Bee and I trotted without speaking as we hurried to get to the dinner table on time. Dusk was coming on quickly, and the trill of crickets began to echo from the woods along the road. It was a sound I usually loved, but tonight my brain was like a knotted ball of string, full of thoughts about Donna LaBelle, and also about Yemassee and Willie Smalls.
As we started to get close to home, we let the ponies slow down and cool off, and I finally turned to Bee. “I think it was him.”
“Who?”
“The man who stole Yemassee, and the man who got Willie Smalls in trouble and robbed the gas company. He was driving the truck.”
“We couldn’t see him.”
“I saw him.”
“His face?”
“Well . . . his shape. He looked short and fat. And if it wasn’t him, why did he stay in the truck and then back up when I started to get close?”
“Maybe because he had to go someplace?”
“It was him!”
“I know you don’t like Mr. LaBelle, but do you really think he’d hang around with a robber and maybe a murderer?”
Sometimes Bee was so stubborn, but I had to admit she was probably right. After all, even though I hated Donna and wanted to believe anything bad that I could about her, it seemed a pretty big stretch that the father of a girl I’d gone to school with could hang out with such bad people. “The LaBelles are some of the biggest jerks I’ve ever met,” I said as we turned into Reward.
“They seem unhappy.”
“Unhappy, snobby, and horrible.”
“Their daughter looks miserable.”
“She’s a jerk. Why are you trying to make me feel sorry for her?”
Bee smiled. “I think you already feel sorry for her.”
I shook my head, unable to deny it. I shot a glance at Bee, amazed as always at her ability to take the high road when all I wanted to do was stomp on people who had made me angry.
“You need to just walk away from people like that and not let them get under your skin,” Bee added.
I laughed. “You’re just like Daddy. He tells me I’ve got to learn to control my big mouth.”
Bee turned to look at me, her eyes going wide in fake innocence. “Who says you’ll ever be able to do that? Seems to me your mouth has been out of control ever since I met you.”
I was still struggling to think of a comeback when Bee turned to me with a serious expression.
“You aren’t going to tell your dad about that guy in the truck, are you?”
“Of course I am.”
“What if it wasn’t him? If you tell your dad, and Grandma Em finds out, she’s gonna ground me for a month. We disobeyed both of them and went looking for Yemassee.”
“But we didn’t. We just went riding.”
“Grandma Em doesn’t live in Abbey’s World. She’s got her own way of looking at things, and she’ll be mad as a hornet to even think that we might have gotten close to that man. Your daddy’s gonna feel the same.”
“I still don’t understand why he wouldn’t have gotten out and helped. It had to be the bad guy,” I insisted.
“What if he has only one leg?”
“He doesn’t.”
“How do you know?”
I felt a stab of resentment that Bee was acting like Daddy and trying to go by cold facts rather than her own instincts. Still, she had a good point about getting in trouble. “We’ve ridden all over the island and haven’t found Yemassee. What’re we gonna do?”
Bee shrugged. “Making false accusations and getting grounded won’t help Willie Smalls, and it probably means we’ll never find Yemassee.”
I hated to admit it, but Bee was making sense. “So what do we do?”
“We just have to be sure before we say anything. I’m willing to get grounded if we know we’re right.”
I nodded. “Okay, I won’t say anything until we both agree. Deal?”
“Deal.” We shook hands.
“So here’s another question,” I said. “Those guys shot Yemassee with one of those dart guns to get whatever that white thing was, right?”
Bee nodded.
“Okay,” I said, ” pleased that I was finally catching up to her in the detective-thinking department. “Why did they just happen to have a dart gun in their truck?”
“Exactly the question I’ve been wondering about,” Bee said. She let her pony stop and turned to look at me. He immediately dropped his head and started to munch the grass. “What if that wasn’t the only robbery those men committed? Remember that armored car?”
I nodded. “They said the guards got drugged.”
“The police don’t ever say everything. What if they got shot with a dart gun and knocked out? And we’ve been forgetting all about the dead guy. Why did somebody kill him? And who did it?”
I shook my head. “What if it was because he lost his mask in the gas company robbery and he got scared when he saw his face on TV and wanted to give himself up?”
“So you think his fat partner shot him?” Bee asked, her eyes going wide.
