The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

by Susan Wittig Albert

“Maybe she’s sick,” she said, now genuinely concerned. “Maybe I should ask Reverend Bledsoe’s wife. She’s cousin to Bunny’s mother, isn’t she? Maybe she knows—”

  “Miz Bledsoe’s up in Nashville,” Lester Lima said. “Daughter had a baby last week.” His smile was a taut stretch of thin lips across stained teeth. “Anything I can help you with today, Miz Tidwell?”

  Verna, feeling as if she’d just been told to go back to her pew and shut up, looked over his shoulder to the shelf behind him. “A bar of Camay soap, please,” she said, and handed over a nickel.

  Verna was already thinking what to do. After work, she would walk over to Mrs. Brewster’s boardinghouse on Plum Street, where Bunny lived. The girl had probably come down with a cold and hadn’t thought to let Mr. Lima know that she wasn’t coming in.

  The afternoon moved along briskly, as it usually did. Until last month, Coretta Cole had worked full-time with Verna. But tax revenues were down and Mr. Earle Scroggins, the probate clerk and Verna’s boss, had cut staff hours. Now Coretta only worked mornings, so Verna had the office to herself in the afternoons. She had a strongly managerial bent and enjoyed keeping things organized and straight, so she spent her time checking records, filing documents, and recording a few property tax payments (but not nearly enough to replenish the county coffers). She issued a license to Junior Prinney and Mary Louise Towerton, who were getting married at the First Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon, registered a birth certificate for the newest addition to the Ollie Cox family, and logged in a surveyor’s report on a property just outside of town.

  She also dealt with Beatty Blackstone, who came in for his third visit in a couple of weeks. This time, he asked to examine the plat that included Mimosa, the street behind Camellia, where Mrs. Blackstone’s house—now the Dahlias’ clubhouse—was located. He didn’t just study the pages with a furrowed brow, either, as he had done earlier. He made notes. Detailed notes, to judge from the busy sound of his pencil scratching.

  Verna wondered what Beatty Blackstone thought he was doing, searching through those old property records, but she didn’t ask. Mr. Scroggins was very strict about not asking questions, which she supposed was right, most of the time—although sometimes people got up to monkey business, especially where property titles and deeds and liens were concerned. Mr. Scroggins had been the probate clerk of Cypress County—that is, his friends and relations had reelected him to that important office every six years for the past eighteen. But he usually came in only once or twice a week, to ask if there was anything he was supposed to do, which there usually wasn’t. Mr. Scroggins had instructed Verna to take care of just about everything (even signing his name on official documents), and if people didn’t bother to read the name painted on the glass in the office door, they’d think she was probate clerk. Unless there was a good reason, she usually didn’t bother to enlighten them.

  When the courthouse clock struck five, Verna put everything away, tidied the office, and watered the mother-in-law’s tongue in the green jardinière in the corner. Then she closed the venetian blinds on the tall windows and left.

  There were several places to board in Darling, depending on who you were and how long you planned to stay. Traveling salesmen or people in town for just a day or two stayed at the Old Alabama Hotel and took their meals in the dining room or across the square at the Darling Diner. Single fellows and men who worked on the railroad boarded by the week with Mr. and Mrs. Meeks, in an unpainted frame house two blocks west of the rail yard, and ate breakfast and supper at the Meeks’ table.

  Widows and spinsters of a certain age who couldn’t or didn’t want to live by themselves boarded by the month with Bessie Bloodworth at the Magnolia Manor, next door to the Dahlias’ new clubhouse. The Manor had a vine-covered veranda across the front, where Bessie’s boarders sat out every night after supper with glasses of cold lemonade and their knitting until it got too dark to see. Bessie said she didn’t want people calling it the old-ladies’ home, so she named it Magnolia Manor and got Beulah to paint a pretty sign, which she hung beside the door.

