The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

“Storm pushin’ in off the Gulf right about now. Could be a hurricane.”


“Just what we need,” Buddy said darkly, remembering the last hurricane that had blown through Darling, maybe ten years before. It had crossed the Gulf Coast west of Mobile, ripped the roof off Jake Pritchard’s Standard Oil station, blown in windows and torn up fine old trees all over town, and sent Pine Mill Creek out of its banks, flooding pastures and drowning old Tate Haggard’s cows. Buddy had been in high school then, and remembered that the sheriff had imposed a curfew and helped the mayor organize the cleanup. He probably ought to talk to Jed Snow, the current mayor, and figure out what they should do if this storm turned out to be a bad one.

He was reaching for the phone to call Jed when it rang. “Sheriff’s Office,” he said. He always liked what came next. “Sheriff Norris speakin’.”

“Buddy, this is Edna Fay Roberts,” a woman’s voice said. “Doc called a little while ago. He wanted me to call you.”

Buddy sat down, picked up a pencil, and pulled a piece of scratch paper toward him. Edna Fay was the doctor’s nurse as well as his wife. She might have news about the autopsy. “Is he finished?”

“Yes.” Then, in a louder voice, she said, “Henrietta Conrad, if you’re still on the line, I’ll thank you to get off, if you don’t mind.” There was a pause and then a click, as the Exchange operator broke the connection. “Those switchboard girls,” Edna Fay said, in a tsk-tsk voice. “Myra May tells them it’s against the rules for them to listen in, but they do it anyway, especially on the doctor’s line. Probably on the sheriff’s line, too. They like to think they’re getting the latest news hot off the wire.”

“That’s the truth,” Buddy remarked pleasantly, putting down the pencil and taking a sip of coffee. He had known Edna Fay since he was a kid, for he’d been accident prone and frequently ended up in Doc Roberts’ office getting stitched and splinted. In his experience, the lady was a talker. If you gave her an inch, she’d take the rest of the morning, and by noon, you’d be no wiser. But there was no hurrying her. She had to go at her own pace.

“It purely is,” Edna Fay said. “Anyway, Doc said to tell you that she was hit on the head—the right temple, actually. Hard enough to produce a skull fracture. He says it was probably something like a beer bottle.”

“Hit on the head?” Buddy picked up a pencil and wrote hit on the head on the scratch paper. Then: beer bottle. “I missed that.”

“Doc said it’d be easy to miss,” Edna Fay said. “It was in the hairline. And yes, she was strangled, no surprise there. But not with her stocking.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, frowning. “I saw the body myself. There was a stocking around her neck.”

“Yes. There was a stocking around her neck. But she was strangled with a rope. A hemp rope. Doc said he could tell by the bruises, and by some hemp fibers that broke off and got embedded in her skin. The stocking came later. Afterward.”

“Ah,” Buddy said. “I see.” The stocking might have been added to make it look more like a sexual assault. He jotted the words hemp rope on the scratch paper.

“Doc said it wasn’t just real easy to fix a time of death,” Edna Fay said. “He guesses it’s around midnight, give or take. But he also found—”

She broke off and Buddy drew a circle on his scratch paper. “Darla Ann,” she said in an exasperated tone to somebody on her end of the line, “I thought you were supposed to be hanging those sheets out. What are you waitin’ for?”