A big part of the problem was the ridiculously low cost of entry into the business. It was entirely possible to become a trailer dealer without ever actually having to make an investment. You could lease the property. The homes would actually be floorplanned by a bank or the manufacturer and all you have to pay would be the interest. You use one of the homes as an office, so the bank owns that, too. You lease or rent all the office equipment. The factory will ship the homes, and you can subcontract out the installations. You've got absolutely no skin in the game!
A cure existed, but Big Bob and I didn't agree on it. The industry needed to consolidate around a handful of major players, and most importantly, begin taking responsibility for their product with the buyer. A trailer factory didn't sell to the buyer, it sold to the dealer and the dealer sold to the buyer. However, if you bought a home and it was a lemon, the dealer had no legal requirement to even answer your phone calls. The warranty was through the manufacturer and the dealer didn't even need to have a service department. You would have to call some company you might never have heard of to ask for help, and they would get to you the next time they had a truck in the area. Since you might live in New Hampshire, and most of the manufacturers were in Indiana or Pennsylvania, you might be shit out of luck for six months or more! This totally skewed the dynamics of the industry. Manufacturers didn't want to deal with buyers, only dealers. Dealers didn't want to be held to any kind of requirement to service what they sold. Buyers were totally screwed unless they found an honest dealer like Big Bob. That was just one of the many problems in the industry.
The only way things would ever change was by legislation and regulation, and on this Big Bob and I disagreed. He thought the present system was just peachy, and I was simply horrified by it. I knew what was going to happen. The reputation of the industry got so bad in the Nineties that when the Great Recession hit and the banks began shutting down credit, they stopped financing trailers. No financing means no buyers means no sellers means no manufacturers. The entire industry collapsed. Some dealers had begun selling modular homes by then, like we did, but the housing business was in the shitter no matter what.
Anyway, we discussed this quite amicably and simply agreed to disagree. He did have a rather oblique question as to how I invested in companies and industries, and I returned with an equally oblique reply about how we bought ownership positions, and didn't lend money. I suspected he was looking for a cheaper bank loan (well, fair's fair - who wouldn't!?) but I'm not a banker.
So the week went well. As the owner of the property, it was a whole lot easier dealing with Big Bob and Harriet then when we were their guests. Regardless, they were going to go home with glowing reviews of Hougomont, and the kids were going to love their vacations. It was the least we could do for Marilyn's family, a family that really had gone out of their way to welcome me both this time and last.
Chapter 87: An Ordinary Life
I'd like to say how every day for the next few years was exciting and filled with thrilling stuff, but it wasn't. Marilyn and I are actually really boring, and we led boring lives. That suited us both just fine! We're really very average people, just ones who didn't have to worry about money. We lived in a fairly average suburban rancher. Yes it was a little larger than the average, and it was on 25 acres, but it would not have been out of place in most developments. That suited us just fine. Neither of us wanted a castle, and besides, castles need servants. The entire idea of servants made both of us feel kind of creepy.
If the idea of servants was creepy, the idea of armed security people were even more so. The Buckman Group continued to grow, and I continued to become more wealthy. Still, at the time Marilyn was being stalked, we had increased security at the office, with a professional security guard in the lobby. Now, after our move to the new offices, we paid a lot more attention to that sort of thing. The door between the lobby and the rest of the offices was locked, and the lobby had both a receptionist and a security guard (dressed professionally, not like a rent-a-cop.) A guard was on duty even after hours, since some of what we were doing was quite confidential. We couldn't chance a break-in for espionage purposes.
After the disaster with my family, I kept security at the Mount Carmel Road residence, as well. No, we didn't install a guard shack, but when Marilyn and the kids went anywhere, they were trailed by a black GMC with dark windows. Likewise, when Marilyn went into a store, a professionally dressed security guard would follow her at a distance. Tessa once joked that they were being shadowed by the War Wagon. I didn't have any personal security. I wasn't worried about myself, only my family.
Marilyn loved her minivan. I kept two cars, a big Cadillac or Town Car that I kept for driving larger groups with, and my little 380 SL, which I would drive whenever it was just me or my wife with me. If I was going out to dinner with Marilyn, we took the 380. If it was with the family, we took her minivan. The Cadillac (I replaced the Town Car in late 1984) didn't actually get driven all that much.
Marilyn cut her hair. Before, it had been long, going several inches down her back, but after the girls were born, she cut it in a shag, shoulder length. It was still curly, but I think she figured that as a 30 year old married woman, she couldn't have long hair anymore. Who comes up with these rules? On the plus side, after Marilyn got back in shape with a decent workout routine with me, her tits had grown another cup size. I approved, but I was hoping that she drew the line at this. If we kept going with this pattern, after our next child she'd be so top heavy she'd fall on her face. D cups were just fine by me!
Holly and Molly, as far as we could tell, were identical twins. Marilyn and I could always tell them apart, however. There was something about them, from the time they were born, that subtly differentiated them. Maybe it was the way their hair curled, or the pattern of faint freckles on their noses. Something about them that only their mother and I could sense separated them. They were also the spitting image of their mother, as best we could tell from pictures of Marilyn at that age. It was spooky, but we first figured it out when Aunt Lynette pulled a black and white picture of Marilyn from a photo album and showed it to us. They were identical!
Marilyn was a stay-at-home mom, and that suited the both of us. Charlie didn't start kindergarten until the fall of 1985, and we would still have the girls at home for a few more years. Marilyn was a housewife and took care of the kids and the laundry and the cleaning. I worked in an office and cooked dinner. How mundane and boring can you get? I'd come home, play with the kids and Dum-Dum, listen to Marilyn tell me about her day, and then watch television with her after we put the kids to bed. It wasn't a bad life.
In many ways, it was what I needed to do with my life. The fall of 1983 had been one of the worst times in my life, certainly worse than having to leave home as a teenager, even worse than my jaunt through Nicaragua and having to leave the Army. Having Marilyn and Charlie stalked and attacked, especially by my brother, and the subsequent arrest and publicity and family breakdown, it had all been just too much for me. I wanted nothing more than to put it all behind me and live quietly and anonymously with my family.