The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “We never heard anything from him,” Myra May said emphatically. “Not from the social worker, either. Cupcake has been with us for almost four years, and not one word.”

  Violet pressed her lips together. “To be honest, Verna, I didn’t make it easy for him to get in touch with me. I took my letters—the letters I’d written to Pansy—as well as her address book. She was my half-sister, you see, and we had different last names. I doubt that he ever knew mine. Our parents are dead, and Pansy and I were the only ones left. There wasn’t any way he could reach me—or so I thought.” She knotted her fingers together. “And at the time, the Depression was hitting hard. People were on the move everywhere. Neil was in the entertainment business, so after we were gone, I thought he’d go to California, or maybe New York.”

  “Sounds like he chose California,” Liz said, “since the lawyer called from Los Angeles.”

  “But he was here,” Raylene said gravely. “Cupcake’s father, I mean.”

  Startled, they all turned to see Myra May’s mother standing in the doorway. She was wearing her usual working outfit—a plain white short-sleeved blouse, dark poplin skirt, and a bibbed gingham apron. Her gray-streaked auburn hair was twisted into a knot at the back of her head.

  Violet half-rose from her chair. “Neil was here?” Her voice was shrill. “Here in Darling?” She sank back down again, helplessly. “How do you know, Raylene?”

  “Not here, exactly,” Raylene amended. “He was in Monroeville. I know because I saw him.” She joined them at the table.

  Myra May got up again, went to the stove, and poured a cup of coffee. “When did this happen?” She put the cup in front of her mother.

  “And how do you know it was him?” Violet’s hands were knotted into fists and her voice was frantic. “You don’t know what he looks like, Raylene! I never even told you his name.”

  Her mind racing, Myra May sat down again. She was remembering that her mother had recently begun to keep a close eye on Cupcake. Something had seemed to be worrying her. But when she asked, Raylene just shook her head and said, “Don’t worry, dear.” Myra May hadn’t questioned her further.

  Myra May was a direct and practical person and not especially intuitive or sensitive to others’ moods—with the exception of Violet’s, of course. She and her mother had been reunited just a couple of years before, and she still hadn’t fully accommodated herself to Raylene’s “gift.”*

  Which was pretty darn creepy, when you stopped to think about it. Who wanted another person peering into your private thoughts, knowing how you felt about things? On the other hand, predicting what a customer was going to order for lunch seemed like a silly parlor trick, something somebody might do to amuse people and keep them coming back. Sometimes, Myra May had to confess, she thought the whole thing was a bunch of foolishness. Her mother was making it up—and people were going along with her, just for the heck of it.

  Myra May narrowed her eyes at her mother. “Answer the question,” she said bluntly. “If you’ve never seen Neil Hudson and didn’t know his name, how did you know who he was?”

  “I just knew, my dear,” Raylene said softly. She looked at Violet. “He was in the audience at Cupcake’s dance recital. He was sitting in the back.”

  “I didn’t see him,” Violet said. “Are you sure—”

  “He saw you, Violet,” Raylene went on. “He knew right away who you were. And after the recital, when he saw you with Cupcake, he guessed immediately that she was his daughter. She’s the right age. And he thought she looked a lot like her mother, with all those strawberry blond curls.”

  “Oh, no,” Violet whispered. “And yes, she does look like Pansy.” She dropped her face into her hands.

  Raylene went on, still softly. “I drove over with my friend Pauline that evening, remember? After you and Cupcake left, I hung back. I heard him talking to the man who was with him. It was a complete surprise to him—discovering his daughter, I mean. Seeing how talented she is. At first he was simply floored. He had all but forgotten about her, and he could hardly take it in. But he’s a quick thinker.” Her voice hardened. “By the time he and his friend left, he was already beginning to come up with a plan.”

  Violet’s head jerked up. “A plan?” Her words were barely audible.

  “What kind of a plan?” Myra May demanded.

  “He’s going to promote her,” Raylene said. “When she did her dance number, he got very excited. He thinks she has an extraordinary potential. I heard him tell his friend that he intends to make her part of his act. He’s going to turn her into another Shirley Temple.”

