The End of the Dream (12 page)

It seemed to those who observed the Scurlocks that there was a close bond between Bill and Mary Jane and their only son particularly between Bill and Scott. Scott clearly wanted his father to be proud of him.

Kevin always felt that Scott needed to share the clever plans he made and carried out, although he could not say whether Bill Scurlock knew about his secret life. The Scurlocks drove the stretch between Sedona, Arizona, and Olympia, Washington, regularly. Usually Scott seemed pleased to see his parents drive up. He was close to them and to his sisters. He always made sure the gray house was cleared out of whatever temporary residents were living there so that Bill and Mary Jane could use it. One summer, he promised his mother she could buy a vacuum cleaner for the gray house. The Electrolux salesman brought all his equipment and did his dirt-dumping demonstration. Mary Jane had to wake Scott up to get the money for the vacuum cleaner, which cost a thousand dollars. “Get two, “ he said impatiently, peeling bills off a thick roll. “One for you to take home and one to leave here.” Bill and Mary Jane Scurlock visited often, proud of their only son. His father always enjoyed seeing the improvements on the treehouse, and, later, on the gray house.

As a grown man, Scott clung to many of his father’s teachings. He had always forbade outright negative emotions. Scott had never been allowed to say, “I hate.” He had been taught that he could only say, “I dislike.” He never “hated” anyone. He caught himself many times saying “hate, “ and with the rote lessons he had learned as a child, corrected it to “dislike.” Sometimes, Bill Scurlock came alone for a visit. He returned Scott’s favor when it came to remodeling. Bill did a lot of work on the barn at Seven Cedars. He was a good carpenter himself, and the exterior turned out beautifully with a distinctive V design of two-by fours that Bill had used to face the building. On one of Bill Scurlock’s solo visits in 1988, there was a near tragedy in the treehouse.

Kevin was also visiting that summer, and he and Scott were working on a walkway high up in the trees that Scott called “the stairway to heaven.

“ He had planned to install a Jacuzzi just beyond the top step of the walkway. Scott’s enthusiasm for building was hardly blunted by ordinary safety precautions. He and Kevin had worked until dark one night on the “heaven” stairway, and the base for the newest steps was close to seventy feet off the ground.

They threw two-by-twelve boards out until they could be attached to one of the cedars that made up the central core of the treehouse.

The two extra feet beyond the holding trees were very strong, strong enough to make each base. They had nailed in all but the top step securely. “Scott said, We’re just going to put one more step in, “ Kevin recalled. “And I said, Man, it’s dark’but you can’t tell him.

So he put the top step in, but he toe-nailed it.

That’s sticking it in just enough to hold it, until you’re ready to secure it. It would be really dangerous for anyone to put weight on it.” And there were no guard rails at all, Scott just didn’t think they were necessary. While the younger men slept in the next morning, Bill Scurlock was up early and set out to see how the carpentry had progressed the night before. He walked up the stairway to heaven, unaware that the top step was only tacked in. When he put his weight on it, it gave way and he plunged straight down. Bill Scurlock was able to throw his arms out and grab tree branches, but he still dangled six stories up in the treetops. He cried out to his son, and Scott woke instantly and clambered out as close as he could get to his father. Bill Scurlock was in his sixties and in terrible pain. “Dad, “ Scott said, trying to sound calm. “I want you to inch toward me.

You can do it.” It was a terrible moment. If Bill Scurlock fell, he would surely die. Following his son’s directions, he I managed to move himself backward through the boughs and finally turn around so that Scott could grab him. He was bruised for weeks. It was a near-miracle that Bill Scurlock was alive. Had he fallen, the impact of hitting the needlecarpeted forest floor below would have been like hitting concrete from six stories up. Scott was badly shaken. He had warned his father very explicitly not to go out on construction in progress. He was gray-faced as he confided to Kevin, “If my father had died, I would have burned down this treehouse until it was only ashes.” In the spring of 1989, Steve Meyers moved to Chicago to set up a studio there.

He knew that Diana wouldn’t be coming with him. Their marriage was over, it had lasted less than three years. Diana had already filed for divorce in Virginia. Steve bought an old warehouse on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago and stayed with a friend until after Christmas.

He leased out a section of the warehouse while he renovated the rest.

Steve didn’t see the mess and the dusty beams. Instead, he saw high ceilings, huge windows, and brick walls that would one day make a fine background to display his new sculptures. He saw the cozy space that might be a perfect room for Cara. He purchased a huge piece of pure white marble, thirteen and a half feet tall and six feet wide at its base. To everyone’s amazement, he got it off the truck and into his new studio by himself, using winches and rollers. He could see a magnificent work inside that marble, waiting to be released. In 1989, Kevin Meyers shuttled between the people who mattered most to him. His mother, his brother and sister, and Scott Scurlock. Kevin visited Steve in Chicago and traveled farther west. When he got out to Olympia, he was shocked at the change in his old friend. Scott, who never let anything bother him, was anxious and upset. Captain Pat, Scott told Kevin, was dead murdered.
 
