Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County

by Amy Hill Hearth

  I turned to look at the night heron and for some reason tears filled my eyes. “I wish there was more I could do,” I said sadly. “About Darryl, I mean. I wish I’d never married him.” She didn’t say anything so I added, “Well, good-bye, Dolores,” and I turned and walked away.

  I’d gone ten or fifteen yards away when she called out to me. “He don’t own the land.”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “He don’t own the land,” Dolores repeated. “He didn’t buy it fair and square.”

  I turned around warily. Was this a ploy to keep me from giving up? Did she want me to postpone my trip back to Mississippi, stay here, and continue the fight against Darryl?

  “What do you mean?” I called back. “Darryl told the newspaper that he bought it from some folks in Kentucky who have been hanging onto it for years.”

  Dolores drew in a sharp breath. “That’s a lie,” she shouted. “He didn’t buy it. He must have made that up, because I’m the one from Kentucky. I mean my people were from Kentucky. I own it. The land. The river. The whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  I couldn’t have been more surprised if the night heron had started singing “How Great Thou Art.” I thought, Surely I didn’t hear that right. But if it was true, or partly true, it could change everything. And something about the expression on Dolores’s face made me realize it wasn’t a lie. She looked frightened. Vulnerable.

  “Well,” I said slowly. “What in the name of our sweet Savior would you be talking about?”

  “Come inside and I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  “Like I said, you’ll have to come inside.”

  “Why are you telling me about this now? I’ve been home two months. Why did you wait?”

  She hesitated. “I was hoping it could be handled some other way,” she said.

  We had a standoff for about three or four minutes, which in the swamp heat of far South Florida feels more like three or four hours. Finally, I gave in, but I tried to look tough as I did so, although I didn’t feel it.

  She directed me to the small table I remembered from my previous visit. “Now, sit down and close your eyes,” she said.

  This seemed like a stupid thing to do but I did it anyway. For all I knew I was about to get a hatchet over the top of my head. But again, there was something new in the tone of her voice. There was no edge to it, no bitterness, as if she’d set down a burden too heavy to carry anymore. Her voice actually sounded younger, like the woman she might have been years before. She walked away from me in the dim, indoor light. “Are they closed?” she called.

  “Oh, all right,” I said impatiently. “Yes, they’re closed. But they won’t be for long.”

  I heard a board creaking, followed by what seemed to be her shuffling around. Then I heard what sounded like the top of a large jar or container being unscrewed. More shuffling around. Then the top being screwed back on again. I heard a scraping noise, followed by a latch clicking into place.

  “Dolores, I am not going to sit here forever with my eyes closed,” I said, trying to sound angry and impatient when in fact I was terrified. There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and I think I’d crossed it.

  I heard her footsteps as she moved closer to me. I held my breath. “Okay,” she said, “you can open your eyes now.”

  She stood less than three feet from me, on the opposite side of the table, holding several pieces of paper in her hands.

  “What in the world?” I asked.

  She didn’t reply. She set them on the table in front of me. I picked them up carefully, but there wasn’t enough light in the fishing shack to read them. I squinted but still couldn’t decipher the words. We’d left the door ajar, creating a shaft of light, and without thinking I stood up and walked toward it.

  “You ain’t leaving here with them papers!” Dolores shouted.

  “I’m not leaving!” I said quickly. “I just need some light so I can read them, that’s all.” I stayed stock-still until she was reassured. A long minute passed, and I slowly handed the papers back toward her. “Here,” I said, “take them back. I don’t want you to be upset.”

  I thought she might grab them and—woe is me!—I would never get to read them. Maybe, the papers were nothing important at all. Or maybe they could change my life and hers, and a whole lot of other people who loved the river. Instead of taking them from me, though, she moved closer to me and took my arm, a gesture which took ten years off my life. Yet all she did was gently steer me closer to the ray of light by the door.

  “My eyes are not as good as they used to be,” she said. “And the ink has faded. I haven’t looked at them in a long time. Now, you read them to me.”

