The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

There were several places to board in Darling, depending on who you were and how long you planned to stay. Traveling salesmen or people in town for just a day or two stayed at the Old Alabama Hotel and took their meals in the dining room or across the square at the Darling Diner. Single fellows and men who worked on the railroad boarded by the week with Mr. and Mrs. Meeks, in an unpainted frame house two blocks west of the rail yard, and ate breakfast and supper at the Meeks’ table.

Widows and spinsters of a certain age who couldn’t or didn’t want to live by themselves boarded by the month with Bessie Bloodworth at the Magnolia Manor, next door to the Dahlias’ new clubhouse. The Manor had a vine-covered veranda across the front, where Bessie’s boarders sat out every night after supper with glasses of cold lemonade and their knitting until it got too dark to see. Bessie said she didn’t want people calling it the old-ladies’ home, so she named it Magnolia Manor and got Beulah to paint a pretty sign, which she hung beside the door.

The young working women in town—the two school teachers, Miss Patricia O’Conner, the new home demonstration agent, and Bunny—boarded with Mrs. Brewster, over on Plum Street. Mrs. Brewster was the soul of respectability and had a reputation for being strict, even by Darling’s standards. Curfew was at nine on weekdays and ten thirty on weekends. At the magic hour, Mrs. Brewster herself went around the house, locking all the doors and checking to make sure that “her girls” were in their rooms, where they ought to be. Breakfast was at six thirty in the morning and supper at six thirty in the evening (Mrs. Brewster didn’t serve noon dinner because all her girls went out to work). Those who missed breakfast or supper went hungry, since they weren’t allowed in the kitchen and weren’t permitted to have food in their rooms. There was a washhouse out back where they could do their laundry and a corner in the basement where they could iron. Or they could pay Cleo (the colored girl who came in on Mondays and Wednesdays) to do their washing and ironing for them. It wasn’t included in their board bill.

But Mrs. Brewster wasn’t entirely heartless. They could entertain their men friends on the front porch or in the parlor and were free to use the wind-up Victrola, so long as they played their own recordings (softly) and refrained from dancing. They could sit out with their men friends on the front porch until it got dark. Then they could sit in the parlor (on separate chairs, but not side by side on the sofa), so long as the door to Mrs. Brewster’s sitting room was left open. Mrs. Brewster herself always said she stood in loco parentis, which was supposed to mean that she was only doing what the mommas and daddies of “her girls” would want her to do. But her boarders thought she was just plain loco, and most moved out as soon as they could.

Verna had met Mrs. Brewster at numerous Darling events, but if she had expected to be greeted cordially, she would have been disappointed. Mrs. Brewster herself answered the front door and returned a grim frown when Verna asked to see Bunny.

“Miss Scott is not here.” Mrs. Brewster, a bosomy lady who always wore long-sleeved black with a little white lace around her throat and wrists, was from Chicago. She had married Mr. Brewster (now deceased) at the end of the Great War and had lived in Alabama ever since. But she had never “assimilated,” to use her word. She liked to say that she might’ve come to live in Dixie, but that didn’t mean she had to think Dixie or talk Dixie. She clipped her words and spoke in short sentences like a proper Yankee. “She has not been here since before breakfast on Sunday.”

Verna (who had convinced herself that Bunny was sick—or pretending to be) was surprised. “She’s been gone since ... Sunday morning?”

“That’s what I said,” Mrs. Brewster snapped inhospitably. “Miss Scott has broken a cardinal rule: being absent without explanation or permission. She did not attend Sunday breakfast, nor has she come home since. I run a respectable boardinghouse and I expect my girls to behave themselves. Miss Scott has exhibited previous difficulties observing the rules, and this is the last straw. She is no longer welcome under my roof.” She began to shut the door.

But Verna put her foot in it. “Excuse me,” she said firmly, “but I am asking about my friend.” Before this minute, Verna hadn’t thought much about whether Bunny was really a friend or just somebody she ate lunch with on the courthouse lawn. But in the face of Mrs. Brewster’s vehement wish to shut the door, she thought that Bunny ought to have at least one friend, and the sooner the better.

“Bunny didn’t come to work today, and she didn’t let Mr. Lima know she wouldn’t be there,” she said crisply. “Now you say that she hasn’t been home for nearly two days. So where is she?”

“I have no idea,” Mrs. Brewster replied, “and I do not want to know.” She made another move to close the door.

“Well, then.” Verna removed her foot. “I suppose I’ll just have to go and get the sheriff.”

The door was four inches open. “The sheriff?” Mrs. Brewster sounded surprised.