A Dark and Lonely Place (52 page)

Reverend Hasley had shouted, “Fall down on your knees . . . Repent! Pray for forgiveness.”

Too late now, she thought, exhausted as she recalled her husband’s final words to her, “You’ll go straight to hell with John Ashley.” I’d be in good company, she thought.

There was an appealing third possibility. Nothing. Eternal sleep. What she needed more than anything was sleep.

For three days she drank only water and whiskey and ate nothing but a few stale crackers from a tin. She felt no hunger, a blessing since it hurt like hell to chew.

I will not endure a fourth night in this dark and lonely place.
She knew precisely what to do instead.

She felt serene, though sleepless, almost happy. A positive energy welled up from deep inside her and buoyed her spirits.

Most people will be relieved to hear the news, others pleased, even elated, she thought, as she stripped off the clothes she’d worn for days. She felt free, though chilly. It had seemed appropriate to be naked, the way she’d come into the world, but she decided instead to wear John’s shirt. She plucked it from the nail where it hung, slipped it on, and was glad she did. Too large, of course—it hung nearly to her knees—but it felt warm, like his arms around her.

Lucy had won but not forever. She was a stranger to the truth, which would be her undoing. Laura took great comfort in knowing that the truth would out. She knew it would. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t there to see it happen.

Smiling, she cut and ripped a pair of his old long johns into strips and braided them tightly together. Suddenly strong, energetic, and beyond pain, she dragged the wooden table into position below the sturdy crossbeam of rock-hard Dade County pine. She remembered how John grinned at her protests that he had squandered his building and carpentry skills on such painstaking construction of a fishing camp.

“This place,” she had said, “will survive anything and still stand like the pyramids long after we’re gone.”

He’d laughed and insisted it was only practice for the house he planned to build her on Miami’s Ocean Beach.

She carried the heavy breadbox to the wooden table, then used a chair to climb up onto it, then onto the box. Cheerfully, she looped the makeshift noose around her throat, fastened the rope tightly around the beam, and pulled it taut.

She gathered herself together for a final quiet moment, took a deep breath, and began to sing a hymn the Salvation Army woman had sung at John’s funeral.

“I’ve wandered far away from God, now I’m coming home. The paths of sin too long I’ve trod; Lord, I’m coming home. Coming home, coming home . . .”
She repeated the verse, her voice shaky as she realized that in her excitement she could no longer remember the familiar refrain.

With tears in her eyes and a smile on her face, she lustily kicked the breadbox out from beneath her. The last sound she heard was not exactly what she expected. Was that the breadbox crashing to the floor? she wondered, as she plunged into empty space. Her feet twitched in a deadly dance more than a foot above the tabletop, then stopped, and she no longer cared.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

D
aisy laughed aloud, elated to see Laura’s car hidden in the pines on high ground near the fishing camp. “Ah knew it!” She slapped the steering wheel. “Ah just knew it! Where else would that girl go?”

Furious at Bill and Lucy, Daisy had fired a piece of her mind like a shotgun blast at her mother, packed up Laura’s things, stocked up on food, blankets, and toiletries, and loaded them into her car. As an afterthought, she dashed back inside to snatch off the wall that sketch of Laura that John had liked so well. She paused to look around the room, then took his guitar and a patchwork quilt in which to wrap it.

She’d come in the nick of time. Leugenia said Lucy had promised to come early the next morning to “clear out and dispose of John and Laura’s possessions.”

“
Loot
would be a more accurate description,” Daisy sniped, as she flew out the door, arms full, her car loaded.

Her hunch proved right. They were so like sisters that she found Laura in the first place she looked, John’s fishing camp. She rapped at the rugged wooden door. No answer. She knocked louder, then heard a crash inside, as though something heavy had fallen to the floor. “Open up! Ah tracked you down, girl!”

Silence.

She tried the door. Locked. “Laura, it’s me! I’m alone.”

Nothing.

Daisy rattled the knob, stepped back, and frowned. On tiptoe, she reached up over the door frame to grope for the extra key. She felt it at the tip of her fingers, but it dropped into the weeds around the stoop.

