s property, where it sat across the bay formed by the two rabbit ears of Bishop’s Point and Sinner’s Point. From here Hangman’s Bluff didn’t look like much, certainly nothing that should have been worth putting up big No Trespassing signs and hiring a private guard. A small bluff at the very end gave the land its name, and its shoreline was thick with tangled undergrowth that looked nearly impossible to walk through.
“You think that guard’s still on duty?” Bee whispered.
“I bet not,” I said, thinking of all the reasons the guard should be long gone. Who would need him there at seven twenty in the morning with a big storm just offshore?
We paddled close to the land then drifted as we tried to spot a place where we could pick our way through the thick mass of bushes, vines, and trees that grew almost on top of one another. As we moved along the bank Bee’s hand shot out, pointing at something. “What’s that?” she asked as I back-paddled trying to keep us still.
I looked where she had pointed, but I couldn’t see anything but more tangled undergrowth. “What?” I asked.
“There’s an opening there. Look as far in as you can.”
We backed the kayak another couple feet until I spotted what she was talking about, a narrow channel that cut through the trees and vines. It led back to something wooden that was set into the dirt embankment and looked an awful lot like one of the old rice impoundments from colonial times that still dot the banks of low-country rivers.
“It looks like a rice gate,” I said. “But that’s weird. I’m pretty sure this was never a rice plantation.”
Before I could say any more about how it didn’t make any sense at all to find a rice gate here, a gust of wind cut across the water and shoved the kayak several feet toward shore. We both glanced up, and there was no question that the ugly clouds that had been offshore were looming much closer. I felt a tremor of anxiety.
“You still want to go ashore?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
We nosed the kayak into the narrow cut and found that the water was deep enough to paddle right up to the wooden thing Bee had spotted. To either side I could see the same big mound of dirt running all the way along the shore. I couldn’t tell how far it went, because all the trees and vines and undergrowth made it pretty much invisible from the water.
“Is it a rice gate?” Bee whispered as she dug her paddle into the mud and brought the kayak to a halt with the bow just inches from the ancient wood.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“What’s it do?” she whispered.
“Rice gates were dams people used hundreds of years ago to let freshwater into rice fields,” I said. “The slaves brought the knowledge with them from Africa and taught their white masters how to build them. This one looks like it’s about to fall apart, but this dirt’s been dug up recently, so it doesn’t look like it’s been here long.”
“Why would somebody put it here?”
I shook my head in confusion. “Haven’t got a clue.”
Without another word, Bee put her paddle across the kayak and boosted herself out of her seat. She put one leg over the side as if she meant to stand up. I think she was expecting the water to be just a couple inches deep, but it was a lot deeper. She stumbled, struggling to keep her balance.
“Thanks for the warning,” I whispered, using my paddle to keep us from getting swamped.
Bee turned, almost up to her waist in water, apparently not even caring that her new running shoes were probably filling up with black, gooey pluff mud. Any other situation and she would have been trying to dive back into the kayak. “Come on,” she whispered. “We need to find Yemassee and get the heck out of here.”
She was right. I glanced at my watch. It was almost seven thirty, and we had agreed to get back by nine. A yellowish pall now covered the entire sky. The wind was coming harder off the water, kicking up small whitecaps and whistling in the branches of the trees along the shore. Even though the tide would be helping to take us home, the wind was going to be pushing us back upriver. It was going to make the paddling slower and more difficult, especially with a load of dogs.
I climbed out of the kayak, and we pulled it all the way out of the water on one side of the cut so it couldn’t drift away while we were looking around.
Bee’s legs were dripping mud as she stepped out of the water. She scrabbled up the dirt bank ahead of me, and I could smell the stink of rotting vegetation and dead fish that is pluff mud’s signature scent. Bee couldn’t have cared less.
She reached the top first, then let out a big gasp and ducked down. “Abbey!” she whispered.
I came up alongside her, staying low so that anyone on the other side of the embankment wouldn’t be able to see us. As I peeked over the top I forgot about staying hidden, because the sight that hit my eyes almost made my heart stop.
The huge hole that yawned in front of us seemed to go on forever. It was maybe seven or eight feet deep and probably ten acres in area. The hole was muddy at the bottom but pretty much totally level.
On the far end of the hole two huge mountains of dirt towered over the landscape, and I knew they had to be the stuff that had been dug out of the earth.
“Didn’t your dad sue Mr. LaBelle for stuff like this?” Bee asked.
“Yeah,” I said, totally confused. “But he’s not building anything now. It looks like he’s just digging.”
“But why would he dig such a big hole?”
“I haven’t got a clue.”
Beyond the two huge piles of dirt I could see what might have been a shed or barn. But the hole was what drew my eyes. The whole thing was shocking, a horrible scar to the land. Somebody had ripped into a beautiful place and made it as ugly as they possibly could.
Seeing this made me mad as a a momma gator when somebody’s threatening her babies. I couldn’t wait to tell Daddy and the judge. I didn’t know if there were laws about digging holes, but there sure needed to be. What Mr. LaBelle had done here was just wrong.
I knew, from living on a plantation all my life, that topsoil is valuable, and that sometimes people sell it. Low-country island topsoil is more valuable than most because it’s so rich, but even so it goes down only a couple feet. But Mr. LaBelle had dug way past the topsoil, all the way into the marl, a thick, junky mixture of clay and mud. Nobody would want marl. It wasn’t good for anything, and because of that I couldn’t imagine why anybody would go to the trouble to dig such a huge hole.
