"Doyle, please," he whispered. "Please."

He heard a bolt slide, and he stepped back. The door cracked and an arm came out slowly; an old man's arm, pallid and spidered with violet veins. On the underside, between the wrist and the elbow, were faded striations of an old scar. The hand was large, but bony and raw-looking. Clinton Tyree grabbed it and squeezed with all his heart, and found his brother still strong. The pale wrist twisted back and forth against his grip, and that's when he noticed the new wound on the meat of the forearm, letters etched into flesh – I love you –blooming in droplets as bright as rose petals.

Then Doyle Tyree snatched his hand away and closed the door in his brother's face.

As he descended the lighthouse, the former governor of Florida counted all seventy-seven steps again. When he reached the bottom he got on his belly and wedged through a gap in the plywood that had been nailed over the entrance to keep out vandals and curious tourists.

From the darkness of the beaconage, Clinton Tyree emerged, squinting like a newborn, into a stunning spring morning. He stood and turned his tear-streaked face to the cool breeze blowing in off the Atlantic. He could see tarpon crashing a school of mullet beyond the break.

The plywood barricade to the tower was papered with official notices, faded and salt-curled:

NO TRESPASSING

CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

STATE PROPERTY – KEEP OUT

But someone recently had tacked a business card to the plywood. The tack was shiny, not rusted, and the card stood out white and crisp. Clinton Tyree put his good eye to it and smiled. The inaugural smile.

LISA JUNE PETERSON

Executive Assistant

Office of the Governor

He took the card off the board and slipped it under the elastic band of his shower cap. Then he trudged down the beach, over the dunes and through the sea oats, across the street to the Peregrine Bay Visitor Center and Scenic Boardwalk, where the navy blue Roadmaster was parked.

Palmer Stoat was buried with his favorite Ping putter, a Polaroid camera and a box of Cuban Montecristo #2s, a cause for authentic mourning among the cigar buffs at the ceremony. The funeral service was held at a Presbyterian church in Tallahassee, the minister eulogizing Stoat as a civic pillar, champion of the democratic process, dedicated family man, lover of animals, and devoted friend to the powerful and common folk alike. Those attending the service included a prostitute, the night bartender from Swain's, a taxidermist, three United States congressmen, one retired senator, six sitting circuit judges, three dozen past and present municipal commissioners from throughout Florida, the lieutenant governor and forty-one current members of the state Legislature (most of whom had been elected with campaign funds raised by Stoat, and not because he admired their politics). Those sending lavish sprays of flowers included the Philip Morris Company, Shell Oil, Roothaus and Son Engineering, Magnusson Phosphate Company, the Lake County Citrus Cooperative, U.S. Sugar, MatsibuCom Construction of Tokyo, Port Marco Properties, the Southern Timber Alliance, the National Rifle Association, University of Florida Blue Key, the Republican Executive Committee and the Democratic Executive Committee. Messages of regret arrived from Representative Willie Vasquez-Washington and Governor Richard Artemus, neither of whom could make it to the service.

"Our grief today should be assuaged," the minister said, in closing, "by the knowledge that Palmer's last day among us was spent happily at sport, with his close friend Bob Clapley – just the two of them, walking the great outdoors they loved so much."

Burial was at a nearby cemetery, which, fittingly, served as the final resting place for no less than twenty-one of Florida's all-time crookedest politicians. The joke around town was that the grave digger needed an auger instead of a shovel. The Stoats had attended the funerals of several of the dead thieves, including some convicted ones, so Desie was familiar with the layout. For Palmer she selected an unshaded plot on a bald mound overlooking Interstate 10. Since he had so often (and enthusiastically) predicted Florida would someday be as bustling as New York or California, she figured he would appreciate a roadside view of it coming to pass.

At the grave, more kind words were spoken. Desie, who sat in front with her parents and Palmer's only cousin, a defrocked podiatrist from Jacksonville, found herself weeping tears of true aching sadness – not over the eulogies (which were largely fiction), but over the unraveling of her own feelings about her husband, and how that had contributed to his untimely death. While she could take no blame for the freakish hunting mishap, it was also indisputable that the doomed rhino expedition had been precipitated by the dognapping crisis – and that the dognapping had been complicated by Desie's attraction to, and abetment of, Twilly Spree.

True, Palmer would still have been alive had he, early on, done the honorable thing and bailed out of the Shearwater fix. But there had been no chance of that, no reasonable expectation that her husband would suddenly discover an inner moral compass – and Desie should have known it.

So she was feeling guilt. And grief, too, because even as she kept no romantic love for Palmer, she also kept no hate. He was what he was, and it wasn't all rotten or she wouldn't have married him. There was a companionable, eager-to-please side of the man that, while it couldn't have been called warm, was lively enough to be missed and even grieved for. Putting the Polaroid in his coffin had been Desie's idea, an inside joke. Palmer would have laughed, she thought, although he undoubtedly would have preferred the bedroom snapshots. Those, she had destroyed.

As the casket was lowered, a murmuring rippled lightly through the mourners. Desie heard panting and felt something wet and velvety brush her fingers. She looked down to see McGuinn, nuzzling her clasped hands. The big dog had a black satin bow on his neck, and a chew toy clamped in his teeth. The toy was a rubber bullfrog with an orange stripe down its back. The frog croaked whenever McGuinn bit down on it, which was every ten or twelve seconds. A few people chuckled gently, grateful for the distraction, but the minister (who was busy walking through the valley of the shadow of death) raised his glacial eyes with no hint of amusement.

Not a dog person, Desie decided, and extracted the chew toy from McGuinn's jaws. The Labrador curled up at her feet and watched, curiously, as another big wooden box disappeared into the ground. He assumed it contained a one-eared dog, like the one in the box that had been buried on the beach. But if there was death in the air, McGuinn couldn't smell it for all the flowers.

Meanwhile, the widow Stoat glanced expectantly first over one shoulder and then the other, scanning the faces of the mourners. He wasn't there. She opened her hand and looked at the rubber toy, which actually resembled a toad more than a bullfrog. She turned it over in her palm and saw that someone had written in ballpoint ink across its pale yellow belly: I dreamt of you!

And then a postal box number in Everglades City, not far from Marco Island.

The sneeze set his lungs afire.

Twilly Spree grimaced. "You sure didn't have to jump on me like that."

"Oh, I damn sure did," Skink said. "I'd never catch you on a dead run downhill. You're way too fast for an old fart like me."

"Yeah, right. How much did you say you weigh?"

"I just figured you might not want to get shot again, so soon after the first time. And that's likely what would have happened out there with those two peckerheads blasting away with their cannons. Either that or the damn rhino would have stomped you into a tortilla."