The End of the Dream (20 page)

Mark hoped that he would never hear from Scott again that everything that smacked of that old life could just be forgotten.

He still had a lot of affection for Scott, but he knew that he probably wouldn’t be able to say no to him if he showed up with some exciting proposition. Nobody could say no to Scott. That was the thing about him, he could make almost anything seem reasonable and possible and do-able.
 
Scott Scurlock had never had to approach strangers to help him carry out his plans, whether it was stealing bananas, building a six-story treehouse or robbing a bank. He had his friends. While Mark Biggins had run off to Montana after the very first bank robbery in June 1992, Steve Meyers had been grateful to accept Scott’s invitation to move to Olympia. Arriving in August, Steve had, of course, been hobbled by his torn Achilles tendon until well into September. But Scott had been understanding, and he gave Steve the gray house to live in, rent free.
 
When Steve could move about a little, he and Scott had worked on the house. Steve didn’t know where Scott was getting the money for the top-of-the-line building supplies, or for the frequent trips he took and he didn’t ask. In late September, when Steve was finally off crutches, Scott asked him to travel to Las Vegas and Reno to place bets on sporting events for him.

Steve knew this was a way to launder money so that it couldn’t be traced. Again, Steve didn’t ask questions. Each weekend then, during the final months of 1992, Scott gave Steve a packet of cash up to $20,000 at a time which Scott had harvested from plastic containers he had buried around the property on Overhulse Road. Steve then went to Las Vegas or Reno and placed bets on both teams in a game, he wasn’t betting to winhe was betting to launder the money and by wagering on both teams, he could limit his losses to five percent, the bookie’s take. Most of his bets were for $1,100 or $2,200. He always registered under his own name, in Reno, he stayed at the Hilton or Harrah’s.

In Las Vegas, he checked into Caesar’s Palace, Scott’s favorite hotel.

At the end of each weekend, Steve Meyers flew back to Washington State, and turned entirely different bills over to Scott. None of this “clean” money had ever been in a bank vault in Seattle. Steve tried to concentrate on the workday weeks at Scott’s place, and not the trips to Nevada. The beat up gray house had benefited tremendously from his labors. The interior of the house had metamorphosed from that of an old farmhouse to a modern residence with all the lavish trappings of any new home in Seattle’s fancier neighborhoods. Some of the floors were polished hardwood with a high gloss Swedish finish. Thick beige and moss green carpeting covered others. Whole sections of walls had been replaced with rich wood paneling. Steve had had to walk away from his warehouse studio in Chicago, but now he worked on Scott’s place as carefully as if it were his own. Steve’s precise and artistic tile counters transformed the kitchen and bathroom. All the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen were new, and there were enough brand new appliances to please any gourmet cook. The bathroom was a work of art with a sunken Jacuzzi tub and a shiny ebony toilet and bidetall with gold fixtures. Steve designed the wall surrounding the Jacuzzi with dull earthtone tiles above and gleaming azure tiles beneath and on the floor.
 
He had even cut a perfect diamond through the wall and installed a mirror that reflected the beauty of his work. Scott’s walls were hung with numerous maps. A man who loved faraway places would naturally choose to surround himself with maps. He also collected Bev Doolittle prints, all of them typical of her work where nothing was what it appeared on the surface. An Indian princess gazing serenely wasn’t just that, wild things and eagles’ wings were there in her hair and in the trees behind her. A wolf with yellow eyes wasn’t really a wolf. If you blinked, you would see an Indian brave painted within the eyes. With the help of his friends who came for summer work parties and the friends who came to stay longer scott’s house, treehouse and myriad outbuildings were fitted with “hidey holes, “ places deep behind closets, in walls, and behind stairways. He had more guns hidden there than anyone realized, and satchels, suitcases, boxes, and containers with blank labels. No one thought anything of it. There hadn’t been a bank robbery since November 19. In early December, Scott had flown up an electrician friend from California to rewire the house. He had also brought Bobby Gray and his wife up from Florida to do some more concrete work. Bobby was someone whom Scott cultivated, always making sure that he maintained a connection to him.

For that holiday season of 1992, when Mark Biggins had headed for California, almost everyone from the old gang on Overhulse Road scattered for family reunions. Scott himself drove to Sedona to be with his parents and sisters. Steve went to Denver to visit Dana.

