The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “She went to the picture show by herself?”

  Miss Blake looked up. “Oh, I meant that nobody was with her coming out of the ladies’. I don’t know who she went to the picture show with.”

  Verna gestured to the bed. “Mrs. Brewster said Bunny was here on Saturday night. What do you think?”

  “I think...” Miss Blake hesitated. “Well, personally, I don’t think she slept here. I doubt she came home after the picture show.”

  “Where do you suppose she is?”

  “Don’t have a clue.” Miss Blake gave Verna a half-defiant look. “But it isn’t the first time she’s been out all night. Oh, she’s always here when Mrs. B checks the beds, or she makes it look like she is. And she’s always back in time for breakfast. Until now, anyway.”

  “Oh, really?” Verna asked, surprised. “But I thought Mrs. Brewster locked the doors. How does she—”

  “I’ll show you.” Miss Blake stepped out into the hall. Verna followed her.

  “This window,” Miss Blake said in a low voice. “Don’t tell Mrs. B, but the girls use it sometimes. To come and go after hours. You can climb down the porch pillar, and there’s a trellis—a little shaky, but almost as good as a ladder for getting back in. Nobody can see you from the street, because of that big tree and the bushes. Not that I’ve done it myself,” she added righteously. “But Bunny has. And the others, too. But mostly Bunny.”

  “Ah,” Verna said. “Of course.”

  Experimentally, she raised the sash and put her head out. The porch roof wasn’t at all steep. If you were young and agile, it wouldn’t be much of a trick to climb out. And if the trellis bore your weight, you could use it to climb back in again. She put the sash back down, noticing that it moved easily and quietly. The girls probably promoted that with a bit of Vaseline on the cords.

  “Well, I guess this tells us something,” Verna said.

  “Shhh!” Alarmed, Miss Blake put a finger to her lips, glancing over her shoulder. “You don’t want to go giving away our secrets, do you? If Mrs. B found out—”

  “I won’t tell her,” Verna said reassuringly. She paused. “Tell me—do you know the names of the young men Bunny has been seeing?”

  “Well, there are several.” Miss Blake stuffed her red blouse into the pocket of her wrapper, then pulled the towel off her damp hair and shook it loose. “There’s Pete Crawford and Willy Warren and somebody else ... Can’t remember who; somebody she knew when she worked over in Monroeville. Bunny isn’t just real crazy about him, but he’s got more money than most, so she sees him sometimes.”

  “What about Maxwell Woodburn? Is he the one she met in Monroeville?”

  “Woodburn?” Miss Blake frowned, shaking her head. “No, he’s her pen pal up in Montgomery. He writes to her a lot. But as far as the boys here go, she always says they’re hardly worth thinking about.” She sighed plaintively. “It’s hard these days, you know? A boy maybe likes you, but he doesn’t have the money to take you out, so he doesn’t let on. That he likes you, I mean. And those that have money, you don’t like. I don’t mean you, exactly,” she amended hastily.

  “I’m sure,” Verna said, very glad that she was past all that liking business. She paused for a moment, thinking. “What about the other girls who live here? Are they friends with Bunny? Would they be likely to know where she is?”

  “No, not really,” Miss Blake said. “The home demonstration agent is a lot older, almost an old maid, and the other teacher says Bunny is wild.” She stopped, frowning, sounding worried. “You don’t suppose something’s happened to her, do you? I mean, they ... they haven’t caught that convict yet.”

  “I don’t have any idea,” Verna said honestly. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” Miss Blake sighed and rubbed the towel through her hair. “Well, I guess maybe she just got tired of Darling and ran off. She talked about that a lot. She was always threatening to get on the Greyhound and go down to Mobile, or even up to New York. She said she knew a lot about selling cosmetics, and that she could get a job pretty easily, with her looks and all.” She rewrapped her turban. “But it’s kinda funny that she didn’t take her clothes and her jewelry. I mean, if I was leaving town, I’d sure as shootin’ clean out my room and take a suitcase. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would,” Verna said, thinking regretfully of the clothes on the floor and the empty suitcase. “I would definitely do that.”

