The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady (10 page)

The square looked even spiffier than usual, Buddy thought. In honor of the Fourth of July celebration next week, the members of the American Legion Post had already planted a festive row of little American flags around the courthouse. They had also hung rug-size American and Confederate flags from the courthouse windows, draped bunting from the streetlights around the square, and slung a big banner across Robert E. Lee Street, declaring, DARLING: THE BEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE SOUTH.

The Fourth was always a crackerjack day, featuring a
swell parade, with the Academy marching band, veterans of the War Between the States (sadly, they were fewer in number every year), and a float featuring Miss Darling and Little Miss Darling. And best of all, the CCC camp boys, nearly two hundred of them, would be there to march, wearing their uniforms and carrying shovels over their shoulders instead of guns—“Roosevelt's Tree Army,” people were calling it. President Roosevelt was a tree man himself, it was said, having reforested his family's depleted land on the Hudson River by planting hundreds of thousands of trees.

Darling itself had a great many trees, which helped to make it beautiful. While Buddy was no expert on the matter, he subscribed to the opinion that when a town's surroundings were clean and pleasant, people were more contented and less likely to commit crimes. Of course, there would always be a few malcontents complaining about this and that and the other thing, and occasional terrible crimes, like what had happened to Rona Jean. But for the most part, people thought their little town was a fine place to live, especially now that the camp was established and there were more jobs and more money to spend. And soon there would be more trees, thanks to the CCC boys.

Trees had been an important part of Darling's life from the very beginning. The town was nestled in the gently rolling hills a few miles east of the Alabama River and seventy miles north of Mobile. Buddy had often heard Bessie Bloodworth, the town's historian, tell the story of its founding. According to her, it had been established in the early 1800s by Joseph P. Darling, a Virginian who was following a faint wagon trail through the area. With him were his wife, five children, two slaves, a team of oxen, a pair of milk cows, and a horse. Joseph P. was on his way to create a cotton plantation on the Mississippi River, but his wife was sick and tired
of bouncing along in that wagon day in and day out, baking biscuits over a campfire and washing diapers in a lard bucket. At this point in her story, Bessie would repeat what she thought Mrs. Darling might have said.

“You can do as you like, Mr. Darling, but I am not ridin' another mile in that blessed wagon. If you're lookin' for your meals and your washin' to be done reg'lar, right here is where you'll find 'em.”

Mr. Darling (who was fond of his grub and liked a clean shirt every now and then) surveyed the dense stands of timber and the fertile soils, the nearby river and the fast-flowing creek beside which they were camped, and—all things considered, but especially the grub—decided that the little valley might be a good place to live, after all. He cut down enough pine trees to build a barn and two log cabins, a big one for his family and a small one for his slaves. Then (because Mr. Darling's interests took an entrepreneurial turn) he cut down more trees and built the Darling General Store (now Mann's Mercantile). Then he ordered some store stock, put on an apron, and waited for the customers to come.

And come they did. In those early days, the hills were covered with a virgin forest of loblolly and longleaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the river bottom, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore and pecan anywhere their roots could find good water. Hearing that the timber was so fine, Mr. Darling's cousin came from Virginia to build a sawmill, so that all those pine trees could be turned into boards for houses and barns. And houses and barns were needed, because the settlers who had also heard of the plentiful timber and fertile soil were also on their way.

Since the settlers were mostly farmers, they cleared the land for crops by cutting even more trees. In fact, over the next few decades, lumber became a very profitable business, in part
because the Alabama River could be used to float the logs in huge rafts down to the port city of Mobile, on Mobile Bay. Before long, the lumber industry in Mobile was loading millions of feet of sawn boards on ships bound for Cuba, Europe, South America, and even the California gold fields. About the same time, the demand for paper began to rise, and paper mills sprouted like mushrooms throughout Alabama's forests, turning the low-grade timber to paper and shipping it via the newly built railroads to major cities all over the country.

But since it never occurred to anybody that they ought to plant more trees to replace the trees that had been cut down, it wasn't long before pretty much all of the original forest had totally disappeared. The hillsides were starkly denuded, the soil was eroding, and even people who didn't know a loblolly from a longleaf had begun to understand that something had to be done to save the land.