  “Oh, no!” Violet wailed.

  Verna’s eyebrows shot up. “His act? You mean, he’s still in vaudeville?”

  “Yes, he’s still in vaudeville,” Raylene replied. “But he has bigger ideas. He thinks he can get Dorothy into the movies. With him. As a father-daughter duo. A song-and-dance act.”

  “Oh!” Violet cried, and put her hands over her ears. “Oh, no, no, no!”

  “Yes.” Raylene was resolute. “He was planning to find out where you lived, Violet, so he could come and take Cupcake away. But he has a friend who’s a West Coast lawyer. He decided he’d try the legal route first.”

  “That must be the lawyer Liz talked to this morning,” Verna said.

  “Mama,” Myra May demanded fiercely, “If you knew all this, why in the world didn’t you tell us? Maybe we could have done something!”

  Raylene’s smile was sad. “Would you have believed me, dear? And what could you do? At least, until he showed his hand.”

  In the silence, Myra May knew her mother was right.

  Raylene straightened her shoulders and went on more briskly. “What’s more, thinking is one thing and doing is another. I had no idea whether this man would actually act on his idea. After all, Neil Hudson didn’t come to Monroeville looking for his daughter, or for you, either, Violet. The discovery was a complete surprise to him. When he left, he was still quite stunned, and the idea of a father-daughter duo had just popped into his head. I was hoping he would think about her welfare and decide to leave well enough alone.”

  Liz leaned forward. “Why was he here? In Monroeville, I mean.”

  “It was accidental,” Raylene said. “After the recital, I asked around and learned that he was with a touring vaudeville troupe that had performed at the Lyric Theater over in Birmingham. They were on their way to New Orleans by auto. Someone who knew Nona Jean from her Ziegfeld days told Neil that she had a student who was a phenomenal look-alike for Shirley Temple. Out of curiosity, he decided to drop in on the recital. It wasn’t until he saw Violet and Cupcake together that he realized who she was.”

  “Well, now that he has a lawyer,” Verna said, “we can assume that he’s determined to act on his intention. And if he’s looking at Shirley Temple and thinking that he can duplicate her success, he’s thinking big money. I read the other day that Shirley is under contract to Fox for a hundred and fifty dollars a week, with another twenty-five dollars for her mother.”

  Myra May gave a little gasp. “You’ve got to be joking!” Violet exclaimed.

  “No, she’s not,” Liz put in. “I read that, too.”

  “But the Temples are asking for even more,” Verna went on. “They want a thousand a week for Shirley and two hundred and fifty for her mother, with a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus for every movie the little girl completes. They’re likely to get it, too.”

  There was a stunned silence around the table. Finally, Myra May shook her head. Numbly, she said, “A thousand a week! Why, it would take us four or five months to make a thousand dollars!”

  “And fifteen thousand for a movie?” Violet’s eyes were large and round in her pale face. “That’s incredible, Myra May! Just think what that kind of money would mean for Cupcake’s future. College and new clothes and a car and . . . and everything!” She gulped a shaky breath. “Imagine! Our little girl in the movies! Why, she would be famous!”

  Fo
r an instant, it seemed to Myra May that her heart stopped beating. “Violet, I can’t believe that you would even consider . . .”

  But her voice trailed away and her unfinished sentence hung in the silent air between them. Surely Violet wasn’t imagining their daughter following in Shirley Temple’s footsteps! That would mean that she and Cupcake would go to Hollywood—and they might never come back! Just the thought of it made her feel cold and empty, as if winter had suddenly frozen her in its icy grasp.

  Verna was the first to break the silence. “Well,” she said in a practical tone, “before I let the child go anywhere, I’d have to be very confident that Mr. Hudson had the connections to get himself and Cupcake into the movies. I’ve read that every week, hundreds of mothers line up outside the Hollywood studios, hoping against hope that their children will be discovered. Almost all of them go home disappointed.”