“I’m just saying that could be what happened,” I said. “Unless there’s a whole gang and somebody else shot the blond guy.”
Bee shook her head. “You couldn’t hide a whole gang on this island.” She thought for a second. “You think the fat guy might have killed Yemassee once they got her back to wherever they were going?”
I shook my head. “A dog can’t talk and give you away. Besides, if they were going to kill her, wouldn’t they have done it when they first came after her?”
“I hope you’re right,” Bee said with a shiver.
After we fed and put away the ponies, I ran home to shower and change for dinner at the big house. But to my surprise, when I walked in the kitchen, I found Daddy wearing an apron and holding a baster in his hand. The aroma of roasting chicken hit me right away, and my mouth started watering like crazy.
It was the first time since his accident that he had cooked the way he used to cook, and for just a second it almost seemed as if Daddy’s coma and all the other things that happened the previous year had been a bad dream. It made me feel good and warm and safe; it put a huge smile on my face. While Grandma Em’s cooking was some of the best in the world, in my opinion, nothing could beat eating a delicious meal in my own house.
Just seconds earlier my brain had been full of puzzling out the connections between the thing in Yemassee’s mouth and the men who had stolen her and the dead man and the gas-company robbery, but my surprise at seeing Daddy and the aroma of that chicken drove all that stuff out of my brain. “Boy, am I hungry,” I said.
“I’m glad,” Daddy said. “But say hello to our visitors.”
I looked around to find Mrs. Henrietta Middleton sitting at our kitchen table. I was even more surprised to see Willie Smalls sitting right beside her. Mrs. Middleton was our friend and neighbor, and she was also Deputy Cyrus Middleton’s aunt. In addition to that, she and her grandson, Skoogie, had helped save Bee and me from getting eaten by Green Alice, but that’s another story. Willie Smalls, of course, was the man Daddy was defending, the man who had been accused of helping out in the Old South Bottled Gas robbery. I had come in the front door and not the back, so I had missed seeing Mrs. Middleton’s truck parked behind the house.
“Good evening, Mrs. Middleton,” I said with my best Young Southern Lady manners. “Good evening, Mr. Smalls.”
I stepped over to the table and shook hands. Mrs. Middleton was a small woman who was bent from all the hardships she had endured. The bones in her hands felt like tiny bird bones, but I could also feel the calluses and the muscles from all the hard work she did in her garden. Her walker stood beside her chair. She needed it because her legs were bad.
Willie Smalls’s hands were huge, just like he was. Even sitting down in one of the chairs around our kitchen table, he was taller than me. The skin on his hands was as rough as bark. His fingers wrapped around my hand like a pair of dark mittens, but they were also very gentle. He mumbled a greeting, but I didn’t expect any more. He never said much.
Daddy had explained to me a long time earlier that when Willie had been born, his parents hadn’t had enough money to go to the hospital. Willie’s umbilical cord had gotten wrapped around his neck just when he was coming out, and it had cut off the air to his brain. As a result Willie was one of the kindest and gentlest people you could ever meet, but the brain damage he had suffered meant he couldn’t think as well as most other people.
Even as I shook hands, my head was spinning with fresh questions. The last I had heard, Willie was in jail and Daddy was representing him at his hearing. Daddy must have sensed my confusion, because he said, “Mrs. Middleton and I posted bail for Willie. He’s going to stay with her until we get all this unpleasantness straightened out.”
I glanced back toward Mrs. Middleton and Willie. “He’s my cousin,” Mrs. Middleton said.
I hadn’t known the Smallses and the Middletons were related, but it didn’t surprise me, because so many of the people who lived on Leadenwah turned out to be related one way or another. I looked at them both a little closer, because I would have guessed that getting bailed out of jail would be a reason for happiness, but neither of them looked very pleased. Mrs. Middleton’s eyes were glassy and sad while Willie hunched with his elbows resting on his knees and popped his knuckles, one by one.
“Stop that, Willie,” Mrs. Middleton snapped, after a few seconds. “If you are going to stay in my home, you are going to have to take that confounded habit outside.”
“Yes’m, sorry,” Willie mumbled. He stopped popping his knuckles, but he kept clenching and unclenching his hands and staring down at the floor.
