The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (25 page)

She handed it back to Lizzy. “Sounds pretty definite to me. If I got a letter like that, I’d be upset. Maybe frantic, depending on whether I really liked the guy.” But maybe it wasn’t a case of Bunny really liking—or even loving—Bent Moseley. Maybe she’d seen him as a meal ticket, and when he dumped her, she had threatened to tell his wife about their relationship. If she threatened him, how would he react? Would he be scared? Would he be scared enough to kill her? To Lizzy, she said, “What are you going to do with that letter?”

Lizzy straightened her shoulders. “I’m going to give it back to him.” She put the letter into her purse.

Verna frowned. “You’re absolutely, positively certain that he didn’t have anything to do with Bunny’s death?”

“I am positive.” Lizzy’s voice was firm. “I know Mr. Moseley, Verna. He would never do something like that. The trouble is that he doesn’t have an alibi for Saturday night. His wife was in Birmingham with the girls and he was home alone.”

So that explained her unexpected remark about Mr. Lima’s alibi, Verna thought. She opened her mouth to tell Lizzy to put the letter back. If she took it, she’d be obstructing justice or something awful like that.

But she didn’t. After all, she herself had taken those earrings—who was she to tell Lizzy what to do?

Instead, she turned back to the drawer. “Here are the earrings I told you about,” she said. She took the box out of the drawer, and opened it.

“Oh!” Lizzy exclaimed, in an awed tone. “Oh, my goodness. They’re beautiful!”

“Do you think Mr. Moseley gave them to her?”

“I asked him point-blank,” Lizzy replied. “He says he didn’t.”

“That must have been some conversation,” Verna said with a dry chuckle. “Wish I’d been a fly on the wall.” She pulled the deposit book out of the drawer. “Just look at how much she was socking away every week, Lizzy. Where in the world was she getting it?”

Lizzy leafed through the book. “Do you suppose she was ... was blackmailing someone?”

Verna eyed her. “What made you think of that?”

“Mr. Moseley said he was lucky she hadn’t tried to blackmail him.”

“Hmm,” Verna said. She wondered, briefly, if Mr. Moseley had said that to Lizzy in order to allay any suspicions she might have had.

“I think he was telling the truth,” Lizzy said, turning the pages in the deposit book. “He seemed to want to tell me everything. Too much, really. I didn’t want to hear it, especially the business about him and his wife getting a divorce.”

“My goodness,” Verna said softly, wondering if this would change Lizzy’s relationship to him—or to Grady Alexander.

“What about Mr. Lima?” Lizzy asked.

“What about him?”

“Maybe Bunny was blackmailing him.” She turned another page.

“It’s a possibility,” Verna replied. In fact, the more she thought about the abrupt departure of the Limas “on vacation,” the more suspicious it looked.

Lizzy glanced down at the paper Bunny had been writing on. “Maxwell Woodburn,” she mused, frowning. “I’m sure he doesn’t live in Darling. I wonder who he is.”

“Amanda Blake thought he might be Bunny’s pen pal in Montgomery,” Verna replied. “Maybe he’s the source of that extra ten dollars a week. Maybe Bunny was blackmailing
him.”

“I doubt you’d blackmail somebody you thought you might marry,” Lizzy said. “I wouldn’t, anyway.”

“Maybe she was using blackmail to get him to marry her,” Verna suggested.

“Well, if he was her pen pal,” Lizzy said reasonably, “there ought to be more letters around here somewhere.”

Agreeing, Verna pulled out the drawer of the dressing table and began to rummage through it. As she did, she uncovered the photograph. “See?” she said, holding it up.

“It’s Bunny!” Lizzy exclaimed.

Verna chuckled wryly. “Bunny in her teddy. And that’s the teddy, over there on the floor. Shocking, isn’t it?”

“Yes, in a way. You wouldn’t catch me sitting on the hood of a car in my teddy, letting some guy photograph me.” Still holding the deposit book, Lizzy took the photo and began to study it. “You know, Verna, there’s something about—”

“Shhh!” Verna put a hand on Lizzy’s arm. “Somebody’s coming!” From the direction of the stairs, they heard the
clack-clack
of pumps on bare wood, and the sound of Mrs. Brewster’s voice.

