The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Home was a tiny yellow-painted frame bungalow on Jefferson Davis Street, a block off Franklin and two blocks from Mr. Moseley’s office, close enough to walk back and forth to work. The house, which Lizzy had owned for three years or so, was just big enough for one person—a doll’s house, really. But as if to make up for its small size, it was surrounded with a large and very pretty yard. In the front, there were azaleas, hibiscus, and a dogwood tree that was lovely in the spring. In the back, there was a grassy lawn, and a perennial border where eleven o’clock ladies sprang up among the lilies and irises in April and May; pink roses covered the trellis in June; and sunflowers bloomed along the fence in July and August. A small kitchen garden, fenced with a low white picket fence against hungry bunnies, provided fresh vegetables and herbs all summer long. The yard was perfect for a gardener, and gardening was Lizzy’s favorite hobby—next to writing, of course.

  In fact, as far as Lizzy was concerned, this absolutely perfect house and its perfect garden had only one drawback. It was right across the street from her mother’s house, which meant that it was close enough for Mrs. Lacy—a quarrelsome, bossy woman who wanted nothing more than to manage her only daughter’s life—to run over once or twice a day to “visit.”

  Lizzy, a dutiful daughter, felt a half-guilty, half-loving obligation to her mother, which was why she continued to live within shouting distance. After all, her mother was a widow and otherwise alone in the world. She was an only child and a daughter, and it was well understood that Darling daughters (only daughters, in particular) had a special responsibility to their mothers. When Lizzy was a girl, her mother had been fond of remarking that so-and-so had never married, in order to stay at home and help her mother. (She had a large catalog of so-and-sos, updated every few months.) And that Great-aunt Polly had refused all beaus and took care of her invalid mother to her dying day. To Great-aunt Polly’s dying day, that is: she took such good care of her mother that the irascible old woman outlived her acquiescent daughter by six years.

  But while Lizzy felt she was duty-bound to look after her mother, she had no intention of following Great-aunt Polly’s example to the grave. So, feeling strong and almost rebellious, she had bought her own house and steadfastly refused to give her mother a key. (After all, a grown person needed some privacy!) And without a key, Mrs. Lacy couldn’t drop in just any old time, which she would have done, since the plain truth was that she was not only bossy and argumentative, but also a snoop. Lacking a key, she had to wait by the parlor window until she saw her daughter come home—and then she came over.

  Just now, Lizzy was praying that her mother would stay away long enough for her to read her letter and have her cry in private. And that privacy—her solitude—was Lizzy’s deepest joy. If she wanted company, she had plenty of books, including the one she was writing. And if she wanted to hear a human voice, why, she could listen to her own. She could talk to her orange tabby cat, Daffodil, who never ever talked back.

  Lizzy went up the steps to the front porch, where Daffy was waiting on the porch swing, keeping cool in the breeze that filtered through the honeysuckle at the end of the porch. He jumped down and wound himself around her ankles, purring a loud welcome. She unlocked the front door and stepped into the small entry hall. On the left, a flight of polished wooden stairs led up to two small bedrooms. On the right, a wide doorway opened into a parlor that was just large enough for a fireplace and built-in bookcases, a Mission-style leather sofa, a dark brown corduroy-covered chair, and a Tiffany-style lamp with a stained glass shade that had cost Lizzy the enormous sum of seven dollars and fifty cents. It was much too much to pay for a lamp, but she loved its soft amber-colored light, which gleamed richly against the refinished pine floors.

  She hung her straw hat on the wall peg in the hallway, then went past the parlor and into the compact kitchen. She had left the windows open, and the room was cooler than the out of doors. Nervously, thinking about the letter (so much seemed to hang on it), she filled a kettle with water and set it on the gas stove and got out her Brown Betty teapot and the ceramic canister of tea she had bought in that cute little tea shop in Montgomery and measured the fragrant tea into the strainer in the teapot. Her fingers trembling, she took Nadine’s envelope out of her purse and slit it carefully, then laid it on the oilcloth-covered table in the small dining nook. The nook looked out on the garden and was one of her favorite places in the house—one of her comfort places, especially when the window was open to the honeysuckle-scented breeze, as it was now.