Mrs. Middleton stood up and grabbed hold of her walker. “Thank you for your advice, Rutledge. We’ve taken enough of your time. I’ll leave you to have dinner with Abbey. Come on, Willie.”
Willie stood up and then went over and shook Daddy’s hand. “Thank you, sir,” he said, then he gave me a wave and followed Mrs. Middleton out the door.
I stood at the door beside Daddy as they climbed into the truck and drove away.
“Willie didn’t look as happy as people should look when they just got out of jail,” I said.
Daddy looked down at me. “Willie has decided that he needs to plead guilty.”
“But . . . you said he didn’t steal anything!”
Daddy shook his head. “The only thing Willie is guilty of is drinking on the job with a couple guys who brought a bottle and talked him into it. He’s guilty of that and of being a sucker. The problem is that Willie knows that what he did was wrong. He can’t understand the difference between being guilty of making a dumb mistake and being guilty of being evil.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m trying to get the charges either reduced or dropped.”
“That’s good, right?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Daddy just looked down at me and adjusted his glasses so they sat on the end of his nose. It was something he did when he was unhappy with me.
“Those aren’t the only charges that need to be discussed,” he said.
Daddy turned and walked back into the kitchen without saying another word. What he’d just said and the way he’d just looked at me gave me a bad feeling. I followed him into the kitchen, but rather than saying anything more, his attention was now on the TV. The sound was low, but local news was on, and the weatherman was pointing to a storm off the southeast coast. A name in big letters at the top of the screen said Tropical Storm Dominique. Daddy turned up the sound just as the man said there was a risk it would strengthen to a hurricane.
The announcer said Dominique’s movement had stalled due to a high-pressure ridge coming out of the west, but it would probably start moving in another day or so. Whether it would weaken or strengthen, and where and even if it would make landfall, was anybody’s guess. He showed a big cone between northern Florida and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Dominique would most likely end up. South Carolina, and more particularly the area around Leadenwah, was smack dab in the middle of the cone.
“If this storm suddenly strengthens and heads our way, it isn’t going to give us much warning because it’s already so close,” Daddy said. “Assuming it hasn’t died out or turned sharply north, on Saturday morning I’m going to close up our shutters. Then I’m going to help Mrs. Middleton and Grandma Em.”
“You’ll need my help,” I said, thinking Daddy couldn’t do the things he used to do all alone.
“I’m able to do more and more every day. I think I can handle that, but while I do the houses, I need you to get the barn secured. Saturday afternoon I’ve got a van coming to take the horses and ponies inland. Just a precaution, but better safe than sorry, right?”
I nodded. Anyone who lived on a coastal island in South Carolina learned from a young age never to ignore hurricane warnings. As much as I hated to see a storm coming, I remembered the look Daddy had given me a moment earlier and felt relieved that at least he wasn’t upset about something I had done.
He turned away from the TV and opened the oven door. Daddy always rubbed his chicken with olive oil then roasted it at a high temperature and basted the skin with the pan juices. It always came out crisp on the outside and juicy in the middle, just the way I loved it. While the chicken was cooking, Daddy put some broccoli in the other oven to roast, and of course we were also having steamed rice.
As he finished with the broccoli, I remembered that I had asked him to check on any construction projects on Leadenwah Island. “Hey, Daddy,” I began. “Did you have a chance to—”
He cut me off by letting the oven door slam closed loud enough to make me jump. At first I wondered if it had been an accident, but he was fixing me with that same dark look he’d had before as he wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. I had a feeling we were going to discuss the “other charges” he’d mentioned.
“I got a phone call just before Mrs. Middleton and Willie arrived,” he began.
I felt my stomach tighten but raised my eyebrows, trying for an innocent look. “Yes?”
“Patty LaBelle said you were extremely rude to her and her daughter this afternoon. Is that true?”
I thought about it for a second. “Partly true,” I confessed.
“I asked you a yes-or-no question. Either it’s true or not true, so which is it?” he demanded.
I thought about telling him that there were times when it would be better not to talk like a lawyer, but I didn’t. In the South being rude to another adult, even if that adult was a total jerk, was a crime, and it was even a worse crime if you were a girl. Girls were always supposed to be “ladylike.” Fortunately Daddy wasn’t as ridiculous about that stuff as most other parents were, but he still hated rudeness.
