The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

And it wasn’t smart to trust Beau. The boy might be lying about tending that fire all night, and unless he could get some confirmation, one way or another, Buddy knew he’d be a fool to put any faith in what Beau said. He’d seen the evidence of Beau’s rage: the shredded jail-cell mattress and the wrecked bunk. He was perfectly capable of flying into a rage and throttling Rona Jean, and then of lying about it.

But Beau had raised a good point. Rona Jean could expect both Lamar and Beau to believe that they were the father; she’d had sex with both of them, so it made sense to try to get money out of them. And there was that threatening letter she had written to him. Her charges—that he’d slapped her, torn her clothes—were false, but he’d be the first to admit that it would have been tough to dispute them if she had pushed it somehow. He was just damned lucky she hadn’t demanded money from him.

But maybe she’d pulled that trick on somebody else. Maybe she wrote a similar letter to him, making similar charges, similarly false, and threatening to go public if he didn’t pay up. The evidence? That stack of twenties, $140 in all, which was a lot more than she could have saved out of her paycheck, especially since she was always broke, according to Bettina. Blackmail payoff, was it? Maybe she squeezed it out of some poor sucker—or for that matter, out of more than one poor sucker, using the same technique she had tried out first on him.

And maybe she had been killed for it.

Frowning, Buddy thought some more about this angle. He went back to the top of his notebook list. With this new possibility in mind, who should he talk to next? He stopped at Violet’s name, remembering that Rona Jean had written something about Violet in her diary. He flipped back through his notebook and found that he had copied a line out of the diary entry for June 5: Violet had promised Rona Jean to give her the money for all the bills, before and after, she had written, and I can leave it there. When he first read that, he’d been totally in the dark. He’d had no idea what before-and-after bills she was writing about or what the “it” was that she could “leave.”

Now, knowing about the baby, it made sense. The “before and after” part, anyway. He needed to talk to Violet and find out what she knew. And Myra May, as well.

He put the notebook into his shirt pocket. Bodeen Pyle might be important, especially if there was some jealousy involved between the two brothers. But Bodeen could wait until Buddy had filled in some more of the details. He turned the key in the Ford’s ignition and drove off.





TEN


Lizzy’s Prayer Is Answered—But Which One?



Lizzy went up the path to her house, carrying her handbag as carefully as if it contained a dozen new-laid eggs. In it was a letter from Nadine Fleming, her literary agent—still sealed because Lizzy hadn’t wanted to open it in the post office or on the street. It might contain good news about Sabrina, in which case she would probably have disgraced herself by bursting into tears of delight. Or bad news, in which case she’d be crying tears of disappointment. One way or the other, Lizzy knew she was going to cry. She preferred to do it in private.