The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Beulah thought of her own daughter when she said that—dear little Spoonie, who always said she wanted to grow up and be a beautician, “just like Mommy.” Spoonie’s ambition delighted Beulah, for she believed there was no higher calling than making women beautiful. She considered herself an artist and had an abiding pride in what she’d accomplished, especially considering that she’d had to cross over from the wrong side of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks to do it, and then take the Greyhound bus to Montgomery and get a job as a waitress to put herself through the College of Cosmetology, where she learned every single thing she needed to know “to make the ordinary woman pretty and the pretty woman beautiful.”


Now, she owned her very own Beauty Bower, which occupied what had once been a screened porch across the back of the house that she and Hank bought on Dauphin Street. Hank had enclosed it, put in electricity and a new hot water heater, and installed twin shampoo sinks and haircutting chairs and mirrors. Beulah added the finishing touches, painting the wainscoting her favorite peppermint pink, wallpapering the walls with fat pink roses, and spatter-painting the pink floor with blue, gray, and yellow.

A couple of months after she opened, business was so good that Beulah advertised for a beauty associate, and Bettina Higgens had applied. Bettina wasn’t the prettiest blossom in the garden. Her brown hair was stringy, she was thin as a rail, and she had never been to beauty school. But Beulah saw the hidden talent in Bettina’s nimble fingers and the desire in her heart, and knew that she had what it took to make women beautiful. What’s more, she was reliable, very reliable. Within a couple of weeks, the two were working elbow-to-elbow at the shampoo sinks, eight to five, six days a week.

Except this morning. The reliable Bettina wasn’t there.

“Strangled? Rona Jean Hancock?” Leona Ruth Adcock had just come into the Beauty Bower and was hearing the news for the first time. Her eyes were large in her narrow face. She looked around for a moment, then demanded shrilly, “Well, don’t everybody talk at once.”

“Yes, strangled,” Bessie Bloodworth confirmed, looking up from the Ladies’ Home Journal she was reading. “With her own stocking. Silk chiffon, I heard. Havana heel.”

“Havana heel,” Leona Ruth muttered under her breath.

Beulah glanced up at the clock and saw that it was just after nine. “I’m running a little behind this morning,” she told Leona Ruth. “I’ll do you as soon as I finish Earlynne and Bessie, Leona. I hope you don’t mind waiting.” She reached over and turned up the radio, which was broadcasting a weather report—something about a storm out in the Gulf. But whatever it was, she’d missed it. What came up next was her favorite Irving Berlin ballad, “Say It Isn’t So.”

Saturday mornings were always busy at the Beauty Bower, with ladies getting beautiful for Sunday church. But the Bower was one of the best places in town to find out what was going on (right up there with the diner and the party line, depending on which branch of it you were on), so Beulah figured that this Saturday was going to be even busier than usual. And since Bettina wasn’t there to help out, she would be doing all the shampoos and sets herself. It was going to be a long day, and another hot one, in a weeklong string of hot, steamy days. Beulah was glad for the big fan in the ceiling and the other two fans strategically placed on the counter and the floor.

“Take your time, Beulah. I’m not in a tearing hurry.” Leona Ruth took off her purple straw hat and white summer gloves and went back to the subject. “Who found her? Where?”

“Violet Sims,” Aunt Hetty said from under the hair dryer. “In the backseat of Myra May’s old Chevy.” She frowned. “Although what that girl was doing in Myra May’s garage after eleven o’clock at night is a mystery.”