The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (6 page)

“Why are you so suspicious?” he would ask helplessly, when she raised a little question about this or that. “You’re always poking around, looking for problems where they don’t exist. Why can’t you just accept things at face value? Trouble will go away, if you give it half a chance. Look at the Romans. And Hannibal. And the French and Indian War. All over now. All gone away.”

Verna didn’t quite get his point about the Romans and Hannibal, or about the French and Indians, either. But accepting things at face value wasn’t her nature, which was good, given what she did for a living, working in the probate office. Her detail-oriented focus came in handy when she had to do a plat search or look up property records, and the people who worked with her had learned to rely on her ability to smell a rat when there was one in the neighborhood. Or not even a rat, necessarily, just something that wasn’t right and needed fixing.

So Verna went on being naturally and happily suspicious and mistrustful and wary, and Walter went on being driven almost crazy by Verna until he died ten years ago, when he crossed Route 12 without looking up and the Greyhound bus ran over him. Verna always suspected that when it happened, he was crossing the Alps with Hannibal or building Hadrian’s Wall with the Romans or was off someplace else where there weren’t any buses but maybe a lot of camellias.

She opened the screen door and went into the cool, quiet dark. She still lived in the same small house that she and Walter had lived in. She liked it because it was paid for and Verna was always one to be careful about money, and didn’t mind it being small because she didn’t have any children.

Inside the door, she was met by her black Scottie, Clyde, who climbed into her arms and washed her face thoroughly while he was saying hello. Then he jumped down and ran into the kitchen to wait for her to open a can of Ken-L Ration—horsemeat, although Verna had never told him what it was. Clyde adored Racer, the bay gelding who belonged to old Mr. Norris, next door on the south. Mr. Norris’ son Buddy owned a motorcycle, but old Mr. Norris refused to have anything to do with automobiles and hitched Racer to a two-wheeled cart when he had to go somewhere that was more than a good walk away. Racer spent his off-duty hours in the pasture behind the Norris house, where Clyde kept him company. Clyde would be horrified if he knew he was eating horsemeat.

Verna went into her bedroom, took off her hat, and put it on the dresser. Then she changed out of her brown-and-orange plaid dress and into her garden clothes—a pair of Walter’s baggy green canvas pants and one of his old plaid shirts (Verna never threw anything away), and went out to the garden. Clyde immediately scampered off to see what Racer was up to and Verna went to her garden shed for the hoe, then headed out to give the weeds in the bean rows a quick haircut.

Walter had never cared much for vegetable gardening. It was flowers he had his heart set on. In fact, Verna always suspected that he loved his camellias a great deal more than he loved her. He had filled their backyard with them, big floppy bushes with big floppy flowers that she had never appreciated, never even liked very much. To her, they always seemed exotic (well, of course—they came from Asia, didn’t they?) and overly demonstrative, flashy, flamboyant show-offs that took up too much room, took too much pampering, and seemed only too willing to surrender to root rot, dieback, bud drop, sunburn, scale, scab, and flower blight. And if Walter’s anxious fussing enabled them to survive these afflictions, they were bound to keel over the next time the thermometer dropped down to twenty, which it did every three or four winters—just often enough to allow Walter to start his camellia collection all over again.

After Walter walked in front of the bus, Verna mourned for the requisite period of time, then invited all her camellia-loving friends to come and take starts from Walter’s bushes. Then she had every last one cut down and the roots dug out, and Mr. Norris came over with Racer and plowed up about half of the backyard. Now she grew vegetables and a few flowering annuals and roses around front and felt like these were all the garden she wanted. More than she needed, actually. Which was why when she was done hoeing, she picked a tin lard pail full of green beans and carried it through the gate to the Norris house.

“Yoo-hoo, Mr. Norris!” she called, standing on the back wooden steps. She called loudly, because Mr. Norris was hard of hearing. “It’s Verna, from next door. You here?”

Mr. Norris came to the screen. He had a water bucket in his hand and was on his way to the well pump on the cistern. Their street had been on the water main for ten years, but he refused to have city water. City lights, either, or city gas. Coal oil lamps had been plenty good for his momma and daddy, he said, and they were plenty good for him.

“Got somethin‘for me?” he asked, and peered into the lard pail. “My, my, them’s a nice mess o’ beans, little lady.” He eyed her mischievously. “Got some fatback to go with ’em?”

