The End of the Dream by Ann Rule Page A

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    would buy me a ticket back from New Zealand too .. . the owner had no problem with my staying on the boat as an unpaid crew member.” As it turned out, Marge stayed with the boat for fourteen months. They sailed on to Tahiti and then back to Hawaii, arriving in Honolulu in October 1977.
    Two decades later, she remembered the day well. There was a heat wave in Honolulu and they went to the movies to escape the heat.
    “We saw Star Wars.” When Marge Violette had sailed out of Honolulu, she didn’t realize that she wouldn’t be coming back for more than a year.   She had simply stepped out of Kevin and Scott’s perfect world onto a sailboat. But in the interim, an invisible curtain had dropped between them, She would see Scott Scurlock only once more in the seventies, and that was when she stopped over in Honolulu briefly after her long cruise. “Scott took me and another girl to a Halloween party, “ Marge recalled. “I wore leotards with wings attached to my arms and went as a butterfly.
    Scott may have worn a plaid shirt and gone as a lumberjack but on this I’m not sure.. .. There were a lot of University of Hawaii students there.. .. It was one of the nicest parties I have ever attended.” Marge’s brother was getting married back in New , .
    Jersey, and she left for the mainland the first week of November 1977.
    In the years ahead, Marge kept in touch with Kevin and saw him once in a while. On one occasion, she took a train across Canada. to see him in Edmonton, and she visited him in Virginia and met his mother. Years later, when Marge got engaged, she called Joanna Meyers to tell her.
    Joanna blurted, “Oh, I’m sorry it’s just that I always hoped you and Kevin would get married.” It was different with Scott. Marge would not cross paths again with Scott for seventeen years. When they did meet again, their worlds would be completely changed. Joanna Meyers’ children had not only left home, it looked as though they were going to settle in far flung corners of the world and she might never see them all together again. Dana was in New York, Steve in Italy, Kevin in Hawaii, and now Randy, too, had headed off to Europe. He would make Italy his base for a very successful career writing musical scores for movies. Their homecomings would be infrequent but wonderful. Joanna was always so glad to see any of her children. She was proud and grateful. Somehow they had come through the fire of her stormy marriage and had grown past the ego-damaging neglect of their father.
    Dana was married now to the stage director of the New York City Ballet Company, Peter Gardner.
    And although Steve wasn’t married, he had settled down with a woman.
    But neither Randy nor Kevin had shown any signs of permanent romantic commitments. Of all the children, Kevin seemed the most unsettled, the searcher who knew that he wanted to paint and that no other career would suit him, but he hadn’t found a spot where he could set up a real studio. He was younger than Dana and Steve and not as disciplined as Randy. And, by all accounts, he was having a wonderful time in Hawaii.
    He wasn’t thirty yet. There was time. Just when it seemed that all the Meyers were going to be fine, small things started to go wrong.
    There was the slightest creaking in what had seemed to be a solid structure. It was like finding a fissure in a wall left behind by an undetectable earthquake. The damage seemed minuscule, but deep inside, there was a fault that would one day make itself known.
    Kevin Meyers trusted Scott Scurlock completely. Although he liked almost everyone he met, there were only a handful of people he trusted completely. Scott was one. They were best friends, brothers, coconspirators, adventurers together. Kevin would recall those days and say, “I honored Scott’s pathi honored him.
    “ They still had little money, but they didn’t need L much.
    Their landscaping jobs paid them enough to rent The Shire and buy what they needed. They