  When the tea was ready, she poured herself a cup, added a spoonful of honey, and sat down. Steeling herself to read the letter—bad news or good?—she took it out of the envelope and said a tiny silent prayer for the courage to face whatever came. She had just begun to unfold it when she heard a sharp rapping at the back door. She looked up to see her mother peering through the glass.

  “Damn and blast,” she muttered, and quickly slid the folded letter under the oilcloth. With a long sigh of resignation, she got up and opened the door.

  “Oh, hello, Mama,” she said brightly. “I was just sitting down to a cup of tea. Would you like to join me?” She was going to do it anyway, Lizzy thought. She might as well be invited.

  “I waited for you to telephone me when you got home,” Mrs. Lacy said accusingly. “But you didn’t.” She puffed out her breath. “Lord sakes, it is hot. Comin’ across the street in that sunshine is like walking across a bed of coals.”

  “Then maybe you’d rather have lemonade,” Lizzy said. “It might cool you off.”

  “I’ll have lemonade,” Mrs. Lacy said, as if she had thought of it herself, and went to the refrigerator to get it, taking the opportunity to look on the shelves to see what Lizzy was eating. Mrs. Lacy was an oversized woman with an oversized voice and ample bosom and hips. She was wearing a wide-brimmed orange straw hat and a red rayon chiffon dress splashed with large orange and yellow flowers that made her appear even bulkier than usual. Her smile was just a little smug. “I have some important news, in case you’re interested.” She put the pitcher on the table.

  “Of course I’m interested,” Lizzy said. Since the kitchen was quite small and Mrs. Lacy was quite large and loud, she took up more than her share of the space, leaving very little room—and not quite enough air—for Lizzy. Now, Lizzy moved her teacup and the teapot to the round kitchen table and took a glass out of the cupboard for her mother. The one time her mother had tried to squeeze into the dining nook, she’d gotten stuck and Lizzy had had to move the table so she could get out.

  Lizzy was often tempted to feel sorry for her mother, but that was difficult, because she had been so foolish. Five years before, she had put up her small annuity and her paid-for house as collateral against a bank loan to buy stocks in the booming stock market, planning (like everybody else in America) to get rich quick and be set for life. When the stock bubble burst and Wall Street crashed, she lost everything. Mr. Johnson, at the bank, carried the note on her house as long as he could (he had done that for a great many Darlingians), but he finally had to foreclose.

  Unfazed, Mrs. Lacy declared that the bank could take the house and she would move in with her daughter, which, as Lizzy saw it, would be a disaster of titanic proportions. Her little dollhouse wasn’t large enough for two normal-sized people. If her mother moved in, there wouldn’t be any room for her—and not one shred of privacy.

  Lizzy had gone into action to avert this calamity. She had been saving for a car, so she went to the bank and put the money down on a loan to buy her mother’s house. Now, Mrs. Lacy worked a couple of days a week at Mr. Dunlap’s Five and Dime and helped Fannie Champaign to make hats. Out of her earnings, she was able to buy groceries and give her daughter a few dollars a month for rent. It wasn’t enough to cover the payment to the bank, and Lizzy still had no car. An ideal solution, of course, would be for her mother to marry, and Lizzy had often addressed the Almighty on that very question.
But the Almighty wasn’t listening—at least, He wasn’t listening yet. And in the meantime, it was worth every dollar it cost to keep her mother on the other side of the street.

  With an air of mystery, Mrs. Lacy sat down at the table, picked up the pitcher of lemonade, and poured a glass for herself. “I’ll save my own personal news for last, because I’ve got something else on my mind. It’s about the murder,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “Rona Jean Hancock’s murder. You’ve heard she was strangled, I suppose. In Myra May Mosswell’s car. With her stocking. Which is what happens to girls who fool around.”

  “Yes, Mama, I know,” Lizzy said with a sigh. “Such a terrible thing.” She picked up a folded napkin and fanned herself with it, wondering briefly if maybe the killer had been driven mad with the heat. She’d read about things like that happening. It might make an interesting story.

  “But that isn’t all,” her mother went on, eyes sparkling, quivering with barely suppressed excitement. She looked, Lizzy thought, as if she was enjoying herself. “Ouida Bennett says that the girl was pregnant.”

