Disappearance at Hangman's Bluff (8 page)

Mrs. LaBelle's eyes narrowed, and all the lines in her face stood out, showing how truly angry she was. For half a second I thought she might actually come over and try to slap me.

“
What
did you just say to me?” she demanded. The words came out in a cold hiss, as if she was having a hard time getting air through her throat.

I stretched my lips and gave her the nicest smile I possibly could. “I said, ‘I think you dropped your cell phone,' ma'am.”

Her eyes flicked to the phone sitting a couple feet away in the dirt and then came back to me. I could tell she was embarrassed because we had seen her throw the phone, and her embarrassment made her even angrier. “You
would
be the one to know about laws, wouldn't you?” she rasped. “You and your trash-talking father.”

I could see Bee staring in shock, probably racking her brain to think of some way to make things better, but the situation was already too far gone for her to do much good.

Suddenly I heard the passenger door open and another voice, loud and shrill. “
God
, Mother, at
least
ask them to call somebody who can change the tire!”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of blond ponytail and a pink bow. Even before I turned, I knew exactly who it was, and my stomach tightened even more.

The girl hadn't focused on our faces yet, because she yelled, “Hey, would you please help—” She stopped dead when her eyes went to my face. “Oh,” she said, her voice dripping with dislike, “it's
you
.”

“Hi, Donna,” I said in a sappy-sweet tone. “I hope you haven't gotten too sweaty and dusty sitting out here waiting for somebody to change your tire.”

Nothing about Donna LaBelle had changed. She was dressed in one of her trademark outfits, a pink pleated skirt and lime-green polo shirt. Her skin looked like it had just been washed, right
after
she'd gone to the tanning salon. Her hair was just so, and even from here I could see the gleam of her perfect nail polish. I thought I might even have seen some of that eye makeup older girls put on. I hated myself for doing it, but I glanced down at my faded riding pants and my chewed nails that always seemed to have dirt stuck under them.

If I'd looked in a mirror, I would have seen the exact opposite of Donna—a girl with sunburn on her freckled face, because she always forgot to put on her sunscreen, and a curly mop of hair that never stayed in place. Fortunately I was wearing a riding helmet, so at least my lack of “Donna-perfect” hair was covered up.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Donna said. She was batting her eyes in a way that told me she was wishing I would drop dead of a painful heart attack at that very moment.

Bee was looking at all three of us as if she couldn't believe what she had gotten herself into. She was walking Buck around the Mercedes, probably hoping I would follow and we could make a quick getaway. When I made no move to follow, she made a last, desperate attempt to make things better. “We can help you change your tire,” she offered. “Abbey knows how. Her dad taught her.”

“She does
not
know how,” Donna said to her mother, as if Bee was an idiot for suggesting it and as if I was way too dumb to possibly know such a thing.

I wanted no part in changing their tire, but there was no way Donna was going to get away with telling me I didn't know how. I jumped off Timmy and walked to the trunk. “It just so happens I
do
know how to change a tire,” I said. “I just changed one last week.”

That was true, but it was also true that it was the
only
tire I had ever changed, and it was on a small tractor, not on a car. Still, I had learned how to use a jack and how to loosen the lug nuts and how to refasten them again.

I reached inside the trunk and started to pull up the carpeting that covered the bottom, because I was pretty sure that's where I would find the spare tire. I was hoping to find the jack there, too, but before I got the carpet up very far, Mrs. LaBelle rushed over and slapped her hands down on top of it.

“That's okay,” she said, blowing her cigarette breath into my face from just a couple inches away. It made me want to gag. “We'll wait.”

As Mrs. LaBelle shoved my hands away, she also managed to drop her purse onto the dirt road, where it spilled open. We both bent over to pick it up, causing us to knock our heads together, but it must have hurt her much more than it did me, seeing as how I had my riding helmet on. I straightened up, but not before I caught sight of the small flask that had spilled out along with her cigarettes, lighter, and lipstick.

