The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

Verna was silent for a moment, thinking what to say and how to say it. She wasn’t excited at the thought of having a roommate, even a temporary one. But she knew what a calamity it would be for Liz if she had to live with her mother again.

“Well, if worse comes to worst,” she said at last, “and you feel that you have no alternative but to let your mother move into your house, you can come and stay with me. I have an extra bedroom, you know. I’ll be glad to share.”

“Thank you,” Liz replied simply. Her brown eyes were swimming with tears and her delicate chin quivered. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.”

“You’re welcome,” Verna said. She felt a splat of something warm and wet on her arm, and looked down. Liz’s tears?

No. At that moment, the heavens opened and the rain began to pour.





The shower was brief but heavy, and by the time Verna had dashed the two blocks to her house, she was thoroughly soaked. She lived at the corner of Larkspur Lane and Robert E. Lee Street, in the same two-bedroom white frame house that she and Walter had bought after they were married. She had paid off the mortgage with Walter’s insurance money, updated the plumbing and installed electric lights, and figured she would live there the rest of her life. She liked her privacy, but if Liz couldn’t work things out with her mother and needed a place to stay, she’d make room. Times were hard right now, and lots of people had to make unexpected—and sometimes unwelcome—compromises. Not that having Liz staying with her was unwelcome, exactly. It would take some getting used to, though.

Verna was met at the front door by her feisty black Scottie, Clyde, who let her know in no uncertain terms that he was glad she was home and hoped that she wouldn’t be going out again anytime soon. She knelt down and ruffled his shiny black fur.

“What would you say if Liz’s orange tabby moved in with us?” she asked. It was a serious question, because Clyde was decidedly territorial. If Liz came to live with her, he might have a hard time compromising with Daffy.

Clyde declined to comment on the possibility of a cat but felt strongly about the prospect of dinner, which according to his reckoning was already a half-hour late. So Verna hurried to her bedroom, where she stripped off and hung up her wet things, toweled her hair, and pulled on a green print housedress. Her next stop was the kitchen, where she took an open can of Ken-L Ration out of the icebox and mixed it with some leftover mashed potatoes and a little hamburger from last night’s dinner. As usual, Clyde made short work of it.

She let the dog into the fenced backyard and glanced at the clock. It was time for her own supper, so she opened the icebox and took out a couple of eggs, a small tomato, an onion, some parsley, and a package of Velveeta cheese. She beat the eggs with a couple of spoonfuls of cream and cooked them in a skillet on her gas range. She added chopped tomato, onion, and parsley and some thin slices of Velveeta, then folded the omelet in half and slipped it onto a plate. She poured herself a glass of milk from the bottle in the icebox, took off her apron, and sat down to eat at the kitchen table, her current reading propped up on the green glass butter dish in front of her.

Usually, this was a mystery from the library, but tonight she was reading a story in the crime fiction magazine The Black Mask, one of the pulps that she enjoyed. The story involved a Chicago gangster who was trying his best to go straight, but kept getting hooked back into a life of crime. It was the same issue of the magazine (September 1929) that had carried the first installment of an exciting novel—The Maltese Falcon—by a new writer, Dashiell Hammett. Verna had copies of the third and fourth installments (in the November and December issues of the magazine) but she was still looking for the other two issues, so she could read the whole story from start to finish. She had heard that the book would be out soon, but she doubted that Miss Rogers would get it for the Darling library. Miss Rogers was not a fan of hard-boiled detectives. She wouldn’t like Sam Spade. And anyway, there might not be any money for new library books. The town budget was getting awfully tight.