  I began to read the first one. Instantly, I realized it was a deed of some sort. The language came from a lawyer, I had no doubt. Lawyers had a peculiar way of making the English language seem a lot more convoluted than it actually was. There were lots of “herebys” and other highfalutin words until I finally got to the good part: the name of the person who owned the property and the date, “the Third Day of April 1877.”

  I recognized the name: General John Stuart Williams, a United States Senator from Kentucky who had been a Confederate general. Williams was generally credited as the founder of Naples.

  As for the property, I knew it immediately. It described the exact spot where I was standing, and all the way past the Negro village.

  In other words, it was almost exactly the same parcel that included the river and surrounding land where Darryl was planning to build his Dreamsville.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER I HIKED back to the main road carrying the precious deed, along with a few other miscellaneous pieces of paper that might or might not have had anything to do with the deed.

  Dolores had gently rolled the documents into a scroll which she covered with a layer of spatterdock lilies and tied with Florida bear grass. All this, to keep the elements from attacking our precious documents during my walk back to town. Still, I prayed it wouldn’t rain. The skies had been threatening all day.

  I say “our” documents because that is what they had become. Once they left their secret hiding place inside Dolores’s fishing shack, they were mine, too. Mine to protect, and mine to share. It wasn’t that Dolores trusted me. I was simply her best hope and last chance.

  I went directly home and put the papers into Mama’s old trunk. Then I went back out, locking the door behind me, which, I realized, was only the third or fourth time in my life I had bothered. I was so energized by my exciting secret that I commenced to walking all the way to Jackie’s house.

  One of Jackie’s twins opened the door a crack, announced that her mother was not home, and shut the door. Never mind that Jackie’s car was in the driveway. I knocked again, and waited an embarrassingly long time. When Judd swung open the door, I was happy as a Cheshire cat with a new container of Py-co-pay Tooth Powder.

  “Come on in, Mom’s in the kitchen,” he said. “Sorry about my sister.”

  Jackie was trying one of Mrs. Bailey White’s recipes, Died and Gone to Heaven Cake. She was five minutes away from taking it out of the oven. She took one look at me—I had hardly ever walked all the way to her house—and knew I had big news. The problem was the twin daughters were lurking about, and I didn’t trust them one bit. Even Judd—I wasn’t sure he should be in on this, either. He had gone out to the carport to work on one of his science experiments.

  Finally the cake was done, and Jackie set it out to cool. “Girls,” she shouted, almost knocking out my eardrum. “I’m going out with Miss Witherspoon. The meatloaf is still in the fridge—just take it out when you’re ready for dinner. And be sure to leave some for your brother, would you please? Don’t be greedy! And—are you listening to me? Don’t any of you touch this cake until I get back.” To me, she said, “My girls hate me. I wish I knew why.”

  She started demanding answers before we even got to the car. The convertible t
op was up; Jackie was anticipating that it was going to rain. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Where are we going?”

  “I guess to Mrs. Bailey White’s,” I said with a shrug. The old Victorian murder house was, more than ever, a refuge for the remaining members of our old book club.

  “Are you going to tell me what this is about?” Jackie pleaded.

  “I have something to show you,” I said. “Some old papers.”

  “Old papers?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t bring them with me because it looks like rain.” In fact, the wind was picking up and a deluge was increasingly likely—one of those tropical rains that comes down so hard that it feels like someone in heaven opened a spigot.

  “Dora, please tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  “Well,” I said breathlessly, “you are not going to believe it. I almost don’t know how to say it.”

  “Oh for Pete’s sake, Dora, just spit it out, would you?”

  I frowned. Yankees could be so rude. What an expression—“spit it out.” Mercy.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “I think there may be a way to stop Darryl.” I paused, then blurted out, “Dolores gave me some old papers. One of them looks like a deed.”

  “What? A deed? You mean a land deed?”

