Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County

by Amy Hill Hearth

  “Oh,” I said, completely off guard. I started to say something evasively Southern but stopped myself. I could learn something from Jackie, couldn’t I? So I tried my hand at Jackie’s signature bluntness. “I’m not ready to talk about that yet,” I said, and although it sounded Yankee-rude it also felt surprisingly good to say what I meant.

  The others looked a little surprised. “Well, Dora dear, whenever you’re ready,” Plain Jane said, rescuing me. “For the moment, we need to figure out what we’re going to do about Darryl, anyway.”

  “What, other than hoping Seminole Joe goes after him?” Jackie chortled. “Seriously, I’m beginning to think that old ghost could help us in some way.”

  “Jackie, you are going to get us into some serious trouble,” Plain Jane said uneasily.

  “Oh, don’t be silly!” Jackie said, lighting yet another cigarette. “What do you think I’m suggesting? Summoning the ancient spirit of Seminole Joe and asking for his help?”

  “Well, I suppose one of us could dress up like Seminole Joe and sneak up and bop Darryl over the head, not to hurt him but just to scare him,” Mrs. Bailey White said thoughtfully. “Maybe then he’d be afraid to go ahead with his project?”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t think that’s funny,” I said.

  “I wasn’t joking,” Mrs. Bailey White replied. I looked at her for a long time, trying to reconcile this sweet-looking little old lady with the woman who had done time in jail and was now suggesting that we hit my former husband over the head “just to scare him.”

  “Mrs. Bailey White,” I said, my voice all squeaky and trembling, “this is out of the question, and I do not want to be part of this conversation.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Bailey White said, looking a little chagrined. “Sorry I upset you, Dora.”

  “Now, girls,” Jackie said, trying to diffuse the situation. “I have a better idea. You know how I used to do some copyediting over at the newspaper, before I had my radio show? Well, I’ve been asked to do some writing—a column, as a matter of fact!”

  “How exciting!” Plain Jane said, and I might have detected a touch of envy in her voice. “Jackie, you’re just full of surprises. Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I’m telling you now. And, besides, they only just asked me last week.”

  “What’s the column going to be called?” Plain Jane asked. That was a question I wouldn’t have even thought to ask but, after all, Plain Jane had written for some of the big-name magazines in New York.

  “Chatter Box.”

  “Chatter Box?”

  “Meaning little bits of news and delightful gossip,” Jackie said. “And my byline will be Miss Dreamsville.” After a pause, she said, “The owner came up with the Chatter Box thing. I’m not sure I like it, either. But I won the more important battle. It will not be on the Women’s Page! It will be on the Editorial Page.”

  “What’s wrong with the Women’s Page?” Mrs. Bailey White asked innocently.

  “No, no, no, I will never write for the Women’s Page,” Jackie said crossly. “It’s all weddings and gardening tips and all that junk. No, no, no! I don’t want my column to be stuck there!”

  “But everyone reads the Women’s Page,” Mrs. Bailey White said softly.

  “Men don’t!” Jackie cried out. “If it’s on the Women’s Page it implies that my column is for women only or about women’s ‘concerns’ and that’s not what I’m going to write about.”

  “Well, what are you going to write about?” asked Plain Jane.

  Jackie smiled, and to me it seemed a little mischievous. “The agreement is that I get to write my column about anything I want. My first column is supposed to run in two days and I couldn’t decide what to write about. The editor suggested a piece about how Collier County seems to be forgotten at the statehouse in Tallahassee. But that seems deadly dull, doesn’t it? Now I’m thinking I could write about Seminole Joe.”

  “What?” I asked, realizing I was at least one step behind Jackie’s thinking.

  “Well, what if I wrote a piece about Seminole Joe, pointing out that he haunts the area where Darryl is going to do all that construction? And maybe get everyone in Naples all scared and stirred up, so there’d be opposition to the project?”

