A Dark and Lonely Place (51 page)

Three white pine coffins were built, but funeral plans hit a snag when no clergyman would agree to officiate, not even those friendly with John and his family. All feared retaliation from lawmen or relatives of those
killed or injured by the gang. Hollow-eyed and desperate, Laura sought help from the Salvation Army commander in Miami. “Who are we to make the final judgment on a man’s life?” he told her, and agreed to help. “That’s up to God, not us.”

John Ashley was laid to rest on Tuesday, November 4, 1924, the day Americans elected Calvin Coolidge president, and Sheriffs Baker and Merritt celebrated their wins at the polls.

The Salvation Army commander brought a woman with an angelic voice with him. She sang two hymns. Laura wept quietly through the service, which ended in prayer.

Leugenia choked back bitter sobs as the coffins were lowered into the ground. “Look there, at all three of them!” she cried. “Killed for nothing. And here’s the old man.” She lovingly caressed her husband’s headstone. “Dead too soon, like the others. My Joe was a good man who never harmed a soul.”

“Never mind, Mama,” Daisy said, holding her mother. “We’ll see them all again someday soon.”

But Leugenia was inconsolable. “It’s all Bob Baker’s fault!” she wailed, as the few mourners dispersed. “We didn’t do a thing to him. I wish he’d fall, be paralyzed, and have to be spoon-fed for the rest of his life.”

“Doesn’t do any good to talk like that, Ma,” Bill said, as his wife, Lucy, dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief.

Rumors that the dead were handcuffed first and then shot spread quickly. Whispers grew into questions asked out loud. Judge Angus Sumner empaneled a coroner’s jury for an inquest into whether the shootings were justifiable or murder.

The two groups of deputies each hired a lawyer. A young Fort Pierce attorney, Alto L. Adams, who would later become chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, was hired by the Ashley family. The inquest began the day after the funerals. The undertaker, who owned the hardware store/mortuary, testified that he’d attended to the bodies and saw no evidence that they’d been handcuffed.

The two young Sebastian men in the other car on the bridge that night, testified for four hours. Ted Miller and Sam Davis swore they initially saw the prisoners standing in the road, hands in the air, surrounded
by deputies. They saw Sheriff Merritt as well, they said. When they returned across the bridge, they said three of the men were now handcuffed together while Ashley stood off to the side, also handcuffed. They passed slowly for a good look and plainly saw cuffs on all four, they said, then rushed into town and told a number of people that the gang had been captured. Shortly after, they said, Sheriff Merritt arrived in Sebastian by another route to report the “wild gun battle.”

Adams, the Ashley attorney, asked the judge to have the bodies exhumed for an unbiased examination of their wrists and to determine exactly how they had died. When jury members appeared enthusiastically in favor of the move, the judge denied the request and disqualified the jurors on the grounds that they could not be impartial. He quickly empaneled a new, handpicked jury for an inquest on the following Saturday. The carefully selected jurors listened intently to testimony from Sheriff Merritt and the seven deputies and reached immediate verdicts of justifiable homicide in all four deaths.

Lester Lewis, the part-time hardware/mortuary worker who took delivery of the dead and had always said that they’d arrived in handcuffs and stacked like cordwood, was never asked to testify. The two young men at the bridge were not called to appear at the new inquest either.

Each day Leugenia trudged wearily down the path to the little family graveyard to mourn. Laura went alone at night or just before sunrise, carrying fresh flowers and a loaded gun. Twice in the two days after the funeral she had run off vandals and would-be grave robbers she caught creeping into the tiny cemetery after dark. Rumors had spread that more than $100,000 in missing loot had been buried with the dead men.

Ten days later, at midmorning on a Friday, Bill and Lucy arrived unexpectedly. He tooted the horn as they pulled up, and Leugenia dropped her darning to greet them. Lucy’s eyes burned bright as she flounced inside. Bill exuded icy anger. Laura first assumed that they had quarreled, but it quickly became apparent that their anger was shared, directed at something—or someone—else.

They totally ignored her and spoke only to Leugenia, who looked confused. What now? Laura wondered, her heart sinking.

“Mama,” Lucy said dramatically, “we would never want to be the ones to have to tell you, not ever. But like I told Billy this mornin’, you’re bound to find out since the whole world knows.” The eagerness in her eyes betrayed her words.

