The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

He leaned forward on his elbows, pulling off his glasses and brushing his hair out of his eyes. “The fact is, Adabelle and I haven’t had a real marriage in ... well, quite some time.” He cleared his throat, looking away. “I don’t suppose you want to hear that, but it’s true. I only tell you because of ... well, because of the girl. The girl who died.” He pushed the papers around on his desk until he found what he was looking for. He held up the Ettlinger’s invoice. “The girl I bought this bracelet for. I had it engraved with her initials.”


Lizzy fastened her eyes on her steno pad. She could feel the flush creeping up her cheeks. Mr. Moseley was right. She didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t— “I lied to you, Liz,” he said steadily. “I did know that girl, as I’m sure you have already guessed. Eva Louise Scott. Bunny.” He sighed. “I met her in the drugstore and thought she was very pleasant. Pretty, too. A little flashy, but—” He sighed. “She laughed a lot, and I liked that.”

Lizzy started to say something, but he held up his hand, stopping her.

“One night after Adabelle had gone back to Birmingham, I was driving home late from the office. I happened to see Bunny walking back to her boardinghouse. She had been to the picture show. It was dark and beginning to rain, and she didn’t have a raincoat or an umbrella, so I stopped and gave her a lift. We started talking and—Well, I suppose you could say that I lost my head.”

Lizzy pulled in her breath, trying to steady herself. Why was he telling her this? Why—?

“It was a mistake, of course, and I knew it.” He picked up the bottle and poured a generous slug of whiskey into his glass. “Couldn’t help myself, I guess.”

“Please,” Lizzy managed. His words were sounding slurred. “Please don’t—”

“They say confession is good for the soul, Liz. So let me confess.” He turned to look out the window, sighing, putting his fingers together under his chin as if he were saying a prayer. His voice was low and heavy with sadness—and whiskey. “You know, I can’t really believe she’s dead—much less that anybody could actually shoot her. She was such a sweet, delicate little thing, and she’d had such a damned hard time in her life.”

He was silent a moment, then swung his chair around so he could look at Lizzy. “Did you know that her daddy was a drunk? And that her momma ran away from home when she was nine years old and left her with four young children to take care of—including a pair of twins? The family lived out in the country, and Bunny had to walk miles to get to school every day. But she did it, and kept her brothers and sisters fed and clothed, too. That took courage. Real courage.”

Lizzy was staring at him. Bunny’s mother ran away from home, leaving her with four children?

“But that’s not true!” she protested. “Bunny was an only child, and her mother was a widow. They didn’t live in the country—not at all. She and her mother lived in Monroeville, where—”

Mr. Moseley acted as if he didn’t hear her. “I know that’s no excuse,” he said. “For what I did, I mean. The world isn’t fair, and lots of young women have a hard time.”

“Really, Mr. Moseley, she didn’t—”

He waved her objection away. “I just felt sorry for her, that’s all.” He picked up his glass and drank the whiskey in one gulp, then set the glass down hard on the desk. “She seemed to have a genuine appreciation of finer things, pretty things. I wanted to show her a good time, give her some pleasure. When we went to Mobile a couple of weeks ago, we walked past Ettlinger’s. She saw the bracelet in the window and liked it, so I bought it and had it engraved for her.”

Lizzy’s heart had stopped at the words We went to Mobile. Mr. Moseley had taken Bunny to Mobile? You didn’t drive all that way just for one day. They must have stayed overnight, in a hotel. But even if they didn’t stay in the same room, he was married, and that made it wrong! And not only wrong, but dangerous. Lizzy wasn’t very sophisticated about affairs of the heart, and she hadn’t had much experience of her own. But she knew that a girl who would deliberately lie to a man about her family situation in the way that Bunny Scott had lied to Mr. Moseley—well, a girl like that couldn’t be trusted not to make trouble, that was all. If she had lied, what else might she have done?

Her heart started again with a painful thud and she straightened her shoulders. “She must have liked it,” she said almost desperately, trying to think of something to say. The words felt thick on her tongue. “The bracelet, I mean. I saw her wearing it the other day. And she was wearing it when she ... when she died. I saw it. On her ... her arm.”