Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (2 page)

Instead, it said “big trouble.”

Which led me back to Jackie. She'd been a newcomer to
Naples, having moved from Boston, of all places, when her husband was hired to work for one of our wealthiest residents, Mr. Toomb. Jackie was glamorous and witty but she had a special talent for upsetting the status quo. If they'd been able to get away with it, the town fathers would have had her tarred and feathered and shipped back north.

The book club upended the grapefruit cart, but that wasn't all. Jackie had also started a secret radio show she called
Miss Dreamsville
on WNOG, “Wonderful Naples on the Gulf.” This was the first late-night radio show in Naples. I don't know what goes on in Boston, but in Collier County, Florida, a middle-aged wife and mother like Jackie had no business having her own radio show, especially if it involved the deliberate cultivation of a secret, seductive persona (or to use Jackie's favorite term, “temptress”).

Then, Jackie came up with her wildest idea yet. She volunteered to take care of a baby so that its unmarried mother—our book club member, Priscilla—could go to college. Plain Jane and Mrs. Bailey White agreed to help. Now this was an extraordinary offer that would have been considered an act of great Christian charity except for one thing. Priscilla and her baby were colored.

Oh, that was more than enough to cause “big trouble.”

And yet it didn't make sense that Dolores Simpson would send the telegram. She held a grudge against Jackie. Why would she care if Jackie was in trouble up to her ears?

Mrs. Conroy had moved on to another hymn, “Up from the Ground He Arose,” never my favorite, but at the moment, hearing it sung by Mrs. Conroy with her machine-gun vibrato, made me want to beg for mercy. Although I could have borrowed Mrs. Conroy's telephone I slipped out the front door and scurried
to the phone box on the corner. I thought I'd try to call Jackie since Dolores didn't have electricity let alone a phone. As luck would have it, the long-distance operator could not get through to anyone in Collier County. A storm had knocked down the lines in Lee County, north of Collier, and it would be another day or two before calls could go through.

So this is what I did: I borrowed money from Mrs. Conroy. And I took one Trailways bus after another all the way back to Collier County. It was the same route I'd taken a year earlier, only in reverse.

The last stretch from Tampa to Naples on the Tamiami Trail was the longest, or so it seemed. I asked the driver to drop me off at a little side road that led to an area known as Gun Rack Village. It was a sorry excuse for a road, but the only way to get to Dolores Simpson's fishing shack unless you had a small boat with a shallow draft.

The bus driver made me promise to be careful. His warning that I better watch out for swamp things was good advice. I whistled and sang, or banged my hand on my little suitcase, just to keep from catching any snakes or gators by surprise.

I found Dolores sitting on the step to the rickety dock that led to her two-room fishing shack. She was whittling a stick into a small weapon known as a “gig.” At any other time and place I would have been wary of someone crafting a spear, but seeing her there, knife in hand, made me feel downright nostalgic. I realized I'd been gone too long. This was the Everglades, the River of Grass. To the Seminole Indians, it was “Pa-hay-okee.”

To me, it was simply home.

D
olores spat out a big stream of tobacco juice. “Well, it's about time you got here,” she barked, barely glancing up from her handiwork.

This was not the greeting I expected. “I left as soon as I could,” I said, thinking that the least she could do was be impressed, maybe even grateful, that I'd done what she'd asked. “You know, Jackson, Mississippi, is a long way from here. I had to borrow money—”

“I don't care about that,” Dolores said.

“Well, are you going to tell me what this is about?” My voice was high and squeaky. I hated that, especially when I was trying to sound confident and mature.

She kept whittling.

“Look, Dolores, I think you owe me an explanation.”

She still didn't answer.

“Is this about Jackie Hart from the book club?”

“That woman's a damn fool, and so is old Mrs. Bailey White
and that other gal—what's her name, Plain Jane—who are helping raise that baby.”

I had a terrible thought. “Is Priscilla's baby all right?”

“Baby's fine,” Dolores said.

“Then what is it?” I must have been on my last good nerve because I spoke sharply. “You sent me a Western Union! What in tarnation is the ‘big trouble' you were talking about?”

