The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

Lizzy was glad. She’d had a terrible adolescent crush on Bent Moseley in the early days of her employment and had mooned around, allowing herself to suffer greatly from unrequited love. But then he had married blond, beautiful Adabelle, a willowy debutante from a wealthy Birmingham family. They had two children, both girls who were blond and very pretty like their mother, and several years back had built a fancy house on the outskirts of town, near the Cypress Country Club. Adabelle’s father had helped build the house. He had helped to further Mr. Moseley’s political career, too, although it was rumored that he hadn’t been too happy when his son-in-law returned to private practice. Now, Lizzy didn’t allow herself to think of her earlier crush on Mr. Moseley—not very often, anyway. She just enjoyed working with him, did the best she could to make his work easier, and kept her romantic fire banked. These days, she wasn’t even sure it was still burning.

This Monday was different from the usual because of the excitement of what had happened out at the Murphy place on Sunday afternoon, at the very hour that the Dahlias were holding their meeting. Mr. Moseley told her all the details when he came into the office. Two men had escaped from the prison farm. One had been shot in the shoulder—he was back at the farm, probably in solitary. The other had gotten away, Mr. Moseley said. He’d run back toward Briar’s Swamp along the river bend, but the dogs had lost the scent, which was very odd, because Sheriff Burns was always bragging that the dogs were the best in the whole state. Anyway, they hadn’t yet turned up his trail, as of this morning. Buddy Norris had tried to give chase on his Indian Ace motorcycle, but he hit a chicken, lost control, and rammed his motorcycle into the corncrib. The chicken only lost a few feathers, but Buddy ended up with a broken arm.

“The same one that got broken before?” Lizzy asked, trying not to smile. It wasn’t funny, she supposed, at least, not to Buddy.

“The other one,” Mr. Moseley replied. His tone was grave but his dark eyes were twinkling and the corner of his mouth twitched. “The one that didn’t get broken ... before.” The husband of the woman Buddy had been too friendly with had consulted Mr. Moseley about filing for divorce, but he and his wife had apparently made up, or maybe they decided that a divorce would be too expensive. Anyway, the wronged husband hadn’t kept his second appointment.

“I hope Buddy’s going to be all right,” Lizzy said primly.

“Doc Roberts says he’ll be fine. Not too sure about that motorcycle, though. Jed Snow said the frame was pretty badly bent.”

“That’s too bad,” Lizzy said. “Buddy’s really crazy about that motorcycle.” He rode it up and down Darling’s streets on patrol—at least, that’s what he called it. Lizzy supposed that patrolling was intended to be a good thing, except that Darling’s residential streets weren’t paved and Buddy usually rode so fast that if something was wrong or somebody was trying to flag him down or get his attention, he’d never notice. Mostly all he did was raise the dust, which hung like a cloud of smoke over the street long after he and his motorcycle were out of sight.

“I don’t suppose he’d be happy patrolling on a bicycle, would he?” she added wistfully.

“I doubt it,” Mr. Moseley replied. “But with that escapee on the loose, it would be a good idea to have somebody patrolling. I don’t suppose he’ll come in this direction—he’s probably aiming to stay out in the woods. But some folks are going to fret until he’s captured.” He looked at his watch. “Well, now, Lizzy. Who’ve we got coming in first this morning?”

The morning’s appointments marched briskly toward noon, when they closed the office for an hour. Mr. Moseley usually went home for a sit-down dinner with Adabelle, meat and potatoes and vegetables and dessert. But Lizzy always brought her lunch and ate on the grassy lawn behind the courthouse, under the chinaberry tree, where she was joined by two or three of the women who worked in the businesses around the courthouse square.

Today’s group was small, just Bunny Scott (who sold cosmetics at Lima’s Drugstore and gave makeup demonstrations for ladies’ clubs in the area) and fellow Dahlia Verna Tidwell, who had some news about yesterday’s prison farm escape and the efforts to capture the escapees. Verna, it turned out, had seen Dr. Roberts bringing Buddy home, his arm in a sling and a bandage across his forehead after he had wrecked his red Indian Ace at Ralph’s place.

“Guess that’ll teach him to ram that old motorcycle of his into other people’s corncribs,” Bunny said, and giggled in a way that told them she wasn’t talking about motorcycles and corncribs.

“How you talk, Bunny,” Lizzy said, pretending to be shocked.