Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff (4 page)

Four

T
he next day was Sunday,
and Bee and I got up early, packed snacks and water, smeared on sunscreen, and met at the barn a few minutes after seven. We brought along a map of Leadenwah Island, and our plan was to ride down every single back road and try to spot the white truck.

As we saddled the ponies Bee said, “You really think that truck is on the island?”

I nodded. “I bet it's near wherever Yemassee found that white thing she was carrying,” I said. “Probably the men who stole her saw her as she was digging it up. If we just ride around long enough, I bet we'll spot them.”

Leadenwah Island is about seven miles long and three miles wide, and it forks like a pair of rabbit ears about halfway out, creating two separate points of land that jut out into the river. The point nearest to Reward is called Bishop's Point. The farther point is called Sinner's Point.

Like a lot of places in our part of the country, Leadenwah Island had a fair number of people who lived in small houses or double-wides set close to the road. We figured that if the fancy pickup with the double back tires belonged to one of them, it would be easy to spot. But there were also a fair number of folks with plenty of money who lived on much bigger places, and while the two guys we saw hadn't looked rich, it definitely wasn't out of the question.

Even before we got to the end of the plantation drive and onto the township dirt road, I could sense Bee already starting to worry. When I glanced over at her, she was chewing her lip. “What?” I asked.

“Most of these big places are set pretty far back from the road,” she said.

I shrugged. “So?”

“Gonna be hard to see a truck if it's parked all the way in the back.”

“Yup,” I agreed.

“So we're gonna trespass?”

“Can you think of any other way for us to spot that truck?”

Bee thought about that for a long moment. “I guess not,” she said at last.

We rode out the plantation drive, then turned left on the township dirt road. We went past several of the neighboring properties without even turning our heads, because we knew the people who lived there and the people who worked for them.

When we hit the paved road that ran down the center of the island, we turned left. A big tractor trailer overflowing with a load of freshly dug dirt passed us heading toward the mainland, and we had to close our eyes and turn our heads away from the blowing dust. That was the only vehicle we saw until we came to the Y intersection and went left, heading toward Bishop's Point. After that we saw an SUV or two and some pickups. None were white, and besides that I recognized the drivers and waved. A tractor with a big cutting bar passed us on its way to mow someone's fields, and we waved at that driver, too.

Once we were on the point, we stayed on the main road and then turned down the first of the narrow dirt roads that went toward the water and started to search for the white truck. We checked the small places close to the road and skipped past the first couple big places because, again, we knew the owners and the people who worked there. The third large property was one we didn't know anything about.

Old families still owned a lot of the larger properties on Leadenwah, but increasingly, as people would pass away, strangers from Atlanta or Charlotte or New York would buy them. Some of the newcomers spent a lot of time here and really became part of island life, but there were some, like the owner of this plantation, who didn't seem to care much about getting to know us locals.

“Ready to do some exploring?” I asked.

“Okay, but if somebody comes out and starts screaming at us, you're doing the talking,” Bee said.

Bee might have been the worst liar who had ever been born. I'd figured out pretty soon after we'd become friends that whenever we had to fib our way out of a tough spot, I was the one who had to do it. “No problem,” I said.

The property where we stopped had a couple fancy gateposts marking the entrance. A pair of wrought-iron metal gates would have been closed if the owners were away, but today they were open. We turned our ponies into the drive and started down the long allée of live oaks. The branches formed a high canopy over our heads, and Spanish moss hung from them and waved in the breeze.

We rode in silence for a ways, but then Bee asked, “So what are you going to say if the owner threatens to call the police?”

“Easy,” I said. “We're going to say that we thought one of our classmates lived here.”

“And what if we run into those two men?”

I shot her a sideways glance but didn't say anything because I'd been worrying about the exact same thing. We were getting farther and farther away from the township road, and I was growing more and more nervous.

Plantation
is a Southern word that basically means “big farm.” In my opinion plantations are the most beautiful places in the world, lush and green with fields of crops, and pastures full of animals, and ponds that twinkle in the sun, and pretty houses, and lots of flowering trees. A plantation is the opposite of a suburb. There aren't any nearby houses or neighbors you can run to for help, and once you get far enough away from the road, people driving past in cars wouldn't be able to see you at all.

Therefore, if you went riding up the driveway of a plantation where someone wanted to hurt you, it could be real dangerous. It hadn't even been four months since some bad people had tried to kill Bee and me on our own plantation, so I knew I wasn't being a weenie.

“Um, there's one thing I kind of forgot to tell you,” I said.

Bee looked at me and wrinkled up her face like she knew it was going to be bad. “What?”

“I saw one of those men on TV last night. They didn't just steal Yemassee. They also robbed that gas company.”

Bee's eyes went wide. “Those guys saw us!” she exclaimed. “And now you tell me they're also like major criminals? Are you seriously crazy?”