“Little lady” was a joke between them, because Verna was five-foot-eleven (taller, when she wore dress pumps with heels) and Mr. Norris, now in his seventies, was stooped, standing no higher than her chest. What’s more, since she usually wore Walter’s baggy old pants, she couldn’t rightly be called a lady. And “fatback” was meant to be funny, too, because Verna didn’t eat pork and Mr. Norris knew it. She had raised a pet pig when she was a girl and pork never seemed to taste right to her after that. Which was why she knew she shouldn’t tell Clyde what was in his can of Ken-L Ration.

Verna walked to the well with Mr. Norris and watched him hang the bucket on the pump spout and raise and lower the handle. The water gushed out, clear and cool and every bit as good as the water that came out of the city mains. The full bucket was heavy and she took it from him.

“Buddy’s not around to fetch water for you?” she asked. “He’s out lookin’ for a lady-friend?”

Mr. Norris’ son’s philandering was another joke, although sometimes not very funny. Buddy had got himself in serious trouble a couple of months before, when his wandering eye lit on another man’s wife and the man took exception. Buddy had ended up with a broken arm and a black eye, which you might’ve thought would be embarrassing for a deputy sheriff.

But not for Buddy, who was never embarrassed by anything. He had gotten the deputy’s job because he’d ordered a how-to book on scientific crime detection from the Institute of Applied Sciences in Chicago, Illinois, and had taught himself how to take fingerprints, identify firearms, and make “crime scene” photographs. When Deputy Duane Hadley retired earlier in the year and moved over to Monroeville, about fifteen miles to the east, to live with his married daughter, Buddy applied for the job. Sheriff Burns had been so impressed with his knowledge of fingerprinting and photography that he hired him on the spot.

Of course, the fact that Buddy rode a 1927 red Indian Ace motorcycle was probably the deciding factor, since Sheriff Burns had heard that the New York Police Department bought nothing but Indian Aces for their crack motorcycle police squad. Buddy’s motorcycle gave Verna a headache every time he came roaring up to the house. But it gave Roy Burns the right to brag that Darling had the only mounted sheriff’s deputy in all of southern Alabama.

“Buddy?” Mr. Norris shook his head. “Naw, he’s out on a case.” He liked this, so he said it again, louder. “He’s went out on a case. Sheriff come by in his automobile and told him to ride out to the Ralph Murphy place. At the end of Briarwood Road, out by Jericho.”

“What’s going on out there?”

“Jailbreak.” Mr. Norris was enjoying himself

“From the prison farm, I reckon.” Prison farm guards with rifles sat on their horses and watched the work parties, but occasionally somebody, or a pair or a trio of somebodies, would walk off and head for the trees. If they didn’t get shot, they could be hard to find out there in the woods.

“cup.”

“Have they found them yet?” she asked. “The escapees, I mean.” Verna wasn’t all that anxious, but she knew that many people in town would be concerned. Once, years before, an escaped prisoner had made his way to Darling. Desperate, he’d broken into the diner for food and into Mann’s Mercantile for clothing to replace his prison stripes. He’d jumped a train and gotten as far as Montgomery before the police caught up with him, and until then, everybody in town was on pins and needles, wondering where he was.

“Found ’em?” Mr. Norris said. “Haven’t heard.”

No, of course he hadn’t. Mr. Norris refused to have a telephone, which made Buddy so mad he could spit. As a deputy, he said, he needed to be on the line, and kept threatening to get himself his own place, just so he could have a phone. As it was, if the sheriff needed Buddy, he had to call Verna or Mrs. Aylmer, on the other side of the Norris house, and one or the other would run over to get him.

They reached the back door, and Verna opened the screen and set the bucket on the wash bench just inside.

“Why don’t you jes’ come on into the kitchen and help me snap them beans?” Mr. Norris asked.

Verna tried not to laugh. If she went in with him, pretty soon she’d have all the beans snapped and he’d be asking her to cook them—and bake a batch of cornbread, to boot. “Sorry. I’ve got to get back and finish my hoeing.”

