The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Please do,” she said, and turned away. A few moments later, he heard the front door close.

  He looked around, feeling large and bumbling and intrusive, like a bully on the school playground. Rona Jean’s bedroom was messy. The bed was unmade, and clothes were strewn on the floor and the only chair in the room. He tried not to look at the filmy underwear, and the stockings reminded him of how she’d been strangled. There were dresses and blouses and skirts hanging haphazardly in the closet and three or four pairs of shoes on the floor. The closet shelf was crowded with various hats (Rona Jean seemed to be a collector), and a couple of hats hung on hooks on the wall. He recognized one of them, an olive green felt helmet-like affair with a peacock feather trim—the hat she had worn when they went to the Methodist pie social. He remembered it because the preacher’s wife had come up and admired it loudly and asked Buddy if he didn’t like it, too, and he’d had to say that he did, when he didn’t.

  He wandered over to the dressing table, with bottles and tubes and little jars of makeup scattered on its top and dance cards and tickets and mementoes stuck into the mirror frame. He noticed a couple of photographs, one of Rona Jean and a man he didn’t recognize, the other of Rona Jean and Violet. The photograph with the man had the name Lamar written on the back, and a date in the previous month. He took both and put them into his notebook.

  A few moments later, he found Rona Jean’s red leather diary in the bottom bureau drawer under a blue cardboard box of Kotex. He felt himself blushing as he picked up the box. One end was open and something fell onto the floor, a long and narrow white rectangular pad covered with gauzy stuff with long flaps on both ends. He picked it up quickly and stuffed it back in the box, then noticed a narrow pink elastic belt lying on the floor, probably also fallen out of the box. He picked it up, fingering it curiously and noticing two little cloth tabs with tiny brass safety pins. He had seen ads for Kotex, of course, but he’d had no clear idea what they looked like, or that a girl pinned them on. The rig must be pretty damned uncomfortable, he thought. Then, feeling suddenly that he had no right to be looking at something so intimately female, he dropped the belt back into the box and put the box in the drawer and pushed it shut.

  After the Kotex and belt, the small red leather diary did not seem all that personal, and he sat down on the bed and began to leaf through it. The cover bore a gilt-embossed 1934, and there was a separate lined page for each day, with the day’s date and the day of the week printed at the top. The pages carried the scent of Rona Jean’s perfume, and she wrote in purple ink, in a loopy feminine script with a flourish of capitals and small circles for the dots over the letters i and j—the same ink and the same script in the letter she had sent him.

  Unfortunately, Rona Jean had not been a dedicated diarist, and only about half of the pages were filled, mostly with rambling complaints about her work at the Telephone Exchange and her irritation with her roommate, who was (as Rona Jean put it) “not a very fun person to live with and as bad to nag as my mom about keeping things picked up.” He would study it in detail later, but he thought he should give it a quick once-over, in case there was something immediately useful. And besides, he was curious, especially about (admit it, Norris) what she had written about him.

  He went back to April, when he had first taken her out, and found notations of their dates on three consecutive weekends. The first was headed, Buddy Norris, church pie supper. On that day, she wrote that she had worn her green dress and green felt hat—he’d forgotten about the dress. Likes to have me laugh at his jokes, kissed me good night (not a very good kisser). Buddy squirmed, feeling his face redden. What the hell was wrong with the way he kissed? Other girls had never objected, and she had certainly seemed to be enjoying it at the time.

  The following weekend, it was, Buddy, CCC dance, not a very good dancer (which was undeniably true: he didn’t know his right foot from his left) but got to dance with lots of guys. He hadn’t minded her dancing with lots of guys. In fact, he had thought it was swell that she was having so much fun. Afterward, they’d sat on the back porch where he’d kissed her and a little more, but she didn’t write anything about that, whether she thought it was good or bad or just plain indifferent.