  “Yes. And it appears to be a large piece of land that includes the river,” I said. “But I didn’t look at it all that long.”

  “So you don’t have it with you—this deed?”

  “No, it’s hidden in a safe place, along with the other papers.”

  “Where?”

  “My house.”

  Jackie hit the brakes and did one of her famously sloppy three-point turns, right there in the middle of the Tamiami Trail with me screaming the whole time. How I wished I had my own car.

  “Where we going?” I howled.

  “Back to your house, to see those papers, of course!” Jackie yelled. The woman was crazy. Plumb jack crazy.

  “Now wait just a minute!” I shouted, surprising myself as much as Jackie. “I’m the one who has been entrusted with the papers, and I think I should have some say in what we’re going to do!”

  Jackie surrendered. “Okay,” she said, pulling to the side of the road. “You tell me what you want to do.”

  “We can get the papers but I’m not showing them to you until we’re at Mrs. Bailey White’s house where we can all look at them at the same time.”

  Jackie started to protest but I held my ground. “Stop your fussing, Jackie, and drive the car.” And to my surprise, she did.

  Twenty-Five

  I may need my smelling salts,” Mrs. Bailey White announced. “Do y’all realize what this is?”

  None of us being lawyers, we weren’t sure what we were looking at, but Mrs. Bailey White recognized the name on the deed, just as I had.

  “This could be our saving grace, gals,” she said, fanning herself with her hand. “One is definitely a land deed, but I don’t know about the rest.”

  The only legal papers I’d ever set eyes on were Mama’s handwritten will and my divorce papers. Jackie was at a loss, too. But Plain Jane had more worldly experience. She had worked for a land surveyor during the war, and later, for an insurance company. This was long before her current career as a magazine writer, but she remembered the earlier jobs well.

  “I can’t say for certain, but I think this second piece of paper is a trust document,” Plain Jane said. “And this third piece of paper—it looks like a birth certificate, filled out by a midwife for a home birth. For a newborn by the name of Bunny Ann McIntyre.”

  “Who in the world is that?” Jackie said.

  “Well, whoever it is, she comes from royalty,” Plain Jane said. “Not Queen Elizabeth kind of royalty. More like Collier County royalty. That is, if she’s a direct descendant—and maybe the heir—of the old general. Now, this last document doesn’t look as authentic. It just seems like a crude family tree that somebody has drawn up. But again, if you look carefully,” she added, studying the paper, “you’ll see the name Bunny Ann McIntyre on there.”

  I cleared my throat. “I know who she is. Dolores Simpson told me that’s her real name. She says she’s Bunny Ann McIntyre.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jackie shrieked, almost dropping a lit cigarette.

  “Ha, ha, ha, ain’t that something?” Mrs. Bailey White said, clapping her hands together.

  “Do you think Robbie-Lee knows?” Plain Jane asked.

  “I don’t think he knows any of this,” I said. “I don’t think she ever wanted him to know. At least, as long as she was alive.”

  “Well, how do we know any of it’s true?” Jackie said, bringing us back to earth. “This may be a bunch of donkey excrement.”

  “What?” Plain Jane said, frowning. “What kind of saying is that?”

  “Oh, something I used to hear up north,” Jackie said. “It’s just a polite way to say—”

  “Never mind,” I interrupted. “How are we going to find out if it’s true? What if we can use this to stop Darryl?”

  We were lost in our own thoughts. “Who would name their daughter Bunny Ann?” Jackie said suddenly, with a snort.

  “Well, you named your daughters Bronwyn and Halcyon,” Plain Jane said. “No wonder they’re mad at you all the time.”

  “But those are family names,” Jackie said defensively.

  “Maybe Bunny Ann is a family name.” Plain Jane had a point.

  “Ladies! Ladies! Please,” cried Mrs. Bailey White. “We have more important fish to fry.”

