When I Grow Too Old to Dream

As the millennium dawns, all three of the “Main Street Janes” are in the midst of major life changes. Recently widowed narrator, Sally Jane, has given up her day job to start an antique business in the once-bustling Tweetsie Railroad depot center of Elk Station, NC. Living in the apartment atop the mall becomes challenging when her septuagenarian mother, Emma Jane (aka “Emmer”), retires from inn keeping and moves in with her. And to further complicate things, Sally Jane’s prattling daughter, A“meri”ca Jane, is busy converting her grandmother’s old inn into an artist colony, soon-to-be inhabited by a colorful cast of quirky characters.

While cleaning out the inn’s attic, Meri Jane discovers an old trunk filled with costumes and memorabilia, which Emmer identifies as having belonged to a dancer named Fritzi Bright who stayed at The Esmerelda Inn with a traveling vaudeville show in the summer of 1935. Although five years her senior, Fritzi had befriended the adoring eleven-year-old daughter of the innkeepers and promised to rescue her from her boring, small-town life. But when the troupe prepared to depart following their final performance, Fritzi Bright had disappeared into thin air, leaving only a cryptic note and her devastated fan behind.

Now, sixty-five years later, bodies suddenly start falling at mention of the name “Fritzi Bright,” and Sally Jane’s got her hands full sorting out suspects whilst trying to maintain balance between her passionate, spontaneous daughter and her fastidious, Anglophile mother. Could it be that Emmer’s merely getting a bit “dotty” when she claims that Fritzi must be back at The Esmerelda, as the aroma of her perfume and the melody of her song “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” are in the air? Or perhaps she’s on to something, after all?