The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies Read online

  The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

  Susan Wittig Albert

  A brand-new mystery in the "exceptional" (Booklist) series by the national bestselling author.

  Rumors are sprouting in Depression-era Darling, Alabama. The town's newest visitors, Nona Jean Jamison and Miss Lake, may be the Naughty and Nice Sisters from the Ziegfeld Frolic, who specialize in dancing nearly naked.

  The Dahlias suspect more than modesty when Nona denies her association. They'll have to dig through clues to get to the root of the mystery…

  Susan Wittig Albert

  The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

  The second book in the Darling Dahlias series, 2011

  To garden clubs everywhere,

  with grateful thanks for

  making your communities more beautiful.

  The Darling Dahlias and I send you our love.

  Author’s Note

  I love writing about real places. The little town that is the setting for this series is fictional, but it is located in a very real place: in southern Alabama, in the wooded hills west of Monroeville and east of the Alabama River, about seventy miles north of Mobile. You will find a map of Darling on the series website: www.darlingdahlias.com. You will also find other items of interest there, including: Depression-era recipes and household tips, some historical background of the 1930s (the period in which the series takes place), and information about Southern gardens. I’ll be adding new material frequently, so please bookmark the site and visit often.

  I also love language, and in this series, as in all my books, I’ve tried to use the language of the people and their times. This historical series includes language and social practices appropriate to the early 1930s in the rural South. For instance, the characters use the terms “colored,” “colored folk,” and “Negro” when they refer to African Americans, and the attitudes of white people toward their black fellow citizens reflect the conscious and unconscious racism of the times. To write truthfully about this time and place requires the use of language and ideas that may be offensive to some readers. Thank you for understanding that I intend no offense.

  As I work on these books, I especially find myself loving the spirit of the times. The 1930s were terribly difficult years, because so many people were facing daunting challenges that resemble some of the economic challenges we face today. But people didn’t lose hope. They had faith in themselves, in their families, and in their communities, and they did whatever they could to help themselves. I am touched by this spirit as I read the newspapers and books published in those years, and as I remember my mother and my aunts talking about the “tough times” they lived through in the decade before I was born. Ordinary people were tough and resilient enough to weather extraordinary challenge, and I hope to represent that spirit in these books.

  Susan Wittig Albert

  November 1, 1930

  Darling, Alabama

  Dear Reader,

  When the author of The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree asked us if she could write a second book about us, we were thrilled. It’s not every garden club that gets a book written about it, much less two books! But we agreed because we liked the way Mrs. Albert gave you all the ins and outs of what happened in The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree. Mr. Dickens naturally didn’t print the full story in the Dispatch, so lots of people in town didn’t know all the details and were very surprised when they found out. In fact, some people were so surprised that they tried to boycott the book when Mr. Mann put a stack of them out for sale in front of the Mercantile, and Mrs. Lima was heard to say that she didn’t know how she was going to hold up her head in this community, now that everybody knew what had gone on in the back room at Lima’s Drugs. We’re sorry about that, but we do believe that Mr. Lima will toe the straight and narrow from here on out, and that Mrs. Lima won’t have a thing to fret about. Everybody understands that people make mistakes. Live and learn, as the old folks say.

  Anyway, when Mrs. Albert learned that we were in the middle of another mystery and asked us if she could look over our shoulders and write everything down as it happened, we thought it was a good idea. Several of us were especially wondering about the pair of ladies who had moved into Miss Hamer’s house on Camellia Street, the one with all the naked ladies in the front yard. And if you don’t know what naked ladies are, well, you can read this book and find out. We won’t tell you anything more about that, since we don’t want to spoil the story for you.

  And it’s true that we need stories these days, don’t you think? Times have been hard since the Crash, people are out of work all over the country, and it seems like too many of us are scraping the bottom of the barrel. But stories-even when they include a few folks who don’t measure up by the Golden Rule-help us to forget our troubles for a little while and learn something about people and the silly (and sometimes dangerous) things they do.

