The River to Glory Land

Book 3: Glory Land Novel

by Janie DeVos

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Miami in the 1920’s is a city with two faces. By day, it’s a dazzling beacon of industry; when the sun goes down, neon signs flash and decadence reigns. As Prohibition takes hold, speakeasies and illicit distilleries spring up alongside lavish mansions. Nothing can slow the influx of tourists thirsty for strong liquor—or quell the greed of those eager to provide it.
 
Caught between these two worlds, and two very different men, beautiful Lily Strickland throws herself into re-building her grandparents’ Art Deco hotel while reveling in everything the city’s nightlife has to offer a blonde-bombshell flapper. When her shy, unassuming sister is caught up in Miami’s vicious mob underworld, Lily turns to the doctor she’s loved for years. But it may be up to a young pilot and former rumrunner to save her sister and salvage the legacy her family has worked so hard to build.

Release date: December 18, 2018

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 336

Sample

Acknowledgments

As I began the research for my book, life intervened with a wonderful twist of fate. I discovered that Jo Ann Bass, granddaughter of the founders of the iconic Miami restaurant Joe’s Stone Crabs, lives just twenty minutes from me during the summer months, which is the off-season of the restaurant (one can only buy stone crabs in a month with an R in it.). Jo graciously invited me to lunch at her gorgeous home, which is actually a 100-year-old converted barn. We sat in her kitchen eating chicken salad, and she regaled me with stories of her grandparents in the 1920s. One story involved her grandmother chasing Al Capone’s girlfriend out of the restaurant. Her grandmother liked Al’s wife. Sitting with Jo has been one of the highlights of my years of research. I’d like to thank this most beautiful and elegant lady for the memories; those that she shared with me, as well the ones that she and I created together. I will cherish that afternoon always.

And many thanks to Jack Riley, FAA Certified Aviation Instructor and friend, who didn’t just explain the basics of flying to me, but took me up in his plane so that I could experience them. As we soared over the Blue Ridge Mountains and through the gorges, I thought a lot about the courageous pioneers in the field of flight. Even with all of the instruments available to pilots today, the simple act of flying remains an amazing feat to me. Having said that, flying 100 years ago, without much more than a compass as equipment, took more than courage. It took an immense desire to grab that brass ring; one that was sky-high and out of reach for the vast majority of humankind.

I’m also extremely grateful to my friend and fellow Rotarian Dr. Arch Woodard for helping me understand the uses and side effects of chloroform in the early days. Though this was long before his time, he was kind enough to provide me with valuable information about early twentieth-century medicine, and kinder still in using layman’s terms in discussing it with me.

Finally, I am greatly indebted to the older generation of Miamians who generously offered up their rich memories and recollections of a golden age in Miami…a time that has long since vanished but that set the foundation for the beautiful city that glitters and glows in her own right today. To simply say ‘thank you’ to each of you seems like far too little. My gratitude is so great. For now, a heartfelt ‘thank you’ will just have to do.

Preface

Eden in Ruins

September 18, 1926

Miami, Florida

The roof blew off at exactly 3:17 a.m. I knew that because the violent winds that invaded our home tore the kitchen clock off the wall and shot it across our living room. It barely missed Mama’s head before it shattered at my feet. The roar in the room was so deafening that I couldn’t hear the clock’s wood and glass case explode. But I could see the time, and it was 3:17.

Suddenly, Daddy grabbed my arm and pulled me into the kitchen. With Olivia and Mama right behind us, we made our way out the back door, which was opening and closing like it was possessed. Making a human chain, we clung to avocado and mango trees as we crossed the backyard, paralleling the rising river, to Howie Weiss’s house. The sky was an eerie cement-gray color, which only blended into the gray curtain of rain pelting us hard enough to skin us alive. I glanced up for a second, and caught a glimpse of Howie’s silhouette cast by the illumination of his lamp. He stood in the doorway and urged us to hurry. Thank God, he knows, I thought.

At last, we made it up the porch steps and into his kitchen; then Daddy and Howie used their shoulders to force the door shut.

