The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

As Ophelia drove home from the camp, the southwestern sky was dark and ominous, and she knew that the coming storm was likely to be a bad one. After she and Sarah got home and carried their purchases into the house, the first thing she did was turn on the parlor radio to try and catch a weather forecast. Ten minutes later, the announcer on WALA was reporting that the storm that had been hanging around out in the Gulf had finally crossed the coast and was picking up speed. It was moving inland west of Mobile on a curving path that took it in a northerly direction. The announcer warned of torrential rain, lightning, and winds of over a hundred miles an hour, higher in gusts.

Ophelia, who had weathered a great many storms, didn’t need to look at a map to know that Darling was on the edges of the path and that they were about to be brushed by a hurricane. She telephoned Jed to alert him to the situation, then summoned Sam and put him to the task of telephoning the boys on his baseball team to tell them that their picnic was postponed, since the whole town would be hunkering down until the storm had blown over. She called Sarah down from upstairs (where she had been trying on her new bathing suit) and put her to work collecting all the candles and oil lamps in the house so they could be easily located when the lights went out, which was sure to happen. Darling’s power went off when the wind blew hard or when there was ice on the wires, and it was sometimes days before the electricity was restored. Ophelia filled gallon jugs with water from the faucet, since Darling’s water pumps wouldn’t work without power.

The big worry was the food in the icebox. The ice that had been delivered that morning and kept the food cold throughout the weekend would normally be replaced on Monday. But the Darling Ice Company depended on the Darling Power Company and the Darling Water Company. If the electricity went out, the ice company wouldn’t be making ice over the weekend, which meant no Monday deliveries—or Tuesday or Wednesday, either, if the power was out for a long time. Ophelia tied a length of bright red yarn to the icebox handle to remind everybody not to leave it open when they took food out of it.

At two o’clock, Jed closed the Farm Supply and came home. He and Sam fastened wooden shutters over the windows while Ophelia went down the street and persuaded Mother and Dad Snow to come and ride out the storm with them. Their house was one of the sturdiest in the neighborhood and had weathered several bad blows over the years, with only minor damage. They would all be relatively safe there, and it was good for the family to be together.

But while she was tending to her storm preparations, Ophelia was thinking about the situation at the camp. The boys would likely be confined to barracks for the duration of the storm, but the buildings were designed as temporary structures, and she wasn’t sure that they would weather a big blow without a lot of damage. She hoped everyone would be safe.

But mostly, she was thinking about those two voucher lists she had taken from the quartermaster’s filing cabinet earlier that day—the people, with names, addresses, and amounts, who were due to receive contract payment checks from the government. For the life of her, she still couldn’t figure out why the second list, the one Sergeant Webb had typed, contained so many more names than the list she herself had typed. It didn’t make sense, she thought. It just didn’t make sense.