The End of the Dream (28 page)

Ellen was a listener and not a judge. Despite her thick taffy-colored hair and large blue eyes, she seemed unaware of how attractive she was.

She was not drawn to Scott in a sexual way, she saw, instead, a troubled soul. She would have liked to see him with a woman who loved him, but he had told her many times that he could never be with the kind of woman he most admired. “It’s one of the sadnesses of my life that I have to deny myself the company of women I really want. I have to have ditzy’ girls, “ Scott told Ellen. “I can’t be with a woman who is going to size things up and start asking me questions. I can’t afford that luxury.” She looked at him without comprehension.

“Ellen, you know that I have to have dumb women, “ he said again, “women who won’t question me or want to be too involved.”

“Why? “ Ellen asked for the twentieth time. “What is it that you’re hiding? “

“You don’t want to know.” She didn’t not really. When she didn’t know, it was easier to see him as just Scott. By 1995, no one close to Scott wanted to come out and ask him a direct question. They all feared the truth. Again, Scott gave his parents a large gift of money.

When his father asked where the money came from, he had responded, “You don’t want to know.” Instead, Scott had muttered something about starting a Geoduck harvesting business in Washington, and investing in construction back east. Geoducks are immense clams that dot Northwest beaches. They can dig down faster than most humans can follow. They are much sought-after, and commercial ventures in the Olympia area use hydraulic suction pumps to pull them from the floor of the sea. Had Scott actually invested in Geoducks, he might eventually have made more than he had stolen. Whatever Scott told the Reverend William Scurlock probably would not have mattered. His father seemed to look upon Scott as a golden child who was beyond reproach. His whole family had adored Scotty from the moment he was born and, in their eyes, he could do no wrong. They certainly would not pursue answers to questions that would mar the image they had of him. In May 1995, Scott headed down to New Orleans again for the Jazz Fest. There he met friends who lived on the East Coast and they all stayed in the Lower Garden District for a week.

Scott Scurlock had a wonderful time wherever he was. His whole life was a vacation, if he became satiated or bored, he simply moved on. He traveled once more to New Orleans during the summer of 1995. There was a flood while Scott was there, and he sat in a bar one afternoon, lifting his eyebrow quizzically in an expression that was familiar to his friends, watching water roll through the door and rise to the first rung of his stool. He only grinned and took off his shoes and socks.

Every one left the bar except the bartender and Scott, and a slender woman with flyaway blond hair. She was thin and delicate looking, an almost plain woman with glasses and a pageboy haircut that lay flat against her skull. Even without makeup, her features were quite perfect.
 
Outside the sky turned black and the water continued to rise.

The woman was so attracted to Scott that she scarcely cared that the muddy water had risen up to their knees as they clung to bar stools.

She laughed and took off her shoes too. She and Scott talked for hours as the water rose higher.

Her name was Sabrina, and she told him she was from Phoenix and that she worked in a jewelry store there. Sabrina Adams* must have felt as if she had stepped into the pages of a romance novel.

Scott
 
Scurlock was incredibly handsome, and the only sounds she heard were the gentle slosh of floodwaters that rose around them, and his soft, deep voice. They talked and drank and Sabrina fell in love.

She wasn’t a gorgeous woman, she had a certain rabbity quality that kept her from that but she was appealing in a small-boned, dependent way. And she had enough guts to ride out the flood with a stranger.

Scott was quite taken with her, he saw that she trusted him absolutely and that she also had a careless almost hedonistic air about her. She was enjoying this adventure as much as he was. He invited her to come to the Seychelles Islands with him, and she said yes without hesitating.

Afterwards, when Scott told his friends about meeting Sabrina, he sometimes described encountering her one way, and sometimes another.