  NINE

  Lizzy Makes an Identification

  Lizzy finished up her Monday afternoon work at the usual hour, but Mr. Moseley was still at his desk. In fact, he had been there since right after lunch, working on a stack of documents he had brought into the office with him. He had made several telephone calls direct from his phone without asking Lizzy to get the other party for him, the way he usually did. He kept the door shut while he was talking.

  Usually, Lizzy knew everything that happened in the office, so she was intensely curious. Whatever was going on, it involved Mr. Riley, the certified public accountant who sometimes worked on cases that required an auditor. It also involved Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson, who had already called twice and had sent a packet of papers over from the Savings and Trust in the middle of the afternoon. There had been two or three other calls, as well—the same man each time, but he refused to identify himself and asked to be put straight through to Mr. Moseley, after which Lizzy was instructed to hang up. After the first call, Mr. Moseley told her to cancel the two appointments left on the day’s calendar. She knew that something very mysterious was going on, especially when he was still at his desk at the end of the afternoon.

  Lizzy rapped on his door, and when she heard a grunt, she opened it. “It’s five o’clock and I was thinking of going home. Are you going to want me again today, Mr. Moseley?”

  Mr. Moseley glanced up from his work. His brown hair fell in a boyish shock across his forehead and he pushed it out of his eyes. He had taken off his suit coat, undone his blue tie, and was working with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up on his forearms. His forehead was creased, but his eyes lightened when he saw her.

  “I’ll always want you, Liz,” he said, in a joking tone. “You know that”

  Lizzy felt herself blushing. She understood that it was just his way of saying that she was a good secretary and he liked her work, but his tone made the compliment sound more ... well, more personal than he probably meant. It was disconcerting. It renewed the romantic dreams she had folded and put carefully away, like old linens closed in a drawer with lavender.

  She pressed her lips together. “Yes, Mr. Moseley,” she said evenly. “Would you like me to stay a little longer? In case you need me for something?”

  He looked back down at the papers on his desk. “No, you go on, Liz. I’ll be here for a while. And I’m expecting somebody, so please leave the downstairs door unlocked.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched, arms over his head. “There is one thing, though,” he said casually—too casually. “Do you have much money in the bank here in town?”

  She frowned at the unexpectedness of the question. “In the bank?” She thought. “Well, not a lot. Maybe fifty dollars or so. I’m saving for some more work on the house. Why?”

  “It might be a good idea if you took that money out” He glanced at the clock on his desk. “They’re closed over there now, but you could do it first thing in the morning. You can keep it here in the office safe if you don’t want that much money in the house.”

  “Take it out of the bank?” she asked uncertainly. “But why would I—”

  His eyes narrowed and his tone became stern. “Don’t ask,” he commanded. “Just do what I say. And don’t tell anybody else about this. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” he added emphatically. “That’s an order.”

  She nodded, perplexed, and felt the prickles of apprehension on the back of her neck. Something serious was going on. She didn’t know what it was,
or why it ought to involve her, but—

  “And don’t worry,” he said, and gave her a lopsided grin. “Just do what I say and you won’t have anything to regret”

  Which perplexed her even more. But she had never questioned Mr. Moseley and she wasn’t about to start now. She got her purse out of her bottom desk drawer and went down the stairs to the street, thinking that she’d better go next door to Hancock’s and buy some sugar. She’d stop at Mrs. Freeman’s house and pick up some eggs, too. Mrs. Freeman had a dozen laying hens that produced more eggs than she could use, so she traded the extras to the neighbors. Lizzy was already in debt to her for three quarts of raspberries, to be paid off when the berries were ripe.

  But just as she stepped onto the street, a blue Ford coupe pulled up in front of the building and Grady Alexander jumped out. He was wearing his working clothes—blue shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows on tanned, strong arms, dark twill wash pants, sweat-stained felt fedora. He had what Lizzy thought of as that “Grady look” on his face, the intent look he wore when he had his mind on something serious.

