The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (13 page)

Myrtle, not to be outdone, said that if she told them who in town was so far behind in what they owed at the Mercantile that Mr. Mann wasn’t letting them have any more credit, they would probably have a big laugh, because it was good comeuppance for some who lorded it over others. But of course that list would never be in the newspaper, so maybe she should just whisper a few names—

Lizzy said no, she shouldn’t, because things were hard enough for people without having their dirty laundry hung out all over town for everybody to see and point fingers, and anyway, judging from the number of bankruptcies that Mr. Moseley was filing, lots of folks were in the same sad situation. At which Myrtle had the grace to look ashamed and say that she was just having a little fun but maybe it wasn’t funny after all. She changed the subject.

“Anybody goin’ to the Elks’ picnic on Saturday?” she asked brightly, and the conversation moved on to other things while they all finished eating, then folded up their lunch bags and got ready to go back to work.

“I wonder where Bunny is,” Lizzy said to Verna as the others left. “You know, I think I actually miss her. I get impatient with her because she’s such a silly kid, but when she’s around, she keeps us from getting so down in the dumps. She always finds something to tease us about and make us laugh.”

“I’m curious, too,” Verna said. “First time she’s skipped lunch in quite a while.” Verna agreed with Lizzy about Bunny. Her perfume and makeup and flouncy ways were sort of silly, but it was a youthful silliness that livened you up when you were feeling dark and gloomy. “Maybe she just got busy at the drugstore. I’ll drop in and say hi.”

Lizzy nodded. “See you at Ophelia’s tonight for hearts?”

“I’ll be there,” Verna said. “What are you bringing?”

“Haven’t decided,” Lizzy said. “Cookies, I guess. That’s easiest. I’ll have time to bake after work. See you tonight”

Bunny wasn’t at the drugstore, as Verna discovered. Her glass display case gleamed and the cosmetics on the shelves behind it were attractively arranged, but Bunny herself was conspicuously absent.

“Dunno where she is.” Lester Lima was behind the pharmacy counter in the back of the shop, dressed in his usual long white coat, recording a prescription in a ledger. He glowered at Verna over the tops of his gold-rimmed glasses.

“Really?” Verna asked, surprised.

“Didn’t come in to work this mornin’. Didn’t let on she wasn’t comin’ in, either. You see her, Miz Tidwell, you tell her that she’s not gonna have a job here if she doesn’t come to work tomorrow, or at least tell me when she is comin’ to work. She’s too flirty, anyhow.” At Verna’s raised eyebrow, he cleared his throat and added sourly, “Likes to make up to the menfolks more’n she should.”

Verna suppressed the observation that Bunny’s flirtiness was probably good for business, although since Mr. Lima was a Baptist deacon, he likely took a dim view of that kind of advertising.

“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.