The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

Bunny (she hated her real name, which was Eva Louise) was in her early twenties and liked to shock. Today, she was wearing a lipstick-red silky rayon dress with a tantalizing V-neckline that exhibited her ample endowments and must have shocked some of Lester Lima’s drugstore customers, including Mr. Lima himself, who was a deacon in the Baptist church. He had told Earlynne Biddle (Earlynne’s son Benny was a soda jerk at the drugstore soda fountain) that he would never have hired Bunny, except that she was the Baptist preacher’s wife’s cousin’s daughter. According to Earlynne (who had told this to Lizzy), the girl had grown up over in Monroeville, where she lived with her widowed mother until the previous winter, when she had moved to Darling.

However, since Bunny sold cosmetics, her peroxided hair, lacquered nails, and full figure weren’t entirely bad things, at least as far as the drugstore’s business was concerned. Benny Biddle had told his mother that Bunny was bringing in a whole passel of new customers. The men in town who would never be caught dead at a cosmetics counter were coming in to shop for perfume and lipstick and such for their wives and girlfriends. They didn’t always have money to buy, Benny said, but they certainly liked to shop.

“Well,” Verna said, “it must have been pretty scary for Lucy, out there with the two kids and those escapees on the loose. Guess that was why she called and asked Jed to come out”

“Oh, really?” Bunny took a shiny gold lipstick tube and a matching gold compact out of her purse. Looking into the mirror, she began to apply bright red lipstick. She pursed her lips, applied a second coat, then smoothed it with her little finger, the nail enameled bright red. “Lucy called Jed? Is that what you said?”

Verna nodded. “Myra May told me. She wasn’t on the board when the call went through. That was Violet. But it was definitely Lucy calling.”

“My, my!” Bunny’s eyebrows, carefully plucked, were arched up under her bangs. “That’s interesting, I must say.” She closed her compact and put it away. “I was over at the Snows’ last night—not Jed and Ophelia’s place, but his folks’. I met Sis last winter when I first moved here, y’see, and I stopped to say hi when I saw her out front, keeping an eye on her kiddos. We all sat around and talked for a while. Jed’s wife, Ophelia, was there. She said it was Sheriff Burns who called and asked Jed to go out to the Murphy place. She was kinda curious about that, which is why I remember it”

“Hmm,” Verna said, in a skeptical tone that implied all manner of things.

Lizzy, who noticed Verna’s skepticism, folded the wax paper in which she had wrapped her egg salad sandwich.

There was a silence. Bunny took out a tiny bottle of My Sin and began applying it to her wrists and behind her ears. She was wearing an expensive-looking bracelet with geometric silver-plated links and rhinestones that caught the sun and fired it back. “Far be it from me to gossip,” she said carelessly, “but last week, Mrs. Adcock told me that Jed Snow and Lucy Murphy are quite the—”

“I’m sure there’s nothing to it,” Lizzy interrupted, before Bunny could tell them what Mrs. Adcock had said. Didn’t matter whether there was any truth behind the talk—all by itself, talk could cause plenty of trouble. Working in a law office had taught her that, among other things. She folded the wax paper with her brown-paper lunch sack and put them both into her purse. “Anyway, it’s none of our business.”

But she couldn’t help feeling sad for Ophelia, who was always so cheerful and never had a bad word to say about anybody. And for Ralph, who had met Lucy at a church social when she came over from Atlanta to visit her aunt Rachel. He’d been so smitten that he’d proposed to her inside a week, and they were married so fast it made everybody’s head swim. Lizzy wondered whether Lucy had known what she was getting into. The Murphy place was a bit ... well, primitive, especially for a girl who was raised in Atlanta, with all those modern things—electricity and flush toilets and trolley cars. And Ralph’s boys were in their teens and sassy, since they hadn’t had a mother for as long as they could remember. She wouldn’t be surprised if Lucy gave it up and went back to Atlanta.

Verna took an apple out of her bag. “So,” she said, changing the subject. “Anybody go to the picture show this weekend?”

She nodded across the street, where the marquee of the Palace Theater announced a double bill. Applause (a talkie starring Helen Morgan), paired with Tarzan the Tiger. Tarzan was a silent film, so Don Greer, who owned the theater, hired Mrs. LeVaughn to play the piano. The younger people like the talkies but the older folks said they liked it better when Mrs. LeVaughn played the piano and the actors and actresses didn’t talk, leaving more to the imagination. In an effort to please both audiences, Mr. Greer usually tried to book one talkie and one silent.