The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

The Beauty Bower opened promptly at nine in the morning, after Beulah saw Hank Jr. and daughter Spoonie off to school. Then she took out her hair curlers (she had traded her bob for curls), applied her makeup, and donned a freshly ironed pink-ruffled apron, with Beulah’s Beauty Bower embroidered across the bib. Bettina, similarly aproned, was already at work, sweeping the floor, folding towels, and making sure that the customers’ cover-up capes were clean and ready to be deployed.

Each day brought its regulars—the Mondays, Tuesdays, and so forth. These ladies had gotten so used to meeting at Beulah’s that it was more like a tea party than anything else, especially since somebody usually brought cookies while somebody else brought cupcakes, to go with the coffee percolating in Beulah’s kitchen and the iced tea in the icebox. There were also the “irregulars,” as Bettina called them, women who never could remember what day their appointment was or whether they had made one at all and just stopped by to see if Beulah or Bettina could fit them in. They usually could, after a short wait, which nobody minded because the Beauty Bower was such a good place to catch up on the news.

The Mondays included Myra May Mosswell and Miss Dorothy Rogers (nine o’clock), Mrs. Voleen Johnson and Leona Ruth Adcock (nine thirty). Beulah especially liked having Myra May first on Monday morning. That way, they got to hear a full report of all the weekend goings-on, straight from the telephone exchange and the Darling Diner. It got the week started off right.

“Well, dear?” Beulah asked, when Myra May was stretched out flat in the chair with her feet on a stool and her toes turned up in her peep-toed shoes (Myra May liked to paint her toenails red so they showed through her rayon stockings). Her eyes were closed, and her head lay in the shampoo tray. “Got any good news to tell us? Have they captured that escaped convict yet?” Beulah poured a pitcher of water over Myra May’s dark hair.

Myra May opened her eyes and squinted up. “Water’s too cold, Beulah. I like it hot, remember?” Beulah poured some more hot water out of the teakettle into the pitcher and tried again.

Myra May smiled blissfully and closed her eyes. “No, they haven’t captured him. Sheriff Burns says they’re still looking. But there’s some other news. Somebody stole a car on Saturday night”

“Stole a car!” Beulah and Bettina exclaimed in astonished unison.

“Well, my goodness gracious,” Miss Rogers said. She was in the same prone position as Myra May, toes up (sensibly shod) and head in the shampoo tray. “A car theft? In Darling?”

“Whose car?” asked Bettina, scrubbing Miss Rogers’ gray hair energetically.

“Watch your fingernails, Bettina,” Miss Rogers reprimanded. “And the water could be a little cooler. I don’t like hot water.”

“The car was a roadster,” Myra May said. “Pontiac, near new. Stolen from in front of Fred Harper’s house. Belonged to his brother. He phoned the sheriff around midnight Saturday night to say it’d been stolen.”

“Who stole it?” Beulah asked, vigorously applying shampoo.

“Mr. Harper said he didn’t know. A man and a young woman. They—”

“A woman?” Miss Rogers interrupted sharply. “Really. I don’t know what girls these days are coming to. Dancing, smoking, drinking, taking the Lord’s name in vain.” She sniffed. “And now stealing cars. Society is going to utter wrack and ruin.”

“Was Mr. Harper’s brother visiting?” Beulah asked.

“No,” Myra May replied. “He’d borrowed the car. Mr. Harper, that is. His brother is a dentist, lives over in Monroeville.” She opened her eyes. “That feels lovely, Beulah, but you can rub a little harder.”

“Lord sakes. A girl?” Bettina was shocked. “What’ll Sheriff Burns do if he catches her? Will he put her in jail along with Clipper Rexnoth?” Clipper could be counted on to get roaring drunk a couple of weekends a month and be confined to jail to sober up safely.

“That will never do,” Miss Rogers said definitively. She fished for a hankie in her brown-checked bosom (Miss Rogers always wore brown—checks, stripes, plaids, or plain) and wiped a drop of water off her cheek. “The sheriff will have to find somewhere else to put her.”

“There’s an old lockup in the cellar of the courthouse,” Bettina offered, pouring a pitcher of rinse water through Miss Rogers’ hair. “I saw it once, years back. Used to be full of old records, but they got wet and mildewed, so they had to put ’em somewhere else.”

“That won’t do, either,” Miss Rogers said. “It’s like a dungeon down there. She’d catch her death of pneumonia.”

“What did she look like?” Beulah asked Myra May. “The girl who stole the car, I mean.”

“All I know is what Mr. Harper told the sheriff,” Myra May replied. “She was—”

The telephone on the wall rang. Beulah was the one person on the street who had a private line, because the phone rang so often with calls from women wanting their hair done that the constant jangling would be a nuisance to anybody else on the line.