Lizzy gasped. “What do we do?”

“Quick!” Verna whispered. “We have to hide! Come on!”

Grabbing Lizzy, she pulled her behind the curtain that was strung diagonally across one corner. There was barely room for them. Holding their breaths, they crowded against the wall, behind Bunny’s dresses. Verna hoped to heaven that the curtain wasn’t moving and that their shoes couldn’t be seen below its hem.

“—the only room I have available at the moment,” Mrs. Brewster was saying, as the door opened. The footsteps came into the room, but not very far. “The unfortunate girl’s belongings are still here, as you can see. But I can have the room cleaned and thoroughly aired for your daughter, whenever you need it.”

A woman’s high-pitched voice said, critically, “Is this the largest you have? I’m not sure that my Sue Ellen would be happy in such a small room.” She sniffed. “And what is that odor? Some sort of exotic perfume, I suppose.” Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “You say that the young woman was killed in an automobile wreck?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Brewster said shortly. “My girls are usually quite trustworthy and follow the rules of the house without question. But this one—” She made a disdainful tsk-tsk. “I am sad to say that she was almost incorrigible.”

The scent of Bunny’s My Sin was overpowering, and Verna felt her nose tickling.

“Rules of the house,” the woman repeated thoughtfully. “You are strict with your boarders, then, Mrs. Brewster?”

Verna took a deep breath and pinched her nose to stop the tickle.

“Oh, absolutely,” Mrs. Brewster replied. “In fact, you can ask anyone in Darling. They will all tell you that I am extremely strict with my girls. Curfews, meals, visiting hours, the presence of young men in the house—I consider myself
in loco parentis,
and I watch over the young women with as much care and attention as their mothers. Your daughter is a treasure,” she added sanctimoniously, “and I pledge to guard her virtue with my life.”

Verna pinched harder, feeling that she was about to explode.

“Well, then,” the woman said, sounding mollified, “perhaps the room will do after all. My Sue Ellen is, as you say, a treasure, but she is a bit wild, and it would be a comfort to me to know that she is being watched carefully. One young man in particular is making quite a nuisance of himself. I have forbidden him to—”

The sneeze came just as the door closed behind them.

“Whew!” Lizzy breathed out. They listened as the
clack-clack
of heels receded down the hall. “That was a narrow escape.”

“What wretched old women,” Verna said in disgust. “Remind me never to behave that way when I get old.”

After a moment, they came out from behind the curtain. Verna went to the door and opened it a crack. They could hear the women’s voices drifting up from downstairs. “Sounds as if they’re in the parlor,” she whispered.

“In the parlor?” Lizzy’s eyes widened. “Then we can’t go down the stairs without being seen! We’re stuck here.”

“Maybe not,” Verna countered. “How good are you at climbing?” She stepped out into the hall and raised the window sash. It went up smoothly. “The girls use this as their secret exit, when they don’t want Mrs. Brewster to know that they’ve been out past curfew. You see that trellis? That’s how they do it.”

Lizzy looked out the window, onto the porch roof. “I’ve always been good at climbing trees, and this isn’t much different.” She hiked up her skirt. “And it seems like the easy way out, compared to trying to sneak past those two old dragons. Let’s go!”

A few minutes later, Verna and Lizzy were safely on the ground and out on the street, strolling nonchalantly down the block, arm in arm, and trying not to giggle.

Myra May’s shift at the switchboard behind the diner began at four in the afternoon five days a week and ended at midnight. Darling was a small town. Only about half of the residences had telephones and most of these were on party lines. Given people’s habit of listening in, a single phone conversation could keep as many as half a dozen people busy at once. Which meant that the switchboard operator’s job was normally pretty light, except when there was an emergency—like the day the convicts escaped and everybody was calling everybody else, trying to find out what was going on. Most afternoons and evenings, there were only five or six calls in an hour. Myra May got a lot of reading and knitting and letter-writing done during her shift.