  “Oh dear!” Lizzy said, completely taken aback. So there wasn’t just one death—there were two. Rona Jean and her unborn baby. She frowned. “Are you sure that’s true, Mama? Where did Mrs. Bennett hear—”

  “Oh yes, it is definitely true,” Mrs. Lacy said, picking up her glass and drinking deeply. “Ouida heard it at Mann’s Mercantile. Mrs. Mann’s cousin Agnes works over at the Monroeville Hospital, where Doc Roberts did the autopsy on Rona Jean. Agnes heard it from a records clerk over there and phoned Mrs. Mann right away. Ouida happened to be in the store when the call came.” Mrs. Lacy dropped her voice confidingly. “Poor Ouida has been putting on so much weight lately that she had to buy some new elastic to repair the waist of her unmentionables. Anyway, she got an earful as soon as Mrs. Mann hung up.”

  I’ll bet she did, Lizzy thought darkly. And then she delivered that earful to everybody she met on the way home. She shook her head. There was no way on God’s green earth to keep a secret in Darling.

  “And if you ask me—” Mrs. Lacy leaned even closer and lowered her voice almost to a whisper, as if she were afraid that somebody might be listening at the open window. “If you ask me, it’s entirely likely that whoever it was put that bun in Rona Jean’s oven was the one who killed her.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Lizzy acknowledged cautiously. “But—”

  Her mother sat back. “And what’s more, it could very well be the sheriff who got her in the family way—and who could have done the awful deed himself. The very person who is supposed to be investigating this crime!” She threw up her hands. “What this world is coming to, I don’t know. When we can’t trust the law to—”

  “Mama, stop!” Lizzy said firmly. “Facts are one thing, but gossip is something else again. It can wreck a person’s career, and even his whole life. I wish you wouldn’t—”

  “But it’s not gossip!” her mother exclaimed, offended. “It’s the truth, Elizabeth, the bare-bones truth. Leona Ruth Adcock saw Rona Jean and Buddy Norris hugging and kissing with her very own eyes, right there at Rona Jean’s kitchen sink. Of course, he wasn’t sheriff then, but he was a deputy sheriff and—”

  “And Leona Ruth’s eyes aren’t what they used to be,” Lizzy said sharply. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing wrong with her tongue, except that it flaps on both ends.”

  Her mother gave her a reproachful look. “I don’t know why you’d want to defend Buddy Norris, Elizabeth. He’s a man, just like all the rest of them.” She took another drink of lemonade. “He wouldn’t even be sheriff today if it weren’t for poor Roy Burns gettin’ bit by that rattlesnake and dyin’ such an untimely death. And bein’ sheriff doesn’t make a person holy. Sheriffs can chase around just like anybody else. In fact, Roy Burns himself used to—”

  “I didn’t say it made him holy, Mama,” Lizzy protested.

  But in a way, her mother was right. Having worked for Mr. Moseley for quite a few years, Lizzy had a respectful attitude toward the law and anybody who enforced it. It seemed to her that the law put up a barrier between the civilized and the savage—a necessary barrier that separated the good from the bad. Mr. Moseley was always telling her that it wasn’t as simple as that, that good people often did bad—that is, unlawful or immoral—things, and vice versa. And she knew from her own experience that it didn’t take much black mixed in with the white to make a fuzzy-looking gray.

  But as far as she was concerned, anybody who enforced the law stood for justice and order, and justice not just for some but for everybody, which right now, meant justice for Rona Jean Hancock, who had been murdered. And Buddy Norris had been elected to stand up for Rona Jean, find out who had killed her, and assemble the evidence that would allow Mr. Moseley (who was county attorney this year) to get a conviction. Buddy was only a man, yes, and young and inexperienced at that. But she knew him well enough to know that it was ridiculous to think that he’d killed Rona Jean. He had an important job to do, and out of a sense of fairness, Lizzy didn’t think people should be saying things that made his job even harder.

  Her mother turned her glass in her fingers. “Well, of course, the sheriff wasn’t the only one who was fooling around with Rona Jean. Adele Hart says she was sitting out on her front porch one night this week and saw a man waiting around the back of the diner for Rona Jean to go off her shift at eleven.”

