A Dark and Lonely Place

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ALSO BY EDNA BUCHANAN

Legally Dead
Love Kills
Shadows
Cold Case Squad
The Ice Maiden
You Only Die Twice
Garden of Evil
Margin of Error
Act of Betrayal
Suitable for Framing
Miami, It’s Murder
Contents Under Pressure
Pulse
Never Let Them See You Cry
Nobody Lives Forever
The Corpse Had a Familiar Face
Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder

Simon & Schuster
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Edna Buchanan

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition November 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buchanan, Edna.

A dark and lonely place / Edna Buchanan. — 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Outlaws—Fiction. 2. Florida—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.U324D37 2011
813’.54—dc22
2011017031

ISBN: 978-1-4391-5917-0
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6584-3 (ebook)

For T. Michael Smith, the best man I ever met

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

PREFACE

T
his is the novel I have yearned to write for half my life.

Dark stories whispered down generations about the notorious outlaw John Ashley and his sweetheart, Laura, haunted my dreams and stirred my soul from the moment I first heard their names.

The violent and gripping saga of outlaw lovers in wild frontier Florida hooked me instantly. But their voices were echoes, their faces ghostlike shadows, and I covered crime for the
Miami Herald,
lived for the moment, today’s story, tomorrow’s headline.

Until one late night long ago in the newspaper morgue, I stumbled upon an old photo, a handsome youth with a grin so infectious I couldn’t help but smile back. The legend had become real! I was thrilled to see John Ashley’s face for the first time.

How touching to see him, more than a hundred years later from my vantage point on the observation deck of history. He stood at the threshold of manhood, wearing a fresh haircut, a crisp white tropical suit, and a dark tie. His life stretched out before him like a promise. In his wildest dreams he could never have imagined how broken that promise would be or what his future held.

Nothing in his past or his family history hinted at the star-crossed love, turmoil, and turbulence in store, or suggested that he would become the most notorious and controversial character in Florida’s violent and colorful history. That the governor would call him more dangerous than the Seminole Wars, in which thousands were killed. That the British would declare him an international pirate and send gunboats in his pursuit.

This year, 2011, is the centennial of the fatal shot that launched the legend. In 1911 young John Ashley, an outstanding marksman who could split the nose of a rattlesnake with a single shot from a .38 caliber pistol from twenty feet away, a hunter, fisherman, and the pride of a large and law-abiding pioneer family, was accused of murder.

Ashley swore he was innocent, vowed to clear his name, and surrendered, eager to be tried and exonerated. Instead, caught in a complex snarl of legalities, he was convicted and sentenced to hang.

His conviction set off a thirteen-year saga of jailbreaks, escapes, a bloody gun battle on the dusty streets of what is now downtown Miami, train and bank robberies, clamoring lynch mobs, rum-running, bootlegging, tragedy, and heartbreak.

To tough, hardworking, self-reliant Florida frontiersmen, John Ashley was a folk hero, a symbol of resistance to Yankee government, greedy bankers, and the law. To vindictive lawmen, he became a deadly obsession.

The initial murder charge against Ashley was eventually dropped. Too late.

No going back. Too many others had died.

I thought often of John and Laura on Miami’s steamy streets as I covered the police beat, with its cocaine cowboys, Mariel boatlift, and deadly riots after the police beating death of motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie. When Metropolitan Miami became the nation’s number one in homicide, gloomy New York writers called the city “Paradise Lost.”

Wrong.

Miami was being itself, repeating history, over and over. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

It had to happen. One hot night on deadline a question occurred to me.
What if
the fictional descendants of the real John and Laura faced the same dangerous and desperate chain of events in Miami today? How would their story end?

Is it possible to change our own destiny? Can those of us with the outlaw imprint of violence and tragedy in our DNA break the cycle? Or is our fate indelibly programmed in our genes?

I knew then that one day I would write this book.
A Dark and Lonely Place
links their stories as they unfold and entwine a hundred years apart. The questions: How powerful is the pull of the past? Must desperate people in dangerous places always end the same way? Must fate, like history, always repeat itself? Real life and history can be dark and lonely places.

