The Styx
Page 31
“She seein’ some kind of glory,” she whispered back.
At the plate Santos dug his back foot into the sand and cocked his bat. He took one last look at smoke now pouring out of the dormered windows at the rooftop of the Breakers and then faced the pitcher. The ball cruised in at a nice level speed, perfect for creating a symbiotic energy between the now powerfully turning bat and the approaching orb. The shattering sound of bursting glass giving way to a ballooning internal heat and that of hard ash on a hard, leather wrapped baseball split their respective air simultaneously.
The patrons watched Santos’ ball make a silent plop in the water, an obvious ten yards past Wagner’s last attempt. Game over. Applause fluttered the beachfront air.
Ida May Fluery clapped too. Her adroit nose began to fill with the smell of dry plank wood charring in fire behind her. She did not see when the crowd’s attention left the ballplayers, but their expressions of mild entertainment turned to surprise and excitement when they noticed the smoke and tongues of fire eating the luxurious Palm Beach Breakers. Ida May Fleury instead watched her boy come to accept a kiss of congratulations on his sweaty cheek. She knew by the rustle of women’s skirts and the unaccustomed yelps of rich men’s voices that, for one day at least, Eden was theirs.
On a clear and sunny day in 1903, the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach burned to the ground. Hundreds of wealthy vacationers were forced out and lost their possessions to the fast moving flames. Since it was near the end of the tourist season, many simply returned to their true homes in the north.
Less than a year later, Henry Flagler had rebuilt the hotel and the soon-to-be-dubbed “snowbirds” returned the next winter. On February 1, 1904, the beachside hotel reopened to universal acclaim.
END
A BIOGRAPHY OF JONATHON KING
Jonathon King is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Max Freeman mystery series, which is set in south Florida, as well as a thriller and a historical novel.
Born in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1950s, King worked as a police and court reporter for twenty-four years, first in Philadelphia until the mid-1980s and then in Fort Lauderdale. His time at the Philadelphia Daily News and Fort Lauderdale’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel greatly influenced the creation of Max Freeman, a hardened former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to south Florida to escape his dark past. King began writing novels in 2000, when he used all the vacation days he accrued as a reporter to spend two months alone in a North Carolina cabin. During this time, he wrote The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002), the first title in the Max Freeman series. The novel became a national bestseller and won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author. A Visible Darkness (2004), the series’ second installment, highlights Max’s mission to identify a dark serial killer stalking an impoverished community. Shadow Men (2004), the third in the series, revolves around Max’s investigation of an eighty-year-old triple homicide, and A Killing Night (2005) tells the story of a murder investigation in which the prime suspect is Max’s former mentor. After finishing A Killing Night, his fourth book, King left journalism to become a full-time novelist.
Since 2005, King has published his fifth and sixth Max Freeman novels, Acts of Nature (2007), about a hurricane that puts Max and his girlfriend at the mercy of some of the Everglades’ most menacing criminals, and Midnight Guardians (2010), which features the dangerous reemergence of a drug kingpin from Max’s past. He has also published the stand-alone thriller Eye of Vengeance (2007), about a military-trained sniper who targets the criminals that a particular journalist has covered as a crime reporter. In 2009, King published the historical novel The Styx, which tells the story of a Palm Beach hotel at the turn of the twentieth century and the nearby community’s black hotel employees whose homes were burned to the ground amid the violent racism of the time.
King currently lives in southeast Florida, where he writes, canoes, and explores the Everglades regularly.
Jonathon King playing basketball for his high school team, the Waverly Warriors, in Lansing, Michigan, in 1972.
King’s yearbook photo from his senior year of high school in 1972.
For seven summers, from 1974 to 1980, King was a lifeguard in Ocean City, New Jersey. He’s shown here in 1974 or 1975 with his best friend and fellow lifeguard, Scott Erb.
In 1976, King worked as part of a crew hired by boat owners to deliver sailboats from New Jersey to Florida at the end of the summer. He’s shown here sailing a forty-foot vessel down the coast.
King’s children, Jessica and Adam, at ages ten and eight, respectively, with the mascot of the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2003.
A handwritten manuscript page from King’s debut novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight. Worried that his years as a reporter would make it difficult to write thoughtfully using a keyboard, King wrote his first two books with pencil on legal pads to avoid sounding like a journalist.
King’s Edgar Award for the Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author, which he won in 2002 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, the debut book in the Max Freeman series. The Edgars, which are given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, are considered the most prestigious awards in the mystery genre.
King stands inside of Kim’s Alley Bar, one of the oldest taverns in Ft. Lauderdale. Several scenes in the Max Freeman series take place here, particularly in A Killing Night, in which Max investigates the abductions of several bartenders. An actual bartender from Kim’s Alley even made an appearance in the book.
King at an isolated fishing camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
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copyright © 2009 by Jonathon King
cover design by ORIM
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9974-6
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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