Dana, only forty-four, had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but she appeared to be in remission. Her family was hopeful. “Dana was the best of all of us, “ Kevin recalled. “She was the one who deserved to live.” Kevin had gone back east in October to pack up his life in Virginia. He spent a month in Reston, putting in a new bathroom for his mother. Then he pulled a trailer with the last of his possessions as he headed west, encountering a number of blinding snowstorms. He had stopped in Denver to see Dana over Thanksgiving, and she assured him that she didn’t expect him to come back again for Christmas.

No one realized how ill Dana really was. Within a short time, the damnable cancer cells would invade almost every organ in her body and they would lose her. Steve Meyers drove back to Olympia after Christmas through Reno, stopping to bet on the Super Bowl. Scott was home when he got back and they began working on the house again. For the first month of 1993, the two men worked companionably as the rain drummed on the shake roof. Kevin, who had been Scott’s closest friend for years, was rarely at the treehouse anymore. He lived in Seattle with Ellen and her girls.

He had remodeled the girls’ bedroom with bunk beds and built-in desks so that they had room to move around easily even though Ellen’s apartment was small. Scott had donated the lumber, Kevin tried to remember the generous things Scott still did. But there was a wariness between them now, a distance that had developed since the incident with the bean pot in the barn. Even with his brother, Steve, Kevin felt alienated. The men who came and went on Overhulse Road had quietly but firmly shut him outside. He wasn’t sure why, but sometimes he was gripped with a shadowy premonition that frightened him. He worried for Steve, who was spending Christmas without the hope of seeing his daughter, and Kevin wasn’t sure where Mark Biggins had gone. He hoped warmly that when summer came, they would all gather around the campfires again. Marge Violettenow Marge Mullinswho had met Scott and Kevin eighteen years before in Hawaii, had kept in touch with Kevin, visiting back and forth, but she hadn’t seen Scott since the magic time they had all shared at The Shire. Her world was now far removed from theirs, she was no longer the carefree hippie girl she once was. In February of 1993 Marge was living in Los Angeles, and was in the midst of a divorce. She had three young sonsseven, eight, and nine and she didn’t want to raise them in Southern California, especially not as a single mother. Marge had thought about relocating to Washington State, and she contacted Kevin and asked about coming up for a visit. She knew vaguely that Scott was living somewhere in Washington since Kevin had talked about Scott’s treehouse there. Now, Kevin said that Scott was traveling in Mexico, but that he wouldn’t mind if she and her boys stayed in the treehouse. Marge was a little leery about that, but she knew her sons would love to at least see it.

She told Kevin that she would stay at a motel, and he said he’d be glad to drive her around to look at the area. “But Scott’s not the same as he was, Marge, “ Kevin warned her. “You wouldn’t want to spend too much time around him. He’s on some kind of a negative trip. He’s gone farther along a dark path.”

“What do you mean’a dark path? “ Kevin wouldn’t explain what he meant, and she didn’t press him. Marge and her sons flew up to Washington. They got a motel room in Olympia. She was not about to climb up into a six-story treehouse with three little boys until she checked it out. She called the number Kevin had given her for Scott, and got an answering machine. A woman’s chirpy voice said, “Hi there!

This is Bob and Linda, and we’re not home right now.” Marge didn’t know any Bob and Linda. When she told Kevin he’d given her the wrong number, he laughed. “That’s how Scott screens his calls. That’s his number all right, but he doesn’t answer the phone much. Just leave your number, he’s back from Mexico and he said he’d call you.” One of the ways Scott controlled his friends was by being virtually unreachable by phone. He would either unplug his phones so that they rang futilely, or he let the machine answer. Often, the only phone that worked on the place was the hone line in the treehouse was when he was entertaining a woman. Then, he seemed to be somehow pleased by the interruption and he carried on long conversations while the woman of the moment waited for him. When Scott got Marge’s message, he did call her back, and she and her boys came out to the treehouse to visit.

When she saw Scott, she felt the years drop away. It was as if she’d only said good-bye to him the day before. Scott didn’t look that much different, he still smiled the same way. She was acutely conscious that she was a forty-five-year-old woman, with some streaks of gray in her hair, and some extra pounds around her hips. Scott didn’t seem to notice. He was as sweet to her as he’d always been. “We clicked right away, “ she recalled. He was the same Scott who had sat with her on the beach in Hawaii as they talked about what they wanted in the future.
 
