The Girl from Felony Bay (16 page)

I didn't know what Tom Blackford looked like, but he had gotten so much publicity for his articles on Daddy that I imagined he would be handsome and cool, like Robert Redford in an old movie that Daddy and I had watched once. Whatever I expected, it wasn't the person who got off the elevator a couple minutes later.

Tom Blackford was short with tired eyes and a horseshoe of limp dark hair around the sides of his head. He had two halves of a mustache that didn't quite meet in the middle, and narrow shoulders, and even though he was mostly skinny, he had a gut that stuck out over his belt.

He looked at my name tag, then at me. His eyes weren't very friendly. “Well, the rude young lady I spoke to on the phone. You wanted to see me?”

His voice was high-pitched and nasal, different from the way it had sounded on the phone. He must have been eating when the lady called, because he had bits of food stuck between his teeth.

“I have something you might be interested in,” I said.

“About your dad?”

“No.”

He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “I thought you were going to tell me you had new information that proved your father's innocence.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from telling him once again what a pea brain he was. “There's stuff going on at Reward that I thought you might want to know about.”

He wrinkled his lips as if that whole subject was too boring for words. “Like what?” he said in a tired voice.

“Like part of the plantation was sold to somebody other than the person who thought he was buying the whole thing.”

Tom Blackford looked at me a moment, considering. Then he let out a sigh, as if what I'd just said had triggered barely enough interest to justify a conversation. He jerked his head for me to follow, held his ID card to the lock that opened the glass doors, and then pointed me inside the elevator. We went up to another floor and got out in a room full of people who were sitting at desks typing on computers. I assumed they were the other reporters.

Mr. Blackford led me to a very small office along the side of the room. It had no window, but the walls were hung with pictures of him and framed copies of what I assumed were his most famous articles. Sadly, the first one I looked at said “Wealthy Attorney Accused of Stealing Millions,” and I felt my face start to color with shame and anger.

I sat in a chair he pointed to as he went around and plopped down behind his desk. He took out a pad of yellow lined paper, flipped to a fresh page, and grabbed a pen.

“Okay, so Reward was sold.”

“Yes.”

“Who bought it?”

“William Ellington Force.”

“Another relative?”

I shrugged. “In one sense.” I thought about telling him that William Ellington Force was a descendant of slaves who once lived on Reward, but I didn't think it was fair to bring Bee's family into this without asking their permission.

“But another part of the plantation was sold to somebody else?”

“Yes.”

“And this is important because your relative thought he was getting the whole thing?”

“Well . . . yes. Or, no. I'm not sure, exactly.”

“That's it? That's what you came here to tell me?” Blackford threw down his pen and shook his head. “That's not news. Sorry.”

He started to stand.

“It's news because I'm pretty sure that right before his accident my father had been about to deed that same property over to an African American lady who lives in a trailer down the road. Daddy thought it was heirs' property and that it was rightfully hers, but she had been kicked off by my uncle Charlie.”

Blackford looked at me. “Heirs' property, huh?” His lips bunched and worked back and forth beneath his pitiful mustache. “I assume this lady's not the new buyer?”

It was my turn to treat him like he was dumb. “You're not supposed to have to buy what's already yours, are you?”

He gave me a look. “So, who did buy it?”

“Something called Felony Bay Land Company, LLC. I don't know who owns it, but I'm trying to find out.”

“What are they, real-estate developers?”

“Well, I don't know if they're developers, but they've been digging a lot of holes.”

“A lot of holes?”

“Yessir. I think maybe they're looking for treasure.”

He threw down his pen again. “Why're you fishing me with this story, kid? What's in it for you? People buy land all the time around here. They dig holes for perk tests so they can put in septic. Or they dig holes as foundations for houses. Or they dig holes to dig holes. I don't know, and I don't see any story here.”

I was feeling desperate. “Don't you think taking land away from a poor, disabled lady ought to get people interested?”

Blackford raised his eyebrows and seemed to think about that. Then he gave his potbelly a little rub and stood up. “Yeah, maybe. Thanks for coming in.”

I felt a sense of failure as he walked me out to the elevator. I didn't have the slightest idea what he would do with the information. Probably nothing, I decided. I left without even kicking him in the shins the way he deserved.

I
took another bus south,
going back toward where I had started earlier, getting off at Calhoun Street and walking east several blocks to East Bay, to the offices of the Coastal Conservation League. I didn't know very much about the CCL, only that they got involved in protecting land and water from polluters and developers and others who wanted to do things that screwed up the environment.

I didn't really know what I expected them to do or even what they could do. I just had a vague notion that if they thought somebody might be doing something bad to the environment, they might start trying to find out who they were and why they were doing it. Maybe they could find out who the people were behind FBLC LLC, even if I couldn't. Maybe they would think it was bad that so many holes were being dug so close to the water. Maybe they would tell them they needed a bunch of permits and at least slow down whatever was happening at Felony Bay. I knew I might be grasping at straws. These people might laugh at me. But what other choice did I have?

