Chapter 15

Tina stuck very close to us for the longest time following her ordeal. Tara, Cary and Edwina set up a schedule where one of them was always inside the building on school days. The teachers and administration would no more have thought to ask them to leave than they would turn down a pay raise. Ben wouldn’t have liked it and that would spell trouble.

Cary blossomed into a beauty in her early twenties. She was always attractive, but less so than Tara, or Edwina, who were classic beauties. As Edwina filled out her smile broadened with her waistline. Something magical happened to her after we made love for the first time.

Edwina matured, as did her love for me, from a teenager with a teenager’s concept of commitment into beautiful, poised, and lovely woman, fully engaged in a loving, lifelong relationship. As she matured her closeness to me evolved. She came to trust me to leave her intact, no matter what we did, or how she acted. That freed her to fully enjoy her sexuality without worrying about losing the one thing she was determined to save.

Our relationship began to change and grow shortly after Tina’s kidnapping. The fear and stress that having our little one kidnapped was too great not to change their outlook on life and safety. Edwina was the youngest and needed the most reassurance, so I made sure she was with me as often as possible and showed her how normal our lives were. Those few hours of terror shouldn’t color the rest of her life, and I was determined to see that it didn’t.

On the other hand, she also needed to see me as the father / protector in the family. Edwina wasn’t present when I shot one of Tina’s kidnappers. She hadn’t seen me deal with the situation as deliberately and permanently as possible. Edwina needed to feel safe and it was my job to help her achieve it.

We had spent a week away in the bus. The goal was to take Tina’s mind off of the whole thing and give her a whole bunch of new and exciting memories to take the place of the ones she made tied up in the back seat of a Buick.

The amusement parks of the day weren’t all that they’d be by the eighties, but there was plenty to amaze and amuse my girls. So we traveled up to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey for two full days and hopped over to Atlantic City for a few days on the beach. Coney Island would have been just as appropriate, but I hesitated taking the bus into Brooklyn. The trip worked just as I’d hoped. Tina was kept busy enjoying all that a vacation away with her family could provide. Children are resilient and keeping her spirits up, while taking her fun places was just what she needed to leave it behind.

When we got Tina home and ready to start back to school, I hired off duty Deputies to stay at the school and deal with anything that came up that threatened my Tina. Ben was so impressed with my plan that he met with Sheriff Cowell and hired another one, to make sure there would always be two armed police officers on the premises in case of trouble.

Our groves and other interests continued to expand and overtake vast chunks of our competition. Ben and I tended to work in tandem, which allowed us to coordinate labor, pickers, drivers, processing plants, and overall business expansion. It was like working alongside Jim Bell all over again.

By nineteen sixty-one, when I was twenty-two and Tina was ten, Ben was starting to show some of the business acumen and acquire the trappings of success that made him one of the elite, super wealthy. It was all I could do to try and keep up with the changes happening in our industry. Having a mentor like Ben Hill Higgins took me places I would have been frozen out of, and I remained always properly respectful and eternally thankful.

We guessed right and our grapefruit became a great success. I had added almost fifty-thousand more acres to our holdings and we both watched as RALICO took off. Our increased market share helped us control some of the price fluctuations that plagued citrus in the seventies. The company was quite diversified, owning railroads, sugarcane and sod production, cattle ranching, and forestry acreage. It was only eleven years later, in seventy-two, that Ben asked me to help him leverage a majority stock position and he became Chairman of the board of RALICO a few months later in early seventy-two.

It didn’t hurt that Ben was then a sitting State Senator, having served twelve years in the State Legislature before capturing the Senate seat where he served for eight more. He had his eye on the Governor’s chair but lost to Askew in seventy-four.

I stayed as far from Florida politics as possible. That was a road I had no intention of walking ever again. That didn’t stop me from suggesting things to Ben that helped him anticipate certain events and making himself look smarter than everybody else. Ben’s interest in politics began and ended with business. He was driven to open new markets for our products and worked tirelessly to win contracts, concessions, tax breaks, and other incentives for all Florida agriculture, not just RALICO.

Ben and Eleanor spent virtually every special day with us. Tina flourished under our combined care and when she graduated from high school it was her decision to go to Polk Community College and study agriculture. Our special relationship, combined with our businesses being so intertwined, meant that we were the best of friends and the closest of associates. Eleanor spent so much time at our house that we knew to expect her every time Ben headed for Tallahassee to do his legislative business.

Rather than have her driving home late at night, especially in the winter months, we remodeled Cary’s old room just for her, and she loved to spend the night with us whenever we had anything planned that would run late. When Ben was up in the capitol, he used to call our house before he called home, because it was likelier that he’d find his wife with us.

She and I discussed the special four-way relationship that the girls and I maintained. “Michael ... How do you handle three women at the same time?” I tried to feign surprise but she wasn’t having it. “Michael Ryan I have known you four had a special relationship for years. Those three ladies are like extra daughters to me and I feel like I know them better than I know my own kids.”

She gave me a loving smile and went right on. Ben and I have wondered for years how you juggle three grown women and end up with three happy women. Ben is quite scandalized by it, but I think it’s kind of ... you know ... sexy.” It took some juggling on my part, but I convinced her that our lives are centered on respect and common goals. We love one another and our love is enough for all four of us. She never again brought up our living arrangements.

Tina soared through school, graduating near the top of her class. It was her specific desire to go to Polk Community and live at home, where she felt safe. The experience of being kidnapped was never far from her mind. The fact that both of her kidnappers were dead didn’t seem to lessen her fears. It was my suggestion that she attend Webber International University which was in nearby Babson Park, but Tina wanted to be closer to home, and no matter how we approached the topic, she never budged.

Fine.

Our baby was going to Polk Community College and that was that. Of course, all of that was in the future.

Tina lived a happy and secure life, but she tended to want to stick close to us whenever possible. Tara and Tina developed a typical mother – daughter relationship, complete with all the ups and downs that strong women experience. When Tina asked to be taken to Tara’s gynecologist to receive birth control, Tara took it uncharacteristically hard.