Randy White: Ten thousand isles

I got up, went to the little ship's galley, which is my kitchen, and got the jar of iced tea out of the fridge. I carried it into the living room as I said, "So tell us what happened, JoAnn. Me and the friendly witch doctor here, we're both at your disposal."

She grinned, then chuckled. Her face was attractive in an unspectacular way: a successful woman with her own life, her own mind and way of doing things.

Delia Copeland came from a family of fishermen and clammers, people who lived in tin-roofed houses and built their own boats. Like JoAnn's people, the Copelands and Smiths were spread around South Florida from Flamingo to West Palm. Delia's parents had settled on Marco Island before the Mackle brothers turned it into a famous resort and forced land prices sky high.

When Delia graduated from high school, college was not a consideration. Who had money for college? Instead, she went to work waitressing at the Marina Inn in Goodland, where she met a forty-year-old pompano fisherman out of Upper Matecumbe, though his people were from Devil's Garden, north of the Big Cypress Indian Reservation. He was part Cracker, part Miccosukee and he looked a little like Clark Gable.

"His name was Darton Copeland," JoAnn told us. "He was a strange one, Dart was. I was just a girl, but even I could tell there was something unusual about him. The way he'd look at you, his eyes had this kind of… I don't know, like a glow to them. Have you ever seen a wolf?"

I said, "Photographs, that's all."

"They were like that. His eyes. They were a sort of brownish yellow. They had a light to them."

One thing about Delia, JoAnn told us, she'd always had perfect judgment when it came to men. "Put her in a stadium full of a thousand guys and she'll pick the biggest loser and abuser every single time. Why some women are like that, I don't know. Sad thing is, they're usually the talented girls, the ones with a lot to offer. Maybe deep inside they're afraid they'd soar away if some jerk wasn't there to drag them down and make things ugly and safe."

Two months after meeting Copeland, Delia was pregnant. She was eighteen years old. Copeland married her in a drunken wedding ceremony and vanished one month later, and four months before his daughter, Dorothy, was born.

"We heard rumors that Dart was living back on the Keys with one of his wives. He had several wives, it turned out. Delia's daddy went looking for him a couple of times but never found him, so Delia raised Dorothy on her own. This little blond-haired child, she looked like an angel, she really did. Big blue eyes and very, very long, delicate fingers. That's what I remember best about her. Her eyes and those fingers of hers, like stems on flowers.

"I was twelve when Dorothy was born, and mature for my age, so I baby-sat her lots of nights while Delia did her waitressing. One thing I can tell you from personal experience, that child was different. I think you've been around me enough to know I'm the solid type, Doc. I'm a show-me person. I believe that when we die, we die, and that's all there is to it, and I've never bothered reading a newspaper zodiac column in my life. What a racket. But this child was different. I don't know what caused it or why, but she was."

JoAnn swirled the ice in her glass, looking to me for some reassurance. Tomlinson spoke before I had a chance. "You and Doc are a lot alike, no argument there. Branches of the same tough tree. And this guy"-he hammered his thumb at me-"is straight as cable. Or Wally Cleaver. You say the baby was different? We believe you."

"But how?" I asked.

"One thing was, she was always so… distant? Yeah, like only part of her was in the room with you. Only part of her heard what you said. Like most of her, maybe the most important part of her, was in an entirely different world."

Tomlinson was nodding, like he was enjoying the story but already way ahead. He asked, "Did the child tell you what she could hear?"

JoAnn paused for a moment, then said very carefully, "She told me that she could hear voices. She told me that herself. One night she looked out the window-this was down on Marco Island; she couldn't have been more than six-Dorothy looked out the window and she said, 'There are so many people trying to talk to me, JoAnn. All the talking, it makes me so tired. They won't let me rest.' She was crying. Very upset."

Tomlinson said, "When you looked out the window, no one was there. It was dark. You were on an Indian mound or there was a shell mound near by."

She said, "You're doing it again. That's one of the things that irritates me about you, Tomlinson. I know you're smart. But the tricky part of you, I don't like. I need some honesty. How do you know that Dorothy heard people that no one else could see or hear?"

Tomlinson seemed amused but also a little wistful as he said, "Because, all my life-" He stopped, thought for a moment before he continued, "Because I've known someone who's the same way. It's a very strange gig, like being able to hear through the walls of a busy hotel. People like Dorothy are born on a dimensional cusp. Half in this world, but half out, which means they're aware of other worlds as they spin by."

"Other worlds."

"Absolutely. You don't know what I mean?"

JoAnn gave a little laugh as I said, "No one knows what you mean, Tomlinson. Let her finish the story."

"Okay, okay, but keep in mind a simple truth: classic physics has no explanation for randomness. The existence of many worlds is the only explanation for what appear to be random events. You get some time, read a paper called The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It explains it all."

I rolled my eyes, but she was nodding. "Okay, different worlds. I thought you meant like ghosts."

"Yes, ghosts, too. Dorothy could probably hear ghosts. And believe me, ghosts are no different than people. Lots of loud, self-centered shits. They're worse than drunks."

"Ghosts, uh-huh." She looked at me. "Do you believe any of this?"

I said, "No, of course I don't. Half the time, he says things like that just to irritate me. Certain people are more perceptive than others, I believe that. I also believe that some people have a tough time dealing with their own imaginations."

Tomlinson tilted his bottle of beer upward, drinking, a familiar smile on his face as JoAnn said, "Whatever the reasons, Dorothy was different. The voices, the way she behaved, all sorts of things. But the main way she was different-and no one ever has explained this-the way she was most different was that she was good at finding things. Old stuff, stuff made of metal. Dorothy would go right to it. Lose your keys? A diamond ring on the beach? People would call Delia and say, You mind if we borrow Dorothy for an hour or so?' She became kinda famous on Marco Island."

"That's a great gift," Tomlinson said. "Extraordinary."

"Yeah. I used to think so. But then, this gift of hers, her gift for finding things, I think that's what went and got that little girl killed."

JoAnn didn't know all the details. She'd been in her twenties when Dorothy died. She'd already moved away from Marco Island, but stayed in phone contact with Delia Copeland.

"I knew that Dorothy made good grades in school, but that she was kind of a social outcast. An oddball, the other kids probably figured. Delia worried about that. It hurt her that the girl didn't have friends. And there were always people around trying to get Dorothy to use her gift for reasons Delia didn't like. I know she worried about that, too. As I said, Dorothy got kind of famous on the island."

Something that contributed to the girl's notoriety was her discovery of several pre-Columbian wooden artifacts. She found them in the muck of what everyone thought to be a mosquito drainage ditch. The ditch turned out to be a canal that had apparently been dredged by the Indians who'd once lived there, the Calusa.