  “Agreed,” I said hastily. “What we need is a lawyer. Jackie, what about those lawyers you talked to on the telephone in New York and Boston? The ones who gave you advice about Darryl using your name—”

  “No, no, no,” Mrs. Bailey White interrupted. “We don’t need some highfalutin Yankee lawyer! What we need is a local boy.”

  Naples was a small town and between us we quickly came up with a list of every lawyer in town. They all had ties, however, to the most powerful folks in town. Finally, we agreed that several of us should make a day trip up to Fort Myers in search of a lawyer. Whether one could be found—indeed, whether one existed—who would meet with all of our approval, and who was willing to look into our situation, would remain to be seen. But as Mama used to say, “You’ve got to get out there and try. Sitting at home and doing nothing but frettin’ will never get you anywhere.”

  • • •

  I DID NOT HAVE A dime to contribute and felt badly for it, but between Jackie, Mrs. Bailey White, and Plain Jane, there was enough to pay for a lawyer.

  They returned from Fort Myers feeling triumphant, having managed to find “a nice young man who is not connected,” as Jackie explained. This made me a little uneasy. “Young” could be good; passion and energy might trump experience. “Unconnected” to Jackie and the others meant “uncontaminated,” but I wondered if it might translate as powerless.

  The lawyer’s name was John Ed Yonce. He was very interested in the case but said he’d have to meet Dolores first. This, of course, was a problem. How would we get Dolores to go to Fort Myers? Even if Jackie offered to drive her up there, we didn’t think she would go.

  Somehow, Jackie had persuaded poor Mr. Yonce to come to Collier County and meet Dolores at her home. I say poor Mr. Yonce because that fella was in over his head. I don’t think there was anything he learned in law school that could have prepared him for Dolores. Or Jackie, for that matter.

  Jackie offered to transport Mr. Yonce from Fort Myers to Naples if necessary but announced that she would not drive him to Dolores’s fishing shack. “It’s horrible for my car,” she declared. “I really don’t want to drive back there again.” And who could blame her?

  Neither Mrs. Bailey White nor Plain Jane were in a position to help. That left me to figure out what to do. I could escort him by foot or canoe. Mr. Yonce chose the latter.

  The next morning, I waited at the public boat launch as agreed. The d
ay started badly. When I tried to pay the fee to rent the canoe with a Kennedy fifty-cent piece, the man in charge refused to accept the coin on account of the fact that he was a Kennedy hater. Now, I found this disgusting for a variety of reasons. Number one, Kennedy was dead—assassinated!—and the way I was raised, “of the dead say nothing evil.” Secondly, he had been our president and therefore deserved our respect whether you agreed with him or not. Last but not least, the coin was issued by our government and was therefore as legitimate as a twenty-dollar bill or anything else.

  Well, I won that battle based on the last point. He took my fifty-cent piece, but I was left with a sick feeling in my stomach and an angry headache.

  I was relieved when Jackie finally pulled up. A man I presumed to be Mr. Yonce sat beside her in the front seat. Was it some kind of mistake? He didn’t look much older than Judd. As he climbed out of the car, my heart sank even further when I saw that he was wearing a suit and wing-tip shoes.

  Jackie took off with a wave of the hand, leaving us to our own introductions.

  “My, isn’t she something?!” he said. “Mrs. Hart, I mean. She told me all about her radio show, how she gave that up, and now she’s writing a newspaper column.”

  “Oh, she’s something else all right,” I said with a smile. Men of all ages were always impressed with Jackie. What I didn’t say was, Oh boy, if you think Jackie is something else, just wait until you meet Miss Bunny Ann McIntyre, aka Dolores Simpson.

  “Thank you for taking me today,” he said.

  “Mr. Yonce, um, why are you wearing . . . those clothes?” I asked.

  “Because I’m meeting a client!” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  He put on a lifesaving vest—few of us locals wore them, even though they were made available at the dock—and climbed daintily in the canoe. I could see I had a long day ahead of me.

  “Aren’t you going to help me paddle?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how,” he said.

  “I’ll show you how,” I replied. “Get in the front.”