  So we hope this story brightens your day a little. And speaking of bright, Aunt Hetty Little wants us to remind you of something we have said before but which bears saying again. We keep our faces to the sun so we can’t see the shadows, which is why we plant sunflowers and marigolds and cosmos in amongst the collards and sweet potatoes and okra in our gardens.

  We hope you will, too.

  Sincerely,

  Elizabeth Lacy, president, The Darling Dahlias

  Ophelia Snow, vice president & secretary

  Verna Tidwell, treasurer

  The Darling Dahlias Club Roster, October 1930

  OFFICERS

  Miss Elizabeth Lacy, president. Secretary to Mr. Moseley, attorney at law, and garden columnist for the Darling Dispatch.

  Mrs. Ophelia Snow, vice president and secretary. Wife of Darling’s mayor, Jed Snow.

  Verna Tidwell, treasurer. Secretary to the Cypress County probate clerk.

  CLUB MEMBERS

  Earlynne Biddle. Married to Henry Biddle, the manager at the Coca-Cola bottling plant. A rose fancier.

  Mrs. Bessie Bloodworth, Darling’s historian. Owner and proprietor of Magnolia Manor, a boardinghouse next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse and gardens.

  Mrs. George E. Pickett (Voleen) Johnson, wife of the owner of the Darling Savings and Trust Bank. Specializes in pure white flowers.

  Mildred Kilgore. A collector of camellias, Mildred is married to Roger Kilgore, the owner of Kilgore Motors, and lives near the Cypress Country Club.

  Aunt Hetty Little, oldest member of the club, town matriarch, and lover of gladiolas.

  Myra May Mosswell, owner of the Darling Diner and an operator in the Darling Telephone Exchange. Lives in the flat over the diner. Has a vegetable garden.

  Lucy Murphy, the newest member of the club. Lucy is married to Ralph Murphy and lives on a small farm on Jericho Road. Just planted a peach orchard.

  Miss Dorothy Rogers, Darling’s librarian. Miss Rogers knows the Latin name of every plant and insists that everybody else does, too. Lives in Magnolia Manor. Beulah Trivette, artistically talented owner/operator of Beulah’s Beauty Bower, where small groups of Dahlias gather almost every day. Loves cabbage roses and other big, floppy flowers.

  Alice Ann Walker, bank cashier. Her husband, Arnold, is disabled. Loves spring-flowering bulbs.

  ONE

  The Naked Ladies

  Elizabeth Lacy opened the small shed behind the Dahlias’ clubhouse and stowed the rakes, hoes, and spades inside. She closed the door, took off her floppy-brimmed hat, and turned to Verna Tidwell.

  “The garden looks really swell, don’t you think?” she said, surveying the result of the afternoon’s hard work.

  “Well, it ought to,” Verna reto
rted crisply, stripping off her green cotton gardening gloves. Her brown hair was short and combed straight back from her face in a characteristically no-fluff style. “We’ve poured a lot of time and sweat into this place over the past few months. How many Dahlias were out here this afternoon, slaving in the sunshine? I counted ten. That’s a good turnout.”

  Lizzy stretched down and touched her toes, working out the kink in her back that came from kneeling in front of the phlox bed for two hours, pulling weeds. “Ten is right. Voleen Johnson said she had company, and Ophelia’s boy was playing in the baseball tournament at the fairgrounds. Oh, and Myra May had to work the switchboard because Violet is up in Memphis.” She straightened up and stretched her hands over her head. “Her younger sister just had a baby and Violet’s helping out. Myra May said the sister isn’t doing too well.”

  Verna stuck her gloves in the pocket of her gardening skirt, wrinkling her nose distastefully. “Have you ever noticed that Voleen always manages to have out-of-town company on one of our work days? If you ask me, I think she invites them on purpose, so she doesn’t have to come over here and risk breaking one of her fingernails, all pretty and polished up.”