“What it is, Lucy?” Leugenia frowned into the pale freckled face of her daughter-in-law.

Lucy nodded at Bill who, with a flourish, dropped a newspaper onto the kitchen table. He stood there, arms crossed, eyes hard.

“Oh, Lord.” Leugenia waved it away in disgust. “What are they saying about us now?”

“Not us,” Bill said. “Laura.”

Still ignored, as though she weren’t even in the room, Laura stepped up and read the front-page headline. “What . . . ?” She gasped, then snatched the paper up in both hands.

“Scorned Everglades Queen Betrayed Ashley Gang,” the headline screamed over the same photo of them that had convinced John it was too dangerous to travel together. The story reported that Laura Upthe-grove, Ashley’s rejected lover, was furious when he left her, and in retaliation had tipped off Sheriff Baker about his travel plans, setting in motion the fatal ambush.

“Lying trash! How can they say such a thing?” She hurled the paper to the floor, kicked at it, and burst into angry tears.

Leugenia picked it up, took her reading glasses from the shelf, and sat down at the table. Lips moving, she read a few paragraphs, then lifted her eyes, now flooded by tears, to Bill and Lucy. “Laura wouldn’t do that. Ever.” She looked bewildered. “This isn’t true.”

“Now, Mama, how can you say that?” Lucy’s sulky, syrupy words were patronizing. “When it’s all right there in front of you, spelled out in black and white. Read it again. Better yet, why not ask her?” For the first time since they’d arrived, Lucy, her eyes glittery, turned to look accusingly at Laura.

Leugenia opened her mouth but couldn’t utter a word.

“It’s a lie!” Laura said sharply.

“You were mad as a red-ass dog ’cuz he left,” Bill snarled. “I know. I was right here. You wouldn’t even say goodbye to him that morning, and he was dead that night!”

Laura and Leugenia shook their heads in unison.

“Answer me a simple question, Ma,” Bill said. “Did Laura go out in the car that day after John and the boys drove off?”

“Laura would never . . .” Leugenia’s voice trailed off. “She . . . she loved Johnny.”

“Answer the question,” Bill demanded.

Leugenia’s eyes widened.
“No,”
she moaned. Her mouth opened in a look of horror. “Oh, God, Laura, did you do it?”

“No. Don’t you believe it,” Laura said.

“John was my brother,” Bill said, “and I loved ’im, but he was no saint, Ma.”

“Billy!” Leugenia stared in shock at her sole surviving son.

“I found out a few things.” He glanced to Lucy for confirmation. She looked strangely pleased and nodded.

“Didn’t want to tell you this either, Mama, but John tried to force himself on Lucy the night before our weddin’. She didn’t tell then, ’cuz she didn’t want to upset the family.”

“You tramp! You lying bitch!” Laura lunged, caught Lucy’s hair, and slammed her face against the heavy wooden tabletop.

Lucy fought back, clawed, bit, and howled for her husband. Leugenia shrieked. John’s old hound dog woke from his nap behind his master’s empty chair, lurched stiffly to his feet, barked ferociously, and bared his teeth.

Laura and Lucy stumbled against the table. Crockery crashed to the floor. Stunned at first, Bill rushed forward, pulled Laura off his wife, and slammed his right fist into her face with a punch so explosive that he painfully bruised his knuckles.

Lifted off her feet by the blow, she crumpled to the floor like a broken doll. The old dog padded to her side and whimpered.

“Don’t care what you say about me,” Laura mumbled through bloodied lips already puffy. “But don’t you dare lie about John!” She looked up at Leugenia, pleadingly. “He was your best child, everything you believed him to be.”

Bill spat at her. “John got Pa and Bobby kilt,” he shouted. “Ed and Frank died too, because a him. But remember what started it all? Our family never had a bad word or a bit of trouble in this world till John
brought her home. Tell me the truth, bitch.” He towered over Laura, his face red and threatening, his voice ragged. “When you ratted them out to Sheriff Baker, did you know they’d be killed? Did you even give a goddamn about what would happen to them?”

“Don’t believe it, Lu,” she gasped. The left side of Laura’s face had begun to swell.