  The weekend after the dance, the last weekend in April, was when things changed. Buddy for supper, she had written, and under that, contemptuously, Babe in the woods, with a frowning face. Well, she had him pegged there, he reckoned, as far as sex was concerned. He wasn’t a totally new hand at the game—there was Claudia back in high school and Irma Joy a couple of years ago and a couple of brief encounters that he didn’t remember with a great deal of pride or even pleasure. But it was obvious that Rona Jean knew a heckuva lot more about sex than he did. And after his talk with Mr. Moseley this morning, he was relieved that things had turned out the way they had.

  That was it for his appearances in her diary. During the first week of June, she wrote that as soon as she got the money for a ticket, she was going to hop on the railroad train and ride it to Nashville or Chicago or New York, or maybe even to San Francisco. But a couple of pages later, she wrote that leaving Darling meant leaving Violet behind, and Violet was her “one true friend.” She went on:

  I haven’t told Bettina anything about it, because she would only frown and make ugly faces at me. And anyway she won’t do a thing but lecture. Violet is the only one I can count on in this whole entire town to help me out of this mess. She says if I go through with it, she’ll give me the money for all the bills, before and after, and I can leave it there.

  Which means I can save my money for a ticket. But Myra May is right. It’s going to take more than just a train ticket. I want to have enough to keep me going until I can find work. Which might take a while, bad as things are these days. So I need to hold out for more.

  Puzzled, Buddy took out his notebook and copied both paragraphs, noting the day they were written and underlining help me out of this mess and give me the money for all the bills, before and after, and I can leave it there. He would have to ask Violet to tell him what kind of mess it was and what kind of before-and-after bills Rona Jean was talking about. Or maybe he should ask Myra May. Or both. He considered. Yeah, maybe it would be good to get them together and ask them both at the same time—surprise them with the question, so they couldn’t put their heads together and agree on an explanation. He wanted the truth.

  He went back to the beginning of the year and noted all the names of friends that he found on the pages, both men and women, along with the dates and places they’d gone, if that was included. There were other notations and abbreviations, too. On the small calendar for December 1933, and in January and February, she had made Xs on five or six of the pages, all during the first week of the month—maybe Bettina would know what that meant, or Violet. And on a couple of the pages on which she had written a name or mentioned going out with someone, she had also drawn a little Valentine heart with an arrow through it in a lower corner of the page. There were no hearts on his pages, though. Another mystery. He would definitely have to ask.

  When he was finished, he looked down at his list, seeing the names of two men he knew (not including his own): Beau Pyle and Lamar Lassen, whose photograph had been displayed on Rona Jean’s mirror. There were names of two other men he didn’t know: Jack Baker and Ray (no last name). There were two others—not clear whether these were men or women—with just initials: B.P., who was mentioned twice, recently; and DR mentioned once, with a phone number over in Monroeville. For Friday night, last night, the night she’d been killed, there was no notation. The last name in the diary was Violet’s. They’d gone to the movies on the Sunday afternoon before Rona Jean was killed.

  Buddy put his notebook in his pocket, then began looking through the drawers in the vanity table for stationery and envelopes, hoping to find an address book and maybe even a few letters. He found a flat gold box of the same unlined pink writing paper Rona Jean had used to
write the letter to him. But there was no address book, and if she was saving letters other people had written to her, they weren’t in the box. But he found something else of even greater interest: a stack of twenty-dollar bills—$140, when Buddy counted them out—with a rubber band around it. He looked down at the money, trying to decide what to do with it. Finally, he put it in his wallet, then wrote out a signed and dated receipt for $140 on one of his notebook pages and stuck it in Rona Jean’s dressing table mirror.

  He thought for a moment, remembering what Bettina had said about Rona Jean always borrowing from her. But here was $140 in twenties—a lot of money. How had she gotten it? Who gave it to her? Why? And was there more money stashed around the room?

  There wasn’t, at least not that he could find. A few moments later, taking the diary with him, he put on his hat, locked the front door, and left.