  The young working women in town—the two school teachers, Miss Patricia O’Conner, the new home demonstration agent, and Bunny—boarded with Mrs. Brewster, over on Plum Street. Mrs. Brewster was the soul of respectability and had a reputation for being strict, even by Darling’s standards. Curfew was at nine on weekdays and ten thirty on weekends. At the magic hour, Mrs. Brewster herself went around the house, locking all the doors and checking to make sure that “her girls” were in their rooms, where they ought to be. Breakfast was at six thirty in the morning and supper at six thirty in the evening (Mrs. Brewster didn’t serve noon dinner because all her girls went out to work). Those who missed breakfast or supper went hungry, since they weren’t allowed in the kitchen and weren’t permitted to have food in their rooms. There was a washhouse out back where they could do their laundry and a corner in the basement where they could iron. Or they could pay Cleo (the colored girl who came in on Mondays and Wednesdays) to do their washing and ironing for them. It wasn’t included in their board bill.

  But Mrs. Brewster wasn’t entirely heartless. They could entertain their men friends on the front porch or in the parlor and were free to use the wind-up Victrola, so long as they played their own recordings (softly) and refrained from dancing. They could sit out with their men friends on the front porch until it got dark. Then they could sit in the parlor (on separate chairs, but not side by side on the sofa), so long as the door to Mrs. Brewster’s sitting room was left open. Mrs. Brewster herself always said she stood in loco parentis, which was supposed to mean that she was only doing what the mommas and daddies of “her girls” would want her to do. But her boarders thought she was just plain loco, and most moved out as soon as they could.

  Verna had met Mrs. Brewster at numerous Darling events, but if she had expected to be greeted cordially, she would have been disappointed. Mrs. Brewster herself answered the front door and returned a grim frown when Verna asked to see Bunny.

  “Miss Scott is not here.” Mrs. Brewster, a bosomy lady who always wore long-sleeved black with a little white lace around her throat and wrists, was from Chicago. She had married Mr. Brewster (now deceased) at the end of the Great War and had lived in Alabama ever since. But she had never “assimilated,” to use her word. She liked to say that she might’ve come to live in Dixie, but that didn’t mean she had to think Dixie or talk Dixie. She clipped her words and spoke in short sentences like a proper Yankee. “She has not been here since before breakfast on Sunday.”

  Verna (who had convinced herself that Bunny was sick—or pretending to be) was surprised. “She’s been gone since ... Sunday morning?”

  “That’s what I said,” Mrs. Brewster snapped inhospitably. “Miss Scott has broken a cardinal rule: being absent without explanation or permission. She did not attend Sunday breakfast, nor has she come home since. I run a respectable boardinghouse and I expect my girls to behave themselves. Miss Scott has exhibited previous difficulties observing the rules, and this is the last straw. She is no longer welcome under my roof.” She began to shut the door.

  But Verna put her foot in it. “Excuse me,” she said firmly, “but I am asking about my friend.” Before this minute, Verna hadn’t thought much about whether Bunny was really a friend or just somebody she ate lunch with on the courthouse lawn. But in the face of Mrs. Brewster’s vehement wish to shut the door, she thought that Bunny ought to have at least one friend, and the sooner the better.

  “Bunny didn’t come to work today, and she didn’t let Mr. Lima know she wouldn’t be there,” she said crisply. “Now you say that she hasn’t been home for nearly two days. So where is she?”

  “I have no idea,” Mrs. Brewster replied, “and I do not want to know.” She made another move to close the door.

  “Well, then.” Verna removed her foot. “I suppose I’ll just have to go and get the sheriff.”

  The door was four inches open. “The sheriff?” Mrs.
Brewster sounded surprised.

  So was Verna. The statement had come, she supposed, of reading detective novels and the occasional true crime magazine. But the door stayed open, so she went on.

  “An attractive young woman is missing. I am her friend, and I want to know where she is. If you can’t help, I’ll ask Sheriff Burns. He’ll probably bring a search warrant and—”

  “A search warrant?” The door opened a little wider. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because we might be talking about a case of foul play.” Of course, Verna didn’t think this for a minute, but characters in true crime stories were always wondering about foul play, and it sounded good. Or bad, depending on how you looked at it.

  She thought of something else, and added, “Especially with that escaped convict still on the loose. We can’t be too careful, can we?”

  These last remarks gave Mrs. Brewster pause. Finally, much put-upon, she heaved a sigh of patient exasperation. “Just what is it you want to do, Mrs. Tidwell?”

