Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County Page 3

  But then all of a sudden he left for New York City. Just like that. New York City! Inspired by that awful woman, Jackie Hart, who put it in his head that he was missing something. Well, dagnabbit, if he wanted to go north so badly he could have gone to Fort Myers, or Sarasota, or maybe even Apalachicola. At least he would have still been in Florida. He’d have still been squarely on Confederate turf. But why New York City? It wasn’t even part of the United States, as far as Dolores was concerned.

  She looked over at the night heron. “Oh, just you wait and see,” Dolores said mournfully. “Being a mother is hard. When they grow up, they gonna do what they gonna do. Your young’uns will do the same to you that my boy did to me.

  “But he’ll be back one day,” she added, this time to herself. “I know he will.”

  The second person who had messed up her life was Darryl Norwood, ex-husband of that little gal, Dora Witherspoon. She hoped she’d gotten through to Dora. The telegram had worked to bring her back here. Maybe there was some hope that the river could be saved.

  If not, she would have nowhere to go. “Things won’t be so peachy for you, either,” she called over to the bird. “You’re going to be the last night heron in Collier County. What we have here is a mighty bad situation. At least you can fly away. You can start over. I can’t. I’m good for nothin’. I’m stuck.”

  Dolores examined her hands. Twenty-five years working in the ’Glades, and they looked like the skin of the alligators she caught. But that was the least of her worries. Back when she’d been a dancer, the owner of the club had complained that her breasts were too small. Unless she allowed liquid filler to be injected into her breasts, she would lose her job. She’d gone along with it. Now they were lumpy, and hard, and hurt in ways she didn’t think possible. How stupid she’d been when she was young. Some mistakes you pay for, forever.

  Her first mistake was thinking she was in love. She was fifteen and had just finished eighth grade. When her belly started swelling, she thought maybe she had worms, or possibly a hernia. But her mama and daddy knew otherwise. They threw her out.

  She’d hitchhiked to Tampa on the back of a tomato truck in pouring rain. She still didn’t know what was wrong with her or why her parents made her leave, but a stranger on the streets of Tampa took one look at her and walked her to a hospital emergency room. Three hours later she had her baby. The nuns convinced her she was racked by sin and not worthy to be a mother. She never had a chance to hold the baby. She wasn’t even sure if the baby was alive or healthy, and there were times when she wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing.

  She left that hospital four days later on her own two feet, alone. She hitchhiked to the beach in St. Pete and survived by stealing picnics from tourists. Being so young, her body bounced back quickly, and soon she got herself a job at a nightclub. It was only after she showed up on her first day of work that she found out she was to be a dancer, not a waitress. She went along with it, thinking she’d do it just for a while, but “a while” turned into seven years. And that’s when she got pregnant again.

  The owner of the nightclub suggested an option that would, as he said, “fix” the situation but Dolores was too scared to consider it. One of the other dancers—a sweet-faced girl from Alabama—had gone to an underground clinic and died.

  Surrendering another baby to the State of Florida was out of the question, as far as Dolores was concerned. This baby was a keeper, come what may. She had him at the same hospital as the first one, only this time she was prepared. She scooped him up and took off out of there before somebody could thrust papers in her face and hand her a pen. She named him Robbie-Lee after a crop reporter she liked to listen to on the radio. A man who sounded nice, day in and day out, whether he was discussing the worrisome possibility of a January freeze in the orange groves or warning listeners about a fierce storm that had popped up over the Gulf on a summer day. Sometimes the friendly voice asked questions which he quickly answered himself. For example: Did you know that Tampa is the lightning capital of the United States? (Well, it is!) Or: Did you know that many historians believe our city gets its name from the Calusa Indians, or the Shell People, because “Tampa” means “sticks of fire” in their ancient language? (Well, it does!) So her radio announcer was smart as well as nice, a quality which Dolores admired.