The shock of seeing the hole had made me forget why we were there for a moment. As my thoughts snapped back, I realized Bee wasn’t with me, and then I saw her running along the side of the dirt rim, popping up every few seconds to look at something, then running again.
“Bee, what are you doing?” I said in a loud whisper, but she was already too far away.
I took off, too, but didn’t catch her until she’d gone maybe a hundred and fifty yards. We were less than a hundred yards from the end of the hole now, and when I glanced over the top to see what Bee was looking at, I could see the two huge dirt piles up ahead, and I could tell that the shed I had spotted a moment earlier was one of those double-wide trailers. A bulldozer and one of those big trucks that carried the dirt were parked to the left of the double-wide. Bee didn’t seem to be looking at any of that but was staring hard across the hole.
I finally managed to grab her. “Stop before you get us caught,” I whispered. We were both panting hard from running through loose dirt. “You see Yemassee?”
When Bee turned to look at me, tight creases cut at the sides of her mouth and around her eyes so that she almost looked like a stranger. It took a second to realize that I was seeing anger—pure, white-hot rage.
I didn’t have long to wonder about it, because right then Bee jumped up and started running along the top of the dirt wall.
“Get down!” I hissed, frantically looking around. “Remember that guard and Leaper!”
Bee ignored me. It took a few seconds to catch her again, and I tugged her lower on the bank to get us both out of sight. “Have you lost your mind?”
She turned to me and growled. “Yucca.”
“What?”
“There are yucca plants over there. Lots of them. Remember what Professor Washburn showed us? They mark the graves in slave graveyards.” Her voice was strained and hoarse as if she had something stuck in her throat.
I crept up and looked over the edge of the embankment and saw the plants that are also known as Spanish bayonets because their leaves are tipped with daggerlike spikes. A bunch of them were growing along the edge of the hole on the far side, not all bunched up, but spaced out like they might have been marking graves. Bee must have eyes like an eagle’s to have spotted them from where we started.
“You think those are really graves?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t so sure, but having no way to stop her I followed. At the end of the big hole the sides were no longer straight up and down but slanted so equipment could drive in and out. We jumped down and ran across the opening, trying to stay low enough not to be visible to anybody in the double-wide. When we reached the other side, we climbed back up to the top of the embankment and stared down at the yuccas. Some of them had been dug up and shoved around, and pieces of pottery lay scattered on the ground. I knew from the graveyard we’d visited with Professor Washburn that these were definite signs of old slave graves, and walking to the edge of the hole I saw where other yuccas had toppled in and lay in the mud.
Bee came to stand beside me and looked down at the dislodged yuccas. A sound like a growl came from her throat, and then without another word she jumped halfway down and then slid the rest of the way into the hole.
“Bee, stop,” I hissed.
Once again ignoring me, she started clawing into the loose packed dirt along the side of the hole with her bare hands. I squatted behind one of the yuccas and tried to spot the guard or Leaper. I saw no sign of them, but even so we had to find Yemassee and get out of there before the storm got worse. The ruined graves were a terrible crime, but we needed to get home alive in order to report it to the police.
I felt a fresh blast of wind and looked up at the sky. The sun was totally hidden now behind the thickening clouds. A glance at my watch showed that it was almost eight. We had only a few minutes before we needed to start back to Reward.
“We gotta go!” I said in a loud whisper.
If Bee heard me, she gave no sign. She kept ripping at the dirt like a dog going after a bone. Her hair was frizzing, and there was dirt and mud on her arms up way past her elbows. I stared at her in amazement, not believing this was the same girl who was always so worried about being neat, keeping her nails perfectly clean and never breaking the rules.
“Bee!”
She kept digging, her eyes fixed on the hole she was widening out. Finally she stopped, and a second later pulled out something that was so totally crusted with dirt that it looked like a rock. She brushed away dirt until the white of bone showed through, and suddenly there was no mistaking the shape. A chill ran from the back of my neck to my feet.
“Please tell me that isn’t a human skull,” I said.
Bee held it like it was as precious as a bar of gold. “I knew it,” she whispered. “I knew it.”
When she raised her head and looked at me, tears were running down her cheeks. “This could be someone in my family,” she said.
All I could do was nod, because the realization of what she was feeling right then hit me like a sledgehammer.
“These people have to be punished,” she said.
“Yeah, but we can’t punish them right now. We gotta get out of here,” I urged.
Bee looked around, suddenly seeming to see everything else for the first time. “Why are they doing all this?”
“I don’t know.”
Bee kept the skull in her hands, but she turned and started walking toward the dirt ramp at the end of the hole. Rather than trying to stay low and hide, she just headed toward the two huge dirt piles.
I trotted to catch up. “Will you stay out of sight?” I whispered. “We have to find Yemassee and then go. Have you forgotten about the storm?”
Bee spun around. “The storm is what I’m thinking about! Like what five or ten inches of rain are going to do to these graves! They’ll be washed away forever.”
I stood there, trying to think of some way to get through to her. “I understand how upset you are. I’m upset, too, but we can’t do anything about the graves right this second. We’ll come back. I promise.”
Bee looked at me. Her eyes were wild, but finally she nodded. “Okay,” she mumbled, “let’s find Yemassee.” With that she turned and took off running. I watched her for half a second, realizing with horror that she was too angry to be her normally cautious self, and then I ran to catch her, praying with each step that we weren’t about to get eaten by Leaper.
Bee had already come to the first of the huge piles of dirt and started around it, but in the next instant she disappeared completely. I sprinted after her, fearing the worst.