“Laura!”

Dead silence.

“There better not be poison oak out heah.” Daisy angrily stamped her foot. “If there is, I’ll git you for this, Laura.” Then she dropped down on all fours to search for the key.

She finally found it, got up, fumbled, then managed to unlock the door and shove it open.

“Laura?” Brow furrowed, Daisy stepped into the dimly lit interior. Something wasn’t right.

It was Laura. Swaying gently above the table, half-naked, wearing only John’s favorite flannel shirt. Her face was blue; her hands hung limply at her sides.

“No!”
Daisy shrieked. She dropped the parcel she carried.

Eyes averted, she scrambled past the horrifying tableau to the shelf where John kept his shaving gear. She seized his straight razor, ran back, lifted the bulky breadbox off the floor, and slid it back onto the table.

Laura stared, eyes wide open. No sign of life.

Daisy climbed onto the chair, then onto the table. The razor in her right hand, she stepped onto the breadbox, caught Laura around the hips with her left arm, and struggled to lift her enough to relieve the pressure on her throat. Staggered by the dead weight, she slashed frantically at the makeshift rope.

“No!” she gasped. “It’s not sharp enough!”

Sobbing under her breath, she looked wildly around the room for a sharper blade. John’s fishing rods stood in the corner near the stove. His razor-sharp fish-gutting knife hung beside them in a leather sheath on the wall.

She looked up at Laura, then gently released her. Daisy jumped down from the table whimpering. “Oh, dear God, don’t let her die!” She ran headlong for the knife on the wall, slid it from the sheath, and rushed back to the table.

“Help me, John,” she prayed. “Help me save her!”

Back on the table, she jumped, grunted, slashed savagely at the braided rope. The blade nearly severed it. The strands unraveled at lightning speed. Laura’s full weight toppled toward Daisy, who was unable to hold her and lost her footing. She teetered on the breadbox, which toppled to the floor. So did she.

Laura landed with a resounding thud, flat on her back on the hard wooden table top.

Daisy dragged herself to her feet a moment later, wide-eyed and whimpering. Her jaw dropped as a deep sigh came from Laura’s open mouth. Did she really hear that? Yes! The impact from the fall had restarted her breathing.

Daisy splashed water on Laura’s face and pleaded, called to her, then rubbed her pale lips with whiskey. Laura grimaced. Her eyelids fluttered. Her color began to flood back.

Laura finally focused on Daisy’s tearstained face.

“Oh, Daisy,” she gasped painfully. “Are you dead too?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

O
stracized by the community, abandoned by the Ashleys except for Daisy, who now had a family of her own in Jacksonville, Laura turned to whiskey to numb her pain and loneliness.

It tormented her that she could not visit John’s grave and that he and the others could not rest in peace. Frequent news stories reported how their graves were being vandalized and desecrated by thieves and treasure hunters in search of the rumored money. The publicity only drew more grave robbers and souvenir seekers, until not a single bone was left in their coffins.

Laura drifted from place to place, unwanted by the public and targeted by police, who frequently arrested her. The offenses probably would have been ignored had she not been the notorious former Queen of the Everglades. In and out of jail, she was charged with traffic violations, drinking, gambling, and selling moonshine.

Shunned by half the public for her outlaw past, she was despised by the other half for setting up John and the others for a fatal ambush by police.

No one believed her, and one day, pushed too far by her arrest on another minor charge, she struggled fiercely with the deputies until she was beaten, scratched, and bruised. At the jail she asked for iodine to treat her injuries. When a jailer handed her the bottle, she drank it all before he could stop her. Another failed suicide attempt. The iodine used for prisoners at the jail had been heavily diluted with water as a cost-cutting measure. All it did was make her sick.

She settled in Okeechobee, but police arrested her time after time for drunk driving. Those who knew her said “she looked all used up.” Local authorities finally told her she wasn’t wanted and had to leave town.
With nowhere left to go, she moved in with her mother, who operated a gas station that sold fuel and bootleg liquor in Canal Point.

