The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Violet’s “Yes, that’s how it happened” was almost inaudible. Pale and wan, her soft brown hair in a mass of curls around her face, she was lying on the sofa in the apartment over the diner, where she lived with Myra May. Raylene Riggs had spread a crocheted granny afghan over her and was kneeling beside the sofa, holding her limp hand.

“Maybe just one or two questions, Buddy?” Raylene asked in a low voice. She’d said that Violet had fainted again after she and Myra May had gotten her upstairs. “This is so difficult for her. She and Rona Jean both worked in the Telephone Exchange, and they sometimes went to the movies together. They were close friends.”

Buddy hadn’t known that, actually. He scribbled the words close friends with Violet—movies in his notebook, then wondered briefly how Myra May felt about that and wrote Myra May?? with a heavy underline. When he’d been trying to get Violet to go out with him, before he’d understood about her situation, he had felt that Myra May was acting kind of jealous. Or maybe “protective” was a better word, like a mama hen ruffling her feathers and snapping her beak, hovering over her chick and not wanting anybody to get too close. He wasn’t quite sure why it was, but after Violet had made it clear that he was wasting his time, Myra May had eased up. Then he wondered who else (besides Violet, that is) Rona Jean might have counted as her close friend, and added other friends? He guessed that was something he had better find out. He bit his lip and focused on his next question.

This was Buddy Norris’ first investigation as the sheriff of Cypress County, and the fact that he was investigating a murder—and Rona Jean Hancock’s murder, on top of that—made it a lot more important than the usual humdrum routine of minor thefts, car wrecks, gambling, and moonshining that the sheriff’s office dealt with every week. Rona Jean’s murder had struck Buddy like a bolt from the blue, and investigating it was not at all what he wanted to be doing on a bright and pretty June morning.

But the sadly ironic truth was that whoever had strangled Rona Jean had handed Buddy his first big case, the opportunity he needed to show the citizens of Darling that they had been right to elect him as their sheriff. It was a test of what he had learned so far, a measure of his abilities as an investigator. He couldn’t afford to fail.

Until several weeks ago, Buddy had been Darling’s deputy sheriff, and not an altogether popular one, at that. Some folks criticized him for his youth (he was in his late twenties but looked younger) and others for his “swagger and derring-do,” especially when he arrested Reverend Craig, the traveling revival preacher, who was driving his 1926 Studebaker sixty miles an hour out on the Jericho Road. On the front seat was a bottle of what the reverend claimed was communion fruit of the vine. When Buddy tasted it, however, the bottle proved to contain something a sight more potent than grape juice. It was Bodeen Pyle’s Panther Juice, and as illegal as sin. Nevertheless, some folks said that Buddy didn’t show good judgment when he arrested a man of God. If he was going to be sheriff, he had a lot to prove.