The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Buddy nodded. “Thanks. Deputy Springer will come in later this morning and take everybody’s fingerprints. And maybe—”

“Fingerprints?” Raylene asked blankly. “What do you want our fingerprints for? We didn’t—” She stopped, frowning.

“I understand,” Buddy said. “But we’ve already found prints in the car, and Wayne—Deputy Springer, that is—will likely find more. We need to get the prints of everybody who has ridden in that car in the last few months so we can eliminate them. Any prints that are left might belong to the killer.” That was how it was supposed to work. Buddy had yet to see it work that way in practice. There were always unmatched, unidentified prints left over, which pretty much rendered the process useless, practically speaking.

“Oh,” Raylene said. “I see.”

“It would also help if you and Myra May and Violet could come up with a list of the people Rona Jean knew—who maybe had some kind of connection with her. People she worked with, especially.” Usually, he’d ask about family, but in this case, he already knew the answer. Rona Jean had been an orphan. She had told him once that she had nobody on this earth. “I’ll ask Bettina Higgens for a list, too,” he added.

“Poor Bettina,” Raylene said with a sigh. “This is going to be so difficult for her. She and Rona Jean were as thick as thieves.” When Buddy frowned, Raylene took a breath and added, “I didn’t intend anything special by that remark, Buddy. It was just a way of speaking. If you come in for lunch, we’ll have the information for you then.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Buddy said. But before he went back to the garage, he took a moment to jot down Bettina’s name and the phrase thick as theives. (Buddy had not been at the top of his class in spelling, and the i-before-e rule always confused him.) He was well aware that Raylene hadn’t consciously intended anything special. But everybody knew that she had the “gift,” as Aunt Hetty Little put it. She saw things other people didn’t see. Buddy couldn’t help wondering whether she might know something she didn’t know she knew.

Back at the garage, Lionel Noonan had pulled his black 1930 Packard into the alley, and he and Wayne were waiting for Buddy to tell them it was okay to put Rona Jean into the hearse for her last ride.

Buddy took one more look. Her bright red lipstick was a streak of garish neon in a face that was pale as death, and her scarlet nail polish made her fingers look as if they had been dipped in blood. “All right, boys,” he said with a sigh. “Load ’er up.”





THREE


The Dahlias Bloom in Beulah’s Beauty Bower



“I just can’t believe something like this would happen in Darling.” Earlynne Biddle lowered herself into Beulah’s haircutting chair and smoothed the pink shampoo cape tied around her neck. “Rona Jean was a hardworking girl and polite to her elders—well, mostly, anyway. She didn’t have a mother to keep her on the straight and narrow, but she wasn’t any wilder than other girls her age, far as I could see. I cannot imagine who would want to up and strangle the poor thing.”

“I always feel so sorry for girls who don’t have a mother,” Beulah Trivette said sadly, combing through Earlynne’s wet brown hair. “Seems like they get off on the wrong foot in life.”