“How’d you know we were coming?” Daddy breathlessly asked as he wiped the wetness away from his eyes.

“Part of someone’s roof hit the side of our house,” Howie replied as his wife, Ellen, handed towels to all of us. “Looked out the back door to see what the dickens had crashed against our east wall with such force and saw y’all comin’. Glad I did because I wouldn’t have heard you poundin’ on the door.”

“That mighta been our roof,” Daddy said. “It’s completely gone.”

“Well, thank God, you’re not,” Mrs. Weiss replied. “C’mon. Let’s move into the living room. We’ll be more comfortable in there.”

We all settled and I noticed that everyone had found someone to sit close to, closer than usual. I was sitting by Mama on the couch, while Daddy was sitting next to Olivia on a loveseat. She hadn’t said a word since she’d let out a blood-curdling scream when our roof started to peel back. Even in the weak lamplight, I could see that my younger sister was as pale as a ghost. Obviously, she was scared to death. We all were. But with Olivia’s quiet nature, I was never sure what she was thinking.

Just then, something hit the house hard. “God a’ mighty, this is a bad one,” Mr. Weiss said quietly, almost to himself. Fortunately, the sound of windows breaking did not accompany the loud bang, for if it had, it was likely their roof would go, too.

The quiet in the room was heavy as we all continued to listen to the storm’s relentless rampage. Each time the wind reached a high-pitched wail, I held my breath, and then let it out as the gale calmed down. Everyone gripped the arms of whatever piece of furniture they sat on with white-knuckled readiness as though we knew that at any second we might be forced to make a mad dash out of the house, but there was really no place to go. The neighbor between the Weisses’ place and ours wasn’t home and the place was boarded up tightly. The neighbor on the other side of the Weisses was quite a ways down. Finally, my mother broke the silence.

“Poor Mama said she got harassed all day by folks sayin’ that the headline about the approaching hurricane was just an attempt to sell more papers.”

She was referring to my grandmother, Eve Harjo, who worked at the Miami Herald. Grandma had told her that by noon she’d heard enough such malarkey and headed on home.

Home for my grandparents was actually the ten-story, Mediterranean-style Spinnaker Hotel they owned on Miami Beach, and the Weisses’ house belonged to them too. It was the place where my mother and her brother, Dylan, had been raised, and Olivia and I had spent a lot of time there as children.

“I’m surprised your folks didn’t come stay with y’all, Eliza,” Mrs. Weiss remarked. “It seems like it’d be safer here, than right on the beach in a hotel that tall.”

“They wanted to keep an eye on things,” Mama explained. “Now all we can do is pray they’ll be fine.”

And I was praying. I prayed that my grandparents and the hotel would be standing after the storm. For without those two people I adored, I’d be devastated, and without their hotel, I’d be unemployed.

“You get everything tied down real good at the marina, Striker?” Mrs. Weiss asked my father. Everyone called him “Striker” because he always got a strike when he threw a fishing line in.

“As good as I could, Ellen,” Daddy replied, taking his eyes off the ceiling to look over at her. “Fortunately, we reinforced the building after the last big blow, but I couldn’t get three of the boats we’ve been working on inside. We lashed ’em down as best we could at the dock, though.”

My father was an expert craftsman who built boats, both motor and sailing vessels, and my parents owned Strickland Water Crafts, which had been a very successful marina on the Miami River for years. While Daddy designed and sold his much sought-after boats, Mama worked in the office.

Throughout the remainder of the early morning hours, we made small talk as we continued to watch the ceiling, praying the roof would hold, and listening to the storm’s wrath pound us with a fury unlike anything any of us had experienced before. Finally, as we sat at the kitchen table eating some of Mrs. Weiss’s guava jelly donuts, the rain stopped battering the house and the winds died down. Opening the kitchen door, we cautiously stepped outside to look at the new Miami awaiting us. In the course of just one night, she had fallen, leaving much of the city completely flattened and still submerged after a mountain of water from Biscayne Bay had surged inland. No one said a word as we surveyed the absolute destruction around us, though I could hear Mrs. Weiss and Olivia softly crying.

