The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

The weekend after the dance, the last weekend in April, was when things changed. Buddy for supper, she had written, and under that, contemptuously, Babe in the woods, with a frowning face. Well, she had him pegged there, he reckoned, as far as sex was concerned. He wasn’t a totally new hand at the game—there was Claudia back in high school and Irma Joy a couple of years ago and a couple of brief encounters that he didn’t remember with a great deal of pride or even pleasure. But it was obvious that Rona Jean knew a heckuva lot more about sex than he did. And after his talk with Mr. Moseley this morning, he was relieved that things had turned out the way they had.

That was it for his appearances in her diary. During the first week of June, she wrote that as soon as she got the money for a ticket, she was going to hop on the railroad train and ride it to Nashville or Chicago or New York, or maybe even to San Francisco. But a couple of pages later, she wrote that leaving Darling meant leaving Violet behind, and Violet was her “one true friend.” She went on:

I haven’t told Bettina anything about it, because she would only frown and make ugly faces at me. And anyway she won’t do a thing but lecture. Violet is the only one I can count on in this whole entire town to help me out of this mess. She says if I go through with it, she’ll give me the money for all the bills, before and after, and I can leave it there.

Which means I can save my money for a ticket. But Myra May is right. It’s going to take more than just a train ticket. I want to have enough to keep me going until I can find work. Which might take a while, bad as things are these days. So I need to hold out for more.

Puzzled, Buddy took out his notebook and copied both paragraphs, noting the day they were written and underlining help me out of this mess and give me the money for all the bills, before and after, and I can leave it there. He would have to ask Violet to tell him what kind of mess it was and what kind of before-and-after bills Rona Jean was talking about. Or maybe he should ask Myra May. Or both. He considered. Yeah, maybe it would be good to get them together and ask them both at the same time—surprise them with the question, so they couldn’t put their heads together and agree on an explanation. He wanted the truth.

He went back to the beginning of the year and noted all the names of friends that he found on the pages, both men and women, along with the dates and places they’d gone, if that was included. There were other notations and abbreviations, too. On the small calendar for December 1933, and in January and February, she had made Xs on five or six of the pages, all during the first week of the month—maybe Bettina would know what that meant, or Violet. And on a couple of the pages on which she had written a name or mentioned going out with someone, she had also drawn a little Valentine heart with an arrow through it in a lower corner of the page. There were no hearts on his pages, though. Another mystery. He would definitely have to ask.

When he was finished, he looked down at his list, seeing the names of two men he knew (not including his own): Beau Pyle and Lamar Lassen, whose photograph had been displayed on Rona Jean’s mirror. There were names of two other men he didn’t know: Jack Baker and Ray (no last name). There were two others—not clear whether these were men or women—with just initials: B.P., who was mentioned twice, recently; and DR mentioned once, with a phone number over in Monroeville. For Friday night, last night, the night she’d been killed, there was no notation. The last name in the diary was Violet’s. They’d gone to the movies on the Sunday afternoon before Rona Jean was killed.