“This isn't just about Yemassee,” I told her. “It's about a man named Willie Smalls and Daddy.” And I told her about who Willie was and about Daddy's bail hearing. “If we can find the men who did all this, it'll help Daddy out, and he can get back to doing the kinds of things he was doing before, not getting all mixed up in this dangerous criminal stuff.”

She looked at me, and her eyes narrowed. She huffed some air out her nose and shook her head. “I must be crazy to be your friend,” she said.

Up ahead of us the line of live oaks seemed to stretch forever. Cows and horses grazed in the pastures on either side. We had ridden a good quarter mile off the county road before some barns came into view on our left. They were pole barns, the kind with just a roof and no walls, so I could see through to the other side. I looked hard for any sign of a white pickup truck but saw nothing other than tractors, mowers, and assorted farm equipment.

“Is this far enough?” Bee asked, her voice tight with anxiety.

That was when I heard the bark. A second later four or five big dogs came around the corner of an outbuilding and headed straight for us. Judging by their angry sounds, I didn't think they were coming out to say hello.

“I think this is plenty far,” I said as I wheeled Timmy around. I didn't even have to kick him, because it was clear he didn't want any more to do with those dogs than me. Even Bee's pony, Buck, was fast on his feet for once as we started to gallop down the drive toward the township road.

Ponies are fast, but their legs aren't as long as horses' legs by a long shot. For a few seconds it seemed like the dogs were going to catch us because we had to start from a dead stop and they were already running. I felt a twinge of something close to panic as I heard the barks getting closer, and I kicked Timmy hard. The barks stayed close for several more seconds, then finally they began to fade. When I felt like I could risk it, I looked back and saw that the dogs had stopped and were standing with their tongues lolling out as they watched us leave.

Once we were back out on the township road, Bee and I reined in our ponies and let them catch their breath. “That wasn't overly successful,” I admitted.

Bee gave me a cool look. “I'd say your brilliant plan of trespassing onto people's property and then claiming to be lost is almost guaranteed to get us bitten or shot.”

I bit back my normal response. Bee could definitely be a bit of a wuss, but in this case I couldn't argue. Anyplace we trespassed was going to have dogs, or worse, a hothead with a rifle or shotgun. I should have known that in the first place. After all, we
were
in South Carolina.

“Okay, change of tactics,” I said. “From now on we'll circle the fence lines and try to find a way in through the pastures. We'll stay out of sight better and be farther away from the buildings and the dogs, but we still ought to be able to spot the truck.”

Bee mulled over my suggestion for a few seconds then gave an uneasy shrug. “We'll try it,” she said. “But we stay away from swamps.”

Bee harbored an unholy fear of snakes and any other critters that like to hang out in swamps. Also a few months earlier we'd almost been eaten by a huge alligator named Green Alice.

“Deal,” I said, happy that she was still willing to come along.

We continued down the dirt road. For the next five hours, every time we came to a large property, we skirted the fence lines until we found an unlocked pasture gate. It took longer that way, but we stayed out of sight and managed not to get chased by any more dogs or any crazy owners. We spotted plenty of trucks but not a single new white pickup truck with a set of double back tires.

The day continued to get hotter as we searched. The sky was cloudless, the breeze nonexistent. We found several places to water the horses, but by late afternoon we were tired, frustrated, sunburned, mosquito-bit, out of snacks, and very sweaty.

As we plodded along the dusty road toward home, I got out the map and planned our next day's exploration. Little did I know what lay ahead. If I'd had any idea, I think I might have given up any hope of rescuing Yemassee and maybe even of trying to help Daddy.

Five

T
he next morning Bee met
me at the barn at seven, just like we had planned, but she told me she couldn't go riding right away. Grandma Em had a new project she was working on, and she wanted Bee to learn about it. I was invited, too, she said.

“How long will it take?” I asked.

“We're leaving in just a few minutes, and Grandma Em promised it would take only about two hours. She wants to get done before it gets too hot.”

“I guess I'll come,” I said. I didn't want to give up two hours of looking for the white truck, but I sure didn't want to go snooping all alone, either.

We went out into the pasture, got our ponies and put them in their stalls so we wouldn't have to waste time catching them later on, and just about the time we finished, Grandma Em drove up to the barn in a car I'd never seen before. A stranger got out of the driver's seat and introduced himself. “I'm Professor Emmitt Washburn, girls,” he said.

The professor was a tall, thin African American man with his hair all black and gray, which made me guess he was probably about as old as Grandma Em. But I also noticed that his eyes had the kind of glint in them that you'd expect to see in an excited kid and not in an old person. It made me like him right off. He opened the door for us, and Bee and I climbed in the backseat.