“Well, I swear, would you take a look at that?” Mr. Weiss exclaimed. Our eyes followed his to a sight that I was sure I would never forget if I lived to be a thousand. There, caught up in the splintered and leafless branches were fish, hundreds of them, looking like peculiar fruit hanging in a ruined Eden.

Chapter 1

Waltz of the Water Stains

November 1927

I noticed another water stain on the vaulted ceiling that made a trail down the stucco wall as I was whirled around the Spinnaker’s ballroom. It was one of many stains in my grandparents’ beautiful hotel, sad reminders of last year’s hurricane.

“Slow down a smidge, Mr. Burton,” I said, forcing myself to smile at the foul-smelling millionaire from Rhode Island. “A waltz should be a thing of beauty, danced in a smooth and graceful tempo. Not a race around the room.”

I forced a laugh to match his, then looked back at the damaged ceiling to avoid the old lecher’s whiskey-fueled grin. His eyes strayed to my bosom nearly as often as he stepped on my feet during our thrice-weekly dance lessons. He and I were the only two in the room, which made me a tad uncomfortable. As my eyes moved past a bank of arched windows that looked out at the Atlantic, I noticed there was a small crack in the upper left corner of one. Ah, well, I thought. They’re doing the best they can at getting everything repaired. Restoring the Spinnaker to its original glory prior to the storm had been an expensive undertaking, and slowing the progress of those repairs was the fact that our busy season was starting out as an exceptionally slow one. Far fewer guests were filling the hotel’s one hundred and fifty rooms, and fewer patrons were filling their bellies in its two restaurants.

Staring over Mr. Burton’s right shoulder, I thought back to my conversation with my sister during breakfast in our grandparents’ old home. Immediately following the storm, we stayed at the Spinnaker until my parents could hire a reputable contractor to build our new home. But the Weisses had become hurricane weary, and decided to pack up and move back to Ohio. When they did, we immediately took up residence in the old home place on the Miami River.

I sat across from Olivia while she had her usual breakfast of lightly buttered toast and black coffee, and I thought for the millionth time how very different we were. Though we were close in age (I would turn nineteen in December, and Olivia would turn eighteen in January), that’s where the similarities stopped. Though we both had blond hair, mine was more of a deep gold like Daddy’s. Hers was platinum blond like our great aunt Ivy’s. Today as always, she wore one of her drab suits or skirts, and, as usual, she had her hair pinned up in a bun at the nape of her neck. Though I’d tried to get her to go with me when I had my long, straight hair cut into a stylish bob, she refused. She said that a secretary needed to look more respectable than some flapper out for a night on the town. Lifting my eyebrows at her was my only reaction to her barb; otherwise, I chose to ignore it.

Olivia glanced up at me as she buttered the other half of her toast. Catching me watching her, she smiled a smile that could melt the hearts of the most hardened, Her eyes were ice blue, also like Aunt Ivy’s, while mine were light brown, like Mama’s. I was quite a bit taller than my very petite sister. She’d had the good fortune of being born with delicate features that I’d always envied. My features were more angular and though I wished I could somehow soften them, I couldn’t complain too much. I never lacked for male attention. Although Olivia hadn’t either, any poor boy’s attempt to talk with my sister was met, inevitably, with few words and lame excuses. She wasn’t a snob, just shy.

Our father, Paul Strickland, was a quiet, serious man, but he certainly wasn’t shy.

On the other hand, our mother was nothing less than outgoing—and outspoken at times—yet everyone loved her. To be honest, everyone loved them both. I was somewhere in between our parents’ two distinct personalities, but Olivia was a hard one to figure out. As we finished breakfast, I was trying to convince her to give up her job as secretary at Doxley’s Import Export Company, and come to work at the Spinnaker instead.

Olivia bit off a corner of her toast and chewed slowly as she seemed to be mulling over the idea of coming to work for our grandparents. Finally, after wiping her small, bow-shaped mouth, she said, “Thank you, sister, but no. Truly, I’ve never been one who thought it a good idea to work with family. After all, who can you complain to after a long day’s work if the one you want to complain about is the one spooning mashed potatoes onto your plate?”

