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A ticket to paradise lost
By B.J. ORAM © St. Petersburg Times, published December 27, 2000 Paulie Starr was dead, and Ada Wellington somehow felt responsible. Ada had been the one among the six friends to suggest that they each put $2 a week into a pool to buy lottery tickets. It was a long shot, of course, but it was their only chance to raise the millions of dollars they would need to buy Windy Oaks before Jimbo Hobbs sold their homes out from under them. All six members of the Windy Oaks lottery pool got along well, which was why they got together in the first place so many months ago. They were friends despite being from different parts of the country with little in common except they were all single, all getting up there in years, they enjoyed the quiet life of the campground, and they all could use some more money. A jackpot of $13-million, however, had begun to change character and behavior toward one another. Each had figured out their share after the TV news announcer had read the winning numbers on that Saturday night three weeks ago, and almost immediately, some friction began to flare. Jake had griped that Ada and Edith should only get one share since they were sisters and their two shares would be twice as much as the other winners, who all were single. If one of the sisters were to die, Jake pointed out, the surviving sister would get a double share. Ada, eyes flashing, was already rising out of her seat to bark at Jake when Johnny spoke up. "Funny you didn't have that concern all those weeks when Ada and Edith were putting in $4 to your two bucks," Johnny noted. Jake started to speak, but reading Johnny's look, he slumped into his chair. "The rules today are the same ones we agreed on when we started this," Johnny continued, looking at the faces seated around the faded linoleum table in the Windy Oaks campground bar. The room was empty except for the six residents. Jimbo Hobbs, the owner and bartender, was somewhere in the back room, probably sleeping off his latest binge. "We're all in this together, and we gotta do it right," Johnny went on quietly. "So enough of the bickering, all right?" They talked about what to do next and decided they needed to get legal advice. Johnny mentioned a lawyer in town, Harry Hill, who had handled his will. He had done right by him, Johnny said, allocating what little assets he had to Johnny's nieces and nephews, just as he had requested. "As a rule, you can't trust them snakes," Jake had said. "But if Johnny trusts this lawyer, I guess that's good enough for me." They didn't trust the lawyer well enough, however, to hand over the winning ticket, and they debated for nearly an hour where to hide it. They all wanted to be able to keep an eye on it and to keep anyone outside of their circle from finding it. Paulie thought of hanging it on the bar's bulletin board. "No one ever reads that thing, so they wouldn't even notice it." "Yeah, hiding in plain sight. I've heard of that," Gus added. Jake had a better idea -- hide it on the Windy Oaks sign. This way, they could all keep an eye on it (and each other) at all times. Jake had suggested hiding it behind the pelican, but Edith had wrapped it in an old plastic bag and formed one corner of the plastic to look like a little bit of fish tail sticking out of the pelican's bill. Jake couldn't keep from laughing aloud. Finally agreed, they stood to go back to their RVs and travel trailers. Johnny stopped them at the door. "Folks, none of us are Rockefellers, so this is probably the last chance that any of us will ever have to hit it big. We're not getting any younger and this could mean the difference between life and death for some of us. The only ones who know anything about the $13-million, and the only ones who can mess this up, are those of us in this room." In the back room, sprawled across several cases of Bud Lite, Jimbo stirred from his Seagrams-induced haze. Did he hear right? Did Johnny Bartolli really say something about the old geezers winning $13-million, or was he still dreaming? Three weeks had passed since that meeting and the euphoria among the six neighbors had waned as the ill feelings and mistrust grew. Then, Paulie Starr's body washed up against the park's dilapidated pier with a gaping wound in his head. Could it have been an accident? Possibly, but not likely. Jake swore it was a bullet hole, but some of the others wondered why he seemed so certain. And why was Gus the only one around when Paulie's body was found? And, now, Johnny was dead. One of the park residents had found his bloody body slumped behind the tool shed at the park, his skull crushed. Everybody at Windy Oaks now was looking at each other uneasily, suspicious of their longtime neighbors as well as the strangers who always seemed to be going in and out of the park. Paulie had been a quiet man but, like Gus, he liked his cocktails. Could he have bragged to some stranger who decided to kill him after failing to get Paulie to divulge the location of the ticket? But what about Johnny? He was too wary to be tricked like that. There was hardly ever any reason for the police to come to their quiet campground, and now there were two dead bodies in a matter of days. The sheriff's office, naturally, was looking for connections and had learned from other residents that Paulie and Johnny were part of a group of six singles who regularly met to play cards and gossip. Having two of the six friends turn up dead was entirely too much of a coincidence for the investigators to swallow. They focused their attention on the four friends lucky enough to still be alive. About the author Bernard J. Oram was born in Allentown, Pa., and served in the Navy for 31/2 years. He participated in the invasions of Omaha beach, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was among the first Navy personnel ashore in Amori, Japan, after the surrender. After being discharged in 1946, he attended school in New Haven, Conn., for advanced photography. He began work for the Call-Chronicle Newspapers in Allentown, then set up his own business called Photographic Studios. B.J. moved to Florida in 1956 and worked at the St. Petersburg Times. He retired from the Times after 31 years and moved to Dunnellon, where he began working for the Ocala Star-Banner. After a leave of absence for a major stroke, he returned to the Star-Banner. He now works for the Riverland News in Dunnellon writing a column called "Observations by Oram" and other freelance work. He also wrote a four-month column for the Times in a special magazine called Seniority on Strokes and Hope and Recovery. He lives in the Village of Rainbow Springs. CHAPTER ONE: TICKETCHAPTER TWO: PARADISE LOST
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