  This was either the best or worst idea I ever heard. I’d have to think on it overnight to decide which. In some respects it was brilliant. It might even work. On the other hand, it was one of those ideas that could have consequences we couldn’t anticipate. Jackie had a history of getting herself, and everyone else around her, in over their head. She was good at coming up with creative ideas but her strong suit didn’t include fixing up the messes that sometimes resulted.

  She saw our hesitation. “Aw come on, girls! What could go wrong?”

  Not the words I wanted to hear, but I admired her confidence just the same.

  Twelve

  If he hadn’t been so overburdened with work, Ted Hart might have enjoyed the challenge to start an airline for Mr. Toomb, his boss. The fact was that he was already away from his wife and kids more than he or they had expected. Hopefully, Mr. Toomb would quickly allow him to hire an assistant.

  But he was off to a bad start. He and Mr. Toomb could not even agree on a name for the airline. Ted had suggested Florida Airlines. Mr. Toomb’s idea? Wild Blue Yonder Airways. Ted could see immediately that marketing would be a problem. The word “wild” could be interpreted as “reckless.” And “yonder” had a connotation that was anything but sophisticated. The well-heeled Yankees they would need as customers were not going to like it. Well, Mr. Toomb was the boss, and the boss always got what he wanted. Especially if the boss was a powerful, no-nonsense man like Mr. Toomb.

  Ted spent two weeks in Tallahassee to get the permits lined up. It was easy compared to the way things were done up north, Ted thought. In fact, before anyone realized what was happening, the crummy little airport landing strip in Naples was under construction. The Naples airport had been so lacking that Mr. Toomb had been forced to accept that headquarters for his new airline would be in Tampa, which was, compared to Naples, an actual city. Meanwhile, the headline in the Naples paper said the state was financing some “improvements” to the humble airstrip, but in truth it was being modernized and expanded to accommodate Mr. Toomb’s vision.

  One problem was going to be Ted’s son, Judd, who was deeply involved with the cadet corps of the Civil Air Patrol. Making a mental note to himself, Ted vowed to be careful not to say too much around Judd, who seemed to be on friendly terms with everyone at the Naples Airport. Mr. Toomb was a secretive man, which meant Ted—if he wanted to stay employed—had to keep secrets, too. Not that Mr. Toomb was doing anything illegal, Ted quickly told himself. Mr. Toomb was an opportunist. A well-connected opportunist, the most formidable kind.

  Ted sighed. This was not what he thought he was getting into, back when he was in the Army during the war and wanted to make the world a better place. Somehow that dream had been diverted, one little decision at a time, into a simpler, more personal goal: go to college on the G.I. Bill and become the first person in his family to wear a suit to work. It had meant leaving Boston, which he hadn’t counted on. It had meant long days on the road, travel, and, needless to say, time away from Jackie and the kids. Was it worth it? On good days, the answer was yes.

  Jackie’s parents, owners of a well-known restaurant in downtown Boston, were not happy when Ted proposed to their only daughter. Sometimes it occurred to him that he was still trying to prove himself to them, even though he knew it could never happen. They would not even come to visit. It wasn’t Florida they were opposed to; God knows they’d spent their fair share of time at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach and the Breakers in Palm Beach. They just wouldn’t come to Collier County, that’s all. In their minds, Collier County was the sticks.

  Of course, the way things were headed, his in-laws might change their stubborn minds about Naples. There could come a time when Naples surpassed the swankier places on
Florida’s east coast. Not likely, but possible.

  As for his own parents, they didn’t have the money to travel to Cape Cod for a holiday, let alone Naples. In fact he wasn’t sure if his parents had ever gone on a vacation. This thought made him so sad that he found it necessary to light his pipe, a habit that calmed him.

  He watched as a tiny, single-engine plane landed gracefully on the lone runway and taxied carefully around construction equipment and scores of workmen who hadn’t even looked up when it landed. There were no hangars, only the terminal building which housed a weather station, a bathroom, and a so-called lobby with a half-dozen molded plastic chairs, a Coke machine, and plenty of ashtrays. He’d seen better accommodations overseas in the Army during World War Two.