Though she sounded like she was about forty-years-old, I had to admit she had a point; however, that didn’t change the fact that my grandparents needed her.

“Olivia, aren’t you bored to tears at that export office? For the life of me, I don’t understand how you can work there. That dreadful railroad embargo brought most everything coming in and out of here to a screeching halt. I know the embargo was lifted last May, but you can’t tell me that business isn’t slow. Lord, there’s been enough bad press up North about it…not to mention our over-inflated land prices, and apocalyptic hurricanes. It’s a wonder anyone wants to come down here anymore.”

“They will once the snow starts piling up,” Olivia replied as she lifted her coffee cup to her mouth.

“Exactly!” I said, slamming my hand down on the table, which caused my sister to jump and slosh some of her coffee. “Don’t you see, Olivia? If anything will keep the tourists coming down here, it’s the lure of the weather, not to mention the nightlife. It’s…well…” I glanced up toward the ceiling, looking for the right words to describe Miami after dark.

“Amoral and hedonistic?” Olivia offered with a smug smile.

“Exactly, again!” I beamed. “And that, dear sister, is what will save this place. Those looking to indulge need hotels, and Grandma and Granddaddy need you to help run theirs.”

“I’m just fine where I am, Lily, and I’ve told you why. I said the same thing to Daddy when he offered to give me a job in the marina office. So, please, let’s leave it at that.”

Mr. Burton’s phlegm-thick cough brought me out of my musings and I decided I couldn’t stand the old geezer another minute. “That’s all the time we have this morning, I’m afraid,” I said, abruptly interrupting our waltz and stepping back from the vile man.

“But, it’s only twenty minutes until eleven,” he complained.

“Yes, but…” I hadn’t thought up a reason for a shortened lesson. “I have…We have fresh seafood coming in, and Chef is…at the doctor’s office. I have to be at the receiving door to inspect it. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Ah, I do hope nothing much ails the chef,” Burton replied, his brows pinching together in concern. “I so look forward to his bouillabaisse on Wednesday nights, you know.”

How typical of him to worry about getting his belly filled, rather than the well-being of the one filling it, I thought. “Yes, well, I’m sure he’ll be at the helm tonight, expertly navigating through his culinary specialties,” I quipped. The name of the restaurant in question was the Helm.

My attempt at humor was not lost on him. “You’re a pistol, you know that, Lily,” he laughed as he pinched my bottom through my lavender satin dress. At that moment, I wished I was holding a pistol.

Slapping at his hand in anger, I started to tell him exactly what I thought of him, but I stopped myself before I could offend one of the highest paying and still-regular costumers we had at our hotel.

Smiling, though I was absolutely seething, I said, “That’ll be enough for today, Mr. Burton—enough of everything.” Turning on the heels of my purple pumps, I left him standing in the middle of our water-stained ballroom roaring with laughter. Before I started my second job of the day, as luncheon hostess at the hotel’s other restaurant, the Hibiscus Room, I needed to shower off the smell of that man.

Chapter 2

Blindness of Convenience

“Follow me, please,” I said as I took two menus from a stack on the maître d’s podium. I led the way through the Hibiscus Room to Floyd “Buddy” DeMario’s usual table in the corner. A woman was with him that I’d never seen before. She was an orangey-redhead, and towered over the short mobster from Detroit by several inches. The smell of her rose-scented perfume was enough to knock a person over. As I walked back to the front of the restaurant, the scent still lingered heavily in the air.

At 11:25 a.m., the restaurant wasn’t open, but Buddy DeMario always arrived five minutes early for his lunch. His daily reservation was listed in our reservation book under the alias “Sam Smith.” Oddly enough, the crime boss from Michigan chose to eat lunch at The Spinnaker every day even though he owned two burger joints. Additionally, he had partial ownership of a couple of the hotels on Miami Beach and the Lemon Tree speak-easy. I couldn’t come up with a reason for his loyal patronage, other than that he loved the food. He sure made it easy for one of his enemies to find him if they chose to, and I assumed he had plenty of them. He usually sat with his back to the wall, and we seated him before any other patrons arrived. It was not his usual habit; however, to show up with a woman who was not his wife.

