The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  All of these new customers added up to a lot more money flowing into Darling. Why, according to Mayor Jed Snow, the camp had pumped some forty-five hundred dollars into Darling’s economy in just the last month alone! Which in turn meant that Darlingians who had been flat broke and despairing could now afford to pay thirty-five cents for a meal at the diner or a dollar fifty for a new pair of shoes at the Mercantile or a quarter for a kite or an O-Boy Yo-Yo for the kids at the Five and Dime.

  Sitting on a rainbow. Myra May was smiling as she beat the eggs and milk together. Yes, it was actually beginning to seem that they had put the worst of the dark clouds and hard times behind them. Life was good and getting better and better every day.

  At least, that’s how Myra May felt at that instant. She would be feeling very differently a few moments from now.

  * * *

  On the other side of the partition, behind the lunch counter, Raylene finished with the coffee percolator and began wrapping the silverware in paper napkins, so they would be ready to set the tables as the customers came in. She was making extra wraps this morning, because she had the feeling that today was going to be a busy day—and something of a strange day, she thought, wrinkling her nose and frowning just a little.

  Raylene had learned long ago to trust her feelings, for she was psychic. “Not very much, actually,” she told people when they noticed. She liked to downplay her ability so folks wouldn’t pester her to read their palms or tell their fortunes. “And mostly just about little things.”

  Like what things people wanted to eat. At today’s lunch, for instance, Raylene already knew that Sheriff Buddy Norris was going to change his mind and order liver and onions instead of the usual meat loaf, while Mayor Jed Snow would go with the meat loaf instead of fried chicken, and the county commissioner, Amos Tombull, would top off his stewed chicken and dumplings with peach pie and ice cream. It was a good thing to be psychic about, as she told her daughter, Myra May. It meant having a pretty good idea of how much of everything to cook.

  But occasionally there was something else. Like right now, she had a disquieting feeling that she couldn’t quite shake when she thought of the day ahead. She frowned again, catching a fleeting glimpse, in her mind’s eye, of men traipsing through the diner’s backyard and strangers coming into the place and asking questions about—

  “Miz Raylene,” came an uncertain voice. “Miz Raylene, you busy?”

  Raylene looked up. It was Lenore Looper, a slight, brown-haired young woman who worked the eleven-to-seven shift on the switchboard three times a week. The Darling Telephone Exchange was located in the back room of the diner. When the Exchange first opened, with only a couple of dozen customers, it had operated from seven in the morning until seven at night. Now, practically everybody in town had a phone and the Exchange had to be staffed around the clock. The girl who worked the night shift was allowed to nap on the narrow cot along one wall, as long as she kept an ear cocked for emergency calls. It looked to Raylene as if Lenore had been doing just that, for the bobby pins were falling out of her hair, her print dress was twisted, and she was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

  Raylene reached up and turned down the volume of the Philco radio that sat on a shelf behind the counter. “What is it, Lenore?”

  Lenore pulled at the bodice of her dress to straighten it. “It’s Bettina Higgens, who works over at the Beauty Bower. She just called the switchboard, askin’ about Rona Jean.”

  “Rona Jean?” Raylene asked, frowning. The room seemed suddenly darker, as though a couple of the light bulbs over the counter had just burned out. “She worked the three-to-eleven shift yesterday, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But it seems she didn’t come home last night.” Lenore yawned, covering it with a dainty hand. “Bettina is Roma Jean’s roommate. She’s asking if anybody here knows where Rona Jean might’ve went. If they do, she says would they please call her.”

  Feeling a flutter of apprehension, Raylene went to the pass-through and leaned across the shelf into the kitchen. “Myra May, Bettina Higgens is calling about Rona Jean, her roommate. Seems she didn’t get home last night.”

  “She didn’t?” Frowning, Myra May dropped the big whisk into the crockery bowl. “Where did she go?”

  “That’s what Bettina wants to know. Any ideas?”