As we started driving, Grandma Em swung around in her seat and told us that Professor Washburn taught at the College of Charleston, and the two of them were working on a project to identify all the old slave graveyards on Leadenwah Island, mapping them out and making sure they were protected. The professor started talking, too, and he told us how slave graveyards were the places where slaves used to bury their dead. Unlike white people's graveyards, which had big fences around them and lots of fancy headstones, the slaves had nothing to mark their graves except things they planted and bits of pottery and other small items that over the years rotted away or got broken or covered with leaves. Because of that a lot of the slave graveyards had become lost and forgotten, and sometimes farmers or builders would find them totally by accident.

Grandma Em jumped in and told us how most people would try to respect the graves and would call the proper authorities so the bodies could be dug up if necessary and reburied someplace else, but how other people didn't. Hearing the two of them and how excited they sounded, a person might have thought a slave graveyard was the most interesting thing since sliced bread. I glanced over at Bee a couple times, and she shrugged at me as if to say,
Who knew what was going to get two old people excited?

I looked out the window the entire time we drove, because we were heading in the same general direction Bee and I had ridden the day before and I was hoping to catch sight of the white pickup. We went a little farther out on Bishop's Point, turned down a dirt road, and drove until we came to a small turnoff. There wasn't anything that looked like a graveyard, but then I spotted a narrow path leading off the road into a square of land that looked a little different from everything else around it.

The professor parked, and he and Grandma Em got some colored tape from the trunk. Bee and I followed them down the path to where some bushes and trees had recently been cut, and the ground changed. Inside the cleared area were a number of spots where the earth had sunk down a few inches. The sunken areas were all the same rough shape, maybe a couple feet wide and five or six feet long, and most of them had a yucca plant growing at one end. It took only a second or two to realize I was looking at graves.

Professor Washburn and Grandma Em went around the edges of the plot, looking at the ground with great care and tying the colored tape to different bushes and trees to mark off a rough square. When they finished, Professor Washburn came to where Bee and I were standing, and he led us to some of the depressions in the ground, where he squatted down and felt around under the thick litter of fallen magnolia leaves, finding several small pieces of pottery.

“Very often either yuccas or cedars or magnolias were used to mark the graves because the slaves had no gravestones, and these plates and cups would have been some of the very few possessions the slaves had,” he said. “Their loved ones put them around the graves to help the spirits on their journey.”

I looked at the small pieces of plates or cups the professor had found, but when I looked over at Bee, she was staring at a piece of a broken bowl and I could tell her mind was going a million miles an hour.

Grandma Em came up and put her hand on Bee's shoulder. “You okay, sweetheart?” she said gently.

Bee nodded but kept staring at the little shard. “This could have belonged to somebody in our family,” she said, after a few moments.

“Yes,” Grandma Em whispered.

A few seconds later, when we put all the pieces back under the leaves where the professor had found them, I felt bad, like I wanted to apologize for something. I wasn't quite sure how to put it into words, so I said nothing.

 

When we finished at the grave site, Grandma Em and Professor Washburn dropped us off at the barn. Bee had been quiet on the way back to the plantation, and she was still quiet when we walked back into the cool darkness of the barn. At one point as I saddled Timmy I felt Bee's eyes on me, and when I turned around she was staring at me the way she might have looked at a complete stranger.

“What?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew what the problem was.

Bee took a deep breath and let it hiss out. “I'm just trying to understand how anyone could have treated people so badly.”

I nodded and felt my shoulders sag. I knew she was talking about my family and her family. It was the same question that had been digging away at my brain ever since we'd found those pieces of pottery. That was just about all those people had owned, a plate and maybe a bowl, along with the shoes on their feet and the shirts on their backs. “I don't know,” I said at last. “But I'm sorry.”

Bee came over and gave me a soft punch on the shoulder. “I know,” she said. “It's just that, living here, all that stuff seems so close sometimes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Wanting to find a way to break the awkwardness, I took out the map from a day earlier, where I had marked off the roads we'd already gone down. “Look, we've done these,” I said, showing Bee. “Okay with you if we start here?” I pointed at the dirt road where we'd been just a little while earlier. I hadn't seen any place on that road before we reached the slave graveyard that we needed to explore.

Bee shrugged. “Sure,” she said.

We led the ponies out of the barn and mounted up, and just as it always did, the act of getting up on Timmy's back made me feel better. I looked overhead and saw that the sky was cloudless, which meant it was going to be another scorcher. Even the breeze seemed so tired out by a long summer of hot days that it could hardly be bothered to blow.

My brain sort of went to sleep in heat, and I forgot about everything but riding ponies and finding Yemassee as we trotted off the plantation, to the end of the dirt road and then along the paved county road, once again seeing very few other cars or trucks. A horse van went by, a pickup and a tractor, and then another of the big tractor trailers roared past loaded with dirt that blew off the top and burned our eyes and noses. Just like yesterday we saw no white pickup trucks with double rear tires.