  “You might be right,” Lizzy said, in a noncommittal tone. She didn’t like to criticize other people because you never knew when they might be criticizing you, and they might not be as nice about it as you were. But it was definitely true that Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson rarely lent her perfectly manicured hands to the task when it came to the Dahlias’ garden. Or her own beautiful garden, for that matter, since she had a colored man who did all the work for her. The George E. Picketts were among Darling’s hereditary nobility and Mrs. Pickett’s garden was a showplace, with never a leaf or a twig out of place.

  “We managed all right without her,” Lizzy added, looking around appreciatively. “The garden hasn’t looked so pretty for quite a while. Mrs. Blackstone couldn’t do much in her last years.”

  The small white frame house the garden club had inherited from Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone sat fairly close to Camellia Street. Behind the white picket fence out front, the yard was mostly hydrangeas and azaleas and roses. But behind the house, a large garden swept down toward a tall magnolia tree, a clump of woods, and a small, clear spring smothered in ferns, bog iris, and pitcher plants. This garden had once been so beautiful that it had been written up in newspapers all over the South, and as far away as New Orleans. But as Mrs. Blackstone grew older and less able to care for it, the plants had become disheveled and shaggy, in the ragamuffin way of gardens when there’s nobody to pull weeds or deadhead or prune the roses or dig and separate the perennials or even mow the grass regularly.

  Then Mrs. Blackstone had died and left her house and the garden to the garden club she had founded, whose grateful members quickly renamed themselves the Dahlias in her honor. Then they (well, most of them, anyway) pulled on their garden gloves and picked up their rakes and hoes and trowels and clippers and set about restoring the garden to its former glory. They had yanked the smothering weeds-the dog fennel, henbit, ground ivy, and (the biggest garden bully of all!) the Johnson grass-out of the curving perennial borders, so that the phlox, larkspur, iris, asters, and Shasta daisies could take a deep breath. They had dug and divided and replanted Mrs. Blackstone’s much-loved lilies: Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and her favorite orange ditch lilies. They had untangled the cardinal climber and crossvine and honeysuckle on the fence and repaired the trellises so the mandevilla and confederate jasmine could stretch up and out. They gently disciplined the hibiscus and the dozens of roses, including the climbers, the teas, the ramblers, the shrubs, and a charming yellow Lady Banks. Yet to be done: the cleanup of the woodland and spring at the foot of the garden, where Miss Rogers thought they ought to put the bog garden. And every time a Dahlia set foot on the place, she saw something else that needed to be done, such as painting the shed, or repairing another trellis, or planting a ground cover over a bare spot. Gardens, of course, are a labor of love, and love-and its labor-is never-ending.

  “It is gorgeous, Lizzy,” Verna agreed. Even she (by nature a wary, critical person who always saw the flaws in a thing while everybody else was still admiring it) had to admit that the Dahlias were well on the way to restoring Mrs. Blackstone’s garden to its former glory. And the only money they had spent on the project was the fifty cents they gave Old Zeke to cut the grass and trim along the flower beds every other week.

  Which had been a very good thing (as Verna, the club’s treasurer, knew very well), because when the Dahlias inherited the house, they were nearly broke. Mrs. Blackstone had left them enough to pay the property taxes for several years, relieving some of Verna’s worry. But there was barely enough in the club kitty to keep the lights on, let alone fix the leaks in the roof and replace the plumbing in the bathroom.

  And then, glory be and hallelujah! When they dug the holes to plant their Darling Dahlias sign in front of their new clubhouse, the Dahlias had struck silver. That is, they had uncovered the chest of sterling flatware that Mrs. Blackstone’s mother (a Cartwright) had buried to keep it from falling into the greedy hands of pillaging Yankees as they stormed through Alabama near the end of the War Between the States. When the Dahlias began to look through the chest, they found, in addition to the sterling, a bracelet set with an old-fashioned square-cut emerald, a pair of pearl teardrop earrings, a diamond ring, and a velvet bag containing ten gold coins: twenty-dollar double eagles, still as perfect as the day they were new-minted.

