Tymber Dalton (2 page)

Buried what was left of them, anyway, after vultures and raccoons and other creatures had feasted upon the remains.

After two weeks of searching for the tribe, the Spaniards gave up, leaving the woods to return to their group to the south. Long after, tales of the massacre were legend among explorers and to those pioneers who followed in their footsteps, and eventually other parties avoided the patch of woods near the river the Indians called “Withlacoochee,” citing inhuman screams and a sobbing girl who was heard but never seen.

But the land remembered.

1908

The fate of the Simpson family died with its patriarch, George. He built the house on a ten-acre tract of land outside Brooksville, in the middle of good pine forest, near the phosphate mines.

George thought Tampa was getting too large, too many foreigners. He sold his prosperous shipping business and relocated his family north, where no one would disturb him.

Those who knew him would describe George as a class-A bastard, a real son of a whore. They felt sorry for his wife, Evelyn. He browbeat her mercilessly, often in public, humiliating her any time she dared speak. The kids—Keith, six, and Susan, five—didn’t fare much better. They learned young to stay quiet and not antagonize their father.

George ruled his family like he ruled his business—with an iron fist and a lead heel. Evelyn could voice no objection when he came home one day and announced he’d built the house. He ordered her to pack the contents of their Tampa home, remove the children from school, and have it done by the end of the week.

They moved in late February. She hated the new house and being away from other people. Oriole was not very populated, unlike Brooksville, the town immediately to their west. Their nearest neighbors were workers at the phosphate mines a half-hour walk away, and a clearing with stone cairns supposedly housing the remains of a few unnamed Spanish explorers who were the victim of a brutal Indian massacre—or so local legend said.

Worse, Evelyn could no longer find temporary respite from George’s wrath as she could when he went to work. In Tampa, once he’d left for the day, she could retrieve her carefully hidden journals and write to relieve her despair. Now she had to hide them in the attic and could only risk writing when George worked the small vegetable garden instead of making her and the children do it. Even then she only had time to jot down little more than the latest events, always keeping a sharp eye out the attic’s turret window for George’s return.

She was terrified of something happening to the children, of needing a doctor and not being able to make the half-day trip to Brooksville in time to help them. She hated the utter isolation. She also feared the horrifying mood swings George developed, even worse than before their move. He began acting irrationally, spending long hours down in the cellar with the door locked.

Before, George frequently acted harsh. After ten years of marriage, Evelyn had learned how not to antagonize him and found occasional calm. Now he struck at random, perhaps no longer fearing retribution from the law if one night he drank too much and killed her.

But Evelyn feared more than that. She witnessed him changing into something ominous and quite fearful to her, even more terrifying than the “old” George’s wrath.

* * * *

That summer, everything exploded in the Simpson household.

Evelyn walked into the kitchen after feeding the livestock and found George at the kitchen table, a pile of coins and bills before him. His smile chilled her to the bone. She slowly backed toward the counter, thinking perhaps she could grab a knife and kill him before he hurt her and her children.

“Sit down.” He motioned to the chair next to him. She forced herself to do it, noticing how he winced as he turned to follow her movements. He’d been ill the past several days but refused her attempts to get him to see the doctor.

She secretly and fervently wished he would die.

He waved his hand over the money. “Do you know what this is?”

Her mind raced through possible replies with lightning speed, desperately seeking one that wouldn’t provoke him. She finally shook her head, not daring to speak.

A half-full pint of whiskey stood sentinel by his right hand and he drank directly from the bottle. “Of course you wouldn’t, you stupid bitch. All you know how to do is spend money, not make it. Well, this is two thousand dollars, just a fraction of my years of work in the harness.” He took another swig of whiskey. “I keep it and the rest down in the basement.”

He slammed the bottle on the table, making her jump. She noticed he winced again.

“I’ve made a few decisions today, and I thought you should know.”

I’m going to die today
, she thought.
I hope I can save the children
.

He turned to her. Evelyn swore his eyes burned with a demonic red glow. “I know what you’ve been trying. I know you want me dead, but I figured out your plan before I gave you the satisfaction of dying.”

Now she was not only scared, but puzzled. “George, what are you—”

“Shut up!” He leaned over, his breath strong enough to knock out a horse. He must have been drinking for hours. “I know you’ve been trying to poison me!” His hand rubbed his right side and she realized he wasn’t drunk, he’d gone totally insane.

“George, I—”

He backhanded her, faster than she could have imagined possible. The force of the blow carried her out of her chair, sent her sprawling. She tried to scrabble away, but he moved too quick. He wrapped his fist in her hair and jerked her to her feet, his face inches from hers.

“I don’t plan on keeping a wife who’s trying to kill me, that’s for sure, you poisonous whore.
Puta
!”

She kicked and screamed, trying to pull away while he dragged her upstairs. She struggled, and halfway up the stairs he slugged her. Her head rocked back, explosions going off behind her eyes. By the time she regained her senses he had her tied, spread-eagle, to their bed.

He advanced, hunting knife in hand.

“George, please! I’ve been trying to get you to see a doctor.”

“One more word out of you, and I cut your tongue out.”

Her sanity slipped a notch when she looked into his eyes. No mistaking that they glowed a dark, fiery red.

He cut her clothes off, ignoring her cries when he nicked her with the blade. He dropped his pants and raped her, Evelyn screaming as he tore into her. When he finished, he collapsed on her. She was certain she would suffocate until he finally rolled off of her and stumbled out the door, his hand rubbing his right side.

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.

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.