She regained enough sense to work on the ropes. He’d tied them tightly, and the iron bed frame wouldn’t budge. Her hands slowly went numb and she lost all track of time while she struggled, but after two hours she’d only chafed her wrists bloody. Frantic to get free, she fought like an animal in a snare, sweat and blood mixing and running down her trembling arms.
Evelyn’s heart pounded when the front door slammed. She followed the sound of George’s boots down to the cellar and renewed her frantic struggles. Then she heard him in the kitchen, his footsteps moving through the living room and up the stairs to their bedroom. His wild appearance drove her to new heights of fear and desperation. His hair disheveled, his shirt torn, and she wasn’t sure but thought the dark stains on his sleeve might be blood.
“My babies! What have you done with them?”
He hit her again. When she regained consciousness he was raping her. When he finished he got the knife and cut her free, dragging her downstairs by her hair and out the kitchen door, unmindful of her nakedness.
She thought she smelled gunpowder on him, or maybe smoke, like he’d made a fire. She fought and twisted, knowing if she could get free she could outrun him.
Where are the children?
She prayed they were all right, but deep in her heart she had a suspicion they were already dead and she was about to join them.
If they were dead, she didn’t want to live.
George dragged her across the yard and down a path. The sun hung low in the sky, plunging the woods into deep green gloom. They finally emerged in a clearing where, indeed, George had built a fire. The embers still glowed, ready to be stoked.
George flung her into the center of the clearing. She tripped over one of the small stone cairns and landed near the fire, vaguely aware of him reaching for a shotgun leaning against a nearby pine tree. Evelyn’s attention focused on the small, charred shoe on the edge of the ashes.
The shoe her daughter wore that morning.
She turned to George, her sanity totally shattered. “You bastard! You killed my babies! Oh God, please kill me, just kill me now—”
George sighted down the barrel of the shotgun and pulled both triggers, answering her prayers.
For the first time in her marriage, Evelyn knew true peace.
* * * *
Over two hours later, the fire had consumed Evelyn’s body enough for him to break the charred bones with his boot heel. He drank from the bottle of whiskey he brought from the house, doing a little dance on the grisly pile while he rubbed his side.
“Teach you to poison”—he jumped and landed on a larger bone, snapping it—“me. Teach you to disobey”—another jump—“me. Poisonin’ whore!”
At dusk, he kicked the bones around and spread dirt over the warm coals. He then stumbled down the path, taking a wrong turn, and then another when he tried to correct his first mistake. He drained the last of the whiskey and shattered the bottle against a live oak, muttering to himself and reeling along to a silent drunken jig, not used to being balked, even by nature.
“Goddammit!”
The earth suddenly gave way beneath his feet, sending him plunging forty feet to the bottom of an old well dug by the mining company. Ten years prior, they’d moved their main operations a few miles to the north and covered the well, but the wooden cover had rotted under a thick layer of pine needles and leaves in the humid Florida climate.
The fall didn’t kill George, but both of his legs snapped, and he missed impaling himself on his shotgun by mere inches. The walls of the well were steep and slick with moss. Only two feet of water stood in the bottom of the well, but he had no chance of rescue.
George’s screams for help echoed mercilessly back at him. Just before dawn the next morning his appendix finally burst and peritonitis set in, killing him before noon. Not as slow a death as Evelyn wished upon him, but it certainly was painful. She wouldn’t have been pleased because she wasn’t a woman to hate, despite the years of abuse she suffered at George’s hands.
She would, however, have agreed it was fair retribution for the lives of her children.
* * * *
Two weeks later, when no one heard word from the family, the sheriff and two deputies rode out to check on them. Ted Jensen, the shopkeeper near Silver Lake where they bought most of their supplies, worried when Evelyn and the children hadn’t been in at their regular time. When they missed two weeks in a row, Jensen wondered if Evelyn had left, or if George finally finished off his family. It wasn’t like Evelyn to not leave word if they were going away or make provisions for their livestock.