  But the discovery of this buried treasure had resulted in a hot debate about what to do with it. Some wanted to keep everything. After all, the silver, the coins, and the jewelry were heirlooms, and all of it was very beautiful. But Earlynne Biddle had pointed out that these were Cartwright heirlooms and every last Cartwright was dead and gone from this earth and in no position to care about heirlooms. Aunt Hetty Little had pointed out that if the Dahlias kept the silver, the Dahlias would have to polish it, since they couldn’t afford a maid to do it for them. And Verna had added that the whole kit and caboodle must be worth a small fortune, and the club needed cash money a whole lot more than it needed heirlooms.

  So the Dahlias voted (Mrs. Johnson being the lone dissenter) to sell. Verna and Lizzy took the silver, the gold, and the jewelry to Ettlinger’s Jewelry store in Mobile, where it brought enough to fix the leaky roof and repair the plumbing, with some left over. The Dahlias could now face the autumn rains without fear of flooding, they could flush without fear of overflowing, and their savings account in the Darling Savings and Trust was, if not fat, nicely plump. They called it the “Treasure Fund.”

  “It’s hard to believe we’ve accomplished so much in just five months,” Lizzy replied, fanning herself with her hat as they walked around the house toward the front. She felt a justifiable sense of pride. After all, she was president of the club and she’d worked hard to organize the garden project.

  “Hot months, too,” Verna said. The Dahlias had held the first meeting in their new clubhouse in May, and the summer months in Alabama are not exactly the most comfortable months for outdoor work. But the Dahlias were not delicate Southern belles-most of them, anyway. When it came to gardening, they didn’t wilt.

  Lizzy pushed her brown hair out of her eyes, put her hat back on, and paused, looking at the large empty lot beside the house. The area had once been Mrs. Blackstone’s vegetable garden, with a border of strawberries, two peach trees, and a fig tree in the back. Old Zeke had mowed the weeds for them, but the place still looked straggly and forlorn.

  “I’ve been thinking about this area,” she said. “What would you say to turning it back into a vegetable garden-not for just us Dahlias, but for everybody? There are lots of folks in this town who might be willing to trade some garden work for sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips, okra, collards-things that are sure to grow. I’m sure we could get Mr. Norris to bring Racer over and plow the ground early next year.” The name of Mr. Norris’ horse was a joke,
because the old bay gelding was slow as blackstrap molasses in January. But he knew what to do when he was hitched to the business end of a plow, and he and Mr. Norris made a few dollars every spring by plowing gardens.

  “Good idea,” Verna agreed cautiously, “but what makes you think people will be willing to help? Everybody loves a handout, but when it comes with a rake or hoe attached-” She shrugged.

  Lizzy clucked her tongue. “Verna, you are so cynical.”

  “Just realistic,” Verna replied with a chuckle. “Comes from working in the county courthouse. Want to see people at their worst? Sit behind my desk for a day or two.”

  “Well, the folks who come into Mr. Moseley’s law office don’t win any happiness prizes,” Lizzy retorted. “They only need a lawyer when they’re in really bad trouble.” Mr. Moseley was one of Darling’s three lawyers, and as his secretary, receptionist, and legal assistant, Lizzy had an insider’s view into people’s problems. Unlike Verna, she had an innate sense of compassion and concern and always tried to put herself in the other person’s shoes. “But just because I see the ones who are unhappy or in trouble doesn’t mean that everybody in town is like that,” she added.

  “Maybe not,” Verna said, “but at least half of them are. Times are tough. People are scared. They’re hanging on for dear life to their jobs or their farms or whatever. If they don’t have money, they’ll do almost anything to get it. If they have it, they won’t spend an extra nickel.”

  “Well, then,” Lizzy said reasonably, “maybe they’ll be willing to work for some fresh food-so they can save their nickels.”

  They had come around the front of the house now. Mrs. Blackstone’s prize azaleas, hydrangeas, and weigelas had finished blooming months before, but the Autumn Joy sedum was gorgeous, next to some red spider lilies that looked like a fireworks display. Lizzy smiled, thinking that while jobs and money and food were definitely important-you couldn’t live without them-beauty was important, too. Vegetables could provide a feast for the table, but flowers were a feast for the soul.