A campaign that, until now, had failed completely. The day Ted and Mary had left Villejeune, Mary said she’d never come back. She’d hated the town, hated the swamp, hated everything about the place. She had only agreed to marry Ted on the condition that they move away. And she’d stuck to her word. Obviously, though, everything had changed.
“The job’s here,” Carl said now. “I’ve got a lot going on, and not enough men who know what they’re doing.” He fell silent for a moment, then pressed his original question once more. “Ted, has Mary agreed to all this?”
When Ted replied, Carl could hear the strain in his voice. “She’s not thrilled about it, no. But—look, Dad,” he went on in a rush, as if afraid that if he didn’t spill the words out quickly, he wouldn’t be able to say them at all. “I haven’t worked for a while now, and there just aren’t any jobs. And with the kids Kelly’s been running around with—well, we know we have to get her out of here, and there just doesn’t seem to be anyplace else to go.”
Carl felt a pang of resentment—it wasn’t that they wanted to come home at all. There was just no place else to go. Still, he told himself, at least he’d have them here. And maybe, once Mary saw how Villejeune had changed, she’d want to stay.
After all, like Carl himself, and his dad before him, it was the place she’d been born. It was home.
“Okay,” Carl said aloud. “Just let me know what I can do and when you’ll be here.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Ted said. “It—well, it’s nice to know I can count on you.”
“Nothin’ to it, son,” Carl replied. “If you can’t count on your dad, who can you count on?”
He hung up the phone and got out of bed. Hurriedly, he showered, dressed, and fixed his breakfast, but by the time he stepped out of the house into the damp, hot Florida morning, he was already more than forty minutes behind schedule.
Still, it didn’t matter. He was going to have to see Dr. Phillips about the pain spreading from his hip, so his schedule was in the dumper anyway.
The important thing was that Ted and Mary were finally coming home, and bringing Kelly with them.
The heat was beginning to build as Carl drove through the village. Carved out of the Florida swamps on the northern edge of the Everglades so long ago that no one really knew when it had been founded, Villejeune had survived for more than three hundred years. Though it had had a few ups, most of its times had been downs, with the people of the town scratching out a living any way they could. There had been a few brief booms—the first during the nineteenth century, when there had been a flurry of plantation development, though the plantations had soon failed, cultivation overtaken by the ever encroaching swamps and marshlands. Prohibition had helped, for the lowlands had offered endless hiding places for small stills that pumped out moonshine night and day, and for a while Villejeune made a good living on the rum-running trade. The Florida land boom had followed, even reaching Villejeune for a few months before people had stopped buying land that was three feet under water. But when Prohibition died, so did the good times for Villejeune. For the next half century it went into a slow but extended decline, the cypress of its buildings slowly succumbing to the inexorable onslaught of the climate, while the people who lived in the buildings did their best to survive an economy as soft and treacherous as the mud beneath the swamp.
Then, a few years back, some people from California had begun quietly buying up large tracts of land to the north, outside of Orlando, and when their work was done, Disney World had emerged out of the marshlands. Suddenly the whole area began to thrive, and it wasn’t long before Phil Stubbs, who had been eking out his living for thirty years by guiding adventurous—and very occasional—tourists through the swamp in his single leaky scow, had been able to buy a new boat, and then another and another.
Carl Anderson had taken one look at what was going on around Orlando, and seen that the boom would move southward. Acting quickly, he’d taken on partners and bought options on as much swampland as he could get. During the last five years he had begun exercising those options, draining