  Liz cleared her throat. “But even if he could,” she said gently, “would you want him to? Is the Hollywood life something you’d want for Cupcake?”

  Myra May knew the answer to that. “No!” she cried, and smacked the table with the flat of her hand, hard. “No, of course not! It’s out of the question. Tell them, Violet. Tell them!”

  But Violet was silent.

  * * *

  *Myra May hadn’t even known that her mother was alive. Their reunion is related in The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I MAY HAVE BAKED A LOAF OR TWO”

  Friday, December 21

  When Earlynne asked, “Have you ever tried baking bread?” Mildred had said no. Then, forcing herself to be more or less honest, she had reluctantly corrected herself. “Well, yes. I may have baked a loaf or two.”

  Because she had. But that had been quite a few years ago, and if you’d asked her, she couldn’t have told you what went wrong. But something had gone very wrong, and the result was a misshapen mound of gummy, indigestible dough encased in a crust so hard you couldn’t crack it with a jackhammer. She guessed that she had somehow failed to follow the recipe, and had buried the disaster in the bottom of the garbage pail before Roger could find it and make fun of her.

  And that was the end of Mildred’s bread-baking career. In her opinion, life was far too short to bother doing anything that required a great deal of regular practice, like perfecting her golf swing or learning to play the piano—or baking bread. In fact, baking bread fell into the category of things it might be nice to do someday, but were definitely not necessary to her everyday happiness. Her experiment had taken place before the Crash, when Roger was making gobs of money selling new cars, and at the time, she’d had a cook who baked the family’s bread.

  Then, just when Mildred had had to let her cook go because the economy had foundered and people had stopped buying cars, Wonder Bread had come along. It might be a little doughy and bland, but every loaf was perfectly uniform and evenly sliced, just right for sandwiches—even if the loaves were several days old by the time they got from the big Continental Baking Company’s bakery in Atlanta to Mrs. Hancock’s grocery shelf and then to the Kilgore breadbox. Wonder Bread was a miracle. Mildred couldn’t think of a single reason to give bread-baking another try.

  But she held the firm belief that a bakery that didn’t sell bread didn’t deserve to be called a bakery. So, faced with Earlynne’s shocking admission of bread-baking ineptitude, she decided that she would simply have to learn. Women had been baking bread for their families since the beginning of time, hadn’t they? If they could do it, so could she. Her previous disaster, she was sure, had been caused by her failure to follow the recipe.

  This time, she would be more careful.

  So Mildred asked Earlynne to write down her recipe. She took it and a bag of flour and some baker’s yeast home to her own kitchen, where she could practice in private, with no one to get in her way. Since Roger was out of town, she didn’t have to worry that he would walk in on her. Undisturbed, she could bake for hours. Until she got so tired, she couldn’t stand up.

  Or until she produced the perfect loaf, whichever came first.

  She didn’t stop to ask herself what would happen after that. Would she have to make a career of baking the daily bread for The Flour Shop shelves? If she had thought about this daunting prospect, she might not have embarked on the experiment. She was thinking only as far ahead as Saturday.

  So she got up very early Friday morning and began. But things didn’t go quite the way she expected. The recipe said that the yeast would get bubbly when she added warm water to “prove” it. But she couldn’t see a single bubble in the yeast for her first batch. She couldn’t decide what was wrong. Was the water too hot? Too cold? Was the yeast dead? She threw it out and started over.

  The yeast for the second batch bubbled up nicely, but the dough stuck to her hands when she was kneading it. So she added more flour—so much that the dough got all stiff and sulky and refused to rise. And she hadn’t been very careful when she was tossing the flour around, so there were drifts of the powdery white stuff all over the kitchen floor, which had to be mopped before she could try again.

  The third batch was a different story. She must have let the dough rise too long, because while it looked beautifully light and puffy before it went into the oven, it collapsed with a despairing sigh the minute it felt the heat. She baked it anyway, but when she sliced it, it had the texture of a mud brick and the taste of a crepe paper sandwich. Maybe she had forgotten the salt.