  He had no desire to feel nostalgic about his stint in the Army. Back in Boston, he’d had a few beers now and then at a local VFW but, unlike many other veterans, he discovered he couldn’t think of his war service as his glory days. Unusual for his generation, Ted was bitter about the war. About all wars. About powerful old men, since the beginning of time, who sent young men to their deaths. More than nine thousand Allied soldiers killed or injured on D-Day alone. Ted thought about those numbers every day.

  He watched another plane land then realized that his pipe had grown cold. He leaned over to empty the bowl by tapping it against the heel of his shoe and was surprised, a moment later, to realize that he’d struck the pipe so hard that he’d broken it in two. He was glad no one was around to see this. Men like him didn’t show their emotions when it came to the war.

  His unit had landed at Normandy without him. He had been pulled out at the last minute and never knew why. The shame and guilt resulted in unrelenting pressure. You should have been there, his mind told him daily. You’d better have a good life; you’re living for all of those who didn’t make it.

  Twenty years had passed but it didn’t matter. And, as luck would have it, there were fresh reminders. The only suitable type of aircraft available for Mr. Toomb’s airline, it turned out, were old Army transport planes affectionately known as “Gooney Birds.” And the pilots? The only ones who had answered the newspaper advertisements were former World War Two pilots who had kept up their credentials in civilian life. He’d already hired two.

  So far, the federal government had approved a route between Tampa and points east (Orlando) and north (Tallahassee). It was a huge accomplishment in a short period of time, but much work remained to be done. When he was younger and dreamed of the white-collar life, Ted had envisioned smoke-filled boardrooms and leisurely lunches of prime rib and bourbon. In his mind, a secretary would take care of all the mundane details at work, just as a wife would do at home. Well, fantasy did not match reality. While he was making more money than he’d ever thought possible, the truth was that he hardly had time to enjoy spending it.

  At least Jackie seemed happy now. Their first year in Florida had been tumultuous. Between the book club and the radio show, she’d caused quite a ruckus. She had irritated the heck out of Mr. Toomb, but even that seemed smoothed over. The book club had mostly disbanded, and Jackie was spending most of her time helping with that baby. Yes, it was a bit unorthodox, but it was certainly worthwhile. He was relieved by the decision by Jackie and her friends to keep the baby primarily at Mrs. Bailey White’s house, which was off the beaten path. It also meant that the baby’s mother, Priscilla, could stay there—and not at his house—when she returned on her visits from college. Ted was not prejudiced, or at least he didn’t think he was. However, a man had to protect his wife and children, and he was not going to let them be a target for some furious redneck who might throw a Molotov cocktail through the living room window.

  Like Jackie, he believed that the best way to address the race problem in America was to help Negroes advance through education. In fact, one of Ted’s favorite charities was the United Negro College Fund, to which he donated every year since it was founded in 1944, even when his wallet had been thin. He had met Priscilla only once, but he agreed with Jackie that the young girl was college material.

  He was surprised—but kept it to himself—that Jackie seemed to be enjoying the baby as much as she did. He recalled how brittle she had been as a new mother and it was interesting to see that she was so relaxed with Priscilla’s baby. Maybe, because Jackie was a little older now, and experienced. Jackie’s friend, Plain Jane, seemed to be enjoying the baby, too, at least judging from Jackie’s comments. He had his doubts about weird old Mrs. Bailey White, but from everything he’d heard, the old woman had paid her debt to society and was settling back into a normal life. If Jackie and Plain Jane were, in a sense, helping with Mrs. Bailey White’s rehabilitation, that seemed like a good cause, too.

  Obviously, this was not the life Jackie expected when she’d married him. Of course, it wasn’t what he had planned on, either. If only there’d been a way to climb the corporate ladder without being on the road so much of the time, or relocating the whole family to a place that seemed as far from Boston as Timbuktu.

  Thirteen

  Dolores Simpson did not have a radio or television, nor did she care to. Even if owning one or both had been her heart’s desire, the electric grid didn’t come anywhere near her little fishing shack. She had considered buying one of those newfangled transistor radios, but it cost too much. As for a telephone, the thought was laughable. It would be “a hundred years shy of never,” as the saying went, before anyone put phone lines there.