“Now look what you've done!” Mrs. LaBelle snapped, grabbing for her purse and shoving everything back inside. “Just go away. My husband will be here in a minute.”

I stepped back, realizing that her unsteadiness might have been from more than just trying to walk on a dirt road in high heels. Her eyes were glassy, and her lipstick was sort of crooked on one side, like she'd had her head cocked when she'd put it on.

“You heard my mother,” Donna said, her voice growing shrill, almost panicked. “Just leave!”

Mrs. LaBelle staggered past me and picked her cell phone out of the dirt. I took a deep breath, getting ready to say something
really
mean to Donna, but when I looked at her again, the words stuck in my throat.

There was so much misery etched in her face that for once in my life I bit my tongue. Donna realized that I had put it all together, her mother's crooked lipstick, her stumbling, and now the flask in her purse. Mrs. LaBelle had been drinking, and Donna knew that I knew.

A wave of something weirdly like sympathy hit me. I hated to feel like that where Donna was concerned, but a voice in my head said it wasn't fair to kick somebody when they were down, not even Donna. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to be around them, but we couldn't just ride away. It was getting dark, and even in daylight a person could sit on a dirt road on Leadenwah for hours without seeing another human being. What if Mr. LaBelle didn't get there as soon as they expected? What if he didn't even come? After all, it had sounded like he and Mrs. LaBelle had been having a pretty big fight on the phone.

I was still trying to decide what to do when I heard an engine and saw a pickup truck approaching that could only have come from Hangman's Bluff. It was moving fast, putting up a big plume of dust, but the driver slowed down when he began to get close and stopped about twenty-five or thirty yards away.

It seemed that whoever was driving was trying to be polite and keep their dust away. Even so, the thick cloud continued to move right past the truck and settled over us, coating our tongues and our skin. Mrs. LaBelle brushed her clothes with angry swipes and glared toward the truck.

A man climbed out of the passenger door and came striding toward us. His face wore a stern expression, and right away I recognized Mr. LaBelle. There was no mistaking him, because he was tall and thin with a nose like a hawk's bill and black hair that came to a point and reminded me of Dracula. He wore a pair of cream-colored trousers, a blue blazer, and an open-collared shirt. His shined shoes were already covered in road dust.

He stopped several feet short of Mrs. LaBelle and let out a long sigh. “What's going on?” he asked in a tight voice. “You jerked me away from an important meeting.”

“We were coming to pick you up, and I got a flat tire,” Mrs. LaBelle said in a tone like it was his fault. “Someone needs to fix it.”

Mr. LaBelle didn't say anything, but his shoulders slumped like he was suddenly very tired. I found myself feeling weirdly sorry for him, too, just like I had for Donna. He went around to the trunk, pulled up the carpet, and jerked out the tire and jack.

Mr. LaBelle fit the jack into the side of the car, then glanced toward the truck one time before he stripped off his jacket, threw it across the Mercedes's backseat, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. I expected whoever was driving the truck to come over and help, but the driver stayed behind the wheel with the engine running. The setting sun was glaring off the truck's windshield, so I couldn't see him.

Mr. LaBelle was already starting to sweat through his shirt as he jacked up the car, but the driver still didn't get out and offer to help. I walked over to where Bee was holding the ponies and swung onto Timmy's back. Mr. LaBelle barely glanced in our direction. We seemed to be beneath his notice, which was fine with me.

I gave Timmy a nudge and started walking him in the direction of the truck. “Where are you going?” Bee whispered, but I ignored her. I had a weird feeling about who was behind the wheel and why he wasn't climbing out. I was getting closer and, with my angle changing and the glare on the windshield becoming less blinding, I could make out the shape of a man behind the wheel. He was sitting, but I thought he looked short and kind of fat. Just like the man who had stolen Yemassee.

I was still about twenty yards away when the man put the truck into reverse and backed quickly down the road until he came to a place where he could turn around. He did a fast K-turn and headed back the way he had come in a big cloud of dust. I watched him disappear with my heart thumping.

Eight

B
ee 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?”