  “Afraid not.” Myra May wiped her hands on the cotton apron she wore over her slacks and plaid blouse. “I checked her out at eleven last night, when she finished her shift. I didn’t ask where she was headed—I just figured she was going home.” She quirked an eyebrow. “But you know Rona Jean.”

  As a matter of fact, Raylene did know Rona Jean, who—while she was an excellent switchboard operator when she paid attention—was a little on the wild side. She’d be late to work or ask to get off early. Or she’d be talking to one of her friends when she was supposed to be on duty and let the calls get ahead of her on the switchboard. Worst yet, she had listened in at least once on a private telephone call, which was against the Exchange’s hard-and-fast rule. Myra May had cautioned her that if she was caught listening one more time, she’d be looking for another job.

  By now feeling distinctly uneasy, Raylene turned back to Lenore. “Myra May says that Rona Jean finished up here at eleven last night, and that’s the last we’ve seen of her. If Bettina is worried, she should let Sheriff Norris know, so he can keep an eye out for—”

  At that moment, the back door banged open and Raylene turned to see Violet, ashen faced and trembling, in the doorway. “Come quick!” she cried breathlessly, clinging to the doorjamb for support. “It’s awful! Oh, please, please, come!”

  “Awful?” Myra May was peering through the pass-through. “Come where? What’s going on, Violet?”

  “It’s . . . it’s Rona Jean,” Violet gasped. “In the garage. She’s . . . she’s . . .”

  But whatever Violet was going to say was lost in a long sigh. She slumped to the floor in a dead faint.

  Myra May left Raylene to tend to Violet and dashed out to the ramshackle garage where she parked Big Bertha, her large green 1920 Chevrolet touring car. With 29,012 miles on her odometer, Bertha was cruising on her third carburetor and sixth set of tires, and she occasionally suffered from the hiccups. But the red-painted spokes in her wheels were bright, her green canvas top was sound, and her chrome-plated headlights twinkled. When Myra May climbed behind the wheel and revved Bertha up to her top speed of thirty-five miles an hour, she always imagined that the car was smiling.

  But Bertha wasn’t smiling now, and it wasn’t Myra May behind her wheel. It was Rona Jean Hancock. She was sprawled across the front seat, the top buttons of her red dress undone, her legs splayed in an unladylike way, her head bent back at an awkward angle. On her left leg, she was wearing a silk stocking, held up by an elastic roll garter just above her knee. The right leg was bare, and her other silk stocking was wound tightly around her neck.

  TWO

  Sheriff Norris Investigates

  “Thanks for being willing to talk to me, Violet,” Buddy Norris said, as he sat down on a straight chair next to the sofa where Violet lay.

  Buddy was a lean, gangly man with brown hair and blue eyes, a look-alike (many said) for Lucky Lindy, who had flown his Spirit of St. Louis all the way to Paris, only to lose his firstborn son to a kidnapper and murderer just two years ago. The mildness of Buddy’s expression—he rarely frowned—was somewhat contradicted by the pale thread of a scar across his cheek, a souvenir of a knife fight at the Red Dog juke joint over in Maysville. He was wearing the khaki shirt and pants that passed for the Cypress County sheriff’s uniform, with the nickel-plated star pinned to his pocket flap.

  He flipped to a clean page in his notebook, checking his wristwatch for the current time, seven thirty a.m., and jotting it down with the date. “So you saw that the garage doors were open and went to see why,” he said. “Is that how it happen
ed, Violet?”

  He was feeling a little awkward. A couple of years ago, Buddy had been sweet on Violet Sims, who once was one of the two young ladies he most wanted to get to know. (The other one was the girl who was out there in the front seat of Myra May’s car with her stocking wrapped around her neck, waiting for Lionel Noonan to drive up in his funeral parlor hearse and take her to Monroeville for an autopsy.) But Buddy had given up on Violet when she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in going out with him, although she said it in such a sweet way that he couldn’t feel hurt by the rejection. She simply preferred to spend her free evenings with Myra May and Cupcake in their flat over the diner.