This week, for instance, she was reading a book she’d gotten at the library. The library was small and Miss Rogers couldn’t buy many books, but this one had been donated. Myra May had picked it up, read the first page, and checked it out immediately—in spite of Miss Rogers, who had told her that it was written for children. It was called
The Secret of the Old Clock,
by Carolyn Keene, and featured a courageous, quick-witted sixteen-year-old girl named Nancy Drew. Myra May would’ve loved to have taken part in a few of Nancy’s adventures: finding a will hidden in an old clock, having a run-in with thieves, being overpowered by criminals and locked in an abandoned house. And all because Nancy was trying to help a poor, struggling family denied their share of a wealthy relative’s estate.

This afternoon, though, Myra May was having a hard time concentrating on the adventures of Nancy Drew, exciting as they were. She kept worrying about her friend Alice Ann and wondering whether the sheriff had arrested her yet. It didn’t seem so, for Mr. Johnson at the bank had telephoned Hiram Riley the accountant, and their conversation suggested that they still didn’t have all the evidence they needed to make an embezzlement charge stick. Mr. Johnson seemed certain, though, that Alice Ann had stolen the money—if only he and the bank examiner could figure out what she had done with it.

“Damned clever woman,” he had growled angrily. “Covered her tracks so well that we can’t follow. And she won’t tell us a blasted thing. Just cries and cries and claims to be innocent.”

“What’s the situation at the bank?” Mr. Riley had asked nervously.

“Same as it was.” Mr. Johnson sounded weary. “Precarious, I don’t mind telling you, but keep that to yourself. If we don’t locate that money ...” His voice became dramatic. “We’ll all be in for it, Hiram. The whole town. Bad times comin’, like a big black winter cloud rollin’ down from the north.”

Listening, Myra May thought that Mr. Johnson sounded just a bit too dramatic, which was unlike him. He usually talked like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and here he was, sounding like a Hardshell Baptist preaching Armageddon.

A few moments later, Mr. Johnson asked Myra May to connect him, long distance, with a man in the banking division of the state comptroller’s office in Montgomery. The conversation was too technical for Myra May to follow, but the gist of it seemed to be that Darling Savings and Trust was about to be put on the list of “troubled banks.” Myra May recognized this term because she had read it in the Mobile
Register
when a half-dozen Florida banks had failed the previous year. There was something about “undercapitalization” (she had no idea what that meant) and “unsecured loans” (that one she understood). But the central problem for the bank seemed to be, as Mr. Johnson put it darkly, the “malfeasance of a trusted bank employee,” who would be arrested as soon as the investigation was completed.

They hung up and Myra May sat there at the switchboard, feeling so sorry for poor Alice Ann that she could cry. And so angry at Mr. Johnson—that proud, puffed-up little man who was rich enough to buy and sell half the town and didn’t hesitate to foreclose on any poor soul who got behind on his payments—that she could just about spit nails.

While she was thinking this, there was a call from Florence Henderson, asking to be connected to her elderly mother so she could see if she needed any groceries from Hancock’s, since Florence was coming to town to shop. Her mother asked her to get a loaf of bread, a pound of sugar, and a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which should come to a total of eighteen cents (five cents for the bread, five for the sugar, eight for the corn flakes), which Mrs. Hancock should put on her mother’s account. Then Mr. Snow at the Farm Supply wanted to talk to Calvin Combs so he could ask about payment on an overdue bill for seeds planted the year before. It was a big bill, too, nearly nine dollars, but all Mrs. Combs could say (Mr. Combs was out in the field) was that they would try to pay something—maybe fifty cents—the next week or the week after. Last year’s crop hadn’t done too well because of the drought.

As she plugged in these calls, Myra May kept thinking about Alice Ann, trying to come up with something she could do to help. She knew very well that Alice Ann didn’t have it in her to steal money. What’s more, she was a Dahlia. The Dahlias ought to stand up for one another when there was trouble.