The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

Bunny wasn’t at the drugstore, as Verna discovered. Her glass display case gleamed and the cosmetics on the shelves behind it were attractively arranged, but Bunny herself was conspicuously absent.

“Dunno where she is.” Lester Lima was behind the pharmacy counter in the back of the shop, dressed in his usual long white coat, recording a prescription in a ledger. He glowered at Verna over the tops of his gold-rimmed glasses.

“Really?” Verna asked, surprised.

“Didn’t come in to work this mornin’. Didn’t let on she wasn’t comin’ in, either. You see her, Miz Tidwell, you tell her that she’s not gonna have a job here if she doesn’t come to work tomorrow, or at least tell me when she is comin’ to work. She’s too flirty, anyhow.” At Verna’s raised eyebrow, he cleared his throat and added sourly, “Likes to make up to the menfolks more’n she should.”

Verna suppressed the observation that Bunny’s flirtiness was probably good for business, although since Mr. Lima was a Baptist deacon, he likely took a dim view of that kind of advertising.

“Maybe she’s sick,” she said, now genuinely concerned. “Maybe I should ask Reverend Bledsoe’s wife. She’s cousin to Bunny’s mother, isn’t she? Maybe she knows—”

“Miz Bledsoe’s up in Nashville,” Lester Lima said. “Daughter had a baby last week.” His smile was a taut stretch of thin lips across stained teeth. “Anything I can help you with today, Miz Tidwell?”

Verna, feeling as if she’d just been told to go back to her pew and shut up, looked over his shoulder to the shelf behind him. “A bar of Camay soap, please,” she said, and handed over a nickel.

Verna was already thinking what to do. After work, she would walk over to Mrs. Brewster’s boardinghouse on Plum Street, where Bunny lived. The girl had probably come down with a cold and hadn’t thought to let Mr. Lima know that she wasn’t coming in.

The afternoon moved along briskly, as it usually did. Until last month, Coretta Cole had worked full-time with Verna. But tax revenues were down and Mr. Earle Scroggins, the probate clerk and Verna’s boss, had cut staff hours. Now Coretta only worked mornings, so Verna had the office to herself in the afternoons. She had a strongly managerial bent and enjoyed keeping things organized and straight, so she spent her time checking records, filing documents, and recording a few property tax payments (but not nearly enough to replenish the county coffers). She issued a license to Junior Prinney and Mary Louise Towerton, who were getting married at the First Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon, registered a birth certificate for the newest addition to the Ollie Cox family, and logged in a surveyor’s report on a property just outside of town.

She also dealt with Beatty Blackstone, who came in for his third visit in a couple of weeks. This time, he asked to examine the plat that included Mimosa, the street behind Camellia, where Mrs. Blackstone’s house—now the Dahlias’ clubhouse—was located. He didn’t just study the pages with a furrowed brow, either, as he had done earlier. He made notes. Detailed notes, to judge from the busy sound of his pencil scratching.

Verna wondered what Beatty Blackstone thought he was doing, searching through those old property records, but she didn’t ask. Mr. Scroggins was very strict about not asking questions, which she supposed was right, most of the time—although sometimes people got up to monkey business, especially where property titles and deeds and liens were concerned. Mr. Scroggins had been the probate clerk of Cypress County—that is, his friends and relations had reelected him to that important office every six years for the past eighteen. But he usually came in only once or twice a week, to ask if there was anything he was supposed to do, which there usually wasn’t. Mr. Scroggins had instructed Verna to take care of just about everything (even signing his name on official documents), and if people didn’t bother to read the name painted on the glass in the office door, they’d think she was probate clerk. Unless there was a good reason, she usually didn’t bother to enlighten them.

When the courthouse clock struck five, Verna put everything away, tidied the office, and watered the mother-in-law’s tongue in the green jardinière in the corner. Then she closed the venetian blinds on the tall windows and left.