He sighed. “Well, when Buddy gets home, you come on back over here an’ he’ll tell you all about the jailbreak.” He slanted her a cagey look. “Or I c’n send him over there.” Mr. Norris was always trying to persuade Buddy that he ought to court Verna, in spite of the fact that she was a dozen years older and a head taller.

“I’ll come over if I’m not busy,” Verna said briskly. She didn’t want to encourage Mr. Norris’ romantic efforts. She and Buddy definitely were not a match.

An hour later, garden chores done and Clyde whistled home from Racer’s pasture, Verna settled down at the kitchen table with a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich and two molasses cookies she’d saved back from the batch she took to the Dahlias’ meeting that afternoon—which were all gone, of course. The Dahlias loved anything sweet, and these were just sweet enough, and spicy. She always put more ginger in them than most people did.

Finished with her meal, she settled down to drink her coffee and read her library
book—The Circular Staircase
, by Mary Roberts Rinehart. She had already read every single one of the detective novels the Darling Library had on its shelves (not a great many—it was a small library) and was reading the best ones for the second and third time. But that didn’t spoil the pleasure, for it was her opinion that a good novel, especially a good mystery, deserved more than one reading. Verna was especially fond of sleuths like Miss Rachel Innes in
The Circular Staircase
, who was clear-sighted and practical and knew exactly what questions to ask, even when she was scared half out of her wits. And Maude Silver, in The Grey Mask, by Patricia Wentworth. Miss Silver was a former governess, fond of knitting and quoting Tennyson, who had set up shop as a private inquiry agent. Verna could almost imagine herself in the role of Miss Silver (except that she’d never had the patience for knitting) and fervently hoped that Miss Wentworth would write more books.

Her reading was interrupted by the telephone. Two longs and a short. It was Verna’s ring, although the four other Larkspur Lane families who shared the line—the Wilsons next door, then the Newmans, the Ferrells, and the Snows at the other end of the block (their house fronted on Rosemont, but they were on the Larkspur line)—were probably picking up their receivers and putting their hands over the mouthpieces so nobody could hear them breathing and know they were listening in. This effort at secrecy was silly, of course, because everybody listened in and everybody else knew it. Some folks now were getting private lines, but most of Verna’s friends and neighbors said they would rather be on a party line. How else would they get the news?

The call was from Myra May, on duty at the switchboard in the diner’s back room. There were four operators on the exchange, Myra May, Violet Sims, Olive LeRoy (Maude LeRoy’s youngest daughter), and Lenore Looper (Olive’s friend). Each worked an eight-hour shift, so the board was covered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There wasn’t that much telephone traffic, though, so Myra May and Violet also waited tables and handled the counter at the diner, also not a very demanding job, now that the diner’s business had fallen off.

“Verna, is that you?” Myra May asked when Verna said, “Hello.” With so many people sharing a line, it always paid to know who was talking.

“Yes, it’s me, Myra May,” Verna replied. “What’s going on?”

“Doc Roberts called for Buddy Norris. The doc asked me to ask you to go next door and tell Mr. Norris that Buddy’ll be late gettin’ home tonight, but not to worry. Doc Roberts is patchin’ him up. He’ll drive him home when he’s done.”

“Patching him up?” Verna asked, surprised. “Why? What happened?”

“I don’t know the details, but there was some shootin’ out at Ralph Murphy’s place late this afternoon.”

“Shooting!” Verna exclaimed. She knew perfectly well that Myra May wasn’t going to tell her everything all at once. She always strung the story out as long as she could, so that everybody who wanted to get on the line had time to get there, and she didn’t have to repeat. In Darling, this was a much appreciated courtesy.

“Right,” Myra May said. “Shootin’. As in guns. Bang bang.”

“Well, my heavens. Did Buddy get shot? I hope he isn’t too badly hurt.”

“Nope. It wasn’t Buddy that got shot.”

“Well, who?”

“The Negro who busted out of the prison farm. Didn’t kill him, though. At least not so far as Doc Roberts said.”

“What happened to Buddy, then?”

“Ran his motorcycle through Ralph’s corncrib and broke his arm.”

Verna had to stifle a laugh. “The same one that got broke before?”

“Nope. The other one. Jed Snow drove him back to town and dropped him off at Doc Roberts’ office. Guess Buddy’ll have to get somebody to fetch his motorcycle later. It’s still stuck in the wall of Ralph’s corncrib.”