  * * *

  Even though Buddy left the windows rolled down as much as he could, the upholstery in the patrol car still smelled of Sheriff Burns’ cigars, the cheap ones Roy bought at Pete’s Pool Parlor. Buddy missed the cranky old man who had become his friend as well as his boss, and it saddened him to think he’d gotten the job of sheriff over Roy’s dead body, so to speak. Well, that was the way life was, he reckoned. You might could get what you wanted, but it came with strings, some of which you couldn’t see until they started pulling on you. Roy hadn’t wanted to die down in that creek canyon, Buddy knew that much. But if Roy had had a choice in the matter, Buddy was about 99 percent sure he would have pinned the star on him.

  He started the car, drove up to the corner, and made a right, then a left on Rosemont, heading toward the square. Today was Saturday, and as he drove past the Cypress County courthouse, the streets were already crowded. The courthouse was an imposing two-story red brick building with a bell tower topped by a white-painted dome. The tower had a clock that struck the quarter hours so regularly you could set your watch by it. Built in 1905 after the big tornado tore down the earlier structure, the courthouse was surrounded on all four sides by an apron of green grass bordered with pretty yellow and orange flowers planted by the Darling Dahlias. The club maintained several gardens around town, on the theory that when times were hard, a few pretty flowers went a long way toward uplifting people’s low spirits. And when times were better, the same pretty flowers made people feel like celebrating the fact that they lived in a town where other people cared enough to keep things looking spiffy.

  The square looked even spiffier than usual, Buddy thought. In honor of the Fourth of July celebration next week, the members of the American Legion Post had already planted a festive row of little American flags around the courthouse. They had also hung rug-size American and Confederate flags from the courthouse windows, draped bunting from the streetlights around the square, and slung a big banner across Robert E. Lee Street, declaring, DARLING: THE BEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE SOUTH.

  The Fourth was always a crackerjack day, featuring a swell parade, with the Academy marching band, veterans of the War Between the States (sadly, they were fewer in number every year), and a float featuring Miss Darling and Little Miss Darling. And best of all, the CCC camp boys, nearly two hundred of them, would be there to march, wearing their uniforms and carrying shovels over their shoulders instead of guns—“Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” people were calling it. President Roosevelt was a tree man himself, it was said, having reforested his family’s depleted land on the Hudson River by planting hundreds of thousands of trees.

  Darling itself had a great many trees, which helped to make it beautiful. While Buddy was no expert on the matter, he subscribed to the opinion that when a town’s surroundings were clean and pleasant, people were more contented and less likely to commit crimes. Of course, there would always be a few malcontents complaining about this and that and the other thing, and occasional terrible crimes, like what had happened to Rona Jean. But for the most part, people thought their little town was a fine place to live, especially now that the camp was established and there were more jobs and more money to spend. And soon there would be more trees, thanks to the CCC boys.

  Trees had been an important part of Darling’s life from the very beginning. The town was nestled in the gently rolling hills a few miles east of the Alabama River and seventy miles north of Mobile. Buddy had often heard Bessie Bloodworth, the town’s historian, tell the story of its founding. According to her, it had been established in the early 1800s by Joseph P. Darling, a Virginian who was following a faint wagon trail through the area. With him were his wife, five children, two slaves, a team of oxen, a pair of milk cows, and a horse. Joseph P. was on his way to create a cotton plantation on the Mississippi River, but his wife was sick and tired of bouncing along in that wagon day in and day out, baking biscuits over a campfire and washing diapers in a lard bucket. At this point in her story, Bessie would repeat what she thought Mrs. Darling might have said.

  “You can do as you like, Mr. Darling, but I am not ridin’ another mile in that blessed wagon. If you’re lookin’ for your meals and your washin’ to be done reg’lar, right here is where you’ll find ’em.”

  Mr. Darling (who was fond of his grub and liked a clean shirt every now and then) surveyed the dense stands of timber and the fertile soils, the nearby river and the fast-flowing creek beside which they were camped, and—all things considered, but especially the grub—decided that the little valley might be a good place to live, after all. He cut down enough pine trees to build a barn and two log cabins, a big one for his family and a small one for his slaves. Then (because Mr. Darling’s interests took an entrepreneurial turn) he cut down more trees and built the Darling General Store (now Mann’s Mercantile). Then he ordered some store stock, put on an apron, and waited for the customers to come.