It was no secret that as powerful as Buddy DeMario might be in Detroit, Eunice DeMario ruled the roost. She was a tiny, sweet-looking brunette who ruled with an iron fist. Rumor had it, she arranged permanent departures for her beloved Floyd’s past conquests. Today, as Buddy sat in the corner eating Shrimp Louie with Miss Rose Hips, his small dark eyes darted furtively around the room. I figured Buddy would be better off locked in a room with his enemies, than facing the wrath of his wife.

As if he’d read my mind, Peter, the restaurant’s manager, said, “If Eunice finds out, he’s a dead man.” I didn’t hear him come up behind me, and his voice made me jump since I was picturing a nasty death for Buddy.

“Lord, you scared me,” I laughed, turning to face him.

Peter Nielsen looked as Scandinavian as his name implied, with his blond hair framing a tanned face, making his bright blue eyes stand out brilliantly. Peter had been employed at The Spinnaker for a little over two years. Prior to that, he managed Keens Chophouse in New York. My grandparents considered hiring him a coup. Now, with Miami’s economy in such a downward spiral, I wondered how long they could afford to keep him.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Peter, if my grandmother catches Mr. DeMario in here with any woman who isn’t his wife; the man’s going to be in just as much trouble as if Eunice had caught him.”

“But your grandmother has no problem feeding a mobster,” he laughed.

“She has her limits, you know.” I smiled, turning back to see if the waiter assigned to Buddy’s table had seen him arrive, and he had. At that moment, he was filling Buddy’s water glass.

I understood Peter’s confusion over my grandmother’s contradictory ethics. Grandma knew that if they didn’t feed Buddy, another place would, and they’d make good money doing so. Besides, the man didn’t conduct his illegal business practices in her hotel.

Having said that, she couldn’t turn a blind eye when the man brought one of his “hussies” into her establishment, especially since she knew Eunice. When I questioned her about her convenient moral blindness, she replied that it was a “woman thing.” She explained that women needed to draw a line when it came to allowing men to walk all over them, as many were quick to do. As women, we had to watch each other’s backs. I remembered that credo when I heard Peter welcome Dr. Neil Aldrich and his wife, Laura, to the Hibiscus Room.

My heartbeat increased immediately, and I felt my face flush. Taking a deep breath to calm myself, I turned around and greeted the tall, auburn-haired doctor.

“Good mornin’, Dr. Aldrich,” I said, glancing up at him but not quite meeting his dark brown eyes. I quickly looked down to greet his tiny raven-haired wife. “Mornin’, Mrs. Aldrich.” The first time I saw the alabaster-skinned, dark-eyed beauty, I couldn’t help but think of the song, “My Irish Rose.”

“Morning, Lily,” Neil replied, and when I glanced back up at him, his eyes met mine.

“Lily?” Laura said, drawing my eyes back down to her. “Is there a table available out on the veranda? It’s such a lovely day, and I was hoping…”

“You can have your pick, Mrs. Aldrich. It’s early and there’s no one out there yet. Follow me, please.” Though I tried not to, I liked her. I didn’t know a soul in town who didn’t. Laura had come down from Ocala to join her husband two months after he arrived to help with the hundreds injured in the hurricane. She immediately rolled up her sleeves and got waist-deep in the misery without complaint. Though she was a music teacher by training, she unselfishly set aside her sheet music for bed sheets and bandages. There wasn’t a bad bone in her body. Unfortunately, I knew the same couldn’t be said about me.

Chapter 3

Balm to the Soul

“Are you here as a spy, Miss Strickland, or merely a guest?” inquired a voice from above my comfortable lounge chair.

My sister was sitting by me, but I guessed the question was posed to me. Pulling down the edge of my large-brimmed straw hat to shield my eyes from the sun, I caught sight of A. . .