Dark Dive by Andrew Mayne

Author:Andrew Mayne [Mayne, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Skolnick Farm isn’t even in the middle of nowhere. It’s off to the side in some forgotten corner of nowhere.

Only one state road comes near it. There are a few scattered farms and forests in a region carved by irrigation canals.

It’s the part of Florida that feels like a video game background that keeps repeating until you have to check your odometer to make sure that you’re actually traveling forward in time and space and not stuck in a Groundhog Day loop.

“Imagine working out here every day,” I say to Hughes in the passenger seat.

“Imagine coming face-to-face with a dead body at any random moment or swimming with alligators,” he replies. “I think I could get used to farm life real quick.”

“Bullshit. One week in and you’d be adding AI to the tractors and trying to figure out a way to get bees to do your bidding or something equally weird.”

“Probably.”

“Find out anything else about the boys’ home?” I ask.

“The newspapers were kind of thin on account of it being in the middle of nowhere. The Skolnicks were an old Florida farming family. When the last one died off in the 1940s, their attorney turned this into a home for orphaned boys. They were taught agricultural skills. That faded into a more traditional education in the 1950s and ’60s.”

“I guess people had a problem with using child labor in hazardous industries,” I reply.

“Something like that. At some point in the late 1970s, they started doing rehabilitation of young men in the juvenile justice system who didn’t have homes to go back to or had behavior issues. Then in the late 1980s, they shut down and redirected their wards to other state programs.”

“Any reason why?”

“Nothing specific. But it looks like they stopped getting state grants. It may not have been feasible. The home was owned and operated by a charitable trust. From land purchase records it looks like they sold off most of the surrounding farmland, including water rights, over several years. In one transaction, they sold several thousand acres for ten million dollars to a development company looking to build a planned city between the coast and Lake Okeechobee.”

I check the gas gauge when I see the first station in miles.

“Let’s pull in here. You want to grab some coffee while I pump?” I ask.

“Sure thing.”

I pull up to the pump and start filling the monstrous gas tank. On the side of the road with the gas station, there are clusters of trees emitting riotous birdsong. Across the road lies wide-open land that doesn’t look like it’s being cultivated for anything, but I’d be the last to know.

The gas tank is almost full when a tractor trailer rumbles by.

“Must be rush hour,” I say under my breath.

I love the solitude of open water; this kind of place unnerves me for some reason. I can’t tell if it’s the isolation of the farmland or the sporadic patches of natural landscape that feel like isolated islands separated by asphalt and man-made canals.

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