She sits back in her chair, eyes closed, satisfied. She doesn’t know when or how, but retribution is on its way.
“All your filth about women… what are you so afraid of, eh? What did my poor sister ever do to you?” Cassie frowns, her eyes narrow as she stares at the chair in front of her. “Cissy was always the good one, the soft one, not hard and crusty like me. You took that goodness and crushed it with hatred.”
She grips the card. “Painful endings? Not painful enough. You are evil, a wicked beast. Betrayal: that is your fate. The Ten of Swords usually means a swift end. You don’t deserve that. You need to suffer slowly, know what is happening. To know that Hell is open and waiting for you.”
Leroy stops snoring. The silence startles Cassie, but then she calms herself.
“Edith can stand up to you. You think that you’re going to drive her out? With all your mewling and bible thumping? Ha, you don’t know our Edith.”
A slow, knowing smile spreads across her face. “Her strength doesn’t come from easy wins, Mr. Preacher-Man. Her strength is like a sword. You hammering away on her just makes the blade stronger. And that blade? It’s going to cut you down.”
The End
But wait…Don’t go!
Are you interested in what happens to Edith and the crew next?
Turn the page for a sneak peek at Book 2- Storm Surge
When someone wants to hurt you, they’ll come for the thing that matters most.
Florida Coast, 1932. Edith Duffy intends to show her gloating enemies a woman can make it in a man’s world. Risen from the ashes of her embattled rum-running operation, her new saloon is thriving thanks to a smuggling partner in the Bahamas. But her success has enraged the conniving town preacher…
With the boy Edith’s affectionately taken on as a ward, her heart’s left vulnerable to deceit. And when a flock of busybody “child protectors” start squawking, the sinister pastor strikes a devastating blow.
Will Edith sacrifice her ambitious plans to protect those she’s come to love?
Storm Surge is the second book in the Rum Runners’ Chronicles, a gripping historical women’s fiction trilogy. If you like strong female characters, temperance-battling settings, and unlikely friendships, then you’ll relish Sherilyn Decter’s compelling tale.
Buy Storm Surge to see blood turn thicker than water today!
… and if you’d love to get an exclusive copy of when Edith met Mickey, sign up to be part of the Bootleggers’ Readers Group on my website https://sherilyndecter.com.
Click here to get the link and start reading Destinations today!
And please take time to read the Author’s Note for Gathering Storm, which is on the next page….
Author’s note for Gathering Storm
I hope you enjoyed the first book in the Rum Runners’ Chronicles. It’s a chance to get to know and understand Edith Duffy a bit better after her wonderful supporting role in the Bootleggers’ Chronicles.
Writing historical fiction, especially when you’re as enamored by real history as I am, is a challenge. Historians are vital for those who want to understand our present and get a sense of what the future may hold. They sift through the detritus of people’s lives, pulling out facts and patterns and then reweaving them into a whole to provide us mere mortals with a path forward.
As appealing as that is, I am not a historian. I am a storyteller. I take those same facts and attempt to reshape them into something that I hope you will find entertaining. My fictional characters get to live with factual characters.
These books are works of fiction and should be considered nothing but. While I’ve tried to stay true to the grand arch of history, occasionally I’ve moved an event that happened in one month into another so it has a better flow through the story.
The Rum Runners’ Chronicles series is based in Coconut Grove in 1932. I set it during the time of Prohibition, an era that reshaped America. Many of the characters found between the pages of the Rum Runners’ Chronicles were actual people, walking the streets and living their lives in Miami during this time. I have been inspired by their individual stories, but have reshaped them to fit the plot of my books. Sometimes things happened in real life in a similar fashion to what I have laid out, and sometimes it is a complete fabrication.
If you get the chance, dig deeper into the information about Gertrude “Cleo” Lythgoe. Known as the Queen of the Bahamas, she was central to the Prohibition legacy and lived and breathed a legendary life. I have blog posts that go into a bit more detail about her and some of the other interesting historical characters you’ll be meeting in upcoming Rum Runners’ books on my website https://sherilyndecter.com, however they only scratch the surface.
I have taken liberties with the character of Mae Capone. Al Capone: Stories My Grandmother Told Me, a biography of a wonderfully complex woman and written by her granddaughter Diane Patricia Capone, helped shape her character. I have, however, taken liberties with the age of her son, Sonny. In real life, Sonny would have been 14 during this period.
Cassie and the tarot deck are central to Edith’s story. The references to Cassie’s deck are based on the Rider Waite deck, published in 1910. They remain a popular deck, especially for amateurs like myself because of their symbolic images and archetypal images.
I based the Florida coastline and the community of Coconut Grove in the Rum Runners’ Chronicles on extensive research.
Back in the 1920s, Cap Knight, Lola Knight, and Al Hasis brought together a group of wooden shacks attached to an old barge which was floated up the present day intracoastal waterway from Miami to its location near the fabled Hillsboro lighthouse north of Fort Lauderdale. This was a rum running restaurant and gambling casino. For over send decades, Cap and Lola and their descendants have served up only the finest seafood in South Florida’s most unique waterfront setting.
Tobacco Road (from Wikipedia) - was a bar in the Brickell area of Downtown Miami, Florida, United States. It was popularly known as the oldest bar in the city. The liquor license it amended was first issued in November 1912 (though property records show the building as being built in 1915, as a bakery) and operated nearly continuously since its opening, having been shut down briefly at times for run-ins with the law, such as when the upstairs, now a live music venue, was used as a speakeasy during Prohibition. Tobacco Road was located at 626 South Miami Avenue, on the south side of the Miami River. Tobacco Road celebrated its 100th anniversary in November 2012. In 2012, the land on which Tobacco Road lies was purchased for $12.5 million. On October 26, 2014, Tobacco Road closed and was demolished by Thunder Demolition Inc. An estimated 4,000 people came on its last night.
Finally, on a personal note—
There is the romantic image of a writer, toiling alone in a garret, suffering for her muse. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. I write all my books with a couple of bad dogs curled up at my feet in the comfort of my home in Canada.
I have a great team of people working with me to make the Rum Runners’ Chronicles the best books they can be. They include my developmental editor Joe Walters from Independent Book Review, as well as my primary editor Marie Beswick-Arthur and her trusty partner in crime, Richard. I’ve also been lucky enough to work with a great cover designer, Jane Dixon-Smith. She reached into my imagination to bring the idea of a beautiful gangster widow at the crossroads of her life in tropical 1920s Florida to life.
I also had a great team of beta readers for Gathering Storm: Jessica Decter, Kim Mitchell, Jeanne Millis, Lori Cumming, Linda Forward, Johann Laesecke, Denise Birt, Sam Millis, Betty Brit Strange, and Boni Wagner-Stafford. They were the first ‘readers’ to dig into Edith’s story and were invaluable at letting me know what parts of the story were working and what parts needed polishing.
Finally, where would I be without my husband Derry. He listened to the subtle difference of phrasing many, many times, provided his medical expertise for several key scenes, and kept me going when I was ready to give up.
I hope you enjoyed Gathering Storm. And there are two more books in the Edith Duffy story, as well as an exclusive novella that tells the tale of when Edith met Mickey.
If you’re interested in learning more, please visit my website https://sherilyndecter.com to connect with me on social media, sign up for my newsletter, or check out what’s coming next.
Thank you, one and all.
Sherilyn Decter
March, 2020
Gathering Storm Page 37
