Read Online The Girl from Felony Bay by J. E. Thompson - Free Book Online

invisible to anyone boating on the river who didn’t know it was there. Felony Bay tucked into the plantation in the shape of a huge teardrop. Also, unlike the pluff-mud banks that ran along almost the entire riverfront, the bay had a sand beach all the way around it.
    From the Leadenwah River, the bay’s entrance looked like nothing more than a narrow creek, because its sides were overgrown by aquatic plants that moved aside when a boat came through, then immediately sprang back to cover up the passage. What looked like a shallow creek was more than ten feet deep at the center. The bay itself probably didn’t take up more than three or four acres. However, just like the entrance, the water was uniformly deep, which made it an excellent and totally protected anchorage, especially for people who wanted to stay hidden. It had gotten the name Felony Bay because most of the people who put their ships there over the years had been criminals.
    Before Daddy’s accident, whenever I had been in a really dreamy mood, I used to come down and sit on the beach at Felony Bay and think about some of the tales he had told me about it. I would close my eyes and imagine Indians slipping into the bay in their canoes to hide from enemies, or some big old sailing ship anchored there with a crew of pirates who were hiding from the British navy. Other times I would imagine the dashing captains of Confederate blockade-runners, who had brought damaged ships into Felony Bay for secret repairs.
    I knew that Bee would find Felony Bay fascinating, too. I wanted her to lie in the sand right on the edge of the bay, close her eyes, and try to imagine the sights and smells and sounds as I told her its stories.
    I was so busy thinking about how I wanted to tell those stories that I didn’t see the signs. It was only when Bee asked, “What are those?” that I looked up and noticed them.
    I felt my breath catch in my throat as I stared in utter surprise. Just ahead of us, a line of brand-new yellow signs that said No Trespassing ran from tree to tree as far as I could see, cutting us off from Felony Bay.
    I stopped and stared. What I was seeing made no sense. “No Trespassing?” I said. I walked over to one of the signs and read the smaller print underneath. “Trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. FB Land Company, LLC, owners.”
    I shook my head. “That’s crazy. This land is part of Reward Plantation. This belongs to your family.”
    I turned to look at Bee. She shrugged. “If my father had sold part of the plantation, he would have told Grandma Em.”
    We stood there looking at the signs, neither one of us saying anything. Finally I said, “Even if your dad had somebody put these up, he wouldn’t mean for you to keep out, would he?”
    â€œNo.”
    We nodded to each other and stepped inside the line of No Trespassing signs. As we went a little farther, we began to hear the sound of machinery. It sounded like a truck or bulldozer growling back and forth, or like somebody using an excavator to dig a hole.
    We continued up the path another hundred yards until we could see light coming through the trees, and beyond that the warm glow of Felony Bay’s mud-colored water under the early-afternoon sun. The machinery sound was much louder here, and as we went forward, I could see something moving down the beach.
    For a few seconds I thought that Bee’s father might have hired contractors to build something here, maybe a guesthouse or a boat shed, and maybe the contractors had put up the signs to keep people out while they worked. It seemed like there had to be a normal explanation, so we started to walk out of the undergrowth and into the open.
    The first thing that came into view was the old, abandoned cabin. It was off to our right, and it was in bad shape. Its roof had started to sag in several places, and the walls of the rear section were starting to