E
DNA
B
UCHANAN

PROLOGUE

1904, WEST FLORIDA, NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE CALOOSAHATCHEE RIVER

J
oe Ashley came home late, grim and smelling of whiskey. He woke his wife, Leugenia, and their nine children and told them to quickly pack up whatever they wanted to keep because they had to leave at once and would not be back.

“Was there gunplay?” his wife asked. Her eyes fearful in the lamplight, her voice trembled. “Is anybody dead?”

“No, but a man was shot. He’ll live, but if we don’t leave now, somebody will die.”

She began to pack her best linens in a wooden chest.

The children, still half-asleep and in their nightclothes, began to gather their belongings, except for John, who was sixteen.

“Where are we going?” he asked his father.

“Get your things together, now, son.”

John dressed quickly, carried his guitar and his banjo out onto the front porch, left them on the steps, and broke into a dead run down the dusty road. The dust, white in the moonlight, looked like silk.

His father stepped out and glared after him.

“It’s that girl,” he said bitterly, then moved to go after the boy.

His wife placed her small, worn hand on his forearm and raised her eyes to his. “He just wants to say goodbye, Joe,” she said softly. “You remember how it was.”

He nodded gruffly and caught her in his long arms.

“I got to get busy,” she said after a moment, and gently extricated herself.

“You can’t bring that sideboard,” he said hoarsely, as she turned away. “It’s too big.”

It had belonged to her grandmother.

“We can fit it in the wagon, Joe. Bobby and two of the girls can ride up front with us.”

He nodded and went to harness up the team.

Laura lived a mile and a half away. John arrived breathless, his lungs bursting. The place was dark. He stood beneath her window and whistled three times like a mourning dove, a signal they sometimes used. When there was no response, he found a feed bucket, carried it to her window, stood on it, and scratched the screen three times.

He heard her whisper in the dark. “John?”

“It’s me, Laura . . .”

She was suddenly there, a swift shadow in the dark. He couldn’t make out her face or what she wore but recognized her sweet scent, orange blossoms and roses. At that moment a mockingbird burst into a soaring, full-throated, heartbreaking song in the night. John knew he would never forget the sound or that moment.

“John, what are you—”

The front door burst open with a crash as though kicked by a mule. Laura’s stepfather loped barefoot across the creaky porch in his long johns, brandishing his breech-loading, double-barreled shotgun.

“I got you now, boy!” he shouted. “Freeze right there! Caught you dead to rights climbing into my little girl’s bedroom!”

John stood his ground, heart pounding. He felt no fear. He could die now, he thought, with no regret, outside her window.

“No, sir,” he said boldly. “I did not try to climb into your daughter’s room. I would never do that. I just tried to get her attention, to tell her something important.”

Laura’s mother, in nightclothes and a hairnet, materialized like an apparition on the porch. Laura’s brother, Dewitt, trailed after her. “Mama, what’s happening?”

“Hush, boy!” she told him. “Git yourself back to bed, right now.”

“What could you have to tell our Laura at this time of the night?” her stepfather asked, then racked one into the chamber.

“Daddy,” Laura cried. “Stop! Don’t do anything! Please!”

John turned to her. “Don’t worry, Laura,” he said softly. “We’re leaving tonight. I came to say goodbye. You are my girl, aren’t you?”

“Goodbye? When are you coming back, John?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know, Laura. But I will, I promise. Remember that. I’ll be back!” Out the corner of his eye he saw her stepfather advance.

“Get down from there, you son of a bitch, now!”

“Are you my girl?”

“Yes, Johnny.”

“Sorry, darlin’,” he said. It was the first time he had called her that. He liked the sound of it as he stepped off the feed bucket.

“Git your skinny ass outta here. Now!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re damn lucky, boy. Last time I came this close to shooting somebody, I did it! Kilt me a Yankee. Git outta here now, afore I shoot you too!”

John stole a fleeting glance at her window then left the way he came. When he arrived home, heartsick and out of breath, the house was empty, his family gone. He and their dog, a bluetick hound that emerged from the woods behind the house, followed the wagon’s tracks for two miles before they caught up with it. His father reached down and with a strong arm lifted both the boy and the dog into the wagon. His mother hugged his neck. “We worried about you, son.”