Which was, Buddy thought as he slowed to let a little girl holding on to a big red balloon skip across the street in front of him, maybe the biggest reason to be grateful to the CCC. Speaking at a recent town meeting, the commandant had announced that over the next two years, the camp was scheduled to receive half a million pine seedlings, fifty thousand black locusts, two thousand five hundred catalpa, and (to help control soil erosion) a quarter of a million kudzu crowns. The pines would mostly be fast-growing loblollies that could put on a couple of feet of height a year. This meant that within a decade, the trees would be twenty feet tall and ready for harvest—a more selective harvest this time, which would leave enough trees standing to prevent erosion and ensure the continuity of the forest. The CCC boys would begin planting in January (tree-planting time), on several thousand cut-over acres out by Briar's Swamp. When they were finished with that section, they would go on to others. This had been
welcome news, and the commandant (Buddy had forgotten his name) had been given a big round of applause.

Buddy shifted into second gear and made a left turn onto Franklin. He drove west for half a block and turned right into the alley behind Snow's Farm Supply. The sheriff's office was located in what had been a small frame house on the back of the lot, and the jail was upstairs over the Farm Supply. This handy arrangement made it easy to keep an eye on the jail, which was usually occupied only on Saturday night and Sunday by one or two of the local fellows who had indulged a little too freely in the local moonshine. Following the practice of his predecessor, Buddy booked them on drunk and disorderly, let them sleep it off overnight, then released them on Sunday in time to get cleaned up and shaved and make it to morning worship at the church of their choice—in lieu of a fine. Sheriff Burns (himself a fervent Methodist) had liked to brag that some of his D and Ds had gotten saved and sworn off the bottle, at least for a while.

Wayne Springer's old 1927 Chevy was parked on the gravel strip in front of the office, and the COME IN sign hung face out on the front door, which meant that the office was open. Buddy went in and slung his hat onto the wall peg.

“Yo, Springer,” he called. The place smelled like fresh coffee.

“Back here,” Wayne replied.

Buddy found his deputy hunched with a magnifying glass over fingerprint cards, at the scarred pine-topped table in what once had been the back bedroom, now a workroom and conference room. A Royal typewriter sat on the table (the deputy was a pretty good typist), and on a shelf beside the table, a radio was playing “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.” Wayne reached over and turned down the volume. The coffee percolator was burping on the hot plate beside it, and
Buddy poured himself a mug. He liked it black and strong, which was a good thing, because when Wayne brewed it, that's how it was. Strong enough to lift a locomotive.

Wayne Springer was tall and rail-thin, with a beaked nose that looked as if he had inherited it from a Cherokee ancestor (which he had), in a narrow, sun-darkened face, and he preferred a battered felt cowboy hat to his deputy's uniform cap. Buddy had hired him because he had five years of experience as a deputy over in Jefferson County, where he'd worked with a bigger and more up-to-date sheriff's office and had gone through a law enforcement training program.

But what was even more important to Buddy's way of thinking was the fact that Wayne came from Birmingham. He had no local baggage or history or kin, unlike the dozen or so other men who had applied for the job, five or six of them with daddies who had political muscle in the county and fully expected to be hired. Buddy thought it would be better to bring in somebody who was essentially unknown and didn't have any special friends or foes. Wayne had smarts and he definitely knew his business. He also had more experience than Buddy, especially when it came to handling a .38 Special, the standard cop gun. (Buddy was a fair shot when it came to pinging cans on a fence, but he'd never gotten used to the idea that he might actually have to shoot
somebody
.) And so far, Wayne had been easy to work with. But they were still trying each other out.

Buddy peered over Wayne's shoulder. The deputy had dusted the dark surfaces of Myra May's car with Chemist Gray Powder made of mercury and chalk, then lifted the prints with strips of that handy new Scotch cellulose tape. Still at the scene, he had transferred the print tapes to individual cards and labeled them with the site where he'd lifted them (the steering wheel, the gearshift, the door handle) and
the date and time. Now, he was sorting and classifying them, getting ready to make comparisons.