  “I’d like to see Bunny’s room.” This was another thing Verna hadn’t thought of before she heard herself saying the words, but now that she had, it seemed like the right thing to do. It was what Lord Peter Wimsey had done in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, He had gone to have a look at the dead man’s rooms. What’s more, he had taken a camera. Briefly, Verna regretted not having thought of that.

  “But Miss Scott is not in her room,” Mrs. Brewster protested heatedly. “And if she did not go to work today, it’s because she has left town. She’s been talking about that for weeks, you know. She’s very dissatisfied here.”

  Mrs. Brewster was right about that. Bunny had it in her mind that she would be happier somewhere else—Mobile or Atlanta or even New York. Verna was about to give up and go away, when she thought of one more thing.

  “Did she take her clothes? And her jewelry?”

  “Well ...” Mrs. Brewster hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “That is, I don’t think so.”

  That decided it. Bunny wouldn’t leave town without taking every scrap of clothing and jewelry she owned.

  “I can either see her room or I can bring the sheriff,” Verna said.

  Another sigh, then: “Oh, very well.” Mrs. Brewster stepped back and pointed up the stairs. “Second floor. End of the hall, on the right. The door isn’t locked. I don’t allow any of my girls to lock their doors. They have nothing to hide from one another or from me.”

  The stairs were steep and the second-floor hall was long, narrow, and dark, with a window at the very end that let in a dim light. Verna shivered, thanking her lucky stars that she had her own home with a yard and a garden and didn’t have to live in a boardinghouse. At the end of the hall, she pushed open the last door on the right and stepped into a small dark room that smelled strongly of talcum powder and My Sin. She went to the single window and rolled up the water-stained window blind, which was ripped on one side. There were no curtains. Perhaps the girls were meant to supply their own, Verna thought sadly, like the Victrola recordings.

  The unforgiving light flooded the room. Verna saw a narrow bed made up to look as if someone were sleeping in it, with the coverlet pulled over a pillow. If Mrs. Brewster had opened the door and looked in on Saturday night, she probably thought that Bunny was there, asleep. Verna had to smile at that, because she had played the same trick when she was a young girl living with her parents, although her truancy had never extended to staying out all night, let alone for the weekend.

  Bunny had indeed not taken her clothing with her—or at least, she hadn’t taken much of it. The chair in the near corner was almost hidden under an untidy heap of skirts, blouses, and dresses. Items of gauzy underwear, including a slinky, silky black teddy, littered the floor like dying moths. In the far corner was a pink-painted dressing table with a small round mirror and a pink bench. The top of the dressing table was covered with bottles and jars and tubes of lotions, potions, and makeup. Long ropes of beads and other costume jewelry dangled from the mirror. In lieu of a closet, a curtain was fastened diagonally across another corner, to hide hanging clothing. A basket on a battered four-drawer mahogany chest was filled with a tumble of colorful silk scarves. A cheap cardboard suitcase sat on the floor next to the chest. Verna hefted it. Empty.

  She went to the dressing table, aimlessly turning things over. All of it was very much Bunny, she thought. A hair-brush with strands of bright blond hair, a cheap rattail comb, a pair of fancy tortoiseshell combs, bobby pins, spilled face powder, a bottle of fire-engine red nail enamel, an open inkwell, a pen. Several scraps of paper, as well, filled with a loopy, childish script. Eva Louise Woodburn, Bunny Woodburn, Mars, Maxwell Woodburn,

  Verna frowned down at the paper. Woodburn? She didn’t recognize the name. There were no Woodburns in Darling, so far as she knew.

  There was a drawer in the dressing table, and she opened it, seeing that it was filled with emery boards, eyelash curlers, and the like. But in one corner, half hidden under a stack of cheap five-and-dime hankies, Verna saw a small wooden box, the polished top inlaid with colored mosaics and mother-of-pearl. Curiously, she picked it up, and then saw, beneath it, a small paper-bound savings account record book from the Darling Savings and Trust, with the name Eva Louise Scott written on the front. A small photograph was stuck inside the book: Bunny, squinting into the sun, wearing a lacy black teddy (probably the same one on the floor) and a pair of high heels. She was posed like a glamorous femme fatale on the front hood of a racy-looking roadster with an Alabama license plate. Her ample endowments were amply visible under the less-than-ample silk that barely covered them. The man taking the photo had cast a shadow in front of him. And yes, it was a man—or a woman wearing trousers and a fedora.

