The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Buddy put his notebook in his pocket, then began looking through the drawers in the vanity table for stationery and envelopes, hoping to find an address book and maybe even a few letters. He found a flat gold box of the same unlined pink writing paper Rona Jean had used to write the letter to him. But there was no address book, and if she was saving letters other people had written to her, they weren’t in the box. But he found something else of even greater interest: a stack of twenty-dollar bills—$140, when Buddy counted them out—with a rubber band around it. He looked down at the money, trying to decide what to do with it. Finally, he put it in his wallet, then wrote out a signed and dated receipt for $140 on one of his notebook pages and stuck it in Rona Jean’s dressing table mirror.

He thought for a moment, remembering what Bettina had said about Rona Jean always borrowing from her. But here was $140 in twenties—a lot of money. How had she gotten it? Who gave it to her? Why? And was there more money stashed around the room?

There wasn’t, at least not that he could find. A few moments later, taking the diary with him, he put on his hat, locked the front door, and left.


*

Even though Buddy left the windows rolled down as much as he could, the upholstery in the patrol car still smelled of Sheriff Burns’ cigars, the cheap ones Roy bought at Pete’s Pool Parlor. Buddy missed the cranky old man who had become his friend as well as his boss, and it saddened him to think he’d gotten the job of sheriff over Roy’s dead body, so to speak. Well, that was the way life was, he reckoned. You might could get what you wanted, but it came with strings, some of which you couldn’t see until they started pulling on you. Roy hadn’t wanted to die down in that creek canyon, Buddy knew that much. But if Roy had had a choice in the matter, Buddy was about 99 percent sure he would have pinned the star on him.

He started the car, drove up to the corner, and made a right, then a left on Rosemont, heading toward the square. Today was Saturday, and as he drove past the Cypress County courthouse, the streets were already crowded. The courthouse was an imposing two-story red brick building with a bell tower topped by a white-painted dome. The tower had a clock that struck the quarter hours so regularly you could set your watch by it. Built in 1905 after the big tornado tore down the earlier structure, the courthouse was surrounded on all four sides by an apron of green grass bordered with pretty yellow and orange flowers planted by the Darling Dahlias. The club maintained several gardens around town, on the theory that when times were hard, a few pretty flowers went a long way toward uplifting people’s low spirits. And when times were better, the same pretty flowers made people feel like celebrating the fact that they lived in a town where other people cared enough to keep things looking spiffy.

The square looked even spiffier than usual, Buddy thought. In honor of the Fourth of July celebration next week, the members of the American Legion Post had already planted a festive row of little American flags around the courthouse. They had also hung rug-size American and Confederate flags from the courthouse windows, draped bunting from the streetlights around the square, and slung a big banner across Robert E. Lee Street, declaring, DARLING: THE BEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE SOUTH.

The Fourth was always a crackerjack day, featuring a swell parade, with the Academy marching band, veterans of the War Between the States (sadly, they were fewer in number every year), and a float featuring Miss Darling and Little Miss Darling. And best of all, the CCC camp boys, nearly two hundred of them, would be there to march, wearing their uniforms and carrying shovels over their shoulders instead of guns—“Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” people were calling it. President Roosevelt was a tree man himself, it was said, having reforested his family’s depleted land on the Hudson River by planting hundreds of thousands of trees.