The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Verna coughed. “If Mildred and Earlynne have all the supplies they need and they’re not concerned about competition, what is their problem, Aunt Hetty?”

  Aunt Hetty fitted two red pieces together and added them to the section she was working on. “Their problem,” she said with a sigh, “is that they don’t know how to bake bread. They have tried, both of them, and they’ve failed.”

  “They don’t know how to bake bread?” Bessie’s eyebrows disappeared under her gray bangs. “They don’t know how?” she repeated incredulously.

  “Then why in the world did they go into the bakery business?” Verna asked, open-mouthed.

  “Are you sure about this?” Lizzy asked, frowning. “It can’t be true.”

  “Oh, it’s true, all right,” Aunt Hetty said ruefully. “Mildred showed me her best loaf. It had the texture of a brick. And it tasted like sawdust.”

  “Oh, no. That’s terrible!” Lizzy stared at Aunt Hetty. “What are they going to do?”

  “They can sell cakes,” Verna suggested. “And cookies and tarts and scones. I know for a fact that Earlynne is an excellent baker where those are concerned.”

  “They can do that,” Aunt Hetty agreed. “I gather that Earlynne thinks that’s the best solution. Mildred, on the other hand, has the idea that they don’t have a real bakery unless they can sell bread.”

  “I agree with Mildred,” Bessie said emphatically. “People may not be able to afford cakes and cookies and such, but bread is a basic. Without it, that bakery won’t last more than a few months.”

  “Well, then,” Lizzy repeated, “what are they going to do?”

  “The question is, what are we going to do?” Aunt Hetty replied. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you girls. I told Mildred that I would bake a couple of batches for their opening, if they would agree to let me teach her and Earlynne to bake a decent loaf of bread. They’re coming over on Sunday to learn how.”

  “But a couple of batches won’t likely be enough,” Verna pointed out. “And it takes a while to learn how to bake bread. It’s not something you can learn to do overnight.” She put three more pieces of blue background together and added them to the puzzle.

  “You’re right, Verna,” Aunt Hetty said. “So that’s where all of you come in.” She turned to Bessie. “How many loaves can Roseanne produce by nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  “It depends on how early we get up, I suppose,” Bessie said. “Ten loaves, maybe a dozen?”

  “And you, Liz?” Aunt Hetty asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Liz replied doubtfully. “I can bake four loaves at a time in my oven.” She calculated. “If I baked three batches, I could produce a dozen by noon, probably.”

  “When Walter was alive, I used to bake once a week,” Verna said. “I’m sure I could do it again.”

  “Could you bake a dozen loaves?” Aunty Hetty asked.

  “Oh, I think so,” Verna said, in an off-hand way. “If I have enough flour, that is.”

  “If you don’t, I can give you some,” Bessie said.

  “Well, then,” Aunt Hetty said, with a satisfied smile. “If the four of us can come up with a dozen loaves tomorrow, that’s a total of forty-eight loaves. That should be enough for the grand opening, don’t you think?”

  “And they don’t need all four dozen loaves at nine in the morning,” Bessie pointed out. “As the first batch sells out, they’ll need more, throughout the day.” She pulled her brows together. “But what about next week? Do you really think Mildred and Earlynne can learn to bake a decent loaf in time to start baking for customers on Monday?”

  “Probably not,” Aunt Hetty agreed. “But I can ask the other Dahlias. If we all contribute, I’m sure we can keep them stocked until they’re able to do it themselves.” She straightened resolutely. “After their first lesson, there’ll be more. Lessons, I mean.”

  Bessie had to laugh at that. “Mildred and Earlynne don’t know what they’re in for.”

  At that point, the grandmother clock whirred and began to chime, and Lizzy looked up. “It’s nine o’clock, girls. If this were the contest, our two-hour time limit would be up.”

  “And we’re more than two-thirds done, aren’t we?” Bessie asked, surveying the puzzle. “All the blossoms are finished, and the pot is missing just one piece.”

  “And the background is nearly done,” Verna said. “If we hadn’t been talking so much, I think we might have finished the whole thing inside our two hours. And this is a bigger puzzle than we’ll have for the contest.”

