The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

And even though the strangers might only be down on their luck and without a shred of malice in their hearts, they were also quite likely to be desperate. In Mobile, a string of local household robberies had been attributed to a pair of young vagrants picked up by the police when they were found sleeping in a nearby park. The boys, barely out of their teens, protested their innocence and the only evidence that connected them to the crimes was circumstantial.

At least, that’s what Mr. Moseley had said to Lizzy, after he read about it in the Mobile Register. He called it scapegoating and had gotten quite angry, saying that it sounded to him like the police had simply collared the nearest hoboes, in order to make an object lesson of the poor fellows. But a jury had agreed with the police, and they were sent to jail.

As the district attorney said during his final summation to the court, “Desperate men will commit desperate acts. It is our duty to be watchful.”





SEVEN


The Skeleton in Bessie Bloodworth??s Closet Bessie Bloodworth was a dedicated student of Darling’s history and knew the family stories of almost all of the local residents. She could tell you anything you wanted to know about who was related to whom and where people’s ancestors had come from. She had even written a little book, which was sold by the local history club. It was called A Few Skeletons in Our Closets: A Peek at Darling History.

Unfortunately, Bessie had recently been reminded that she had a few skeletons in her own family closet. She had climbed up to the attic to get the old green living room drapes that she was planning to donate to the Darling Quilting Club to make comforters for the needy. Under the drapes, shoved far back in a corner, she found a box of her father’s business papers, left after his old office had been cleaned out. Today was both his birthday and the tenth anniversary of his death, so Bessie thought that maybe she should sit down and sort through everything. Or maybe tomorrow, or next week. There was really no hurry, she told herself. Bessie and her father hadn’t been close for years. That was only one of her painful memories. There were others.

Bessie lived at Magnolia Manor, next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse. She had given this name to her family home after her father had died, when she turned it into a boardinghouse for older unmarried and widowed ladies. (Mrs. Brewster, over on West Plum, operated a boardinghouse for younger unmarried ladies. Her Rules for Proper Behavior were very strict, whereas Bessie had no rules at all, believing that if her boarders didn’t understand proper behavior by now, they probably never would.) Running a boardinghouse was the last thing Bessie had planned to do with her life. She had hoped to train as a nurse. But her mother had died when she was a girl—one of the painful parts of the Bloodworth family story—and her three older brothers had left Darling just as quickly as they could. They wanted to get away from their father, who had changed after their mother died. But Bessie didn’t have the same freedom. She couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to. As her father’s only daughter, she was expected to live at home until she was married—to a local boy, of course. After that, she was expected to live close enough to be available to manage her father’s household and take care of him whenever he needed her. There was nothing unusual about this. It was a duty that every Darling parent expected and an obligation that all Darling girls understood.

And that was what Bessie had expected, too. She fell in love with Harold, the boy across the street, and when she graduated high school, agreed to marry him. They planned to live with her father until they could afford their own home. Lots of young people in Darling did this, but it wasn’t an ideal situation and they knew it. Mr. Bloodworth was a volatile man who was given to rash, temperamental outbursts, and he hadn’t approved of his daughter’s choice of a husband. As Darling’s only undertaker and a member of the City Council, he thought Bessie could have done much better if she’d taken the time to look around a little, instead of settling for Harold Hamer, whose prospects were not exactly bright. That’s what her father said, anyway, although Bessie suspected that he would have felt the same way about anyone she chose. Nobody would ever be good enough to marry a Bloodworth.