  And the fourth batch? Well, the less said about that the better, since the neighbor’s cat climbed into the warm bowl while the bread was rising and got sticky dough all over its fur and whiskers. It howled like a banshee while she tried to clean it up.

  By this time, Mildred had spent hours in the kitchen. It was early afternoon. The grand opening was tomorrow, and she had to face the bitter truth. She had followed Earlynne’s recipe precisely (or thought she had), and she had failed. She could not bake even one perfect loaf, let alone produce enough loaves to justify calling The Flour Shop a bakery. They would have to tell their customers to continue to buy stale bread from Mrs. Hancock. All they had to offer were sweet treats.

  And now that she understood something of the work that went into a perfect loaf of bread—a loaf that she and Earlynne would be proud to put on the shelf at their bakery—she couldn’t even think of anybody who could do it! When Wonder Bread came to town, the art of baking bread had pretty much gone the way of all the other old-fashioned crafts that sheltered and clothed and fed people. Like building your own log cabin or weaving your own cotton cloth or making your own sauerkraut. Bread-baking was gone. Gone forever.

  Mildred pursed her lips thoughtfully. No, that wasn’t quite true. There actually was somebody in Darling who practiced many of the old crafts. Somebody who had a loom in her living room, and who actually did make her own sauerkraut. She baked bread, too.

  And when Mildred thought of her, she thought that she might just have solved the problem. For Saturday, anyway.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “DON’T GET YOURSELF KILLED”

  Charlie Dickens had fled Darling when he was a young man, survived the trenches of the Great War, then spent a couple of years as an itinerant stringer for the Associated Press, hoofing it through Europe and the Balkans. After he returned to the States, he began a newspaper career with the Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun, with a special interest in stories about fraud, graft, influence peddling, and corruption. His reporting, some of it done undercover, had put several big-time politicians in jail. Now, he was living a settled life as a Darling newspaper publisher and job printer. But at heart, he was still the investigative reporter he had once been.

  Which is why Charlie had been so eager to agree to what Sheriff Buddy Norris asked him to do, in spite of the obvious danger. He knew a good story when he smelled it. In fact, given the subject—murder and its possible cover-up by an award-winning state official—it might even be a Pulitzer-caliber story. He a
lso knew that Buddy, young as he was, had the instincts of a good lawman. The sheriff wouldn’t have asked him to do this if he weren’t perfect for the job.

  And even though he might be a little out of practice, Charlie liked the idea of testing himself in a tight situation. Sure, he was nervous, nervous as a cat on a hot stove. Who wouldn’t be, heading into the lion’s den? But nerves were a reliable measure of just how much was riding on this investigation. It was good to be nervous. Nerves kept a man alert and watchful. Nerves kept a man alive.

  It had been unexpectedly easy to get permission to visit the Jericho State Prison Farm. All he’d had to do was say that he wanted to interview the warden about his recent award for prison management and the exemplary way the prison was run, and the invitation was forthcoming.

  “Warden Burford will be happy to see you,” said the young man who telephoned to make the appointment. “How about Friday morning at ten?”

  Except for the few local men who were employed out there as guards, the prison farm had always been off limits to Darling folk. They had no special interest in going out there, anyway. Their chief acquaintance with the farm occurred via a practice called contract leasing. In this system, prisoners were farmed out to harvest cotton at local plantations, cut trees for one of the big timber operations, or repair a road washout or rebuild a bridge taken out by a flood. So people got used to seeing small groups of men in black-and-white striped uniforms dragging cotton sacks through a field or shoveling gravel along a road, overseen by a mounted armed guard.

  But other than the occasionally visible evidence of the prisoners-for-rent program, Jericho didn’t call itself to the attention of Darling’s residents. Isolated and almost completely self-supporting, it didn’t rely on supplies or services from the local community. The prisoners grew and processed their own food, cooked and served their own meals, produced their own clothing, operated their own laundry, built their own buildings and roads, and repaired and maintained their own vehicles. Jericho even generated its own electricity with its own power plant, which also powered a small furniture factory. It was a closed shop.