  “But we had important things to talk about,” Lizzy reminded them. She pushed back her chair. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll call it quits for tonight. If I’m going to have a batch of loaves ready for The Flour Shop’s nine o’clock opening, I’ll have to get up very early.” She smiled. “Even before my neighbor’s rooster.”

  “Me, too,” Verna said.

  “Same here,” Aunt Hetty agreed. “And you’ll keep us posted, Liz? About Cupcake, I mean.”

  “Oh, absolutely.” Lizzy began to break up the puzzle and put the pieces back in the box. “I’ll call everybody tomorrow and we can work out the schedule.”

  Bessie stood up. “Let me get some bags and you can take Roseanne’s cookies home with you. She’ll be hurt if nobody eats them, you know.”

  With an effort, Aunt Hetty pushed herself out of her chair. “Bless your hearts,” she said, looking around the table. “And thank you very much.”

  “What for?” Verna asked, helping Lizzy put the puzzle back in the box.

  “Why, for being Dahlias, of course.” Aunt Hetty reached for her cane. “Dahlias, and friends.”

  “Amen and praise the Lord,” Bessie said over her shoulder. “And don’t leave without your cookies.”

  * * *

  *You can learn why Bessie has never married in The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “ONE PIECE OF THE PUZZLE HERE, ANOTHER PIECE THERE”

  Charlie’s old green Pontiac didn’t have a heater, which meant that on a very cold night, the driver’s hands and feet were pretty well frozen by the time he got to wherever he was going. This wasn’t much of a problem, usually, given the southern Alabama climate. But tonight it was, since the Cotton Gin Dance Hall—where he was supposed to meet Wilber Casey—was a half hour away, near Monroeville, and the temperature was hovering near freezing. Charlie couldn’t help wishing that he had the money for a new Ford V-8. He’d read that the Fords finally had a car heater that actually kept you warm without grilling the soles of your shoes.

  But there had been another problem. When he got home that afternoon, Fannie had reminded him of their Friday night movie date, which he had entirely forgotten in the excitement of the prison farm story. Red Dust, starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, was playing at the Palace, cattycornered across from their apartment. And Fannie (who was crazy about Clark Gable) was eager to see it.

  Charlie was too, as a matter of fact, because while he didn’t care much for Clark Gable, he’d heard that Harlow took a bath in the movie—not a scene he was likely to see again. The prudish new Hays Code, promoted by the National Legion of Decency, banned such “vile and unwholesome” scenes from Hollywood movies and turned every movie (in Charlie’s view) into moralistic pabulum. Even the cartoon character Betty Boop had been censored, transformed from a sexy, flirtatious, short-skirted flapper into a demure career girl in a modest, unrevealing dress. Charlie was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have another chance to see Harlow in a bathtub.

  So when Fannie reminded him of their date, Charlie flinched. “Aw, gee,” he said. “I’m meeting a kid tonight at the Cotton Gin, over at Monroeville. At nine.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Charlie.” Fannie pouted. “Do you have to?”

  “Afraid so, honey,” Charlie replied ruefully. “The boy’s name is Wilber Casey—Hamp Casey’s nephew. I’m writing a story on the prison farm for the Dispatch, and he works in the warden�
��s office. I’m hoping he’s going to tell me some things I want to hear.”

  This was true. Charlie hadn’t learned anything he didn’t already know from his interview with Warden Burford, so as an undercover assignment for the sheriff (who was coming for breakfast the next morning) the trip to Jericho was pretty much a bust. But Wilber had been a surprise, and a good one. Charlie was convinced that the boy knew something about Bragg’s murder—if he could get him to talk. It was a big if.

  “Well, then, how about if we take in the early show?” Fannie suggested.

  “We can do that.” Charlie glanced down at his watch. “It’s just five-thirty. How about if we walk over to the Diner for supper? Don usually starts running the newsreel at six-thirty. We ought to be out by eight.”

