A Nurse for Galleon Key — Ethel Hamill

Once the bus left Key Vaca, the knowledge that she was almost there took possession of her entirely. Simone began to tremble with it. A deep trembling that did not reflect itself on the surface; not in any visible unsteadiness of her hands, not in any perceptible quickening of her breath.

This place they had quit, this town called Marathon, was only seven feet above sea level -- or so the guidebook open in her lap had assured her. Here ended the Upper Keys, part of the continental plateau stretching northward and westward from Florida for thousands of miles. From here on, the incredible bridge linked only true islands. And on one of them, one of the smallest of them, one of the most insignificant dots along this last lap of Route One's coastal sweep from Maine to the Florida Strait, she would find Pete.

Galleon Key! she thought. And: Only a little farther now!

The watery world outside her window shimmered unstably, less as if it were actual waves and sunshine than as if it existed only by illusion, like a heat mirage on a melting black tar roadway. The big bus, a laggard through the towns of the upper archipelago, suddenly found wings. It hit Seven Mile Bridge with the rush of a balloon-tired tornado, seemingly intent upon gobbling the span's entire length at a gulp.

The bus was filled, except for scattered vacancies. Simone herself sat beside one of those, in the second seat behind the driver but on the opposite side. Through the wide windshield, she had an excellent view of miracles to come; of miracles, if not of the most important one.

Pete…she thought. He might have been in the spare place beside her. He might have been holding her hand. He might have been -- Pete!

During the long months Simone Greer had nursed her uncle in Gramercy Park, she had dreamed of the day when she could join Pete Enright in Florida -- there to salvage treasure from a Spanish ship sunk on the reef centuries before -- and be married to him.

Now, Uncle Walter, Pete's backer in his salvage operations, was dead, and Simone was on the bus she had taken at Miami on the last lap of her journey to Galleon Key -- and Pete.

But at Galleon Key -- a scattering of buildings, grayed, unprepossessing, unpainted -- there was no Pete to sweep her off the bus into his arms. Alone with her bag, alone with her bright glance shadowing as she looked this way and that…then a voice: “You're Sim, aren't you?” it drawled lazily. “Simone Greer?” and Simone was looking into the face of a man as fair as Pete was dark. Pete. It transpired, had had the use of a helicopter for one day only, and Toby Arnold, his old buddy in the Pacific, here on a roving assignment for the magazine This Minute had been delegated to meet her.

Simone told herself that everything would be all right when she saw Pete. But the young nurse was in for another surprise before she reached the headquarters of the “Peter Enright Treasure Reclamation Expedition,” a boarding house run by Xenia Zeidos. Simone had never delivered a baby alone before -- but that was what she was called on to do not many miles down the road from where the bus had deposited her. The Pangaloses were one of the many Greek families on Galleon Key -- and Aphrodite Pangalos had chosen this day to have her baby…

The feeling of unreality deepened when Simone reached the Zeidos house, for Xenia and Spyros Zeidos had added the lucrative business of raising rattlesnakes to the chancy one of keeping boarders. And one Don Bryant whom Toby had so nonchalantly introduced into the conversation on the drive down was Donna Bryant, a chic redhead and feature writer for This Minute.

Even when Pete returned, Simone had to cope with the ubiquitous Toby, who seemed bent on keeping her away from the man she was planning to marry right away, if things went the way she had planned…