She finally stopped whittling and looked me eyeball to eyeball.

“Your ex-husband,” she said.

“Darryl?”

“Well, that is his name, isn't it?”

I felt my face flush. “I'm surprised, is all.” Darryl was a pain in the hindquarters, to be sure, but I would never have put him in the category of “big trouble.”

“Well, let me be the first to tell you,” Dolores said. “He wants to build houses on my land. And a shopping center! And maybe even a golf course! He's going to fill in this whole stretch of the river and run us all out of here.” She dropped her head and took a sharp breath. Maybe, I realized, to cover up a sob.

I felt light-headed. “Darryl doesn't have that kind of money,” I said finally. “Besides, he's dumb as a post. He doesn't have the smarts to dream up a project like that, or make it happen.”

Dolores scoffed so loud she startled a night heron nesting halfway up a tree about thirty feet away.

“Aw, shucks,” Dolores called over to the heron, “I ain't going to hurt you. Now just settle down on yer ol' eggs and stop your frettin'.”

I looked over toward the mama night heron, my eyes searching until I saw the familiar shape of its beak and the markings on its little head. They were odd-looking birds on account of
their yellow eyes with red irises. Plus, they didn't sing. Instead, they made a sound like the cranky old crows that used to raid Mama's sunflower garden the minute we turned our backs.

“Your Darryl has got hisself help—people from up north will be paying for it.”

“He's not ‘my' Darryl.”

“You were married to the idiot for a few years. I thought you could try to talk some sense into him. Besides, who loves this here river more than you do?”

Well, that was true. I was known for bringing all kinds of swamp and river critters home with me, which Mama, amazingly, tolerated. After a while, folks around the county had gotten to recognize I had a special talent with turtles. After I rescued an Everglades snapping turtle the size of a truck tire from the middle of U.S. 41, folks started calling me the Turtle Lady. From then on, people brought turtles to me that needed help. Three of them stayed on as pets—Norma Jean, Myrtle, and Castro.

I looked again at the mama heron. A heron nest was a messy-looking pile of sticks, and I remembered, with a flush of shame, that years before I had made fun of one when I'd been out for a walk with Mama in these very swamps. She'd said to me, “Now, it may not look like much to you but no doubt it is perfectly suited to the heron. The heron knows what it's doing, rest assured.”

Dolores followed my gaze. “Huh, she's giving you the stink eye,” she said of the heron. “She don't like being stared at, especially by a stranger.”

This seemed a surprising side of Dolores. It didn't fit with her reputation. It was hard to imagine tenderness of any kind in her heart, but then again, she had raised Robbie-Lee and he was the nicest man I ever met. Go figure.

“Dolores,” I said, trying to get back to the problem at hand. “What do you expect me to do about it? About Darryl, I mean?”

“Don't you go rushing me, girl,” Dolores snapped. Her raised voice was met with two sharp squawks, like warning shots, from the heron.

“Aw, will you just stop worrying yourself to death?” Dolores called to the bird. “Do you think I'm going to cook you for my supper? If I was going to do that, I'd have done it already.”

“Dolores, look, I want to help, but I don't know if I can stop Darryl,” I said. “I'm just one person, and I haven't even lived here the past year, and—”

She hurled her whittling to the ground and jumped up with clenched fists, her arms flailing like a toddler having a tantrum. For a split second I thought she might run straight for me and strangle the life out of me, so I stepped backward, tripping over my suitcase and landing on my rear end. The heron, apparently unhappy with the commotion, burst from its nest, wings a-flapping, in what struck me as an almost-perfect imitation of Dolores.

“You can't let him do this!” Dolores screamed. Half sprawled in the sand, I felt like a turtle that finds itself upside down. I heard the sound of fast-moving footsteps heading away from me—thank you, Jesus. A door slammed, and I felt momentarily relieved. She'd gone inside.

Then it dawned on me that I was in a fine pickle. Soon it would be dark in the swamp, and I wasn't about to walk back to the Tamiami Trail with no flashlight or torch. Moonbeams had a way of illuminating sandy paths that weren't visible during the daytime, making it easy to get confused—and lost—at night.