  And come they did. In those early days, the hills were covered with a virgin forest of loblolly and longleaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the river bottom, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore and pecan anywhere their roots could find good water. Hearing that the timber was so fine, Mr. Darling’s cousin came from Virginia to build a sawmill, so that all those pine trees could be turned into boards for houses and barns. And houses and barns were needed, because the settlers who had also heard of the plentiful timber and fertile soil were also on their way.

  Since the settlers were mostly farmers, they cleared the land for crops by cutting even more trees. In fact, over the next few decades, lumber became a very profitable business, in part because the Alabama River could be used to float the logs in huge rafts down to the port city of Mobile, on Mobile Bay. Before long, the lumber industry in Mobile was loading millions of feet of sawn boards on ships bound for Cuba, Europe, South America, and even the California gold fields. About the same time, the demand for paper began to rise, and paper mills sprouted like mushrooms throughout Alabama’s forests, turning the low-grade timber to paper and shipping it via the newly built railroads to major cities all over the country.

  But since it never occurred to anybody that they ought to plant more trees to replace the trees that had been cut down, it wasn’t long before pretty much all of the original forest had totally disappeared. The hillsides were starkly denuded, the soil was eroding, and even people who didn’t know a loblolly from a longleaf had begun to understand that something had to be done to save the land.

  Which was, Buddy thought as he slowed to let a little girl holding on to a big red balloon skip across the street in front of him, maybe the biggest reason to be grateful to the CCC. Speaking at a recent town meeting, the commandant had announced that over the next two years, the camp was scheduled to receive half a million pine seedlings, fifty thousand black locusts, two thousand five hundred catalpa, and (to help control soil erosion) a quarter of a million kudzu crowns. The pines would mostly be fast-growing loblollies that could put on a couple of feet of height a year. This meant that within a decade, the trees would be twenty feet tall and ready for harvest—a mo
re selective harvest this time, which would leave enough trees standing to prevent erosion and ensure the continuity of the forest. The CCC boys would begin planting in January (tree-planting time), on several thousand cut-over acres out by Briar’s Swamp. When they were finished with that section, they would go on to others. This had been welcome news, and the commandant (Buddy had forgotten his name) had been given a big round of applause.

  Buddy shifted into second gear and made a left turn onto Franklin. He drove west for half a block and turned right into the alley behind Snow’s Farm Supply. The sheriff’s office was located in what had been a small frame house on the back of the lot, and the jail was upstairs over the Farm Supply. This handy arrangement made it easy to keep an eye on the jail, which was usually occupied only on Saturday night and Sunday by one or two of the local fellows who had indulged a little too freely in the local moonshine. Following the practice of his predecessor, Buddy booked them on drunk and disorderly, let them sleep it off overnight, then released them on Sunday in time to get cleaned up and shaved and make it to morning worship at the church of their choice—in lieu of a fine. Sheriff Burns (himself a fervent Methodist) had liked to brag that some of his D and Ds had gotten saved and sworn off the bottle, at least for a while.

  Wayne Springer’s old 1927 Chevy was parked on the gravel strip in front of the office, and the COME IN sign hung face out on the front door, which meant that the office was open. Buddy went in and slung his hat onto the wall peg.

  “Yo, Springer,” he called. The place smelled like fresh coffee.

  “Back here,” Wayne replied.

  Buddy found his deputy hunched with a magnifying glass over fingerprint cards, at the scarred pine-topped table in what once had been the back bedroom, now a workroom and conference room. A Royal typewriter sat on the table (the deputy was a pretty good typist), and on a shelf beside the table, a radio was playing “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.” Wayne reached over and turned down the volume. The coffee percolator was burping on the hot plate beside it, and Buddy poured himself a mug. He liked it black and strong, which was a good thing, because when Wayne brewed it, that’s how it was. Strong enough to lift a locomotive.