Stormy Weather (48 page)

Faced with a class-action lawsuit by 186 customers whose homes had more or less collapsed in the hurricane, builder
GAR WHITMARK
declared bankruptcy and revived his construction companies under different names. He was killed thirteen months later in a freak accident on a job site, when high winds from a tropical storm knocked a bucket of hot tar off a roof and through the windshield of his Infiniti Q45. His troubled widow gave up prescription medicine and joined the Church of Scientology, to which she donated her late husband’s entire estate.

The body of
CLYDE NOTTAGE JR
. was flown from Guadalajara to Durham, North Carolina, where—at his family’s request—an autopsy was performed at the Duke University Medical Center. Four days later, Mexican authorities arrested
DR. ALAN CAULK
, seized his laboratory and deported him to the Bahamas. Oddly, no sheep were ever found at the Aragon Clinic.

Despite contradictory affidavits from two preeminent psychiatrists, attorneys for durham gas meat & tobacco persuaded a judge in Raleigh to declare Clyde Nottage Jr. mentally unfit. The posthumous certification was based on disturbing medical evidence supplied by
Mexican officials, and sealed forever by the North Carolina courts. Sixty days after Nottage’s death, DGM&T resumed production of Bronco cigarets. The advertising contract with Rodale & Burns was not renewed.

Eleven months after the hurricane, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a gruesome find in a remote upland area of the Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge in North Key Largo: a deformed human jaw. Locked to the bone was an adjustable iron bar popularly used to deter auto theft. Dental X rays identified the owner of the mandible as
LESTER MADDOX PARSONS
, a career felon and convicted killer wanted for violent assaults on two Florida Highway Patrol officers. According to the Monroe County Medical Examiner, evidence at the scene indicated that Parsons likely starved to death. A search of the hammocks turned up the remaining pieces of his skeleton, except for the skull.

AUGUSTINE HERRERA
sold his late uncle’s wildlife farm and moved with
BONNIE BROOKS
to Chokoloskee, a fishing village on the edge of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands. There he bought a crab boat and built a pineboard house with space for a large library, including a wall for his collection of skulls, now numbering twenty.

BONNIE BROOKS
took up watercolors, cycling and outdoor photography. Her remarkable picture of a pair of bald eagles nesting in the boughs of a cypress made the cover of
Audubon
magazine.

Most of the wild animals that escaped from
FELIX MOJACK’S
farm during the hurricane were recaptured or, unfortunately, killed by armed home owners. The exceptions include one female cougar, forty-four rare birds, more than three hundred exotic lizards, thirty-eight snakes (venomous and nonvenomous) and twenty-nine adult rhesus monkeys, which have organized into several wily troops that roam Dade County to this day.