I gave him his hard look right back. “I was rude,” I admitted. “But before I was rude, I tried to help Mrs. LaBelle. I offered to change her tire and started to reach into her trunk to get the spare. She told me not to do it and tried to slap my hands away.”
I paused for a second, just the way Daddy had taught me in order to get the maximum bang out of what I planned to say next. “Only she dropped her purse, and I saw the liquor flask she keeps in there. Also her lipstick was on crooked, and she staggered a little when she walked.”
Daddy didn’t react. He just kept looking at me without any expression on his face. It was another of his lawyer tricks. He was thinking that if he just let the silence hang, it would cause any guilt I might be feeling to begin to fester. When I was a little kid, it used to work every single time.
“You still need to be respectful toward adults,” he said, after the waiting didn’t do any good.
I felt my eyes narrow. “You’re the one who always tells me, ‘As ye sow so shall ye reap.’ I don’t think I need to respect somebody just because they’ve managed to live for a certain number of years. That’s not sowing much, is it?”
Daddy’s eyes narrowed even more. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. After a second he threw a little more kindling on the fire. “You know the LaBelle family has had a hard time. You and I were in that same position not too many months ago. Maybe a little compassion on your part would be appropriate.”
Once again I didn’t say anything. The silence stretched and soon became a contest of wills. I was not going to be the one who gave in.
“I still don’t think you’ve told me the whole story,” he said at last.
I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. “I was rude because Mrs. LaBelle was rude first. She said you talk trash.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What did you do then?”
“She had thrown her cell phone in the dirt ’cause she was mad, and I told her there were laws against littering.” I glanced at the ceiling. “Well, maybe I said that before she called you a trash-talker. I don’t really remember.”
I could tell that Daddy was doing his best not to smile. He bunched his lips hard and bit down on the insides of his cheeks, but the corners of his mouth still curled upward. Finally he stopped fighting it and gave me a grudging nod. “I know I’m not supposed to tell you this, but good for you.”
I thought I was off the hook, but in the next instant his brows clouded over and he let the other shoe drop. “But we also haven’t discussed exactly where you were when you happened to run into the LaBelles.”
I took a deep breath and told him the truth, and his eyes got as hard as stones. “I thought I could trust you to make reasonable decisions,” he said in a quiet, disappointed voice that hurt worse than a yell. “Clearly I was wrong. Because of your disobedience, you are now grounded. Other than school activities, you may not leave the plantation.”
He looked at me and seemed to think. “And one more thing. Because I thought you were growing up, I was giving you the right to make some decisions about certain social activities.”
I knew where he was going. I wasn’t going to fight him on my grounding, but I would on this. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Please.”
Daddy nodded. “Yes,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument. “You are going to Cotillion.”
“I can’t! It’s tomorrow night and I don’t even have a dress that fits.”
Daddy looked at me with a steely glint. “When you make bad choices, you lose other choices. I’ll buy you a dress tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll love my taste.”
We ate dinner at the kitchen table the way we always did during the week, and even though I’d been grounded and was being forced to go to horrible Cotillion, probably in the ugliest dress in the world, Daddy’s chicken, roast broccoli, and steamed rice were just as good as they had ever been, and they managed to cheer me up. When we finished, we even had ice cream for dessert, and then in that peaceful time when my stomach was stuffed and I was resting before I went up to start my homework, I remembered the other thing I needed to ask Daddy.
“Remember those plantation journals you showed me one time?” I asked. “The ones you gave to the Historical Society?”
Daddy had been watching a news show on TV and he turned to look at me. “Sure, what about them?”
“Bee and I would like to look at them.”
Daddy blinked. “May I know why?”
I explained about the biography we had to write for history and how Bee wanted to write about her earliest ancestors in America.
Daddy’s eyebrows went up. “I understand why Bee wants to do this, but I have to warn you, it’s going to be a tough experience. You think you can handle it?”
I shrugged. “You’ve always told me that a person can’t run away from the truth.”
He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “You’re right, but are you really that brave? If you are, you’re far braver than I would have been at your age.”
“I don’t feel brave, but Bee really wants to do this,” I said. “I don’t think I have a choice.”
In truth I was scared of what those journals might say, and even worse, of the way they might say it. I was scared that they might make my best friend decide she wanted nothing to do with me.