Scott said that Pat had kept an old trailer deep in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula. He described it as a bizarre site, junky and isolated. Pat had decorated the site with naked baby dolls, nailing them to trees.

It was a practice he had never explained, and one that Scott hadn’t asked him about. Now Pat was dead. “Somebody shot him in the head, “ Scott confided, “when he was sleeping. Nobody knows who.” Kevin could see that Scott was genuinely frightened. It was as if he had never really grasped how dangerous drug dealing was. If Pat had been shot because of his connection to the crystal meth operation, Scott figured that he himself might be in danger.

Except for his fears about ghosts, Kevin had never known Scott to be afraid of anything. Certainly not anything concrete. But Scott had other concerns. He said Pat’s murder had cost him an awful lot of money. He had been preparing for a new “experiment, “ and he had entrusted the expensive ingredients to Captain Pat.

“I bought $100,000 worth of chemicals I needed for the next experiment, “ Scott said. “I gave them to Pat, and he buried them around his place in plastic containers. He didn’t tell me where because I didn’t want to know not then. Now, I’ve got all that cash invested in those chemicals, and I can’t find any of them.” Kevin just stared at Scott, wanting to believe this was only an overactive imagination at work. $100,000 worth of chemicals buried in the ground? That hardly seemed possible. But Scott was frantic. Scott assured Kevin he was out of the crystal meth manufacturing business for good. It was too dangerous and unpredictable.
 
Kevin knew he meant it.

Now that Captain Pat was dead, Scott had caught perhaps for the first time a glimpse of his own mortality. Scott still had his “stashes, “ however, of both money and drugs. He had once explained to Kevin how he stockpiled his product. He put the meth into white plastic buckets, sealed them with duct tape, and buried them around the property on Overhulse Road. He said he was like an Indian covering up a trail, he brushed the dirt with boughs so that the ground over the white buckets was left with no trace that anything had been buried there. Somewhere, Scott had perfect diagrams that would lead him to the buried drugs.

He figured he had a supply that would last for at least a couple of years maybe more.

Whenever he needed money, all he had to do was dig up a bucket of meth.

He would be very, very careful now, however, about where he sold it.

He didn’t want to end up with a bullet in his head like Captain Pat.

The drug stashes gave him some time, but Scott would have to find another way to make the kind of money he needed to continue his high-living lifestyle. Kevin feared that it probably wasn’t going to be a job in some corporation’s chemical laboratory. He tried not to think about it as he turned his van east toward Denver, where he planned to visit his sister, Dana, before he went home to Virginia.

They were all headed for a new decade. The boys who raced around Reston in the sixties leaping off buildings were going to be forty before too long. How could that be? Despite his frequent misgivings about what Scott was up to, Kevin had thought somehow that Peter Pan Land in Olympia, Washington, would go on forever. But Kevin had always believed that his sister Dana was the wisest and best human being he knew.

During their visit in Denver, he confided some of the things that had gone on with Scott over the years they’d been best friends.

Dana listened for a long time and saw that Scott had often humbled her proud little brother. “Kevin, “ she said softly, “Scott’s not your friend. Don’t you realize that friends don’t treat friends like that?

“ He didn’t want to believe her, but, inside, he knew she was right.

Kevin was one of only two of Scott’s longtime friends who resisted his tremendous influence.

The other was Bobby Gray, who, long ago, had polevaulted with Kevin at Herndon High. Kevin had introduced him to Scott. “I told him, Scott, you’ve got all these huge plans, you need a professional builder and Bobby’s the best.” Bobby had joined Kevin almost every year for the trip to Washington. Each of them had been enthusiastic workers during the treehouse-building summers, but they had both stubbornly maintained their own lives back on the East Coast. It turned out that Bobby and his wife, Penny, * already had a link to Scott. Penny’s parents had been very good friends of Bill and Mary Jane Scurlock’s when they all lived in Reston. When Penny was a teenager, her family had been invited to a nudist gathering where the Scurlock’s attended. She told Bobby later that she had been shocked by the sight of the Reverend Scurlock in the altogether. It became a favorite inside joke for Bobby and Kevin. Kevin laughed when he heard about Penny’s experience, and asked Bobby what a nudist getaway was like. Bobby scratched his head, and finally said deadpan, “Well, she said it makes you appreciate clothes! “ Although Kevin considered Scott the best friend he’d ever had, and he expected to head west to visit the treehouse regularly, he had held back on giving up too much of himself. So had Bobby. But, in that summer of 1989, Scott asked Kevin for one last favor. On the surface, the favor seemed innocuous enough, and Scott’s request came when Kevin stopped in Denver on his way back to Virginia.

