The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

For a moment, Ophelia thought Lucy might turn and go the other way, almost as if she wanted to avoid a conversation. But then she changed her mind and came forward. Studying her, Ophelia sighed, wishing she dared to wear slacks. A couple of weeks before, she had seen a pair she liked in the women’s department at Katz’s. She had bought them on impulse, but she hadn’t had the courage to wear them yet. Jed would put up a big fuss. He didn’t mind her wearing coveralls when she was working on the Linotype and helping Charlie around the newspaper press, but he was dead set against women wearing men’s clothes in public.

“Hey, Ophelia.” Lucy wore an unusually sober expression—that is, unusual for Lucy, who never let anything bother her. “You’ve heard what happened to Rona Jean?”

Ophelia nodded. “I know about the murder, but that’s about the size of it. A sad thing.”

“Yes. Do you think . . . do they know . . .” Lucy swallowed. “Have they caught the guy yet?”

“Not so far as I know,” Ophelia said, thinking that Lucy seemed awfully apprehensive. But then, Ralph was on the railroad and she spent a lot of evenings alone. Rona Jean’s murder probably made her feel vulnerable. “I’m sure the sheriff’s doing an investigation,” she added.

“I hope so,” Lucy said, in an odd voice. “We can’t have somebody running around killing people. I mean, it’s downright scary, is what it is.”

Uncomfortably, Ophelia changed the subject. “I didn’t think you worked on Saturday.” Five days a week, the camp had hot meals, but on the weekends, the enrollees set out cereals for breakfast and sandwich and salad fixings for lunch and supper, and everybody helped themselves. “I figured you’d be home with Ralph today, working in your garden.”

“I’m not here, usually,” Lucy said in an offhand way. “But Ralph had to make a run to Nashville, and I had a stack of orders to finish.”

She cleared her throat, her eyes sliding away, and Ophelia, with a startling conviction, thought, She’s not telling the truth! Or maybe she was remembering the gossip that had cropped up lately. Lucy was an attractive woman, and Ralph’s railroad job took him out of town at least five days a week, and sometimes weekends, too. In fact, Ouida Bennett’s sister, Erma Rae, who lived just up the road from the Murphys, had told Mother Snow that she had seen Lucy on the back of an Army motorcycle, late in the evening, and that she’d heard that motorcycle several other nights. It didn’t look good, Erma Rae had said, especially with Ralph out of town. Mother Snow had told Ophelia, who had immediately pooh-poohed the idea that Lucy was running around.

But now she wasn’t so sure. Was it possible that Lucy and her motorcycle man had been having a tryst this afternoon? Were they romantically involved? Yes, of course it was possible. In fact, looking at Lucy’s flushed cheeks, she’d say it was entirely likely. But if they were, Ophelia reminded herself, it was none of her business. Whatever Lucy was up to was between her and Ralph and nobody else.

“Anyway,” Lucy was going on, “I thought I’d just go ahead and get it done today, while nobody’s around. Weekdays are always such a madhouse in that kitchen. And there’s always too much paperwork—the CCC may be doing good things, but it’s a huge bureaucracy.”

“That’s certainly true,” Ophelia said emphatically. The Civilian Conservation Corps was jointly run by the secretaries of war, agriculture, labor, and interior, and there were so many reports to compile and send that it made Olivia dizzy. “I often wonder if anybody actually reads that stuff or whether it’s just stuck in a file drawer in an office somewhere in Washington.” Which, as Charlie had explained when he offered her the undercover assignment, might make it all too easy for somebody to cheat the system.

Lucy gave Ophelia a sideways glance. “But you’re not usually here on weekends, either. Right?”

Ophelia nodded warily. “I left some papers on my desk that I meant to take home, so I stopped to pick them up.” It was the second time she had said this out loud, and she thought it sounded more or less authentic.

But she knew it wasn’t true. Did she suspect Lucy of lying because she was lying?