The Girl from Felony Bay Read Online Free PDF Page A

thief, most of them didn’t know what to say to me, so they didn’t say much at all.
    Also, the day Timmy was sold had been one of the saddest days of my life. Even though I didn’t own him anymore, having a job where I could spend time with him and take care of him and make sure he was okay took away some of the hurt.
    The new owners of Reward lived in Atlanta. I hardly knew a thing about them, other than their name was also Force, just like mine, but apparently we were not related. Uncle Charlie had handled the sale of the plantation, but I don’t think he had ever met the people, just their lawyers. Supposedly Mr. Force was a very wealthy businessman who traveled all over the world visiting his various investments. He was so busy that he hadn’t even come to see his new plantation since he’d bought it the previous winter.
    The one thing that made me think Mr. Force might be a nice man was that he had adopted the two old carriage horses. According to the man who had brought them here a few weeks earlier, Mr. Force and his daughter had been on a trip when she had seen the old horses and felt sorry for them. Supposedly she had asked her father to buy them and give them a nice place to retire, and he had done it right on the spot.
    When Timmy and I reached the barn, I turned around and looked to make sure the two carriage horses were following. Their names were Clem and Lem, which seemed perfect because of their slow way of walking and doing everything else. I twisted the tap above the watering trough and filled the big galvanized tub to the top. Then after the horses had a good, long drink, I opened the gate so they could walk to the barn and into their open stalls for their morning grain.
    Once they had eaten, I took Timmy out of his stall, hitched him to the cross ties, then hosed him down and brushed him until his coat glistened. Afterward I did the same to Clem and Lem and put fly coats on all three horses, sprayed them with fly repellant, then put them out in a different pasture.
    I spent the next couple hours mucking out the stalls, then cleaning and oiling the saddles and bridles. With most of the work finished, I walked out of the barn and down the drive toward Reward Plantation Manor, the big house where Daddy and I used to live. The name made it sound like some fancy Southern mansion with tall white columns, but it wasn’t. It was a pretty, old wooden house with green shutters and shaded porches on the front and back. I checked to make sure there were no cars around and that the new owners hadn’t shown up unexpectedly, then I went to a window at the far end of the house and peeked inside.
    It was Daddy’s old library, and it looked almost the same as it had the day I found him lying unconscious on the floor and bleeding from a big gash in his head. A stepladder had been set up in the middle of the room, and when I looked up at the ceiling, I had seen that a couple of old cypress panels had been moved aside to reveal a secret storage space. There had been pieces of gold jewelry and coins and what looked like diamonds scattered around, stuff that I had never seen before, as if Daddy had been trying to get them out of the hiding place or maybe trying to hide them when he fell. Either way, they didn’t belong to him.
    I stared into the room for a long time, remembering the scene as if it had been yesterday. I knew what the police claimed had happened. I knew that pretty much everybody else agreed with them. But I also knew that all of them were wrong. I thought about the last year, living with Uncle Charlie and Ruth, and about last night, about the letter from Miss Walker’s. And I thought about Daddy, lying there motionless in his hospital bed.
    I was going to find a way to prove he was innocent, and I was going to do it this summer. I just didn’t know how.

Four
    T hree hours later I was reading a book in the shade of a big live oak on one side of the barn when I