The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

In her room, Bessie turned on the light beside her bed. She was tired, but her mind was still racing and she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Her glance went to the box of her father’s papers that she had carried down from the attic, sitting on her dresser. She hadn’t had an urgent reason for going through them—until now. Of course, it wasn’t likely that she’d find anything to confirm or refute Miss Hamer’s assertion. But still, she ought to make the effort. When she didn’t find anything, she would at least know that there wasn’t anything to find.

Mr. Noonan had brought the box over from the funeral home one day not long after her father had sold the business. He was already too sick to be able to go through the papers, so Bessie had carried the box to the attic without bothering to take a look. Mr. Noonan told her that he’d kept the business items he had found in the files—burial records, grave marker and grave location information, invoices, employee records, and the like—and was returning items that looked to be of a more personal nature: newspaper clippings, notes from grateful clients, complaints, and so on. There was a note inside the box from Mrs. Noonan, saying that she had put everything into folders, a folder for each year. Now, Bessie was grateful. Her father had been in the funeral and gravestone business for decades and had accumulated a great many papers. At least she didn’t have to sort through dozens of scraps.

The file folders were neatly labeled and arranged in chronological order. Not all the years were represented, and the files were variously thick and thin. Bessie flipped through the folders, found the year she was looking for—the year Harold disappeared—and opened the file. There were only five or six items in it. A clipping about a death in neighboring Monroeville; a plaintive letter from a mother in North Carolina, asking for information about the burial of her son, with a carbon copy of the typed letter her father had written back; and several dated notes in her father’s cribbed and almost illegible handwriting, scribbled on the backs of funeral cards. She was about to close the file when she noticed another piece of paper, the familiar plat of all the graves in the Darling Cemetery, neatly numbered.

Bessie had seen similar copies many times before, at the funeral home and on her father’s desk at home. The plat was necessary, he had once told her, because sometimes people came in from out of town and needed to know where their father’s cousin or their mother’s great-aunt Clara were buried. But this one caught her eye because it was dated in the top corner: the day of Harold’s disappearance, a date she would never forget.

Curious now, she studied it. There was the road and the gate and the lane that meandered around to the back, where an old stone wall marked the graveyard’s farthest boundary. And in the far right corner of her father’s cemetery, there was a tiny penciled square and two letters. HH.

Her heart beating fast against her ribs, Bessie stared at the sketch map, remembering that awful week, the week of Harold’s disappearance. Her father’s unaccustomed kindnesses, his tender gestures, his gruff words: “Some things don’t bear looking into, child.” Her breath caught in her throat, and she put her finger on the penciled square. HH. What had he done? What had her father done?

Outside the open window, a night bird called from the willow tree and the fragrance of the Angel’s Trumpet, its pale blossoms unfurled in the darkness, hung heavy on the air, like the stifling scent of funeral flowers.





TWENTY-ONE


Mr. Moseley Clears Up a Mystery Lizzy was always the first to arrive in the law office, but when she opened the door at her usual early hour the next morning, she found Mr. Moseley already at his desk, a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow, his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair. He glanced up when she stood in his doorway and his eyes lightened.

“New dress, Liz?”

It wasn’t. She had worn the same dress—a flared-skirt, rose-print silk crepe with lace ruffles at the V-neckline—several times before, but she only smiled and nodded. She had been looking forward with great excitement to telling him about the extraordinary events of the day before. But before she could open her mouth, he was speaking.

“Swell news, Liz!” He wore a broad smile and sounded extremely pleased with himself. “Looks like this tax case is going to go forward. It’s not wrapped up—there are still depositions to be taken, more evidence, that kind of thing. But it’s looking solid. And I’ve just worked a deal that takes our client off the hook.”

“The tax case?” she asked, not sure which client he was talking about. “The case you were working on in Montgomery?”

“Yep. The tax evasion case. Which—happily for our client—has turned into a deal between the local gendarmerie and the Feds.” He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. There were circles of perspiration around his armpits, and judging from the scatter of papers across the desk, Lizzy guessed that he had been working for several hours already. There was a half-smoked cigar in the ashtray and the office reeked of stale cigar smoke. She crossed to a window and opened it, letting in a cooler morning breeze.