The search party found the three cows and two horses had broken through the corral fence and were grazing in the yard. Nearly empty, the trough contained murky water. One of the deputies drew fresh water with the hand pump and the dozen odd chickens were scattered by the stampede as the larger animals, including three pigs, fought for a drink. The family’s wagon still sat outside the barn, the harnesses hung in the tack room.
In the kitchen searchers discovered food gone moldy. They searched the house and found no sign of the family or what happened to the family. They discovered closets and dressers full of clothes, and some of Evelyn’s jewelry sat in plain sight on the dresser in the master bedroom. The only hint was a disquieting find in the master bedroom, the sliced remains of a woman’s dress and undergarments on the bed, as well as cut pieces of rope still knotted to the cast-iron bed frame.
So what happened to the family?
They searched the woods, finding only a cold fire pit in a clearing with small, unrecognizable bone fragments and a few stone cairns. One of the men thought it might be where the massacred Spanish explorers were buried. They all agreed someone probably killed and cooked a deer, none wanting to voice their grisly suspicions. The child’s shoe had to be part of an old trash fire, didn’t it?
They didn’t find the old well.
The livestock were given to the local parsonage, who greatly appreciated the donation. The county took possession of the property after the taxes went unpaid. The mining company bought it for back for less than they sold it to George. Eventually, the property changed hands again, and the mysterious fate of the Simpson family faded from newspaper headlines into rural folklore.
Eventually, only the land remembered.
Chapter Three:
1922
Sweat rolled off the man’s ebony skin as he sat in the back of the wagon, baking under the hot Florida sun. He could barely breathe through the flour sack hood. His muscles ached from his wrists being tied behind his back for two hours. The angry, unseen voices chilled his blood even in the ninety-degree heat.
“You know that nigger did it. That girl didn’t just up and run away! Her parents said she’s terrified of the woods.” Bud Jake, a thick-headed Cracker, drove mule teams for the mining company.
Robert Mallory, the mining operations foreman, tried to restore calm. “Bud, settle down. I sent a rider to Brooksville, he’s gonna bring back the sheriff and we’ll let him take care of it.”
The assembled crowd muttered dangerously, Jake speaking their minds clearer than they cared to. “We need to teach these niggers. They come in here, we tell ’em to leave, and they don’t. Mebbe we need to lynch a few of these niggers and scare ’em out of here!”
Agreement rippled through the crowd and Mallory felt the tide shift against the prisoner. Mallory didn’t believe Ben Caleb, a nineteen-year-old digger for the company, kidnapped the girl. Little five-year-old Lisa Prescott disappeared three days earlier from her family’s house not far from the main mining pit, in the Croom woods near Oriole. Searchers had turned up nothing except a shirt belonging to Caleb.
Secretly, Mallory’s mind leaned more toward the father. Mallory remembered when Tom and Mary Prescott first moved into the old Simpson house only months earlier. Mary was an outgoing, pleasant woman, active in the church. Tom, a retired cattle rancher, was always up for a game of penny poker as long as his wife wouldn’t find out
. Lisa was a bouncy, vivacious little thing.
Then Tom changed. Nothing Mallory could put his finger on. In fact, he thought he’d done or said something to inadvertently offend Prescott. Prescott grew surly, sullen, and withdrew from the community—not that they had many neighbors, but they stopped travelling into town. Mary quit going to church, and the few times she was seen she looked drawn, haggard, with dark circles under her eyes.
Mallory suspected something had gone very wrong in the Prescott household, maybe even some buggery. While Mallory wasn’t racist, he knew there were people content to let an innocent colored mine digger hang for a crime they’d committed. Who would the crowd believe? The girl’s “respectable” white father, or the boy?
Mary Prescott wasn’t any help. After the girl’s disappearance Mary withdrew, nearly catatonic, while Tom ranted and raved, his eyes wild and scary as if lit by a raging inner fire.
Mallory’s stomach churned, and his hand drifted to the butt of the pistol slung on his hip. This morning, he was desperately glad he’d worn it. Bud Jake was a stupid, piggish man, always in the thick of trouble and never around to clean up the mess.