  Within hours of leaving the hospital, she fled the area with Robbie-Lee curled up like a kitten under a silk scarf she’d snatched years earlier from a Canadian traveler, or “snowbird.” She skipped out of Dodge without so much as a fare-thee-well to anyone, not wanting to alert her landlord, who would have had her sent to jail for being late on the rent. Never mind that her baby would be taken from her.

  All she could think of was to head back down to Collier County. That’s what people do when they’re almost out of hope, right? Head home? She had heard through the grapevine that her parents were dead, so at least she didn’t have to face their scorn again. And Collier County was familiar. As for making a living, her granddaddy had hunted gators in the ’Glades back in the day, and she thought, Well, heck, I can do that. I watched him do it. I helped him do it.

  Besides, she figured, huntin’ gators couldn’t be any harder or more dangerous than working in some old strip club. In fact, it might be easier.

  The years slipped by like the hidden currents in the river. She wouldn’t have said she’d been happy—she wasn’t sure what that felt like—but she wasn’t miserable. She got by, and folks left her alone. Most importantly, Robbie-Lee had grown up handsome, clever, and nice, just as she’d dreamed.

  If only Robbie-Lee had stayed away from that book club he would be here, helping her with the gators. She hated to admit it but she had come to rely on Robbie-Lee to lend a hand with the big, unruly ones. Since he’d left, she’d pretty much given up the gator business altogether. Especially after an odd thing happened: She had started feeling sorry for the critters. She’d never sympathized with the big ones, which would just as soon eat her up, but the little ones—the only kind she could now grab hold of these days—well, they were almost cute! This had come as a shock to her, and she had quietly started retiring her gear.

  She was living on fish she could catch from her dock. She sold grunts—minnows, the Yankees called ’em—to the bait shops, always setting aside a healthy portion for herself. She rolled the tiny things in flour and fried ’em up whole, just like her granddaddy did, and served ’em with a mess of grits. Indeed, there was nothing Dolores liked better than a big ol’ plate of grits and grunts.

  And now someone wanted to take it all away. To some folks it probably wouldn’t have seemed like much. But to her, it was a little slice of heaven.

  How could a man grow up in the ’Glades and fail to see its beauty? How could he look at it and see only money? She’d run into plenty of men like Darryl in her life. They thought of no one other than themselves. They weren’t any different from the school-yard bullies who used to pick on Robbie-Lee, calling him “homo” and other names. Darryl and those just like him, she decided, were evil.

  The person who was harder to understand was Jackie. She had a nice home, a husband with a steady job, a couple of kids, and a Buick convertible. What else could a woman want? If I had that kind of life, Dolores thought wistfully, I would be busy living it. I wouldn’t waste my time creating problems and meddling in other people’s business.

  Dolores had never met anyone from Boston and wondered if they were all like Jackie. First of all, that peculiar accent that was near impossible to understand. Plus the bizarre urge to speak your mind and have everything upfront and out in the open. And the worst Yankee trait of all, a missionary zeal to fix everything Southern.

  Not that Jackie was a bad person. She wasn’t evil like Darryl. She was just a Yankee and, typical of the Northern born, couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  Five

  There’s something I need to tell you, Miss Witherspoon,” Judd Hart was saying, and I noticed he wouldn’t look me in the eye
. When he heard I was back in town, Judd made a beeline to my cottage to say hello. With his red hair and blue eyes, it was easy to see that he was Jackie’s son. He was thirteen now and about four inches taller than when I left. We were sitting on the bottom step of my porch, feeding pieces of honeydew melon to my snappers. Of course, this meant having to scold Norma Jean from time to time. She was such a piggy, and I could see she hadn’t changed a bit.

  “Judd,” I said, “you don’t have to call me Miss Witherspoon. You can call me Dora.”

  “I can’t call you Dora. You’re a grown-up.”

  “Well, then, call me Miss Dora,” I said.

  Judd frowned. I guess that was too Southern.

  “Well,” I prompted him, “what is it you want to tell me?” I tried to hide the nervousness from my voice. “Is it about all this business with my former husband and the development he wants to build?”