At the gas station on Saturday, August 6, 1927, Laura sold a pint of liquor. The customer, already drunk, counted his change and accused her of cheating him. She denied it. He became loud, made threats, and slapped her. They scuffled, and when he knocked her down, she pulled a gun from beneath the counter. Her mother intervened and wrestled the weapon away. As her mother screamed and struck her and the customer shouted threats, Laura snatched a bottle of acid off a shelf and drank it.

Gagging and choking, the acid burning away the soft tissue in her mouth and throat, she fell to the floor, writhing in agony.

Shocked sober, the drunken customer and his friend shouted frantically for someone to get a doctor.

Her mother intervened again. “No,” she said. “Don’t.” She locked the door. “Let her be. She’s better off dead.”

After twenty terrible minutes, she was.

She was thirty-seven years old.

PART NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

T
hat was my great, great-grandmother.” Tears streaked Laura’s mournful face, and fell from her chin. “Oh my God. Gram never told me. How sad. How terribly, terribly sad.”

John had called his father shortly after they began to read the old scrapbooks. He’d always known he shared the name of an ancestor, a Prohibition-era bootlegger, but knew little more. His father who once traced the family tree, had proudly mentioned ancestors who fought for the South in the Civil War.

But when John’s father and grandfather were young, older family members never spoke of the Ashley Gang. They were an embarrassment. Their kin shunned the press, even changed their names and moved away, to escape the shame and notoriety.

John’s father consulted his grandmother’s family Bible, with its handwritten birth, death, and marriage records, then called back. John, he confirmed, was a direct descendant of Frank Ashley, lost at sea with his brother Ed during a rum-running trip to the Bahamas during Prohibition.

“They are us.” Laura wiped her eyes. “And we are them. We share their DNA. Our lives even parallel theirs. It’s as though destiny has brought us back together after all these years.” She blew her nose and turned another page. “Look! Listen to this.” She cleared her throat and read a news story carefully clipped and saved by Leugenia long after her son John and his Laura were dead and gone.

The article reported that Sheriff James R. Merritt, briefly famous for eradicating the Ashley Gang, saw his dreams of higher state or national office fade with time. After dispatching the outlaws, the hard-nosed sheriff became highly successful and increasingly heavy-handed in his pursuit
and arrests of bootleggers and rumrunners. As a result, his popularity waned among free-spirited Floridians. And the controversy about what really happened that night at the Sebastian bridge never faded.

Political opponents raised the issue during Merritt’s next campaign. His fame had worn thin by then and he was soundly defeated, ousted as high sheriff of Saint Lucie County. He later managed to be elected as a county commissioner despite political mudslingers who resurrected the issue in every campaign.

John Ashley had become the skeleton in Merritt’s closet, the reason his political career did not flourish as he’d hoped.

“Could be written today,” John said. “That’s Florida politics.”

“Oh, no!” Laura gasped in heartfelt dismay at another story published years after the fact. “Officer Riblet,” she exclaimed, with a fresh rush of tears. “Remember the police officer shot by John’s younger brother Bobby?”

John nodded. “The first to be killed in the line of duty. His name’s on the plaque in the lobby,” he said, recalling the recent stray bullet that had scored Riblet’s name.

“He and his wife, Madge, had a little boy, a toddler at the time.” She read the story. The grief-stricken widow was so afraid of guns that she vowed at her husband’s funeral that their only child would never own, handle, or touch a firearm. He didn’t, until he grew into a headstrong teenager who sneaked off to hunt with friends and was accidentally shot in the foot. The wound festered, did not heal, and he died of blood poisoning.

“It killed him, at sixteen!” Laura exclaimed. “She never got over it, it says. Who would? Oh, John, no wonder Gram hid these books away. All those poor, tragic people.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “And they are us.”

He held her, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, “This time, it’s different.” Or is it? he wondered.

His cell phone rang. “Johnny,” Leon said. “We got trouble in Miami.”

“What happened?”

“The cops swear you’re still in town. For all I know, you are. They keep checking tips, armed for bear. They stepped in it. Knew they would. It was just a matter of time.”

“How?” John leaned forward. He heard sirens in the background. Lots of them.