Actually, putting a bullet between the drover’s eyes wasn’t such a bad idea.
“You need to calm down,” Mallory said.
“Mallory, you becoming a nigger lover? Is that it?” Jake scanned the crowd, searching for approval.
“Jake, what proof do you have he has anything to do with the girl’s disappearance? There’s no telling what happened. She could be anywhere.”
“We found his shirt not too far from the place. And nobody’ll swear they saw his worthless hide that night. What more proof ya want?”
Mallory got in the drover’s face. “A witness, for one thing. Maybe you don’t approve of the color of his skin, but he bleeds red just like you and me.”
Jake’s sneer turned his already ugly face into an evil visage. “Well now, why don’t we see about that?” Someone cheered support from the back of the mob.
“Why don’t I plug a hole in your thick head and see if I can let out some hot air?” The drover studied Mallory’s face, then stepped back and spit in the dirt.
The mob muttered, like a scared cur thinking about picking a fight with a larger dog, but Mallory felt the tide shift. He played his ace, pulling a bit of local folklore from his memory.
“How do we know this boy had anything to do with it? The house isn’t too far from the mine. It could have been anyone went up there. Or the father. Or maybe she wandered away and got lost. Maybe whatever happened to the Simpson family happened to that little girl.”
Surprised exclamations from the crowd. Although there was never any proof, most locals believed George went crazy and did something unspeakable to his family, then fled.
Assorted voices spoke up.
“The father?”
“Prescott?”
Mallory jumped on the opportunity. “I’ve known Tom Prescott for a while now. Some of you were here when the family moved to town. You can’t tell me Prescott hasn’t been acting strange lately.” Mallory hoped the tide didn’t swing too dangerously in the other direction. He didn’t want Tom Prescott lynched any more than he wanted Ben Caleb to swing.
“That’s right.”
“He’s got a point.”
“So let’s let the sheriff sort this out when he gets here,” Mallory said. “Believe me, if the evidence proves Ben Caleb is behind this, I’ll help tie the noose myself. But do you want the blood of an innocent boy on your hands if we find out later he didn’t have anything to do with it?”
He risked a look at Jake, standing sullenly behind the wagon, kicking at the sugar sand with his old sprung boot.
Mallory played to the crowd. “You don’t have a witness. You don’t have evidence. You lynch this boy, you’re murderers, every one of you.”
Someone in the back of the crowd shouted, and everyone turned. A rider approached, fast and hard. Mallory hoped it was the sheriff, but by the sudden gleam in Jake’s eye he had a sinking feeling it wasn’t.
Jake stepped up to him, and in a low voice said, “Now we’ll see where your fancy talk gets you.”
The crowd parted for the rider. Tom Prescott looked wilder than ever. He leapt off his lathered, trembling horse and ran up to Mallory.
“Is this the bastard what took my little girl?”
Mallory’s heart sank. Someone was getting lynched today, either Ben Caleb or Tom Prescott. Considering the mob’s skin color, Mallory knew who’d be swinging.
Mallory held up his hand. “Tom, you need to calm down. The sheriff’s on his way, he’ll handle this.”
Tom pushed him back. “I don’t want no sheriff, I want to know what he done with my baby!”
The words were right, but Mallory saw Prescott’s wildly gleaming eyes, and knew his suspicions were dead on. Tom Prescott wasn’t concerned about his daughter, just keeping the focus off himself.
He’s gone mad, Mallory thought. “Tom, we don’t know he did it.”
Jake chose this moment to step in, and Mallory knew Jake had sent notice to Prescott. “Mallory here even accused you.”
With seemingly superhuman strength, Prescott grabbed Mallory by the collar and slammed him against the side of the wagon, knocking the breath out of him. “I didn’t do nothin’!” He turned to the crowd. “Who’s gonna help me? Off to the tree!”