Wayne sniffed. “You been usin'
perfume
?”

“I was searching the victim's bedroom,” Buddy said. “Is it bad?”

“Not as long as you don't get too close.”

Buddy stepped back. Looking down at Wayne's work, he said, “You get the prints of the ladies at the diner and the Telephone Exchange?”

“Yeah.” Wayne nodded at a thin stack of cards at the corner of the table. “From all the weepin' and moanin' that went on, you'da thought their fingers would be purple forever.” The fingerprint kit contained a purple ink pad that some people objected to using.

“Females are like that,” Buddy remarked. “Where you at on that job?”

“Just getting organized. There were lots of prints on that car, but I'm focusing on the doors, the front seat area, and the dashboard. Miss Mosswell is supposed to be giving me a list of everybody that's been in that car in the past month—could be three or four more, on top of the ladies I printed this morning. They'll all have to be excluded.” Wayne's voice was flat, uninflected, unexcited. Buddy liked that about him. “Anything that's left could belong to our man. There's a good one on the driver's side door handle that I haven't found a match for yet. A thumbprint with a scar.”

“Yeah. Well, stay with it, Wayne,” Buddy said, congratulating himself on hiring somebody precise and methodical enough to do a picky job like matching prints. “Could be what's needed to get a conviction.”

He went into his office, in what had once been the dining room of the house, and set the coffee mug on the corner of his desk. Taking down a large brown envelope and a smaller
white envelope from a supply shelf, he slid Rona Jean's diary into the brown one and the $140 in twenties into the white one, labeled both, and dated them. He raised his voice, speaking through the open door.

“Nothing from Doc Roberts yet, I reckon?” He was asking just to be sure. Even if the doctor had gotten to Rona Jean first thing, he wouldn't call with the results until after he'd written the report—unless there was something extra special he wanted to pass on.

“Nope,” Wayne replied. “Nothing. Been quiet as the grave since I got here. Except for the weather report, just before you came in. Might want to keep an eye on the sky today.”

“Oh yeah?” Buddy opened the top drawer of the scarred wooden desk and slid the envelopes into it. “What's happening?”

“Storm pushin' in off the Gulf right about now. Could be a hurricane.”

“Just what we need,” Buddy said darkly, remembering the last hurricane that had blown through Darling, maybe ten years before. It had crossed the Gulf Coast west of Mobile, ripped the roof off Jake Pritchard's Standard Oil station, blown in windows and torn up fine old trees all over town, and sent Pine Mill Creek out of its banks, flooding pastures and drowning old Tate Haggard's cows. Buddy had been in high school then, and remembered that the sheriff had imposed a curfew and helped the mayor organize the cleanup. He probably ought to talk to Jed Snow, the current mayor, and figure out what they should do if this storm turned out to be a bad one.

He was reaching for the phone to call Jed when it rang. “Sheriff's Office,” he said. He always liked what came next. “Sheriff Norris speakin'.”

“Buddy, this is Edna Fay Roberts,” a woman's voice said. “Doc called a little while ago. He wanted me to call you.”

Buddy sat down, picked up a pencil, and pulled a piece of scratch paper toward him. Edna Fay was the doctor's nurse as well as his wife. She might have news about the autopsy. “Is he finished?”

“Yes.” Then, in a louder voice, she said, “Henrietta Conrad, if you're still on the line, I'll thank you to get off, if you don't mind.” There was a pause and then a click, as the Exchange operator broke the connection. “Those switchboard girls,” Edna Fay said, in a tsk-tsk voice. “Myra May tells them it's against the rules for them to listen in, but they do it anyway, especially on the doctor's line. Probably on the sheriff's line, too. They like to think they're getting the latest news hot off the wire.”

“That's the truth,” Buddy remarked pleasantly, putting down the pencil and taking a sip of coffee. He had known Edna Fay since he was a kid, for he'd been accident prone and frequently ended up in Doc Roberts' office getting stitched and splinted. In his experience, the lady was a talker. If you gave her an inch, she'd take the rest of the morning, and by noon, you'd be no wiser. But there was no hurrying her. She had to go at her own pace.