The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (Berkley Prime Crime)

streets on patrol—at least, that’s what he called it. Lizzy supposed that patrolling was intended to be a good thing, except that Darling’s residential streets weren’t paved and Buddy usually rode so fast that if something was wrong or somebody was trying to flag him down or get his attention, he’d never notice. Mostly all he did was raise the dust, which hung like a cloud of smoke over the street long after he and his motorcycle were out of sight.
    “I don’t suppose he’d be happy patrolling on a bicycle, would he?” she added wistfully.
    “I doubt it,” Mr. Moseley replied. “But with that escapee on the loose, it would be a good idea to have somebody patrolling. I don’t suppose he’ll come in this direction—he’s probably aiming to stay out in the woods. But some folks are going to fret until he’s captured.” He looked at his watch. “Well, now, Lizzy. Who’ve we got coming in first this morning?”
    The morning’s appointments marched briskly toward noon, when they closed the office for an hour. Mr. Moseley usually went home for a sit-down dinner with Adabelle, meat and potatoes and vegetables and dessert. But Lizzy always brought her lunch and ate on the grassy lawn behind the courthouse, under the chinaberry tree, where she was joined by two or three of the women who worked in the businesses around the courthouse square.
    Today’s group was small, just Bunny Scott (who sold cosmetics at Lima’s Drugstore and gave makeup demonstrations for ladies’ clubs in the area) and fellow Dahlia Verna Tidwell, who had some news about yesterday’s prison farm escape and the efforts to capture the escapees. Verna, it turned out, had seen Dr. Roberts bringing Buddy home, his arm in a sling and a bandage across his forehead after he had wrecked his red Indian Ace at Ralph’s place.
    “Guess that’ll teach him to ram that old motorcycle of his into other people’s corncribs,” Bunny said, and giggled in a way that told them she wasn’t talking about motorcycles and corncribs.
    “How you talk, Bunny,” Lizzy said, pretending to be shocked.
    Bunny (she hated her real name, which was Eva Louise) was in her early twenties and liked to shock. Today, she was wearing a lipstick-red silky rayon dress with a tantalizing V-neckline that exhibited her ample endowments and must have shocked some of Lester Lima’s drugstore customers, including Mr. Lima himself, who was a deacon in the Baptist church. He had told Earlynne Biddle (Earlynne’s son Benny was a soda jerk at the drugstore soda fountain) that he would never have hired Bunny, except that she was the Baptist preacher’s wife’s cousin’s daughter. According to Earlynne (who had told this to Lizzy), the girl had grown up over in Monroeville, where she lived with her widowed mother until the previous winter, when she had moved to Darling.
    However, since Bunny sold cosmetics, her peroxided hair, lacquered nails, and full figure weren’t entirely bad things, at least as far as the drugstore’s business was concerned. Benny Biddle had told his mother that Bunny was bringing in a whole passel of new customers. The men in town who would never be caught dead at a cosmetics counter were coming in to shop for perfume and lipstick and such for their wives and girlfriends. They didn’t always have money to buy, Benny said, but they certainly liked to shop.
    “Well,” Verna said, “it must have been pretty scary for Lucy, out there with the two kids and those escapees on the loose. Guess that was why she called and asked Jed to come out”
    “Oh, really?” Bunny took a shiny gold lipstick tube and a matching gold compact out of her purse. Looking into the mirror, she began to apply bright red lipstick. She pursed her lips, applied a second coat, then smoothed it with her little finger, the nail enameled bright red. “Lucy called Jed? Is that what you said?”
    Verna nodded. “Myra May told me. She wasn’t on the board when the call went through. That was Violet. But it was definitely Lucy calling.”
    “My, my!” Bunny’s eyebrows, carefully plucked, were arched up under her bangs. “That’s interesting, I must say.” She closed her compact and put it away. “I was over at the Snows’ last night—not Jed and Ophelia’s place, but his folks’. I met Sis last winter when I first moved here, y’see, and I stopped to say hi when I saw her out front, keeping an eye on her kiddos. We all sat around and talked for a while. Jed’s