  So he had turned his attentions to Rona Jean, who maybe wasn’t as pretty as Violet but had seemed sweet and eager to please him (at least in the beginning), which was always a compliment to a fellow. He and Rona Jean had gotten along just fine, for a while. He felt a fist of hot anger tighten in his belly when he thought of what somebody had done to her, and then a quick, warm wash of sadness that was accentuated by the strains of “Goodnight, Sweetheart”—Rona Jean’s favorite song—from the radio downstairs. But this wasn’t the time or the place to dwell on that. He had to put his mind to his investigation and let nothing interfere. He poised his stub of a pencil over the page and waited.

  Violet’s “Yes, that’s how it happened” was almost inaudible. Pale and wan, her soft brown hair in a mass of curls around her face, she was lying on the sofa in the apartment over the diner, where she lived with Myra May. Raylene Riggs had spread a crocheted granny afghan over her and was kneeling beside the sofa, holding her limp hand.

  “Maybe just one or two questions, Buddy?” Raylene asked in a low voice. She’d said that Violet had fainted again after she and Myra May had gotten her upstairs. “This is so difficult for her. She and Rona Jean both worked in the Telephone Exchange, and they sometimes went to the movies together. They were close friends.”

  Buddy hadn’t known that, actually. He scribbled the words close friends with Violet—movies in his notebook, then wondered briefly how Myra May felt about that and wrote Myra May?? with a heavy underline. When he’d been trying to get Violet to go out with him, before he’d understood about her situation, he had felt that Myra May was acting kind of jealous. Or maybe “protective” was a better word, like a mama hen ruffling her feathers and snapping her beak, hovering over her chick and not wanting anybody to get too close. He wasn’t quite sure why it was, but after Violet had made it clear that he was wasting his time, Myra May had eased up. Then he wondered who else (besides Violet, that is) Rona Jean might have counted as her close friend, and added other friends? He guessed that was something he had better find out. He bit his lip and focused on his next question.

  This was Buddy Norris’ first investigation as the sheriff of Cypress County, and the fact that he was investigating a murder—and Rona Jean Hancock’s murder, on top of that—made it a lot more important than the usual humdrum routine of minor thefts, car wrecks, gambling, and moonshining that the sheriff’s office dealt with every week. Rona Jean’s murder had struck Buddy like a bolt from the blue, and investigating it was not at all what he wanted to be doing on a bright and pretty June morning.

  But the sadly ironic truth was that whoever had strangled Rona Jean had handed Buddy his first big case, the opportunity he needed to show the citizens of Darling that they had been right to elect him as their sheriff. It was a test of what he had learned so far, a measure of his abilities as an investigator. He couldn’t afford to fail.

  Until several weeks ago, Buddy had been Darling’s deputy sheriff, and not an altogether popular one, at that. Some folks criticized him for his youth (he was in his late twenties but looked younger) and others for his “swagger and derring-do,” especially when he arrested Reverend Craig, the traveling revival preacher, who was driving his 1926 Studebaker sixty miles an hour out on the Jericho Road. On the front seat was a bottle of what the reverend claimed was communion fruit of the vine. When Buddy tasted it, however, the bottle proved to contain something a sight more potent than grape juice. It was Bodeen Pyle’s Panther Juice, and as illegal as sin. Nevertheless, some folks said that Buddy didn’t show good judgment when he arrested a man of God. If he was going to be sheriff, he had a lot to prove.

  But Buddy was good enough to be a deputy, almost everybody agreed. He had taught himself how to take crime scene photographs and dust for fingerprints out of a book on scientific detective work that he had mail-ordered from True Crime magazine. He was especially interested in fingerprint evidence, which had been used as forensic evidence in the United States since 1911, when Thomas Jennings was convicted of murder after he broke into a Chicago home and killed the owner during an attempted burglary. Jennings left his prints on a freshly painted railing, was convicted, and hanged. Buddy didn’t have much confidence that fingerprints would ever solve a case in Darling, but he wanted to know how to use them if the opportunity ever presented itself.