We took the fork to Bishop's Point and turned onto the road I had marked, and when we passed the slave graveyard, we once again began riding the fence line of the big properties. We stayed at it for nearly three hours and covered four more roads before we stopped to eat the snacks we had brought along and give the ponies a rest.

“Sure would be nice to take a swim this afternoon,” Bee said as we mounted again.

“Yeah,” I said, wiping the sweat from my face with the tail of my T-shirt. “But we should keep going a little while longer,” I said. “School starts tomorrow, and we won't have very much time to search.”

Bee sighed and slumped in her saddle. “We haven't seen anything except some big houses and barns and a bunch of tractors and other farm junk and about twenty snakes.”

I felt just as hot and tired as she did, but I kept thinking about the judge and about Daddy, who I was pretty sure had gotten a ride into his office with Custis and was working all day getting ready for tomorrow's hearing. “None of the snakes were poisonous,” I said.

“But they all scare me. I hate them, even the ones that aren't poisonous, even their little tiny babies.”

“But don't you feel sorry for the judge and Yemassee? Don't you want to help Daddy and Willie Smalls?”

“Yeeessss,” Bee drawled out in her most frustrated tone. “You know I do.”

“Then we need to keep looking.”

Bee let out a sigh, but she gave Buck a kick and headed down the road beside me.

We rode for another couple hours until we had covered nearly everything that was left of Bishop's Point. I felt as hot and cranky as Bee and just as frustrated, because we hadn't seen a thing that resembled the big white pickup truck or a stolen dog. We were getting close to the end of the very last road on the point when we came to another large property.

“This has to be the last place,” Bee said. “If I don't get in the river soon, I'm gonna die.”

“Okay,” I promised.

The property had a white fence along its front and an electric gate across its drive. Low, swampy land ran along the near side of the property, and that meant snakes and alligators, so we stayed on the road and went all the way to the far corner. When we reached it, we saw that the fence turned ninety degrees and ran through fairly dry ground as it headed toward the back of the property and the Leadenwah River. A few yards beyond the fence line what looked like a rutted dirt path also ran back through the palmettos and wild oleander, seeming to run roughly parallel to the plantation's fence.

I turned and waved to Bee, who had stopped about twenty yards behind me. “This is the last place, and we have an easy way to sneak along the side.”

Bee was slumped in her saddle in a way that let me know she was more than ready to quit. I started into the dirt track, but when I glanced back again she still wasn't following. “Look,” I said, pointing, “solid ground. No swamps in sight. Last place, I promise. Come on.”

Bee pressed her lips together, swallowing whatever complaint she wanted to make. After a second she gave Buck a reluctant kick and caught up. We started up the path but went only a few yards before the vegetation thickened, pressing close on both sides and cutting off our view ahead or behind. It also killed the breeze, and the air became steamy and close, smelling of mud and rot. Mosquitoes buzzed around my exposed skin, and behind me I could hear Bee slapping as they landed on her.

When I glanced down at the ground, it looked like a set of big tires had recently gouged the soft dirt. It made me a little nervous, and I tried to look through the thick undergrowth for signs of a shanty or a rusted trailer up ahead. It sure didn't look like we were riding into a place where someone actually lived, but it wasn't unheard of to have your basic hillbilly or redneck living next door to a fancy plantation.

The plantation fence was somewhere off to our right, but the trees were too thick to see it. To my dismay the dirt track bent to the left, heading away from where I sensed the fence had to be, and at the same time it also seemed to get darker and spookier.

“Abbey!” Bee whispered behind me. “I think we ought to turn around.”

I was afraid, too, but Bee was making me act braver than I felt. “Just a little farther,” I insisted.

“Forget it!” Bee's pony came to a stop behind me.

My sense of unease had blossomed like a magnolia flower in full sun, but I thought about Daddy and Willie Smalls and Yemassee and Judge Gator and tried to fight off my fear.

I turned in my saddle and whispered, “Maybe this is where the truck is. How are we ever going to know if we don't keep going? Remember all the people we need to help.”

“We won't help anybody much if some crazy old man lives back here and he shoots us.”

I looked at her, wishing she wouldn't talk like that, because it just made it harder for me to keep my own fear under control. “Just a little farther.”

Bee scowled, but when I nudged Timmy forward with my heels, she came, too. The ground under us was getting wetter, because I could hear the muck sucking at our ponies' hooves each time they took a step. When I glanced down, I could see that whatever had recently driven in here had also sunk deeper and deeper into the mud as it continued onward.

Up ahead the path turned even sharper to the left, completely cutting off our view. It felt like flies were buzzing in my stomach, but I said nothing, afraid if I did Bee would turn around and trot back to the road.