Free The Girl from Felony Bay by J. E. Thompson

to stay away from. Daddy used to say that Bubba’s naturally mean, and when he’s drunk he’s even meaner. Daddy also said that Bubba drinks a lot.”
    Bee smiled, but her face became serious. “We have to figure out if my dad was cheated when he bought this place.” She reached for the list I had made and started looking it over.
    While she did that, my own thoughts wandered back nine months earlier to when I had made a similar list, writing down the questions that needed to be answered to prove Daddy’s innocence. I still had the list beside my bed, folded up in my diary. I hadn’t looked at the questions in a long time, but I didn’t need to because I knew them all by heart.
    Daddy was strong and healthy and never a klutz, so how did he end up falling off the ladder?
    The ladder was in the middle of the room, far away from his desk, so what did he hit his head on to get hurt so badly?
    If he stole Miss Jenkins’s jewelry, when did he do it and why were there so few pieces left? What happened to all the rest?
    Daddy had plenty of money in the bank, and his accountants could show how all the money came from his law practice. So if he stole Miss Jenkins’s gold and jewels and sold them, where was the money?
    Daddy was always totally honest in all the things he ever did. If he didn’t need the money, why would he choose to steal from Miss Jenkins?
    If Daddy didn’t steal the gold and jewels, who did?
    If someone else did, how did they steal it?
    Is it possible that Daddy was framed so that somebody else could get away with the crime?
    I had taken my list of questions to the police and to Mr. Crawford Barrett, Daddy’s law partner. I had asked them to help me get answers, but now, nine months later, not a single one of my questions had ever been answered.
    Bee looked up when she finished reading and then handed the list back to me. I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket for safekeeping. “Tomorrow,” I said, “we’re going to start getting some answers.”

Eight
    I walked back to Uncle Charlie and Ruth’s house that night after eating the most delicious roast chicken dinner with roasted baby potatoes and garden-fresh broccoli. Rufus trotted beside me, full from his own dinner of chicken scraps. The moon was nearly full, rising over the trees in the eastern sky and giving plenty of light to lead me home.
    The piece of paper with all the questions Bee and I had written down bulged in my back pocket, and the need for answers was burning in my brain. How was it possible that Felony Bay had been sold to somebody else? Reward Plantation had been in my family from the early seventeen hundreds to nine months earlier, roughly three hundred years. Daddy never would have broken up the land unless he’d been desperate. So who had done it, and how had it happened, and why? Those No Trespassing signs at Felony Bay made me angry, as if a chunk of our land had been stolen right out from under our noses.
    One thing I was sure of was that Uncle Charlie had at least some of the answers. I wanted to march right into the house and demand that he tell me what was going on. Who had bought the land? Had he had something to do with it? Why had he let that happen, and why hadn’t he said anything? Did Bee’s father know that part of the original plantation land had been sold to someone else? There were so many questions and no answers.
    I also knew that I needed to be careful. Uncle Charlie was strange about a lot of things, and giving up information was definitely one of them. Daddy always said that liars are the most suspicious people of all, always convinced that someone’s trying to put one over on them, since they’re always doing the same. That was Uncle Charlie, all right. Every time I asked him something, he looked at me like I was trying to trick him. That was especially true when he’d been drinking, which by this time of night