  “No, not that,” Judd said. “I just wanted to warn you that when you see my mom, she’ll look a little, um, different.”

  All I could think of was that maybe Jackie had changed her hair, or gained weight.

  Judd looked away. “She’ll be wearing black,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Black. You know, mourning clothes.”

  “Oh, Judd! Someone in your family went to Glory? No one told me! I’m so sorry! Who was it?” My heart went into a tailspin of pity and sorrow. Poor Jackie!

  “Well, no one in our . . . family.” Judd looked miserable.

  “Then . . . who?” I asked.

  “President Kennedy.”

  Hmmm. Jackie had been wearing mourning clothes—for President Kennedy? Since the previous November? In three months it would be a year. I had figured she took it hard but I didn’t think she would carry on this long.

  “She says she’s going to wear them for one year and a day,” Judd went on. “I just didn’t want you to be surprised.”

  “Judd, let me ask you something, and it might seem like a silly question,” I said. “You know I’ve never been up north. What I want to know is, is this something all Yankees do?” In my head, I was picturing everyone in Boston walking around in black.

  “Nope,” Judd said. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she’s the only one in America, other than the Kennedy family, of course. This is just Mom being Mom.”

  “Oh,” I said, at a loss for words. So wearing black for a year, for a president not everyone liked (especially in the South), would be considered odd even in Boston. There were times like this when I got a hint that Jackie was over the top even for a Yankee. “Well,” I said, finally finding my voice, “as the saying goes, ‘To each his own.’ ”

  Judd suddenly seemed defensive. “I guess with her being from Boston and all, and she’s such a fan of Mrs. Kennedy, and all that . . .” His voice trailed off. He tried to grin but it came off as a lame little smile, so he shrugged instead. “I didn’t want you to be, you know, caught off guard. Because when I told her I’d heard you were back in town, she ran to get dressed and I know she’s headed over here any minute now.”

  We’d run out of melon strips to give the turtles. Castro and Myrtle had gone into the shrubs to take naps. Norma Jean was still begging for goodies. She stared at us and made munching movements with her mouth. “Yes, we see you, Norma Jean,” I said, laughing. It was hard to miss an Everglades snapping turtle the size of Mama’s divan.

  “You know what, Judd?” I said. “You’ve done a fine job here, looking after my friends.”

  Judd beamed at my compliment. “I really mean that,” I added. “I wouldn’t have gone off to Mississippi if you hadn’t been here to take care of my turtles. And check on my little cottage. But everything looks swell. Did you have any problems?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, and I was pleased to hear the “ma’am” roll off his tongue, since a Boston boy wouldn’t survive down here for long if he didn’t learn the basics. Seems like he’d settled in fairly good.

  And then he asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to. “How long are you going to be back for?”

  “I don’t know, Judd.” I sighed before continuing. “I’ve still got something I need to do back in Mississippi. But I’ve got to see if I can help Robbie-Lee’s mother. She’s going to lose her home if my stupid former husband”—I paused for a moment, regretting that I had referred to Darryl in such a mean-spirited way in front of Judd—“uh, if my former husband fills in the swamp over there.”

  Judd was quiet for a moment. “But where would all the turtles, and the gators and everything, go?” he asked.

  I was thinking Judd might be a great ally when we both heard brakes squeal. Before you could say “Sweet Jesus, protect me from whatever that is,” Jackie’s convertible slid to a halt in the wind-driven sand that always seemed to pile up on the street directly in front of my cottage. There was no one else in Naples who drove quite like that. And, there was no other car like that south of Tampa: a completely impractical, two-door, banana-yellow 1960 Buick LeSabre for which she had traded, in a moment of pure rebellion, her dull and matronly station wagon.

  We loved that car. Oh, how we all loved it. No one else in our book club owned a car, and Jackie had enjoyed driving us around. It was wonderful to see her again, right behind the wheel, which is how I usually pictured her in my mind although the effect was altered somewhat since she was indeed wearing black. A black head scarf. Black gloves. Black cat-eye sunglasses. And, of course, a black dress that was tasteful but not especially demure. Probably, from that store she was always talking about, Filene’s.

