Isolated on this secluded stretch of land a thousand yards off the northern tip of Lewiston Point, a wide assortment of creative men and women lived and worked in wooden residences affording views of tranquil Crescent Inlet to the east, and the sometimes turbulent Gulf of Mexico to the west. The largest of the dwellings served as a community meeting place, where the transient citizens of the retreat gathered nightly to discuss and sometimes vociferously evaluate each other’s work in progress.
It was rumored that back in 1949, when Marina Blue was still The Cloister, John D. MacDonald wrote his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, while living on a houseboat here. It was further rumored that this earlier experience afloat served as inspiration for Travis McGee’s Busted Flush. Adding credence to the hearsay was the large framed photo of the writer now hanging in the marina dining room, which had once been the community meeting hall. None of the other wooden buildings remained, although there were now tennis courts and a swimming pool on the grounds as well, luxuries not thought essential to the creative process back then in the bad old days.
The long weekend the Glendennings spent at Marina Blue provided the fondest of memories for the entire family. Eddie guessed he was still in love with Alice at the time. He had not yet begun gambling heavily. He had not yet met Christine. He later supposed he started gambling only when he realized he could not make his for tune as a stockbroker. In his view, betting on the dogs was a lot like buying and selling stocks, bonds, and commodities. It never occurred to him that one was a job and the other was an addiction.
He later also supposed that he’d started up with Christine only because he was no longer in love with Alice. It never occurred to him that he might have fallen out of love with Alice only because he’d already started up with Christine.
The way Eddie looks at it now, he chose Marina Blue as a hideaway only because he thought it would be a safe, familiar, and therefore comforting place to hold the kids until all this was over and done with.
It never occurs to him that he might have been trying to re-create for himself one of the happiest times of his life — before it got too late.
It never once occurs to him that it might already be too late.
Eddie doesn’t think of himself as a criminal. He met criminals while he was working at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich, thanks, men who engaged in insider trading and were later caught and sent to prison. He was never one of those. Which was perhaps why he’d never made a killing in the market, he was never a goddamn criminal. And he is not a criminal now.
There are men all over these United States, perhaps all over this world, righteous men who take their children away from negligent or promiscuous mothers, men who rescue their children, in effect, from households that are hopeless — though he can’t claim to have done that, no. That would be lying to himself. And Eddie has never in his life lied to himself.
He knows that in the eyes of the law, he has kidnapped his children, which is a crime, but he is not a criminal. In the eyes of the law, he has taken his own children away from their mother, a woman perceived to be a widow. Which, by the way, and for all intents and purposes, is patently true. Since he is legally dead, or at least presumed to be dead, who is to say that someone declared dead isn’t actually dead? Who is to say that Alice is not truly a widow if, in her own perception, she is in fact a widow? Who indeed?
And who is to say that Edward Fulton Glendenning did not cease to exist on that night of September 21 last year, which was when Edward Fulton Glendenning disappeared? And is it a crime to vanish from the face of the earth? Does this make him a criminal?
He was certainly not a criminal when he first began seeing Christine on the sly, began cheating on Alice, so to speak, his wife of so many good years; that did not make him a criminal. Florida is supposed to have state laws going all the way back to 1868, and these laws govern adultery, unmarried people living together, and oral sex — but they are never enforced. When he first started seeing Christine on a regular if clandestine basis, Eddie got curious about these laws so he went into the legal department of Baxter and Meuhl, where he was then working, and checked out the Florida statutes in their brown leather covers embossed in red and gold, but he couldn’t find any of those laws anywhere in any of the books. So if they weren’t in the statutes, were they even laws at all, or just myths? So he convinced himself that he was not doing anything criminal by seeing a sexy little black girl once, and then twice, and then three or four times each and every week, he was certainly not a criminal.
But Chapter 61.052 of those same Florida statutes informed him that if he and Alice ever got divorced because the marriage was “irretrievably broken,” then according to Chapter 61.08, titled “Alimony,” the court could consider “the adultery of a spouse… ”
Uh-oh.
“…and the circumstances thereof in determining whether alimony would be awarded.”
Which was not such good news.
By the time he met Christine, Eddie was into Angelet and Holmes for thirty grand. When he finally decided he had to do something to get out of this desperate situation, he owed them two hundred thou. With this huge debt hanging over his head, getting a divorce and paying alimony besides was entirely out of the question.
In Eddie’s mind, the two “problems” (he called them) became inextricably linked. If he could not get rid of Alice, he could not be with Christine full-time, and he would have to keep sneaking around corners and taking her to cheap roadside motels for quick afternoon fucks, which was not fair to either one of them. And if he could not get rid of his debt to Angelet and Holmes, then he could not get a divorce with its attendant alimony “penalties” (he called them).
So what to do?
Well, he could always kill Alice.
This was not a joke. Although he was not a criminal, killing Alice seemed to him a perfectly viable solution to at least one of the problems. Kill Alice, and he wouldn’t have to divorce her. He would be free to marry Christine and be with her night and day, you are the one.
Unfortunately, this still left the other little problem, which was a debt of two hundred thousand dollars, payable on demand or he would either be killed or hurt very badly, these people did not fool around.
What to do, oh what to do?
Well, desperate people do desperate things.
When he first told Christine about the insurance policy on his life, she thought this was very interesting but did not see how it applied to their current situation.
“If I die in an accident, the death benefit is doubled,” he told her.
“So?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“So?”
“So if I die in an accident, Alice gets two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And we get to start a new life together.”
“One,” Christine said, “how do we start a new life together if you’re dead?”
“I’m not dead. I’m presumed dead.”
“And two, if Alice is the one who gets this insurance money, how do we get to start this new life together?”
“We kidnap my kids and hold them for ransom,” Eddie said.
After he faked the drowning, they moved out of the state entirely. It might have been safe to settle on the East Coast of Florida someplace, but from Fort Myers to Palm Beach was just a short hop across the state on U.S. 80, and farther south you could jump onto Alligator Alley at Naples and be in Fort Lauderdale in what, two, three hours? They couldn’t take that chance. Eddie Glendenning was dead. They didn’t want any travelers from Cape October to run into his ghost in a bar someplace.