Only she had grown up and he hadn’t. He grinned at her boys and they crowded around him, fascinated. That first night, she and Scott planned to take the three boys out to a restaurant. As they drove past one of his neighbor’s places on Overhulse Road, Scott saw a “For Sale” sign and said, “I’ll come back when it’s dark and take it down.”

“You can’t do that, Scott, “ she said, laughing. “Sure I can, “ he said, grinning. “And I will.” Marge let it pass. She didn’t know how much Scott hated to see “For Sale” signs along his road or that he was engaged in a war with his neighbors. He believed the signs were early warnings that housing developments would follow. He was always afraid that someone would come and cut down the forests that made the real world seem miles away from Seven Cedars. Thurston County authorities had already come sniffing around his treehouse, threatening to tear it down.
 
Scott had stopped that by going to attorney Shawn Newman. It turned out well enough, Newman exchanged some letters with the county and they had backed offat least for the moment. Newman was a man devoted to preserving the habitats of wild animals and to conservation, so he and Scott had something in common. Newman’s receptionist accepted a few dates with Scott. But Scott continued to knock the signs off their posts as soon as they were nailed up. He had one neighbor, Greg Smith who was a minister on the Evergreen campus, and lived a quarter mile away who had real estate signs on his fences.

The two had a running battle. Every time Smith nailed a sign up, Scott would tear it down. On one curious evening, Scott went to Smith’s place and demanded that he stop putting “For Sale” signs on the road.

“He was the scariest guy I ever met, “ Smith recalled. “He was cursing and screaming and threatening me just because of the signs.” Smith called the Thurston County Sheriff who went to Scott’s place and told him he couldn’t pull the signs down. Except for getting a ticket once for doing “wheelies” in a parking lot, it was the closest Scott came to having trouble with the law. Now, Marge thought Scott was half-kidding.
 
She recalled how he had shot out street lights in Hawaii because they ruined the night, and how he routinely broke the speed limit. He had always had such a sense of entitlement. They took Marge’s boys to see Aladdin. Then they went out to dinner. The video game in the lobby of the restaurant wasn’t working, so Scott said he would take the boys to Tilt, a video arcade at the mall. Marge’s sons were so excited. She watched, bemused, when Scott handed each of them a $20 bill to play the games. They were speechless, they’d never had so much money. Once the kids were settled, Scott led Marge to a nearby bar where they could have drinks and keep an eye on the boys. “I had a Margarita without salt, “ she recalled.

“I can’t remember what Scott had. He told me about a woman he was dating in Olympia who had a son, and then about another one he was having an affair with in Switzerland, a woman he hoped to see soon. I offered him one of the buddy tickets’ I got from TWA where he could fly to Europe for under $50.” Kevin had told Marge that he thought Scott might be involved in something illegal, although he didn’t know what it was, so she warned Scott now that if she got him a buddy ticket, he mustn’t try to use it for anything suspicious because he would be sure to get caught. “With that kind of a ticket, you and your baggage would almost certainly be separated, “ she cautioned. Scott looked at her innocently, and smiled. He still had beautiful clear blue eyes, fringed by long lashes. He could make anyone believe anything, she thought.

They talked softly, playing catch-up for all the years. They both loved to travel. Marge said she’d been snorkeling in Fiji, and Scott said he’d been to the Seychelles Islands and to Europe and Mexico many times. “He told me that when he first went to Evergreen, he took a lot of science classes he wanted to study medicine. He wanted to find a cure for cancer, “ Marge recalled.

He told her that one of his close relatives had had cancer and he wanted to cure it. “But then he said he learned a lot about making drugs, and how easy it was. That was when he dropped out of pre-med.

It seemed to me that not all the drugs he made were legal.”

“I stopped smoking’ a long time ago, Scott, “ she told him. “I don’t smoke anything now. I quit using drugs of any kind years ago. I rarely drink. You wouldn’t know me. When I got pregnant with my first son in 1982, I wouldn’t even take over-the-counter medicine.” He smiled and shrugged. It occurred to Marge that they barely knew each other anymore.
 
He lifted his glass and gave her a long beautiful toast about old friends whose paths had drifted apart, but who still had much in common.
 
She laughed, remembering, “It ended with, And may all your orgasms be long ones, “ she said, “but the way he said it, it wasn’t even sleazy or suggestive.” They had another drink, and Scott confided in Marge that he was involved in “some international bank scams.”