JoLayne Lucks worked as an assistant to Dr. Cecil Crawford, the town veterinarian. JoLayne had been trained as a registered nurse, and easily could have earned twice as much money at the county hospital if she hadn't preferred animal patients over human ones. And she excelled at her job. Everyone in Grange who owned a pet knew JoLayne Lucks. Where Doc Crawford could be cranky and terse, JoLayne was all tenderness and concern. That she was rumored to be eccentric in her private life was intriguing but immaterial; she had a special way with the animals. Just about everybody was fond of her, including a number of lifelong bigots who confided that she was the only black person they'd ever trusted. JoLayne found it interesting that so many of the local racists owned small, neurotic, ill-tempered breeds of dogs. The women favored toy poodles; the men, grossly overfed Chihuahuas. In Dade County, where JoLayne grew up, it was German shepherds and pit bulls.
The job at Dr. Crawford's clinic was only JoLayne's second since leaving nursing school. Her first job was at the infamously exotic emergency room of Jackson Memorial Hospital, in downtown Miami. That's where JoLayne had met three of the six serious men in her life:
Dan Colavito, the stockbroker, who on a daily basis would promise to give up cigars, cocaine and over-the-counter biotechs. He'd arrived on a Saturday night at Jackson with four broken toes, the consequence of dashing into the middle of Ocean Drive and kicking (for no apparent reason) what turned out to be Julio Iglesias' personal limousine;
Robert Nossano, the policeman, who would spend his road shifts stopping attractive young female drivers, few of whom had committed an actual traffic offense. Officer Nossano had been brought to the emergency room complaining of a severely bruised testicle, the result (or so he said) of falling on his nightstick while trying to subdue a burglary suspect;
Dr. Neal Grossberger, the young chiropractor, who would phone JoLayne at least twice an hour when she was home, and who would weep like a drunk when she'd refuse to wear the portable pager he'd bought her (baby blue, to match her hospital scrubs), and who couldn't get dressed in the morning without calling to ask what socks he should wear. Neal had come breathlessly to the hospital after consuming a suspect gooseneck clam, and had waited seven hours in the emergency room for what he'd predicted would be a virulent onset of salmonella, which never arrived.
JoLayne Lucks finally quit the hospital after meeting and marrying Lawrence Dwyer, the lawyer. Like JoLayne's other lovers, Lawrence had good qualities that were instantly obvious and bad qualities that took a bit longer to surface. It was Lawrence who'd suggested to JoLayne that they move upstate to Grange, where he could concentrate on fighting his disbarment, absent big-city distractions such as vengeful ex-clients. Such was JoLayne's affection for Lawrence (and her determination to make the marriage work) that she'd declined to read the four loose-leaf volumes of trial transcripts from his Miami fraud conviction. She'd chosen instead to believe her husband's claim of complete innocence, which relied on a complicated theory of prosecutorial entrapment, judicial conspiracy and a careless bookkeeper whose "zeroes looked exactly like sixes!"
In Grange it had been JoLayne who'd found the old house on Cocoa and Hubbard, and JoLayne who'd put up the down payment. She had been touched and secretly proud when Lawrence took the job as a toll taker on the Beeline Expressway until he got arrested for stealing the jumbo-sized bag of change. That evening, after boxing all her husband's clothes, jewelry and toiletries for the Salvation Army, JoLayne made a backyard bonfire of his law books, files, depositions and correspondence with the Florida Bar. After the divorce she asked Dr. Crawford if she could cut back to three days a week at the animal clinic; she said she needed time to herself.
That's when she started exploring Simmons Wood, a rolling splash of oak, pine and palmetto scrub on the outskirts of town. Once or twice a week, JoLayne would park on the main highway, hop the short wire fence and disappear into the tree line. Every green thicket was an adventure, every clearing was a sanctuary. She kept a spiral notebook of the wildlife she saw: snakes, opossums, raccoons, foxes, a bobcat, a half dozen species of tiny warblers. The baby turtles came from a creek JoLayne didn't know the name. The creek water was the color of apricot tea, and it ran through a stand of mossy oaks down to a sandy, undercut bluff. That was where JoLayne usually stopped to rest and eat lunch. One afternoon she counted eleven little cooters perched on flat rocks and logs. She loved the way they craned their painted necks and poked out their scaly legs to catch the sunlight. When a small alligator swam by, JoLayne tossed it part of her ham sandwich, to keep its mind off the turtles.
She never thought of taking the little fellows out of the creek, until that day she'd parked on the edge of Simmons Wood and noticed a freshly painted for sale sign facing the highway: 44 acres, zoned commercial. At first JoLayne thought it was a mistake. Forty-four acres couldn't be right it sounded too small. The Wood seemed to go on forever when JoLayne was walking there. She'd driven straight back to town and stopped at the Grange courthouse to check the plat book. On paper Simmons Wood was shaped like a kidney, which surprised JoLayne. On her hikes she'd tried not to think of the place as having boundaries, but there they were. The for sale sign had been correct on the acreage, too. JoLayne had hurried home and phoned the real estate company named on the sign. The agent, a friend of JoLayne's, told her the property was grandfathered for development into a retail shopping mall. The next morning, JoLayne started taking the baby turtles from the creek. She couldn't bear the thought of them being buried alive by bulldozers. She would have tried to save the other animals, too, but almost everything else was too fast to catch, or too hard to handle. So she'd concentrated on the cooters, and from a pet-supply catalog at Dr. Crawford's she'd ordered the largest aquarium she could afford.
And when JoLayne Lucks learned she'd won the Florida lottery, she knew immediately what to do with the money: She would buy Simmons Wood and save it.
She was sitting at the kitchen table, working up the numbers on a pocket calculator, when she heard a sharp knock from the porch. She figured it must be Tom, the newspaperman, giving it one more shot. Who else would be so brash as to drop by at midnight?
The screen door opened before JoLayne got there. A stranger stepped into her living room. He was dressed like a hunter.
Krome asked, "Did you find her?"
"Yes," said Dick Turnquist.
"Where?"
"I hesitate to tell you."
"Then don't," said Krome. He lay on the sheets with his fingers interlocked behind his head. To keep the receiver at his ear he'd propped it in the fleshy pocket above his collarbone. Years of talking to editors from motel rooms had led him to perfect a supine, hands-free technique for using the telephone.
Turnquist said, "She's checked herself into rehab, Tom. Says she's hooked on antidepressants."
"That's ridiculous."
"Says she's eating Prozacs like Pez."
"I want her served."
"Tried," Turnquist said. "The judge says leave her alone. Wants a hearing to find out if she is of'diminished mental capacity.' "
Krome cackled bitterly. Turnquist was sympathetic.
Mary Andrea Finley Krome had been resisting divorce for almost four years. She could not be assuaged with offers of excessive alimony or a cash buyout. I don't want money, I want Tom.No one was more baffled than Tom himself, who was acutely aware of his deficiencies as a domestic companion. The dispute had been brutally elongated because the case was filed in Brooklyn, which was, with the possible exception of Vatican City, the worst place in the world to expedite a divorce. Further complicating the procedure was the fact that the estranged Mrs. Krome was an accomplished stage actress who was capable, as she demonstrated time and again, of convincing the most hard-bitten judge of her fragile mental condition. She also had a habit of disappearing for months at a time with obscure road shows most recently it was a musical adaptation of The Silence of the Lambswhich made it difficult to serve her with court summonses.