  Verna (who didn’t shock easily) was shocked, and her estimation of Bunny shifted a point or two to the negative. She knew that women out in Hollywood posed for similar photographs—she had seen them in magazines. But this was Darling, and something like this was unusual.

  Still thinking about the photo, she opened the deposit book and was surprised to see the amounts listed in the deposit column: regular deposits of ten dollars a week over the past six months. Two hundred and seventy dollars—not a huge amount of money, maybe, but pretty impressive for a girl who worked at the cosmetics counter at Lester Lima’s drugstore, where she probably earned no more than seven or eight dollars a week.

  Verna put the deposit book back, her estimation of Bunny shifting a notch or two back toward the positive. She had pictured the girl as a spender, not a saver. But if she was saving ten dollars a week, how did she pay her board and room? Where was the extra money coming from?

  The wooden box was still in her hand. Verna lifted the lid and was startled to see a pair of pearl earrings—real pearls, from the look of them—nestled against folds of blue velvet. In tasteful gold letters, inside the lid, was the name Ettlinger’s Fine Jewelry, Mobile,

  Her eyes widened at the sight. If the pearls came from Ettlinger’s, they had to be real. Where had Bunny gotten the money? Or if they’d been a gift, who in Darling could have afforded to give them to her? And then she thought of the bracelet Bunny had worn the other day. It had looked expensive, too. Where—

  Verna’s questions were interrupted by a light rap at the door. A young voice asked softly, surreptitiously, “Bunny? You in there, Bunny?”

  Verna opened her mouth to answer, and then changed her mind. After one more knock, the door was pushed open. Verna swiftly pocketed the little jewelry box. Mrs. Brewster might be confident in the integrity of her girls, but it wasn’t a good idea to leave obviously expensive jewelry lying in an unlocked drawer in an unlocked room in a house where nobody had anything to hide.

  Verna spoke crisply. “Hello.”

  The girl jumped, and her hand went to her pretty mouth. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, my goodness! Oh, Mrs. Tidwell!” It was little Miss Amanda Blake, the elementary school teacher, who had come from Montgomery at the beginning
of the school year. Verna had met her at a Presbyterian ice cream social the month before. She was wearing a green wrapper and her hair was wet under a towel turban. “You startled me. I thought there was nobody here.” She gulped. “I mean, I thought Bunny was—”

  “You were looking for Bunny?”

  Miss Blake looked flustered, and her glance flew from one side of the room to the other. “Not exactly. I mean—Well, Bunny borrowed my red blouse last week. I thought, since she wasn’t here, I’d just come in and see if I could—” She pounced on a bit of filmy red fabric hanging over the seat of the chair. “There it is! Oh, goody, goody gumdrops!”

  Verna suppressed a chuckle. Miss Blake had tried to appear so grown-up when they met at the social. At the moment, she looked as if she were fourteen. “When did you see Bunny last?” she asked.

  “Bunny?” Miss Blake frowned and puckered up her mouth. “Well, I’m not sure. I suppose it was Saturday evening.” She thought for a minute more. “Yes. Saturday. She wasn’t here for breakfast or supper yesterday, or breakfast this morning.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. B is fit to be tied. She says she’s throwing Bunny out.”

  “You saw Bunny at supper on Saturday?”

  “Not then.” Miss Blake shook her head. “It was at the picture show. Johnny Potter and I went to see Helen Morgan in Applause.” She clasped her hands and rolled her eyes in a fair imitation of the melodramatic Miss Morgan. “She was so swell. Helen Morgan, I mean. Really, truly she was. I cried and cried. Have you seen it yet, Mrs. Tidwell? If you haven’t, you must. You’ll just love it. Oh, and there’s a Tarzan feature, too. But it’s silent. Applause is a talkie.”

  “You said you saw Bunny,” Verna prompted.

  “Oh, sure. I saw her coming out of the ladies’ when I went to get popcorn for Johnny and me. But we just waved; we didn’t speak.”

  “Who was she with?”

  “Why, nobody.” Miss Blake held up her blouse, frowning at something she saw on the front. “Just look at that,” she muttered. “Grease. Or maybe coffee. Bunny is so careless.”