Saltwater in the Bluegrass (34 page)

Lamar Jr. had driven
Grandma Lizzy to the lady’s prison in Pee Wee Valley to see Beth Ann every first Thursday of the month for the last ten years. For ten years, the secret had been keep. For ten years, Elizabeth had been forced to talk with Beth Ann through glass barriers.

Elizabeth trusted her grandson implicitly. No one in the family knew about her. No one in the family speculated; no one in the family cared to ask. As far as anyone who was involved with the Ingram family was concerned, the subject was closed. Beth Ann was a memory that had been wiped from their minds, and their mother Elizabeth was, as far as they knew, dead.

Everyone in the family had given up on Beth Ann except Elizabeth Ingram, her mother. Elizabeth continued to care, continued to visit her, and continued to long for her daughter’s release. Elizabeth promised Beth Ann that as long as she was in prison and Elizabeth was alive, she would be here for her daughter. No one except Lamar Jr., Katherine and Beth Ann knew that Lizzy had not drowned.

The apparent twist was that Katherine never knew or even expected that her mother Elizabeth was still in the area and in contact with Beth Ann.

Katherine had threatened her mother that if she did not move out of state, disappear, and never let it be known that she was still alive, Katherine would make sure every person knew that she had allowed her husband, their father, Baxter Ingram, to sexually abuse the girls for years. Elizabeth knew their father was raping the girl’s night after night after night and had never done anything about it. She had never even tried to stop it, or had she? Katherine had so much hatred for her mother that she would never believe that Elizabeth was actually trying to stop Baxter and that she was planning on coming back to save them.

Lamar Jr. had heard the story one night from Lizzy, about Beth Ann and how she was still in prison. Through some questions and prying, he found out his grandmother was still visiting Beth Ann each month. Lamar Jr., his long-lost grandmother, and Beth Ann met. They became a family, meeting on visitor’s days and keeping it quiet, very quiet.

No one was ever the wiser for it.

When Lamar Jr. met me
the week before at the horse races and asked me if I might help him, I never expected such a web of deceit was possible in one family.

Katherine had worked so diligently to keep the family torn apart. Lamar Jr. and I spent three hours talking over drinks and eating oysters down at the Captain’s Quarters, watching boats coming and going on the river.

“So, what was it that actually brought you here?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’re an awfully long ways from Florida.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Was it actually to help Kristina?” Lamar Jr. asked, rubbing his hands together and picking up his bottle of beer, ready to take a drink.

“Or did you have other plans once you got here?”

“Do you mean, did I come all of this way to help Kristina move into the Ingram Towers?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I was just curious.” He chuckled.

“I was wondering why you were helping her.”

“The more I think about it, the more I’m not sure. Let’s just say I was repaying a debt to her father. That is, by helping her, I’m helping him.”

“Her father?” Lamar Jr. asked.

“My uncle, Buddy Stringer—Kristina’s father,” I said.

“How so?” Lamar Jr. asked.

“He instilled in me a lot of his core values, especially when I was younger, when I was going in a million different directions all at the same time and not really getting anywhere.”

“Buddy Stringer. He sounds like a good man. I don’t remember Kristina ever talking about him.”

“That’s not surprising. She wasn’t big on family. Still isn’t.”

“Really?” Lamar Jr. said.

“Then again, what I knew about her back then, when she was growing up, Kristy was all about Kristy, especially when we were growing up and making plans. She always had big dreams, big ideas.”

“Kristina sounds a lot like my aunt Katherine.”

“Katherine Ingram?”

“Yes, my dad’s sister. Kristina reminds me a lot of her.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Probably not,” he said. “They just seem alike in a lot of ways.”

“Probably in more ways than you know,” I said. “Even so, she’s a real piece of work.”

“Yes, but I’ve always thought of her as a real easy person to like and to talk to.”

“Kristina?” I said, questioning his perception. “Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Don’t you mean she’s real easy to look at?”

“Well, maybe that, too.”

“Don’t get the two confused,” I said, staring out at the serene beauty of the river below. “Women can do that to you.”