  But the movie projector at the Palace was old and balky, and Don Greer (the theater’s owner) had trouble getting it running. Then the film broke halfway through the third reel and again in the sixth, which cost Charlie an extra box of popcorn. But the bathtub scene (Jean Harlow taking a bath in a barrel), was worth the wait, Charlie thought. Other men thought so too, for there were plenty of whistles and a few admiring ooh-lalas. The women mostly looked shocked, although Leona Ruth Adcock gave an offended harrumph and made a big point of walking out. She could be heard in the projection room, threatening to report Mr. Greer to the National Legion of Decency.

  It was going on nine by the time Charlie and Fannie left the theater, and Charlie saw that he was going to be late for his meeting with Wilber Casey. “Sorry, honey,” he said, and gave her a quick kiss. “I hope I’ll be home by midnight. Don’t forget—the sheriff is coming for breakfast. I told him you’d make griddle cakes.”

  Fannie rolled her eyes. “You’re meeting some shady character at a dance hall tonight and the sheriff is having breakfast with us tomorrow morning? Something is going on, Charlie. What is it?”

  Charlie saw the opening he’d been waiting for. “I’ll tell you about it when you tell me what’s going on at Warm Springs,” he said.

  Fannie sucked in her breath. “At Warm . . . Springs?” she said faintly.

  “Who is J. C. Carpenter?”

  Fannie’s eyes were large. “How did you find out?”

  “I’m late,” Charlie said. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.” He gave her a quick kiss and dashed for his car, which was parked behind the apartment.

  He was twenty minutes late to the Cotton Gin, which he was sure that the National Legion of Decency would censor if it had a chance. During Prohibition, the roadhouse had earned a racy reputation as a place where you could bring your own bootleg booze. Now, there was a fully stocked bar (although Charlie had heard that Bodeen Pyle was the chief supplier of corn whiskey), and customers were discouraged from bringing their own. They did anyway, but they drank it in the parking lot.

  The large, ramshackle old barn had once housed a real gin, where plantation owners and sharecroppers brought their cotton to have the seeds removed before it was baled and sent off to market. Invented by Eli Whitney some 140 years before, the cotton gin was responsible for the explosion in production—and the explosive increase in the number of slaves—that had transformed cotton into an enormously profitable cash crop. By the middle 1800s, Alabama led the nation in “King Cotton” and had evolved into a kingdom run by a class of landed gentry with immense fortunes built on the backs of the slaves. In Charlie’s opinion (he fancied himself something of a historian), cotton was the fuel that had fired the Civil War.

  But Lincoln had freed the slaves, the plantation economy failed, and it was no longer easy to make a killing in cotton. The boll weevil had migrated north from Mexico before the Great War, devastating the South’s cotton fields. In the 1920s, other countries got into the cotton business, and America lost its monopoly on the international market. Now, under the New Deal, the government paid farmers to plow under a third of their cotton crops and keep the fields fallow. There was only one working gin left in Monroeville and another one in Darling. And from the number of cars and trucks parked around the Cotton Gin, Charlie could reasonably suppose that there was a lot more money to be made in the roadhouse business—especially post-Prohibition—than in growing cotton.

  It was crisp and cold outside, but inside the rickety old building, the air was hot and steamy, heavy with the odors of cheap booze, sweaty bodies, and cigarette smoke. Charlie also caught a distinctive whiff of marijuana smoke: illegal as sin and just as ubiquitous, in spite of the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the state of Alabama to shut it down. Tables were crowded around a wooden dance floor, where pairs of Lindy Hoppers—more energetic than graceful, and most of them half-drunk—were flinging each other around. In one corner, a jukebox was blaring Bix Beiderbecke’s recording of the “Davenport Blues,” its volume turned up full blast to compensate for the dancers’ pounding feet, loud voices, and raucous laughter. The place was badly lit, what there was of the light pooling in the middle of the large room, leaving the corners shadowed.

  It took a moment for Charlie’s vision to adjust to the darkness. When it did, he looked over the heads of the crowd to see a long, mirrored bar across the back of the room. He pushed his way through the sea of moving bodies, bought a mug of frosty root beer (he’d stopped drinking to please Fannie), and began looking for Wilber. He finally saw him sitting by himself in a dark corner, his back to the wall, nursing a can of Jax. Charlie almost didn’t recognize him, for the boy had traded his prison employee uniform for a white shirt with an open collar and the sleeves rolled up. His ginger hair was rumpled, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses.