  Robbie-Lee had been her grapevine to the outside world. He would come home from school—and later, from his job at Sears—and tell her the big news of the day (the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example) along with local news (who had gotten married, who had up and died) and, best of all, little tidbits from Hollywood that he heard on the radio during his lunch hour. If he had something new to tell her about Elizabeth Taylor, it made her day.

  But those days were gone. She didn’t miss people in general. She just missed Robbie-Lee. And with changes coming to the river, she needed the information that her son, had he still been living at home, would have provided. Walking to town was tiring, but she’d done it when necessary, for example, when she’d sent the telegram to Dora Witherspoon in Mississippi. Fortunately, her neighbors, Billy and Marco, aware that Robbie-Lee had gone away, had started dropping off the Naples Star at her fishing shack on their way back from—well, from somewhere. She never really knew what they were up to but followed the unofficial rule of Gun Rack Village: Don’t ask questions.

  The gift of a newspaper miraculously landing on her narrow dock, courtesy of Billy and Marco, didn’t occur every day but it was often enough to suit her. She no longer had to keep track of the passage of days by marking a scrap of paper each morning. She didn’t care that the newspaper was secondhand; there were signs, like cigarette ashes smudged into the newsprint, that the brothers had read it already. That was fine; it meant she didn’t have to pay them.

  On this particular day Dolores heard the truck followed by the familiar thump as the paper hit the dock but didn’t bother to retrieve it right away. Not a thing was happening of any importance. For real news—news that mattered—she’d have to wait for Dora Witherspoon.

  Only when she went outside an hour later to clean her shotgun did she remember the newspaper, saw it sitting there, and picked it up. She took the rubber band off (she saved them; they were hard to come by) and saw this announcement on the front page:

  “Read Our New Column by Collier County’s Very Own MISS DREAMSVILLE!” page 11

  Like everyone else in Naples, Dolores flipped immediately to page eleven. Peering out at her was a little pen-and-ink sketch of a grinning, winking woman who was clearly supposed to be Jackie. Next to the drawing were the words “Chatter Box by Miss Dreamsville!”

  There was a headline beneath it that read, THE LEGEND OF SEMINOLE JOE. Dolores did not take the time to sit down or go back in the house. She read it standing stock still, not even bothered by a sliver of sunlight breaking th
rough some bad-weather clouds and shining in her eyes. Some of the words were hard for her so she read slowly and aloud:

  Residents have long spoken in hushed tones about a dangerous apparition who is said to reside near the Mangrove River and has been known to wreak havoc in our lovely community.

  Seminole Joe, as he is called, has killed (and, some say, eaten) at least seventeen persons since he himself was murdered by Spanish Explorers. It is believed he only attacks Caucasian men. Mr. Joe has been fairly quiet in recent years, but old-timers are concerned this will change with the proposed new real-estate development (cheekily called Dreamsville Estates by Mr. Darryl Norwood, who, it should be stated here, did not ask permission of yours truly).

  Since the beginning of time, one of the peculiarities of the human condition is that people can look at the exact same event, or in this case, the same place, and see entirely different things. Some look at the river and see Nature in all her glory. Others envision a river of money, created with asphalt, timber, and glass. It is not hard to imagine which side Seminole Joe will take as it is widely known that he abhors change and wanton waste.

  A model citizen who has lived in Collier County for all of her eighty years was willing to speak but not for attribution. “I’m very worried that Joe will get all stirred up again,” she remarked. “Anyone working on that project, or living there after it’s built, will never again have a sound night’s sleep. I know I won’t.”

  Will Neapolitans be safe from the wrath of the ghostly Indian? Will Seminole Joe rise again? Only time will tell.

  * * *

  Dolores crumpled the newspaper in her hands and tossed it as far as she could, only to have a wind gust pick it up and toss it straight back, mocking her. What was that crazy Boston gal up to now? Having her involved was not helpful. The woman made a mess of everything she touched. Why was she bringing up Seminole Joe?