  Seeing him, she felt herself flushing, remembering Saturday night, when things between them had almost gotten out of hand. After the picture show, they had driven out to the bluff just beyond the Cypress County fairgrounds, where they parked under the shadowy trees. The flickering stars seemed brighter in the absence of the moon, and the languid music of the frogs and night birds drifted through the open windows of Grady’s Ford. Maybe it was the romantic scenes in the picture show that pushed him into that restless, urgent mood. Or maybe it was just what he said, that they had been seeing each other long enough and it was high time they made up their minds to get married—meaning that it was high time that Lizzy made up her mind, because Grady had already made up his.

  Whatever it was, things had definitely gotten a little steamy between them in the humid, breathless dark, certainly a lot steamier than she had intended. She had pushed his hands away and made him stop at the point when she knew that if she didn’t make him stop right that very second, she would stop wanting him to stop and—

  It wasn’t that she was a prude, or that she was saving herself for marriage, as her mother insisted she should. No. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want it, too, because she did, probably more than she was willing to admit. And she might’ve, if the question of doing it weren’t so tangled up with the puzzle of love and marriage. Grady seemed to have the idea that you only did it with someone you loved and meant to marry, either soon or someday. If they did it, he was bound to think she loved him and meant to marry him, and she didn’t want him to think that. Not yet, anyway. The days when she knew she didn’t mean to marry Grady still outnumbered the days she thought she might want to, someday.

  “Hello, Grady,” she said, as casually as she could.

  “Hullo, Lizzy,” Grady replied brusquely, and strode past her. Then he stopped and turned and snatched off his hat, and the sternness in his high-cheekboned face softened. Somewhere in his family, far enough back so that nobody quite remembered where or when or who, there had been an Indian—Creek maybe, or Choctaw. The lineage might be forgotten, but the lines on his face were clear enough. “Sorry. It’s not you, doll. I’m in a hurry. I gotta talk to Charlie.”

  Doll. She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but there was no point in saying so—again. “What is it?” she asked, caught by the intensity of his expression.

  “Come inside,” he said, and pushed open the door, standing back so she could go first. Grady had graduated from ag school at Auburn and was educated in the latest farming methods, but he was still a Southern gendeman. Or at least he had been, until Saturday night.

  The Dispatch office was the size of Moseley & Moseley upstairs, but was just one large, tin-ceilinged room, with a wooden counter built across the space about ten feet from the front door. Behind it, Charlie Dickens was typing at his battered old desk, wearing his usual green eyeshade, a white shirt and tie, and a sleeveless gray vest. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth. Behind him, at the back of the room, the newspaper press sat silent—he wouldn’t crank it up and start printing until Thursday evening, after Lizzy and Mr. Moseley had quit for the day. It made a lot of noise.

  “Charlie,” Grady said urgendy. “Hey, Charlie.”

  Charlie glanced over his shoulder. He was a large man, past middle age, fleshy and half-bald, with hard, penetrating eyes that didn’t seem to go with the plump softness of the rest of him.

  “Hey, Grady.” Charlie stopped typing, rolled his chair back, and stood, stretching. “Afternoon, Lizzy. Say, Miz Search dropped off a page of tips on makin’ do for that pamphlet your garden club is compiling.” He began sorting through the litter of papers on his desk. “Now, whut the heck did I do with it?”

  Charlie’s skills as an editor and his command of standard English were impeccable, but he preferred to ‘talk ’Bama,’ as he put it. He said that folks felt a little easier talking to him if he didn’t put on the dog.

  Grady put his hat back on, all business. “Charlie, there’s been a bad accident. I was out having a look at Harvey Jackson’s hogs when his boys came in and said there was a car wrecked and somebody dead in it, down in Pine Mill Creek. Harvey and I drove over to look; then I hightailed it back here to town to tell the sheriff. Figured you might want to get out there and take some pictures. Looks like a newspaper story to met.”

  Charlie stopped messing with the papers on his desk and jerked off his eyeshade. “Get out where? Where’s the wreck?”

  “Where the bridge on the county road has been out for the past three weeks. A girl drove through the barrier and into the ravine. She’s dead.”