The crowd was first confused, then galvanized against Caleb. The mob, led by Jake and Prescott and buzzing like an angry swarm of hornets, overtook the wagon, pushing Mallory to the side. His protestations were drowned out by the crowd and their horses and the ineffectual cries of Ben Caleb being carted off to his demise.
Mallory chased them down. Too late he reached the juncture at Croom Rital Road where the “hanging tree,” a dead, twisted oak with a branch worn smooth from the ropes of prior lynchings, stood silent sentry. The crowd milled around, staring at Caleb’s hooded body twisting in the breeze. With the heat of bloodlust cooling, a few of the mob looked decidedly ill.
Mallory’s rage exploded. “What, you were too cowardly to face him when he died?” He hurled invectives at them until the sound of approaching riders made him turn.
Sheriff John Babbitt, followed by Mallory’s rider and two armed deputies, pushed their horses flat out. Babbitt, a large man who dwarfed his stocky roan, jerked the horse to a stop and jumped down, his eyes going to the boy’s corpse.
“Bobby, Pete, cut that fellow down,” he instructed his deputies.
The sheriff turned to Jake. “I should’ve known you’d be in the middle of this mess.” Jake started to open his mouth, and the sheriff—who towered over the drover by a good six inches and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds—poked him in the chest with his finger. “Not one word out of you, or you’ll be the next one swingin’ from that rope.”
Prescott skulked on the far side of the wagon, a dangerous gleam in his eyes.
The sheriff turned to Mallory. “What happened?”
Mallory gave him the quick version. When he finished, the sheriff turned to his deputies. “Get a set of shackles on that man.” He pointed, indicating Prescott. When they balked, the sheriff barked, “Do I need to give you an engraved invitation? Do it!”
Prescott turned to flee, but one of the disgusted mob stuck out his leg and Prescott went sprawling into the sand, sending up a cloud of dust. The deputies were on him, and a struggle ensued. Finally, after Mallory and his rider got into the fray, Prescott was shackled, arms behind him, facedown in the dirt.
Jake stepped forward. “What’s goin’ on here? You got your man. Don’t need no trial either.”
The sheriff turned. “I’ll overlook that comment, Jake, because maybe you’re too stupid to remember what I said about talkin’ a minute ago.” Jake stepped back, and the sheriff addressed the crowd. “Mrs. Prescott started talkin’ this afternoon, after she found out about Caleb. She said her husband had something to do with the disappearance. Didn’t know what,
but he went out with the little girl in his arms one night and come back alone. She watched him do it, and when he come back, he threatened to kill her if she talked. She said he’s lost his mind over the last several months.”
“She’s crazy!” Prescott yelled from the ground. “I didn’t do nothin’ to that girl!”
One of the deputies put a boot to the back of Prescott’s head and shoved his face into the dirt. “Quiet, you.”
Two men quickly turned from the group and raced to the tree line, where they retched. Others started talking about lynching Prescott, and Jake, too.
The sheriff pulled his gun and fired a shot in the air, the immediate silence deafening. “There ain’t gonna be no more lynchings today as long as I’m sheriff.” He cast his steely gaze on the now-subdued mob. “I hope y’all have learned your lessons. You just hung an innocent boy.”
A few of the mob members stepped forward and helped load Caleb’s body into the back of the wagon, covering him with an old blanket.
“Get that loony into the wagon, too.” Even bound, Prescott fought like a wildcat. Finally, Babbitt pulled his gun.
Prescott leered up at the sheriff. “Go ahead, do it. Shoot me like a dog.”
The sheriff spit into the dirt. “Don’t I wish I could.” He reversed the pistol and cracked Prescott on the back of the head with the butt, knocking him unconscious.
They tossed Prescott into the back of the wagon with less care than was shown for the dead boy. The sheriff nodded to Mallory. “We’ll get them back to town. Maybe I can get Prescott to talk.” He called to his men to mount up, and Mallory stopped Jake before he could climb up on the wagon seat.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Jake refused to meet his eyes. “Gonna drive the wagon to town. That’s my job.”