Once he went into great detail about how he had met her “in a jewelry store in Phoenix.” He said he had gone in to case the store for a planned robbery, but, instead he had stayed to talk to Sabrina and become entranced with her. His friends could believe Scott as a jewel thief or cat burglar. He probably was imagining himself right into Cary Grant. However it happened, meeting Scott was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to Sabrina. After their trip to the Seychelles, she became his new woman not his new love but his new woman. So many women had moved through Scott’s life, and yet he hadn’t been able to hold on to any of them. He might have said that was the way he wanted it, he let go deliberately before any of them could hurt him. Sabrina had clearly fallen totally in love with Scott the first night she met him. At first she and Scott enjoyed a temporary monogamy of sorts. They posed for pictures with their arms around one another, their bodies almost one. They cuddled together up in the treehouse, watching videos, listening to music, smoking pot.

Sabrina kept the rooms there and in the gray house spotless, she cooked what Scott liked, and hung on his every word. Probably because he was by this time constitutionally unable to be totally honest with any woman, Sabrina never really grasped what it was that Scott wanted. But she did her best to decipher his mixed signals and tried to interpret them. She believed he actually liked the Greeners, the hippies and the latter day flower children, who had crept back onto Scott’s land while he was away, because they appreciated nature and trees just like Scott did. She even tried to emulate the ragtag visitors. She let her hair grow long and never wore makeup. She even stopped shaving her body hair.

Kevin and Ellen visited in the summer of 1995 and felt a little sorry for Sabrina. She didn’t know yet that Scott was certain to grow bored with her and send her away. Even though he didn’t say it aloud, Sabrina obviously thought he was as much in love as she was. “He liked having her there all right, “ Kevin recalled. “He told me that she was the best housekeeper he ever had that’s all.

But then he said he wanted to get rid of her but he’d miss having her clean.” Sabrina had no idea that Scott spoke that way about her. It was possible that he did love her, but that he had cultivated his cavalier attitude toward women for so long that he could never admit to tender feelings about Sabrina. How he really felt about Sabrina was anybody’s guess. Sometimes, Scott asked her how much she would give up for him. It was either a head game or a test of her love, Would she give up everything? Her family? Her identity? Her life in America?

Would she simply disappear with him for years, if need be? For him?

Of course, she would. Anything. More often now, Scott spoke of leaving everything behind and disappearing. If he went away, Sabrina knew she would have to follow him. She could not bear the thought of being without him. Was the bank robbing over? Had Scott Scurlock proved to his own satisfaction that he was the best? Down in New Orleans, Steve Meyers was finally getting established in his own place, and he was beginning to focus again on his art. Kevin drew his first deep breath about his brother in a long time. Maybe it was over. It was far from over. Scott Scurlock did a lot of traveling in mid-1995, and he spent the rest of the time home in Olympia. But he knew that even the big haul he’d carried away from the Madison Park Sea first Bank wouldn’t last forever not considering his lifestyle. It was only a matter of time until the white plastic pails he’d buried would be empty. His friends had heard him muse about what the life of a cat burglar who stole ewelry might be like. Maybe he was thinking of changing specialties. Perhaps he was only teasing Sabrina. Any reasonable man who had survived fourteen bank robberies without being caught would have to wonder if he had pushed the law of averages too far.

And Scott had had some close calls. It would have been tempting to look for the kind of robbery where he didn’t have to confront dozens of people. Was he tempted to give up stealing completely?

Probably not. Weighing who Scott Scurlock was, how far he had come along the path to amoral behavior, it’s unlikely that he could have gone back.
 
And back to what? The only real jobs he’d ever had in his life were the landscaping work in Hawaii and his short stint as a building inspector in Reston. He had never gotten his college degree.

He was forty years old. How was he going to explain all those years of no visible employment to a future employer? Too late. His tastes were much too opulent for him to accept the kind of job he was qualified for barring a career as an actor. He had the looks, the charisma, the voice, and how he would have loved it. But he had never tried, he was another kind of Hollywood now. Scott was having a strange summer. He was smoking too much marijuana and drinking too much. One moonless night as he walked along the path to the treehouse, he saw something just ahead of him. It
 
wasn’t human, it wasn’t anything he could explain. The thing had red, glowing eyes that stared at him. He was utterly terrified. He blinked once, twice, three time sand finally the thing on the path disappeared.