“I won’t. So tell me about your uncle.”

“There’s not much to tell.”

“There’s got to be something. What was he like? What did he do?

Where did he live?”

For a moment I just sat quietly thinking about the array of passages Uncle Buddy told me about years back, when I was young, of him traveling and navigating around the world to far away places and territories where pavement ends and adventure begins.

“Buddy Stringer was a vision of something I wanted to be, something I thought I was. That is until he got old, or I got older. I’m not sure.”

“How so?” Lamar Jr. asked.

“Over time, I saw what he really was.”

“What do you mean?”

“A drunk. A full-of-shit drunk,” I said.

“I thought that you looked up to him.”

“I did for a long time.”

“There had to be more to him than just that.”

“Yes, of course there was. He was someone I looked up to. He was a sailor, a loner, an adventurer, a captain, and a crew. He was a navy man. He sailed around the world; he lived in exotic ports.”

“It sounds great,” Lamar Jr. said.

“I know it sounds great. When I was young, he was bigger than life. I tried to emulate him. I wanted to be him. He drifted in and out of my life, and at times he was bigger than life. He taught me to ride the waves, how to navigate, how to fish, how to carry myself. I loved the man.”

“So what changed you opinion?”

“The way it eventually affected the people he left behind. Finally, I realized he only care about himself.”

The longer we sat and talked the more I thought about Uncle Buddy. Even though we had our differences, he was still family, and I missed him, and I owed him whatever time I could give him—what it took to find out what had happened.

Lamar Jr. seemed like a nice kid. He too was on the outside looking in, searching for family and trying to make sense of it all. It was unfortunate that his life and his family had become such a dysfunctional mess.

Hopefully, this was about to change. For now we merely sat, we talked, and we drank, and as the evening went on we talked and we drank some more. Lamar Jr. told me about his grandmother. How he had meet her. With that, we made arrangements to meet her the next day. It would happen soon enough.

Jenny and I met Lamar Jr.
and drove over the river to a small home in Jeffersonville, Indiana, the next day and met a most gracious woman.

Elizabeth was a spirited, little, white-haired lady who had been more or less put out to pasture. She was expected to graze the rest of her life. When we arrived, we were asked to come in and to please call her Lizzy. We were welcomed as though she had never known friends before. She made some tea, and together the four of us went out and sat on the back porch. Elizabeth had us help her break some green beans. She had picked the beans from her little garden out back. Lizzy and Lamar Jr. sat on the porch swing rocking. Jenny sat in one of the old blue spring-action metal chairs that bounced, and I sat on the porch with my legs daggling off in the grass.

The story she would eventually tell was unbelievable. It was like some unimaginable dream that could not have been real, but unfortunately it was.

Elizabeth Browning Ingram had spent night after night upstairs, alone in her room at the Ingram house. Time after time, again and again, she would pray for the courage, beg for the strength, fight within herself, with the knowledge of what her life had become. What her family’s life had become.

Baxter Ingram had turned into a horrible man. He had turned into an overbearing monster. Knowing the truth was tearing her apart. Living with the guilt, the shame of what was being done in her house by the children’s father was eating at her more and more everyday. She had confronted Baxter time after time, and each time he had beaten her. No longer was she capable of putting the sounds, the promises, the screams, and the torture of this behavior out of her mind. It had to stop, and Baxter had to be stopped.

For the next two hours, Lamar Jr., Jenny, and I sat there and listened to Lizzy. She told us about the nights, the horrible nights living inside Ingram Mansion, the cold and heartless ways her husband Baxter would leave their bedroom and walk down the hall and into the little girls’ room. More and more it happened. Night after night he would leave and not return for hours.

“How could I stop him? How would I stop him?” she kept saying. It was as though she was reliving it here as she spoke.

“I had to stop him, I had to. No one knew; no one was there to stop him. I had to stop him!” she shouted. “I had to!” she yelled as the pot of beans spilled to the porch floor.

