The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

But she was here, and she should do what she had come to do and get out as fast as she could. There was a sheaf of papers on her desk—that was her excuse for being here, if anybody asked. But what she was really after was a file folder that was kept in the locked top drawer of the gray metal file cabinet in Sergeant Webb’s office. In it was an up-to-date list she had recently typed of the vouchers that had been prepared for payment to the merchants, farmers, and other suppliers from whom the camp had purchased goods and services. She couldn’t for the life of her think why Charlie Dickens would want that voucher list, and when she asked him, he had only said something vague about “checking” with a few of the suppliers. But he’d insisted that it was important to get it, and she would do her best.

Nervously, she went to the sergeant’s door and pushed it open. The quartermaster’s office was windowless and airless and black as pitch, and smelled of the sergeant’s pipe tobacco. She reached up and pulled the chain on the light bulb that hung from the ceiling. When it came on, the bulb swung back and forth, casting swaying shadows across the walls and the bare pine floor. The sergeant’s desk was scrupulously neat, the papers stacked with their edges aligned, two pencils lying perfectly parallel, a calendar displaying the day’s date, a small gold clock displaying the time, a wooden name plaque displaying its owner’s title and name: Sgt. Luther T. Webb, U.S. Army. On a shelf behind the desk were several Army purchasing manuals, a couple of sharpshooting award plaques, and a framed photograph of a pretty blond woman and two small girls in party dresses standing in front of a well-kept home with palm trees in the background—the sergeant’s wife and children, who lived in St. Petersburg. He never spoke of them, though, and she had never seen any letters going back and forth or known him to take leave to go to St. Pete for a visit.

Ordinarily, Ophelia was only allowed in Sergeant Webb’s office when he was there, and she rarely had a reason to open his filing cabinet, which he kept locked. But a few days before, he had asked her to return a file to the top drawer, and she noticed that he had taken the key out of the top drawer of his desk.

Feeling guilty and more than a little apprehensive (What if somebody came in and caught her?), she opened the desk drawer (Lucky it wasn’t locked, too!), found the key, and hurried to the filing cabinet. It only took a minute to locate the file Charlie wanted: a manila folder labeled “Local Suppliers.” She was familiar with it because she herself had typed the voucher list for the sergeant just last week, and she found it easily, in the very front of the folder. She had alphabetized the suppliers’ names, addresses, and amounts. The single-spaced list was numbered, with thirty names on the first page, twenty-two on the second page, and the pages were stapled together in the upper-left corner. Charlie had suggested that she take the list home and copy it out by hand. She could give him the copy, then replace the original in the file when she went to the office on Monday morning. She figured that would work, since the sergeant never showed up before ten o’clock.

But as she was replacing the manila folder in the filing cabinet drawer, Ophelia happened to see that the folder contained a second typed, single-spaced list of vouchers, also labeled “Local Suppliers.” The sergeant must have typed this one, however, since she hadn’t, and she and the sergeant were the only ones in the office who typed. The list was made up of three stapled pages, not two, and contained not fifty-two typed names, addresses, and amounts, but seventy. Seventy? Puzzled, Ophelia scanned it, noticing that on the list were quite a few names she didn’t recognize—eighteen in all, it looked like.