I'd been so eager to talk to Dolores I'd scurried right over to see her, right off the bus. I guess I thought she'd invite me inside and we'd talk. It hadn't occurred to me that we'd have a big fuss and she'd leave me outside all night.

The fall had knocked the wind out of my lungs. I spent several long moments just looking around me. Dolores had made some improvements to the fishing shack since her son had left home. The front door, if you could call it that, had been painted shocking pink. A hand-carved sign, stuck in the ground and tilting wildly like a forgotten grave-marker, read Home Sweet Home. Off to the right, brush had been cleared away from the outhouse which now featured the words “Powder Room” painted in a girlish script.

But the 'Glades were coming alive with evening sounds. I soon decided that gators, snakes, and panthers were, in fact, scarier than Dolores—although frankly I wasn't 100 percent sure. I struggled back to my feet and edged my way carefully along the dock toward the shack, which sat like a little island on rough-hewn pilings. As I knocked, I ducked to one side, just in case she answered with a shotgun blast.

When she didn't respond, I called out, hoping she could hear me. “Dolores, you know I can't stay out here all night. I need to borrow a flashlight.”

Nothing. Quiet as a grave.

I tried again. “Dolores, what would Robbie-Lee say if he knew you weren't looking after me?”

The latch clicked and the door swung open.

“Don't you go saying my son's name,” Dolores said. “He ain't here anyway. He up and left me. Went to New York City.”

“He'll be back,” I said gently. “He's young, and just wanted to see a little more of the world. Just like I did.”

“See the world,” she harrumphed. “I guess the 'Glades ain't good enough for the likes of you, or him.” She paused. “Why would anyone in his right mind go to New York City?”

I couldn't argue with her on that point. Mississippi wasn't exactly a stone's throw away, but at least it was the South.

I noticed she had a drink in her hand. I wasn't sure if this was a good sign or not. “You must hear from him—right? Does he send letters? He should be sending letters,” I said, taking her side.

“Yes, he writes me letters but he doesn't tell me much of anything. Says a whole lot of nothing in them letters. Just things about pretty parks and big, tall buildings.” Suddenly, she brightened. “He saw Liz Taylor outside some theater on Broadway.”

“Really?” I asked, forgetting my problems. “Robbie-Lee saw Elizabeth Taylor in person?”

“Yes, he did,” Dolores replied proudly. “She was going to see a play, and he said he was maybe ten feet from her, with him working in the theater and all.”

“Well, ain't that something?” I said. “Was she just as purty in person? Did he say in the letter?”

“Oh, purtier!” Dolores replied, as certain as if she'd been there herself. “Can you imagine seeing a Hollywood person like Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh?”

“She was my mama's favorite movie star,” I said softly.

“Mine, too,” Dolores said wistfully. “Ever since I saw her in
Father of the Bride
.”

Now I was really seeing another side of Dolores Simpson. I had trouble imagining Dolores in a movie theater at all, let alone watching such a sweet and charming movie. Of course, that film had come out fourteen years ago, in 1950, and it made me wonder what Dolores must have been like when she was younger.
Then I had a memory of Mama, talking about forgiveness and how hard it was for her to get past the fact that Elizabeth Taylor stole someone else's husband. My mind was a thousand miles away when suddenly I realized Dolores was peering at me as if she'd never really seen me before. All this talk about Elizabeth Taylor had altered the air we were breathing.

“Come in,” she said finally.

•  •  •

THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE
up on an ancient horse-hair couch that smelled like spilled beer, stale cigarettes, and low tide. An old metal spring was poking into my back.

She had left me a note, written in pencil in all capital letters. THIS HERE CORNBREAD IS FOR YOU. TAKE IT AND EAT. TAKE A COKE, TOO. SORRY IT BE WARM. COME BACK AFTER YOU'VE TALKED TO DARRYL.

Talk to Darryl? Oh Lord, in my disoriented state, I'd almost forgotten. Honestly, I'd rather have met the devil before daylight but I had agreed the night before that this was the next step. If it was true that he was going to pave over this part of the 'Glades, I needed to hear it from the horse's mouth. And give him a piece of my mind.