I got a better feeling as soon I went into their offices, because the lady behind the desk was about five times nicer than the one at the
Post and Courier
. She actually smiled at me.

“What can I help you with?” she asked.

“I need to talk to someone about what might be an environmental crime,” I said.

The woman raised her eyebrows, but she was being serious, not trying to treat me like a dumb kid. “What kind of environmental crime? It will make a difference as to which one of our people I call.”

“Somebody is digging a bunch of holes along the shore of the Leadenwah River.”

“Big holes?”

“Yes, ma'am. And real close to the water.”

She nodded, dialed an extension, and told the person who picked up, “Someone is here to report what might be illegal digging.” She paused, nodded. “Okay, I'll tell her.

“Sheila will be right out.”

Sheila turned out to be a middle-aged woman with light brown hair and a happy face with deep laugh lines around her eyes. She shook hands and asked me to come back to her office. On the way she got us both glasses of water, and I explained why I was there.

“You saw somebody digging holes near the water on the Leadenwah River?” she asked as we sat down in her office.

“Yes, ma'am. They were big holes, and right down near the water's edge.”

“Were the people burying anything in the holes?”

“You mean like waste?”

“Yes.”

For a second or two I thought about lying and telling her that I'd seen all kinds of horrible things being buried there, but in the end I said, “No, ma'am. I don't they were burying anything, just digging.”

“Were they digging on land or in the water?”

“I think just on land.”

Sheila gave me a sad smile. “I'm afraid, based on what you're telling me, even though it sounds a bit suspicious, that they probably aren't breaking any laws.”

“Can you go out there and check it out? Aren't there some kind of permits they need?”

“Is there something more that you can tell me?”

I let out a big sigh. “It's not really environmental,” I said, and then I told her about Mrs. Middleton and heirs' property.

Sheila looked at me sympathetically. “I can understand why you would want to stop this. But we're an environmental organization. I'm afraid there's nothing the CCL can do. I'm sorry.”

I thanked her for her time, but I couldn't disguise my disappointment. I had started off the day with what I thought were two really good ideas for getting to the bottom of what was happening at Felony Bay. Now I realized that neither one of them was going to work.

There was only one thing left for me to do in town. I walked outside and started toward the Force & Barrett offices to see if Custis had finished getting the answers he had promised yesterday. Even if he had, I knew it would probably be all the information I could get my hands on. My dream had convinced me that time was running out, but I still didn't have enough facts. I just knew something was about to happen and that it was my job to stop it.

I wished so badly that Daddy would wake up so I could ask him what I should do. I wanted to know how a twelve-year-old girl could possibly stop anything.

W
hen I reached
Force & Barrett, I told the red-haired lady in the reception area that I was there to see Custis.

“Please have a seat,” she said. She gave me a cool look and dialed an extension. “The Force girl is here,” I heard her say.

Then she hung up the phone and looked at me. “Someone will be right out.”

I sat and thumbed through a magazine while I waited, expecting to see Martha's smiling face come through the door at any moment. Even so, I couldn't get rid of the feeling that something wasn't right. Several minutes went by, and when Crawford Barrett suddenly appeared, I understood why things had felt weird.

“Abbey,” he said, giving me a big smile.

I stood and nodded. “Hello, Mr. Barrett. I was actually here to see Custis.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But when Custis told me what you had asked him to do, I decided to sit down with you myself.”

I tried to fight down a sense of helplessness that verged on panic. “Custis isn't going to talk to me?” I asked, hearing the tremor in my voice.

Even as I fought for control, part of me felt deeply hurt that Custis would have betrayed my confidence and gone to Mr. Barrett. The other part of me felt an ice-cold anger.

“I'm afraid he's not able to,” Mr. Barrett said. He sat down in the chair beside me and motioned for me to sit again. “A matter came up with one of our clients today. I asked Custis to deal with it, and it required him being outside of the office.”

“Is Custis in trouble?”

Mr. Barrett smiled, as if nothing could be further from the truth. “Absolutely not!” he said with a laugh. “But I know you've raised some questions about the sale of the Felony Bay parcel, and I thought, since I'm the one closest to the issue, that it would be best if I tried to answer them.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said with a smile, since it was obvious that I didn't have any other choice. I have found that with certain adults if you say
sir
and
ma'am
often enough and smile when you talk to them, they think you agree with them, no matter what.

“I believe you asked Custis how it was that what we refer to as the Felony Bay tract came to be sold separately from the rest of Reward. Is that correct?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“Well, the fact is that while the rest of the plantation has always been a single tract, your father had broken out the Felony Bay tract as a separate parcel.”