He was visiting Dana and her second husband and their two sons.

Dana was teaching ballet and was saving for her dream of running a day-care center that she would call “Rose Garden.” She seemed so happy.
 
During that visit, Kevin called Scott to see how things were going in Washington. Scott asked him to come back to Olympia and buy a Chevy four-by-four truck for him. Scott said he would give Kevin the cash to go buy a truck he had already picked out.

That was all. He didn’t have to register it in his name or anything.

Since he wasn’t in any tearing hurry to get back home to Virginia, Kevin agreed to fly back to Washington. On the plane from Denver, he met the woman who would change his life. She was a lovely woman who had soft blue eyes and thick blond hair. Her name was Ellen Hasland, * and she told him she had been visiting her family in Colorado and was on her way home to Seattle. She was a single mother raising three daughters. Ellen had a sweet calmness about her, the exact opposite of Kevin’s nervous energy.

She listened to him talk about his ambitions in the art world, and about his family. He listened lesshe was a man whose energy made it difficult for him to listen but he heard enough to tell him that he had finally found the woman he had been looking for. He was thirty-six, still single, while Ellen was a little younger. But she seemed older and so much wiser. There was the unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t say good-bye when their plane landed.

They made arrangements to see each other again, it didn’t matter that they lived on opposite coasts.
 
Over the next two years they saw each other as often as they could. Kevin came out to Washington, Ellen visited in Virginia. Scott had also met his girlfriend of the moment while flying. She was a flight attendant named Cindo. Cindo told The Stranger some years later about their affair, “He said he lived in Olympia, and we exchanged numbers, saying we’d try to bump into each other again. After that, when I had Seattle overnights, I’d call him and we’d usually get together. Sometimes we’d rendezvous in Vegas.

We’d stay at Caesar’s and Scotty would have everything arranged. He was first class all the way. He told me that he did some construction, some general contracting. He was so talented. He was also a writer and photographer he traveled all over the world to take pictures. I didn’t really know if he had family money or what. It wasn’t something that was really of interest to me. We stayed at the nicest places, we ate at the finest restaurants, and there always seemed to be plenty of money.” Cindo was the perfect girlfriend for Scott, and she would always remain impressed with him. “Scott was real intelligent, and he used to read a lot, and he wrote poetry. He was really interested in environmental concerns. He was always interested in conservation and taking care of the land.

He would never litter. He seemed to give back to the planet by growing things. I really admired his deep convictions to do that.

“ Cindo was, of course, describing exactly the image of himself that Scott strived to project. He wasn’t a writer and he wasn’t even a very good amateur photographer but he enjoyed creating the illusion that he was. Back in Chicago, Steve Meyers began to work again. Chicago wasn’t Carrara, but the feel in the warehouse energized him. He visualized it as a magnificent place. And he remained optimistic. He still had his talent and he still hoped to have Cara with him. He thought he could provide a better home for her than her mother. Steve contacted Scott Scurlock and said he was ready to come to Olympia, Washington, to do carpentry work for him. In the summer of 1990, Steve arrived in Washington State, bringing Cara with him. Scott welcomed them both.
 
There were several buildings now on Scott’s twenty acres, the gray house, a Prowler trailer that Scott’s folks had left for him to fix up and sell, a thirty-two foot storage shed, and the barn that had possibilities but needed more work. Steve stayed for three weeks working on the barn. The Meyers brothers perhaps because they had had virtually homeless years as children, saw a wonderful dwelling in almost every solid old structure they encountered. Were it not for their soaring artistic gifts, they would have made a good living as contractors.
 
After only three short weeks, Steve and Scott became good friends, and Steve moved into the rarefied inner circle of Scott’s world. Kevin recognized this and felt a dull sense of dread. There was, of course, nothing he could do about his fears for Steve. Steve was his own man, and bullheaded at that when he wanted to be. Steve Meyers retained an attorney and filed for custody of Cara. He refinanced his Chicago building so that he could build a bedroom for her, a charming feminine oasis in the midst of the warehouse. They needed a proper bathroom too, so Steve designed one with a Jacuzzi and Grecian urns. When Scott heard about Steve’s massive building project, he volunteered to come to Chicago and help. Scott said he would do whatever he could to help Steve obtain custody of his little girl.