“I loved you like a daughter . . .” Leugenia’s pain had turned to shock and anger. “I thought you loved Johnny with all . . .”

Bill stomped from the room, returned quickly with a few garments ripped from John and Laura’s closet, and flung them to the floor near her. “Get up and get your ass out of here, Laura. You ain’t welcome. Get out! Now!”

“Don’t let her take nothing, after all the shit she’s done, all the damage she’s caused.” Lucy patted her hair, torn askew in the scuffle. “Look, Bill,” she whimpered. “She tore the pocket and the sleeve right offa my new store-bought dress! Scratched my face too.”

Laura struggled to stand, but the room spun and her knees buckled. Using a chair back for support, she finally fought to her feet and gazed imploringly at Leugenia.

“I can’t look at your face,” Leugenia muttered, and turned away.

Laura picked the few garments up off the floor and walked out the door, shoulders straight, chin up. No one watching knew the physical effort it took. Her last words before she closed the door behind her sounded slurred. “I’m sorry for you, Bill.”

“Don’t ever come back here,” he snarled.

She clutched the handrail as she struggled down the porch steps and went straight to the barn, now a garage. She sat in the car, rested her forehead on the steering wheel for a long moment, took a deep shuddering breath, sobbed aloud once, then backed slowly out of the barn and drove away.

“Why did you let her take that car?” Lucy angrily demanded.

“It
is
hers.” Bill no longer sounded bitter, only weary. “And it’s the fastest way to get that woman out of our sight for good.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

L
aura arrived just after sunset at the remote fishing camp John had built. She needed to recover, rest, and think. Where else could she go? No one had been there since she and John had left for the last time. She loved to be there with him, safe together, hiding out in the heart of the great swamp. But without him, it was a dark and lonely place.

His scent still clung to the shirt that hung from a nail in the wall and to the covering on their bed. She found a few supplies: a tin of crackers, dried apples, a bit of salt pork, and several mason jars—corn, snap beans, and tomatoes—she and Leugenia had put up last season. There was water in the rain barrel and more than enough whiskey to numb the throb of her injuries and allow her some sleep. Several of her teeth had been knocked loose. Her neck felt stiff. Her head ached.

She was grateful for the whiskey, even though it burned her mouth like a hot poker where Bill’s fist had split her lip and slammed her teeth through the soft flesh inside her cheek.

She drank herself to sleep but awoke terrified, in a nightmare, before dawn. The long, cold night was alive with snarls, high-pitched cries, and slithering sounds in the walls. With John the nights were short, filled with music, love, and laughter. But the terrible truth was all too real. The man she had loved since childhood was lost to her forever, along with the family she had adopted as her own. They despised her now, all because of Lucy and her lies.

How long is this night? Will the sun ever rise?

It did, as always. In its first pale light she found his straight razor and his boots. She studied her battered face in his shaving mirror and wished to be the way she looked so long ago when she and John were young and Winslow Homer was alive. His sketch of her still hung in the Ashley home, where she would never be welcome again.

She gingerly touched her tender tongue to her swollen lips. What can I do? she wondered.
Where can I go? How can I live?

She tried to pray but choked on the familiar words.
If God exists,
she wondered,
how could He have let this happen?
If only God was alive and John was with Him in a better place, instead of eternally earthbound, beneath South Florida’s fertile black soil like all those before him whose blood had nourished this hungry outlaw peninsula at the bottom of the map.

She yearned for the comfort of another beating heart. If only she had thought to bring John’s old dog here with her. They’d both loved him.

She tried to envision a future. She had always hoped to know her children again but was a total stranger, a notorious and alien stranger to them now. Her mother and stepfather had sided with Edgar from the start. No surprise there. Even bad mothers crave access to their grandchildren. They might take her in, but could she bear their recriminations, allegations, and reminders of all her misdeeds too numerous to count?

“I’d be better off dead,” she murmured, then cocked her head and slowly repeated the words, as though hearing them for the first time.

How inviting, she thought. Freedom from pain. Forever. The good news? A pearly gates reunion with John and all the others who’d gone ahead. The bad news? Hellfire and damnation for all she had done and not done.

Edgar had warned her when she left with John. She never forgot the moment, when he shook his fist and cried out, “You’ll burn in hellfire for this, Laura! You’ll both burn!”