The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Now, with almost no traffic and no county maintenance, Loblolly Road was a narrow green tunnel through arching trees, the roadsides overgrown with blackberry bushes and giant ragweed. The electricity and the telephone lines had once run from the county road to the school and the sawmill, but every fourth or fifth utility pole was leaning at a steep angle and the wires were down. Charlie guessed that his informant had chosen the out-of-the-way place to give them some privacy for their conversation—but they could have gotten the same privacy at the Dispatch office, couldn’t they? When he had been sitting behind his desk back in Darling, meeting at the old school hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea. But as he drove down Loblolly Road, the isolation felt so nearly overwhelming that he wished they had settled on a meeting place closer to civilization, especially in view of the deteriorating weather.

Loblolly School stood in a clearing that the unruly forest, like a tropical jungle, was threatening to swallow whole. It was a one-room frame building, constructed on wooden piers that raised it a couple of feet above the ground—pier and beam construction, common to rural buildings in the area. It stood the test of time, too, for the piers were usually cypress, a dense, durable wood that resisted rot.

But the building itself wasn’t standing time’s test very well. Once painted white, the pine siding had weathered to a pale gray, with wild vines clambering up the walls. The surrounding schoolyard was unmowed, and the whole place wore a derelict look, some of the windows broken, half the shingles blown or rotted off the roof, the peaked belfry empty, its bell carted away long ago to serve another purpose.

Charlie pulled up on the gravel apron in front and turned off the ignition. The parking area was empty—no other vehicle. The woman he was meeting, whoever she was, could not have walked to this remote place, and the road was too rutted for a bicycle. He congratulated himself on being the first to arrive. It gave him a measure of confidence and a sense of control.

Until now, curiosity had been the driving force behind Charlie’s eagerness for this meeting—curiosity and a newspaperman’s instinctive desire to see his byline on a big story. Mata Hari’s claims were shocking, yes. And deeply disturbing, too, for if her allegations were true, it meant that the system that supplied the CCC camps—not just here but everywhere—was easily manipulated. There was a lot at stake here, as he’d told Lorena Hickok, his friend from the old Associated Press days. Because of these wider implications, this story could be big—much bigger, even, than Rona Jean’s murder, tragic as that was.

But as he parked and turned off the ignition, Charlie thought again that agreeing to meet his informant in this isolated spot was not the best idea he’d come up with all week. He knew he didn’t frighten easily. He had distinguished himself for bravery under artillery fire during the Great War, and he’d behaved more or less admirably in several close calls during his reporting career. But at the moment, curiosity and instinct were trumped by apprehension, and he found himself remembering Rona Jean, dead in the front seat of Myra May’s car. He should have told Fannie where he was going. Or the sheriff, although he had deliberately not mentioned this meeting to Buddy, who (he suspected) might want a piece of the action. But keeping it to himself might have been a mistake. If something happened out here, it might be a while before anybody found him.

Don’t be ridiculous, he reprimanded himself impatiently. What’s going to happen? Somebody’s going to show up with a gun and shoot both of us? That kind of thing only happens in Sam Spade novels. Or if you’re Clyde Barrow, with Bonnie Parker riding shotgun. He got out of the car, took off his jacket and straw boater, and put both on the passenger seat, then loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. The back of his shirt was already wet with sweat. A breeze was beginning to lift the leaves on the huge sycamore that stood next to the schoolhouse, showing the leaves’ pale green undersides, so that the whole tree seemed to be shot through with twists of silver. To the south, he glimpsed a bright flicker of lightning and heard a rumble of thunder, and the air was laden with the fresh scent of rain. He rolled up the windows before he left the car, thinking that, if nothing else, a storm might at least break the heat.