It had either run away or vaporized. He ran to the treehouse and clambered frantically upward. He called Ellen and babbled to her that he was frightened. Would she come down? Kevin was away, painting and Sabrina was in Arizona. Scott, who had never been a solitary man, needed company now more than ever. Ellen drove to Olympia and listened as Scott talked all night. He didn’t sleep until the first pale strands of dawn pierced the black lace of the cedar trees. Scott was fine when he woke up. He didn’t want to talk about the red-eyed creature any longer. He thanked Ellen for being his “friend, therapist, listener, advisor, “ and she smiled faintly. Yes, she listened and she gave him advice, but she knew that, in the end, he always did exactly what he wanted to do. When Ellen mentioned Scott’s strange encounter to Kevin, he nodded as if he was not surprised.

Twenty years earlier, in another lifetime for all of them, Scott had been frightened by something similar. Kevin had always believed that Scott’s luck would carry him through anything, and yet he had watched him move along “a dark path.” Now, Scott had quite literally walked along a night-shrouded path and encountered something that sounded demonical. Scott had always been superstitious and afraid of unseen or unexplainable things. As much as he loved movies, there were a few extremely popular films that he avoided. One was Ghost, starring the same actor who had played Bodie in Point Break, Patrick Swayze.

However, in Ghost, Swayze played a murder victim who came back to help his fiancee escape the man who had killed him. One scene in Ghost involves the villain’s death and his screams as black, amorphous, creatures carry him to hell. When that scene came on, Scott turned pale and left the room. He refused to watch the movie ever again.

Kevin was almost relieved that Scott was finally frightened. Now, maybe he was scared enough that he would walk away from what could only end in disaster for everyone. One night, when Scott was so intoxicated that he could barely walk, he and Kevin went for a run. Scott had always been able to keep goin gout of sheer will, if need be. Kevin understood that.
 
He was the same way himself. Now, Scott fell again and again, and Kevin urged him to stop and just sleep it off. He was horrified when he looked at Scott’s knuckles and saw that, when he’d fallen, the gravel and sharp stones had cut them so deeply that the bone beneath was visible.
 
Whatever Scott was running from, it had to be more than the alcohol that clouded his thinking, and worse than the pain in his hands. As they jogged together through the starry night, they talked their voices bursting forth in panting sentences but Scott still didn’t tell Kevin exactly what he was involved in. He did say something that chilled Kevin’s blood. Scott boasted that he had donated $50,000 to Amnesty International. Amnesty International? Why ot, “Save the Trees, “ or “Save the Whales’all those causes to protect the environment that Scott had always been so passionate about?

Kevin wondered if Scott was even telling him the truth. If he had, indeed, given that much money to amnesty, Kevin couldn’t help wondering if it was insurance against his own future. As they ran, Scott confided less to Kevin. He never mentioned seeing the creature with red eyes.
 
Maybe that was why he wouldn’t allow himself to go to sleep drunk. Was he afraid that the thing he had come to fear most would creep into his dreams? The pain in his bleeding hands had to be excruciating, but Scott kept running.

They ran for seventeen miles, it took that long for Scott’s head to clear. It was daylight when they came back to the treehouse.

There was nothing there to be afraid of. It still looked like every boy’s dream fort in the woods. Kevin knew that Steve was having nightmares too, although he wouldn’t elaborate about the images that came to him. But Steve always slept with his late sister Dana’s blanket as a talisman against danger. Finally, Steve admitted to Kevin that he had a recurring dream where his legs were cut off. He would look down to see that he couldn’t walk and would awake in a cold sweat.

Odd. Steve needed his arms to create his art, his hands to shape marble and wood into the images in his head, but in his dreams it was his legs that were severed.

Maybe he wanted to run away from what his life had become but he couldn’t. Despite the terrifying creature that stalked him after the sun had set, Scott went ahead with his next project. He planned to be flawless at his craft, at his crimes. He watched every movie he could find that involved robbing banks. He watched the daily television news and he scoured the papers. When he pinpointed some mistake that ended in a bank robber’s arrestor death he committed it to memory. He believed that he had been blessed with uncommon good luck, but he continued to refine his game plan. He renewed his focus on bank security. He had decided one thing, he didn’t want to go into the banks by himself anymore.