Jenner’s route home took him back through the heart of Port Fontaine. The town had been founded in the early 1900s by Ambrose Burmeister, a New York saloon keeper who’d fled Hell’s Kitchen after the swill he peddled had blinded several customers. With funding from a Chicago meat baron (an exile himself, after being caught canoodling with the mayor’s nephew in the back of a brougham), Burmeister aggressively cleared the swamp along a mile-long swath of coast, diverting the brackish water into a series of ornamental canals and ponds. He planted beach grass and palms along the waterfront, where the beaches were covered in sand so white he marketed it as “diamond dust” in his brochures.
His instincts were spot-on: the beach and one of the state’s first golf courses quickly attracted a wave of affluent home-buyers. Members of the burgeoning middle class who couldn’t quite afford Palm Beach swarmed to Port Fontaine. The rush of gold further increased after photographs of Rudolph Valentino and Nita Naldi lounging by the pool at Stella Maris, the Craine family mansion, appeared in Photoplay magazine in 1922.
Burmeister’s first home, a solemn Beaux Arts box in marble and stone, sat among the pastel pink and green summer houses on the Promenade like a mausoleum in an amusement park. The mansion now housed the Port Fontaine Historical Society; giving Jenner a tour of the downtown historic district, Marty had joked that, while Port Fontaine didn’t have much history, it had plenty of Society. That evening, sitting on the lanai with a cold Heineken in his hand, Marty had told Jenner about the days after 9/11, when waves of Lear jets arrived at Port Fontaine’s tiny airport, each plane belching out another Fortune 500 CEO, mobs of bold-faced names, all fleeing to their estates in Douglas County. “They were like pashas, Jenner, each man richer than the next…” His voice died away under the hiss of sprinklers outside the screens.
Jenner drove south on I-55, heading to the Palmetto Court. The highway sliced Port Fontaine in half along class lines, cutting off the Beaches to the west from the Reaches in the east. Burmeister’s expansion east into the Everglades had been a constant battle against flooding, and where houses in the Beaches were stately and solid, the Reaches was made up of cheap tract housing built alongside waterways that, the joke went, flooded when the ambient humidity hit 65 percent.
Jenner had chosen a cottage away from the motel office, figuring it would be quieter. He parked and climbed out of the car stiffly, ducking his head and cursing himself for not renting a car better suited to his height. After the storm, the air was cooler, soft and wet, sweet with the scent of damp grass. He reached into the car and pulled out his scene kit and the Fontaine Burger Shack leftovers.
Time for bed.