  Lizzy thought about that. Adele Hart and her husband, Artis, owned Hart’s Peerless Laundry, at the corner of Franklin and Robert E. Lee, across from Musgrove’s Hardware. The Harts lived in the house next door to the laundry, which was convenient because they both had to get up well before dawn to get their help started on the day’s washing, as well as manage the three grandchildren who had recently come to live with them. Lizzy and Adele worked together on the Darling Christmas pageant every year, and Lizzy sometimes stopped in for a cup of tea when Adele wasn’t too busy. She knew that the Harts could see the vegetable garden behind the diner—and the garage where Rona Jean’s body was found.

  “Did Adele say who it was?” Lizzy asked.

  Mrs. Lacy shook her head. “Just that she thought he was from the camp.”

  From the camp, Lizzy thought. And the man she had seen with Rona Jean at the movies was a CCC man, maybe even an officer. Was he the same person?

  Her mother was getting her teeth into the subject of the camp. “Those men out there—I swear, they’re makin’ trouble all over. Have you heard about Lucy Murphy?”

  Lucy was a Dahlia who lived on a small farm on the Jericho Road and worked at the camp. Her husband, Ralph, had a railroad job. He was gone all week and didn’t usually make it home until late Saturday.

  “Lucy?” Lizzy felt a flare of concern. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” Lizzy had always thought of Darling as a safe little town, but after what happened to Rona Jean, she was thinking that women who spent a lot of time alone—women like herself and Lucy—ought to be extra watchful. It was an unsettling thought.

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘all right.’” Her mother pressed her lips together disapprovingly. “Ouida’s widowed sister, Erma Rae—the one that lives out on the Jericho Road—saw her riding on the back of one of those Army motorcycles.” She lowered her voice. “Just at dark, it was. Last Wednesday night, when Ralph was gone on the railroad. And Erma Rae said she’s heard that motorcycle before, comin’ and goin’ late at night, only she didn’t know who it was until she saw her. Lucy Murphy, I mean.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Lizzy sighed. “There you go again. I wish you wouldn’t—”

  “I am just sayin’ that—no matter how many good things everybody says that camp is doing for Darling—it’s not all one hundred percent positive. Those boys are flirty. I’ve heard ’em whistling at girls on the square, and who knows what else they’re getting up to. Why, the very idea of a Yankee taking a married lady for a motorc
ycle ride after dark. It’s sinful, is what it is.”

  Lizzy wondered whether the greater sin lay in being a Yankee or giving a motorcycle ride to a married lady. “Lucy manages the kitchen at Camp Briarwood,” she said evenly. “Maybe she had to work late and somebody gave her a lift home.”

  “Maybe, and maybe not,” Mrs. Lacy said, pulling her eyebrows together. “You’re too trusting, Elizabeth. Too naïve. If you ask me, it was one of those CCC boys that got Rona Jean Hancock pregnant, although she herself wasn’t any better than she should be. It could have been one of them that killed her, too, especially considering who it was that Adele Hart says she saw out there behind the diner.”

  “I wonder if the sheriff knows about that,” Lizzy said thoughtfully.

  “Not unless he’s been at the laundry in the last hour or so. Adele told me when I took in my damask tablecloth to be washed and ironed.” She made a face. “For things like that tablecloth, I surely miss my Sally-Lou. Catsup and mustard stains never did faze her.”

  Sally-Lou had been Mrs. Lacy’s maid ever since Lizzy was a girl, but when the money was gone and Mrs. Lacy had to go to work, she’d had to let Sally-Lou go. Now, for the first time in her adult life, Mrs. Lacy had to do her own housework, which Lizzy thought might turn out to be a good thing. It gave her something to do in the evenings, at least—something other than walk across the street and pester Lizzy.

  There was a silence. Mrs. Lacy seemed to be waiting for something. At last, she put her cup down. “Well, do you want to hear my news or not?”

  “What?” Lizzy had been thinking that maybe she’d call the sheriff’s office and tell him what she saw at the movie show and also suggest that he drop in and have a talk with Adele Hart. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mama. You did say that you had something important to tell me. Yes, of course I want to hear your news. What is it?”