  All things considered, Buddy had proved himself to be a good deputy. He wasn’t afraid to wade in with his fists when that was necessary, as it sometimes was. He was strong and athletic and (having been a sprinter in high school and a regular winner of the hundred-yard dash) he got around much faster than the sheriff, who had forty years and fifty-plus pounds on him. What’s more, he rode his red Indian Ace motorcycle when he was on patrol duty, which guaranteed Sheriff Burns some serious bragging rights: Buddy was the only mounted deputy sheriff in all of southern Alabama.

  In fact, everybody said that the sheriff and his deputy functioned as a pretty good team—until the sheriff was struck down dead by a rattlesnake. He was fishing all by himself below the waterfall at the very bottom of Horsetail Gorge when it happened, which was a very bad place to have a rattlesnake tuck into you. Roy Burns weighed well over two hundred pounds, and with his arthritis, he couldn’t move too fast on a good day. On a bad day, when the rattler had bitten him hard on the wrist, he didn’t make it back up to the camp. He sat down and died beside the waterfall. It took three men, a mule, and a block and tackle to hoist him out of the rocky gorge.

  The county commissioners met the next week, as Amos Tombull announced somberly, “to plan for a special election to fill Sheriff Burns’ empty size twelves.” There were two candidates on the ballot, Buddy Norris and Jake Pritchard, who owned the Standard Oil station on the Monroeville highway. But although many had misgivings about Buddy, the endorsement of the Darling Dispatch helped him eke out a win. He was also helped by the fact that Jake had recently raised the price of his gasoline from ten cents a gallon to fifteen, which made some of the voters a tad bit unenthusiastic about him. Jake had the only gas station in town. Some folks may have thought that making him sheriff was giving him too much of a monopoly.

  With all this in mind, Buddy knew better than anybody that, in Darling’s eyes, the investigation into Rona Jean’s murder would be a test case. His reputation, his career, and quite possibly his entire future were on the line here. Which meant that he had to take full charge of the investigation and do most of the legwork himself, rather than rely on his new deputy, Wayne Springer. Wayne, who had learned his policing over in Montgomery, already knew how to dust for fingerprints. He was working on the car right now, and doing a good job. That’s the kind of deputy he was. But everything else connected with this murder, all the interviews, all the people stuff, Buddy knew he would have to do himself.

  He straightened his shoulders, suddenly aware of the burden on them. “Just a couple more questions and I’ll be finished.” He leaned forward. “When you went into the garage, Violet, did you hear anything or see anybody? Or maybe when you were out in the garden, picking beans?”

  “No,” Violet whispered. “I didn’t hear a thing when I was in the garden—except for the rooster up the street and Bill Board delivering the milk and Myra May singing along with the radio. And then I saw the double garage doors open and thought I’d
better close them. When I went in, at first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was just too awful. The way Rona Jean was . . . all spread out, I mean. Like she’d been—” Her voice trembled and she bit down hard on her lip. “And then I saw that stocking around her neck. I just ran.” After a moment she looked up at Raylene. “I’m so sorry, dear. I spilled the bucket of beans I was picking for lunch.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Violet,” Raylene said in a comforting tone. “Eva Pearl came in early to give us a hand at the counter. After the breakfast rush, I’ll send her out to pick up the beans. Or I could just open a couple of jars of that sweet corn the Dahlias canned for us last summer and make corn pudding instead. Most folks like that just as well as green beans.”

  Buddy felt that the interview was getting away from him. “One more question,” he said. “Were you here when Rona Jean . . . when Miss Hancock finished her shift and left last night?”

  He felt Raylene’s curious eyes on him and shifted uncomfortably. Both she and Violet and just about everybody else in town would recall that he and Rona Jean had gone around together fairly recently. He hadn’t called her “Miss Hancock” then. In fact, on their second date she had called him “sweetheart,” in that slow, sweet, suggestive Southern voice of hers. They were trading moonlight kisses on the back porch of the house she shared with Bettina Higgens, and the Victrola was playing in the parlor. Goodnight sweetheart, ’til we meet tomorrow. Goodnight sweetheart, parting is such sorrow. And then the third time they were together, when—