They had grown up on a fine little bass lake, all the Tyree boys, but it was Doyle and Clint who could never get enough of the place – after school and Saturday mornings, and Sundays, too, when church let out. And it wasn't the fishing so much as the good hours together and the unbroken peace – the breeze bending the cattails, the sunlight shimmering the slick-flat water, the turtles on the logs and the gators in the lilies and the querulous calls of the meadowlarks drifting down from the pastures. Doyle Tyree was wretched with longing and loneliness when he suggested to his sergeant that they go carp fishing that evening, not even knowing if there werecarp or any other damn fish in the flooded-out rice paddy; knowing only that in the twilight it reminded him of the lake back home. So they'd cut down bamboo shoots for poles and bowed sewing needles into hooks and for bait swiped a bread loaf from the mess, then grabbed up their remaining bottles of ale – bitter and piss-warm, but who cared? – and set off to catch some major motherfucking carps. The dirt road was unlit and potholed but ultimately it was the damn goat that did the job, some sleepy peasant's runaway goat. When the sergeant swerved to avoid it, the Jeep flipped (as those army Jeeps would do) and kept on flipping until an ox-drawn wagon stopped it as conclusively as a concrete wall.

And Doyle Tyree awoke in a chilly white room in Atlanta, Georgia, with steel pins in his femur and a plate in his head and more guilt and shame on his twenty-five-year-old soul than seemed bearable. He asked to return to duty in Vietnam, which was not unusual for soldiers injured under such circumstances, but the request was turned down and he was handed an honorable discharge. So back to Florida he went, to wait for his heroic little brother. Only after Clint returned safely from the jungle, only after they'd hugged and laughed and spent a misty morning on the family lake, only then did Doyle Tyree allow the breakdown to begin. Within a week he was gone, and nobody knew where.

It was many years before his brother found him. By then Clinton Tyree was governor and had at his disposal the entire state law-enforcement infrastructure, which on occasion displayed bursts of efficiency. The governor's brother, who had been using the name of his dead sergeant from Vietnam, was unmasked by a sharp-eyed clerk during a routine fingerprint screen. The fingerprint data located Doyle Tyree in an Orlando jail cell, where he was doing thirty days for trespassing. He had been arrested after pitching his sleeping bag and firing up a Sterno camp stove inside the tower of Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World – the thirty-sixth time it had happened during a two-year stretch.

Disney police figured Doyle Tyree for a wino, but in fact he had not swallowed a drop of alcohol since that night outside of Nha Trang. He was bailed out of the Orlando jail, bathed, shaved, dressed up and brought to Tallahassee on a government plane.

For Clinton Tyree, the reunion was agony. Doyle grasped his hand and for a moment the dead-looking eyes seemed to spark, but he uttered not one word for the full hour they were together at the governor's mansion; sat ramrod-straight on the edge of the leather sofa and stared blankly at the sprig of mint floating in his iced tea. Eventually Clinton Tyree said, "Doyle, for God's sake, what can I do to help?"

Doyle Tyree took from his brother's breast pocket a ballpoint pen – a cheap give-away souvenir, imprinted with the state seal – and wrote something in tiny block letters on the skin of his own bare arm. Doyle Tyree pressed so forcefully that each new letter drew from his flesh a drop of dark blood. What he wrote was: put me somewhere safe.

A week later, he began work as the keeper of a small lighthouse at Peregrine Bay, not far from Hobe Sound. The red-striped tower, a feature tourist attraction of the Peregrine Bay State Park, had not been functional for almost four decades, and it had no more need of a live-in keeper than would a mausoleum. But it was indeed a safe place for the governor's unraveled brother, whose hiring at a modest $17,300 a year was the one and only act of nepotism committed by Clinton Tyree.

Who scrupulously made note of it in his personal files, to which he attached a copy of Doyle Tyree's military and medical records. Also attached was the letter Clinton himself had written to the division of parks, politely requesting a position for his brother.

The letter was one of the documents that Lisa June Peterson had dutifully shown to her boss, Dick Artemus, the current governor of Florida, upon delivering the boxes of background material about Clinton Tyree. Lisa June Peterson had also reported that the name Doyle Tyree continued to appear on the state payroll – at his original salary – suggesting that he was still encamped at the top of the Peregrine Bay lighthouse.

Which Dick Artemus was now threatening to condemn and demolish if Clinton Tyree turned him down and refused to go after the deranged young extortionist who was cutting up dogs in protest of the Shearwater project.

That was the ball-grabbing gist of the unsigned demand delivered by Lt. Jim Tile to the man now known as Skink: "Your poor, derelict, mentally unhinged brother will be tossed out on the street unless you do as I say. Sorry, Governor Tyree, but these are lean times in government," the letter had said. "What with cutbacks in the Park Service – there's simply no slack in the budget, no extra money to pay for a seldom-seen keeper of a defunct lighthouse.

"Unless you agree to help."

So he did.

Lisa June Peterson had become uncharacteristically intrigued by the subject of her research, the only man ever to quit the governorship of Florida. She'd devoured the old newspaper clippings that charted Clinton Tyree's rise and fall – from charismatic star athlete and decorated-veteran candidate to baleful subversive and party outcast. If half the quotes attributed to the man were accurate, Lisa June mused, then quitting had probably saved his life. Somebody surely would've assassinated him otherwise. It was one thing to recite the standard gospel of environmentalism – for heaven's sake, even the Republicans had learned to rhapsodize about the Everglades! – but to rail so vituperatively against growth in a state owned and operated by banks, builders and real-estate developers ...

Political suicide, marveled Lisa June Peterson. The man would've had more success trying to legalize LSD.

To an avid student of government, Clinton Tyree's stay in Tallahassee was as fascinating as it was brief. He was probably right about almost everything, thought Lisa June Peterson, yet he did almost everything wrong. He cursed at press conferences. He gave radical speeches, quoting from Dylan, John Lennon and Lenny Bruce. He let himself go, shambling barefoot and unshaven around the capitol. As popular as Clinton Tyree had been with the common folk of Florida, he'd stood no chance – none whatsoever – of disabling the machinery of greed and converting the legislature to a body of foresight and honest ethics. It was boggling to think a sane person would even try.

But perhaps Tyree was not sane. Look at his brother, thought Lisa June Peterson; maybe it runs in the family. Look at the way the governor had blown town, fleeing the capitol after his Cabinet had betrayed him by closing a wildlife preserve and selling the seaside property to well-connected developers. So swift and complete was Tyree's disappearance that people initially thought he'd been kidnapped or murdered, or even had done himself in – until the letter of resignation arrived, the angry slash of a signature verified by FBI experts. Lisa June Peterson had made two photocopies of the historic missive; one for Dick Artemus and one for her scrapbook.

For a short while after Clinton Tyree vanished, the newspapers had been full of gossip and speculation. Then nothing. Not a single journalist had been able to find him for an interview or a photograph. Over the years his name had popped up intermittently in the files of the state Department of Law Enforcement – purported sightings in connection with certain crimes, some quite bizarre. But Lisa June Peterson had found no record of an arrest, and in fact no solid proof of the ex-governor's involvement. Yet the mere idea he was still alive, brooding in some gnarly wilderness hermitage, was beguiling.