  Black is not an easy color to wear in Florida under the best of circumstances and, in Naples, it was always a signal that someone had up and died. Black was for grieving and condoling only. Of course, that might not have been true, say, in Miami or some other place where they had bona fide nightclubs. Here in Naples the only place was the Shingle Shack, and I doubt any woman ever wore black unless she was coming straight from the kind of funeral that drives a woman to drink.

  Jackie leaned on the car horn, a Yankee habit that made me want to reach for smelling salts. Why in the name of Our Sweet Savior did she think this was necessary? Did she think we couldn’t see her? She was smiling and waving her arm with the kind of jaunty Northern confidence that annoys the beeswax out of Southerners. Plain Jane, the poet from our book club, was sprawled in the backseat like she was sunbathing on a chaise lounge. I almost hadn’t noticed her.

  “Woo hoo!” I called out, once I had recovered from the car horn. “So great to see y’all! Git yourselves out of that crazy car and come set on the porch with me and Judd for a spell!” But as soon as I raised my voice, I could feel Mama’s disapproval coming straight down from the Spirit World like a bolt of lightning, since hollerin’ was “not nice.” Mama was always talking about things that were either “nice” or “not nice.” That was pretty much how she saw the world. Judd, Jackie, and Plain Jane were probably wondering why I sprang up, rabbit-like, rather than shout again, but I knew better than to disrespect Mama. It didn’t matter than she was six feet under at the Cemetery of Hope and Salvation over by the Esso station.

  Jackie and Plain Jane had both climbed out of the car, and I thought we were going to have a bear-hug reunion, but when I got to the gate and started fussing with the latch, Jackie started screeching like a banshee on a coconut-milk binge. “Don’t open it!” she pleaded.

  I had plumb forgot that Jackie was scared to pieces of my turtles. It was a wonder she let Judd look after them while I was away. For the sake of friendship, and to keep Jackie calm, I climbed over my own fence. Jackie, Plain Jane, and me had a three-way hug like a football huddle. You know you like someone, and truly missed them, when you don’t mind embracing them in the suffocating heat of Florida in August.

  I wasn’t sure about other book clubs, but making a decision, even with just three of us present, required more discussion than Khrushchev and Kennedy probably had during the entire Cuban Missile Crisis. Pl
ain Jane wanted to sit on my porch and sip iced tea and get caught up. Jackie balked on account of my turtles which (a little rudely, in my opinion) she kept referring to as “those dreadful things.”She suggested we go to her house and drink mimosas. I knew what I wanted to do, but I waited for the two of them to talk their ideas to death. Finally, there was a lull. “Where’s the baby?” I asked. “I’m dying to see her.”

  Instantly, it was agreed that we would all go to Mrs. Bailey White’s house, where the baby spent most of her time.

  Judd was obviously relieved that we were leaving. Jackie called to him, “Honey, I made some chili for you and the twins. Go ahead and eat if I’m not home in time for supper. And there’s a special honeydew melon that I bought just for you.”

  As we were driving away, two things occurred to me. One was that the aforementioned honeydew melon was, in all likelihood, the same one Judd and I had just fed by hand to “those dreadful things.”

  The second was that I was thrilled to be back with Jackie and Plain Jane in the Buick. On the radio, the Supremes were singing “Where Did Our Love Go?” and for the moment, all was right with the world.

  Six

  Mrs. Bailey White’s house was haunted. How could it not be? Someone had died an unnatural death there. That someone was Mrs. Bailey White’s husband. Although what really happened was a topic of popular debate in Collier County, and Mrs. Bailey White insisted it was self-defense, she had been convicted. And she went to prison for decades.

  I have to admit I was scared of Mrs. Bailey White when she showed up at Jackie’s book club at the library two years before. We all got the creepy-crawlies but were too polite to ask her to leave. It never occurred to us that we would grow to like her.