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.