  Lizzy bit her lip. “Oh, dear! Oh, Grady, that’s awful! A girl? Who?” Darling was small and its families, neighbors, and kinfolk were all knitted together in a dense fabric of relationships. When somebody died, it left a hole. Everybody felt the loss, one way or another.

  “You can say that again,” Grady replied tersely. “Purely awful. The car rolled a time or two before it got to the bottom, and it landed on top of her. She’s smashed up so bad I couldn’t tell you who. She’s a blonde is all I can say.”

  A blonde? Lizzy stared at him, her heart beginning to pound.

  Charlie was reaching for his suit jacket. “Don’t have any film in my camera,” he said, shrugging into it. “Used it up on Saturday, shootin’ the Vo Ag boys out at the fairgrounds. Lester ordered it for me this mawnin’—be here on tomorrow’s bus. Lizzy, you got film in that Kodak of yours?”

  “Sure,” Lizzy said. “You can take my camera.” She was trying to sound normal. “What kind of car is it, Grady?”

  “Pontiac roadster, green, pretty new. It’s upside down in the rocks by the creek.”

  “Roadster?” Charlie frowned. “Whose ’ud that be? Didn’t know we had any Pontiac roadsters in town.” Darling was small enough so that everybody knew what everybody else was driving, how long they’d had it, and what they’d paid for it.

  “Dunno,” Grady said. “Didn’t recognize it m’self I can give you a lift out there if you want, Charlie. I left Harvey Jackson’s oldest boy with the wreck. I told his dad I’d bring him home, so I’m going back out there. We can stop at Lizzy’s house on the way and get her camera.”

  “Fine with me,” Charlie said, shoving a small notebook into his coat pocket and grabbing his hat. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m going too,” Lizzy said.

  “Sure thing,” Charlie said, opening the front door. “We’ll leave you at your house after you give me your camera, and then we can—”

  “No,” Lizzy said firmly. “I mean I’m going out to Pine Mill Creek with you. I want to see the wreck.”

  “Absolutely not,” Grady said flatly. He went to the Ford and opened the passenger door with a Southern gentleman’s flourish. “Trust me, Lizzy. This is for your own good. You do not want to see this wreck. Now, get in the car. Charlie can ride in the rumble seat as far as your hou
se.”

  “Maybe Liz oughtta ride in the rumble,” Charlie said. “She’s skinnier than I am. How ‘bout it, Liz? You’re gettin’ out first”

  “But I might know who she is,” Lizzy objected. “I know all of the women in this town. I might be able to identify her.” She lifted her chin and hardened her voice. “And if I don’t go, neither does my camera.”

  “Forget it,” Grady said. “You are not going. It is not a thing for a woman to see.”

  “All right, then.” Lizzy folded her arms. This was so like Grady, always trying to tell her what she should and shouldn’t do, which was one of the reasons she was not going to marry him. “I’m not going, and neither is my camera.”

  Charlie scowled. “Hey, you two. Stop bickerin’ and let’s get goin’.” To Grady, he added, “Woman is too damn stubborn for her own good. If she wants to see a dead body, let her. What the hell—won’t hurt her none.”

  “Exactly,” Lizzy agreed. “It won’t hurt me. And I might be able to help.”

  “Help? I don’t see how you can help.” Grady glared at her.

  “I might be able to identify her.”

  Grady made a skeptical noise.

  “Maybe she can,” Charlie said. He was trying to cram himself into the rumble. “Come on. Let’s get that camera.”

  “You’ll faint,” Grady said.

  “I’ve never fainted in my life,” Lizzy said. “But if I do, you can pick me up.”

  Grady’s voice was hard. “Lizzy Lacy, I swear. You are the stubbornest woman God ever put on this green earth. Get in the damn car.”

  They stopped at Lizzy’s, where she picked up her Kodak and turned it over to Charlie. Back in the car, she sat as far over against the door as she could, but it was a tight fit and she could almost feel the heat of Grady’s thigh and the angry thrust of his muscled arm when he shifted gears. What’s more, she could still feel the heat they had generated in this very same car on Saturday night. Neither of them spoke for the five- or six-mile drive.