  “Busy night,” Charlie said, pulling out a chair. “Noisy, too.”

  “Hello, Mr. Dickens.” Wilber looked relieved to see him. “I thought maybe you’d decided not to come.”

  “Now, why would I do that?” Charlie asked. “I promised my wife I’d take her to a movie tonight. Figured we’d be out in plenty of time, but that didn’t happen. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Wilber grinned. “I like to watch people, and this is a good place to do it. Kinda wish my girl was here, though. I’d rather look at her.” His grin faded. “I had to run an errand while you were talking to Warden Burford so I missed you when you left this morning. How did your interview go?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Burford gave me a bunch of bull—but that’s par for the course. I’ll use what’s usable and dig some more.” He sipped his beer. “That’s the name of the game when you’re working on a story, you know. You get one piece of the puzzle here, another piece there. You just keep asking questions until you get the whole picture.”

  Wilber leaned forward, his brown eyes intent. “Mr. Dickens, were you serious when you said that a guy could break into the newspaper business on the strength of a good story?”

  “I was.” Charlie regarded the boy, then pulled out the carrot again. “Somehow, I have the feeling that you might have a story like that, Wilber. Want to tell me about it?”

  Wilber looked down at his beer. “I might,” he said guardedly. “But after we talked this morning, I started wondering. Say I know about something that’s going on at the prison farm—something that nobody outside the farm knows. Something that’s against the law.”

  “Then you tell me about it on background,” Charlie began, “and your name won’t—”

  “No.” Wilber held up a hand, stopping him. “Say I write the story, under my name. Say you print it in the Dispatch. Then say I get fired at Jericho. What happens next? To me, I mean.”

  Charlie was taken aback. Wilber hadn’t snatched the carrot. He was weighing and measuring it and proposing substitutions.

  “Well, there are a lotta variables here,” he said slowly, trying to come up with an honest answer. “It depends on the size of the story, the nature of it, the people involved, your skill as a reporter and a writer. It’s a crap shoot. The story could die in the Dispatch, or it could get picked up by one or more of the wire services. At this point, nobody can say for sure. Bu
t beyond all that, it depends on what you want to do with your life, how much you’re committed to becoming a newspaperman.”

  “Oh, I’m committed, all right,” Wilber said fiercely. “I’m not staying in that prison for the rest of my life.”

  “Well, there are other things to consider.” Charlie turned his mug in his fingers, making snail trails in the condensate on the glass. “That girl of yours, for instance. And didn’t you say that your mother depends on you? It sounds like you’ve got some personal ties holding you in Darling.”

  “Yes, to both,” the boy said. “I want to marry Evelyn, and I need to make sure my mom is taken care of.” He paused uncertainly. “But . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “That ‘but’ tells me a lot right there,” Charlie said. “What happens if your story gets picked up and you get a job offer from the AP over in Atlanta? Or up in Chicago. I’ve seen it happen.” Now he was being truly honest. “Are you free to go where the work takes you?”

  “I could, I guess.” Wilber folded his arms on the table. “But the truth is, I’m a small-town fella. Big cities leave me cold.” He gave Charlie a hopeful look. “I was sorta thinking that maybe I could—well, you know. Work with you. At the Dispatch. You could teach me the business—reporting, how to run a newspaper, the whole works.”

  “Ah.” And there it was. Only now Charlie wasn’t sure who was dangling the carrot.

  “If you like my writing, I mean,” Wilber added earnestly. “If you think I’m good enough.” He reached down and took a manila folder out of a leather bag beside his chair. “I brought you some pieces. It’s mostly stuff I wrote for our high school paper, but some of it’s more recent.” He put the folder on the table between them, adding quietly, “It’s okay if you tell me it stinks, Mr. Dickens. I know I’ve got a lot to learn, but I’m a quick study. I want you to teach me.”