Apparently Elizabeth had decided to kill Baxter. In no way did she want to bring shame to her parents, who were still living in New York, or her children. She knew there had to be a way she could stop Baxter without anyone knowing it had been her. This is when she had come up with the idea of disappearing, staging her own death on the boat and then coming back to kill Baxter late one evening while he was alone in bed.

Lizzy, in her younger days, had been an excellent swimmer. Medals hung in her room from swimming meets she had won at the clubs her parents belonged to. She was sure she could pull it off. She was sure she could return and save her girls from their father. On August 22, 1979, Elizabeth staged her own death while sailing on their sailboat,
The Spirit
. Elizabeth had sailed all her life and knew all about longitudinal and latitudinal lines, bearings and charts, long before GPS and satellites became fashionable. She had sailed these waters, just off the coast, a hundred times and knew it was possible. She would fall off the boat, swim underwater to a nearby marker buoy, and then swim to shore undetected.

Elizabeth made it to shore, changed into clothes she had left by the rocks, and caught a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City. Earlier that week she had made reservations using cash. She stayed at a hotel, off of the boardwalk and out of sight. She stayed there with money she had stashed away for three months, giving it plenty of time for the courts to find her legally dead. It also gave her time to make her plans for returning to Louisville to kill Baxter.

The plan would have worked except for one small detail. When Elizabeth returned home, Baxter was already presumed dead, even though his body was nowhere to be found.

Frank Browning, Elizabeth’s father, had publicly threatened to kill Baxter on so many occasions while drinking, when Baxter Ingram actually came up missing, Frank had been charged with his murder. When Baxter disappeared just weeks after Elizabeth’s death, things became too suspicious for the authorities. When bloodstains were found from an apparent shotgun blast and enough evidence was uncovered in the bathhouse matching Baxter’s blood type, charges were filed against her father.

The irony of the case was that Beth Ann would not let her grandfather take the rap for what she had done. On the first day of trial in the Jefferson County Court Building, Beth Ann walked into the courtroom and confessed to the murder. She was arraigned, charged with her father’s murder, and within days was incarcerated at the Pee Wee Valley Woman’s Prison.

Beth Ann had indeed confessed to the murder saying, “I killed him, but you will never find his body. I killed him. He’s still on the estate, but you will never find him.”

Actually, he was all over the estate.

She had put her father into the Massey Ferguson fertilizer machine and had ground him up into a fine mixture with steer manure from the barn and had spread him all over the lower forty acres of the property. It turned out to be the best corn crop from this area in years. People from all around these parts still asked for Baxter’s Best Sweet Corn when they pick up their yearly planting seed down at the Bunton Seed Company each spring.

We had listened to this
charming little lady’s account for most of the afternoon now. It was amazing, given her age, that she had been able to give so many facts in such detail and color. It was easy to see that the information she was giving had been replaying over and over in her head for years and just busting to get out. She acted and talked as though she had waited for many years just to tell someone, and that was exactly what she had done.

She could not seem to talk fast enough. She talked, and we listened. She would stop, remember more, and then continue on with more of the story. She would speak detail upon detail of the past. Of course, we had a lot of questions for her. She continued to supply the answers without hesitation and then suddenly it hit us. She had talked about a bathhouse that Baxter would take the girls into. What bathhouse?

If there was a bathhouse, there must have been a pool, and when I was over at the Ingram Mansion with Jenny and Charlie earlier, I did not see a pool or bathhouse.

I was excited.

I was starting to get that feeling again, the gut feeling that comes and stays when something is about to happen in my life.

“Tell me about the bathhouse and pool. Where is it?” I asked.

“Where is it?” she asked, as though I had said something stupid. “It is up in back by the driveway. What do you mean, where is it?”

“Granny, there’s no pool,” Lamar Jr. jumped in.

“What do you mean, there’s no pool?” Lizzy said. “I taught the girls to swim in it. Remember?” she said.

“No, Grandma,” Lamar Jr. said, “You’re thinking of Charlie or my dad. I wasn’t born yet when Emily died.”