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

she bobbed her own hair. Her friends loved it and begged her to bob theirs, which she did, to the horror of many of the mothers in Darling, who were convinced that bobbed hair was the first step on the road to perdition.
    Beulah herself thought that her ability to do hair might be the first step on the road to a career. Right after high school, she took the Greyhound bus to Montgomery, where she got a job at a diner and worked her way through the Montgomery College of Cosmetology. She majored in hair and learned how to do a shampoo and head massage, cut a smooth Castle Bob (named for Mrs. Castle, the ballroom dancer who made it popular), manage a marcel iron, make pin curls and finger waves, and color hair. There was also skin care (facials), nails (manicure and pedicure), and makeup—all you needed to know, as the MCC advertised, “to make the ordinary woman pretty and the pretty woman beautiful.” Beulah (who was already pretty and aspired to being beautiful) graduated at the top of her class in cutting and styling and then came back to Darling, fired with the ambition to introduce every woman in town to the fine art of beauty.
    And so she did—in part because Beulah herself was a generous soul and genuinely wanted to help women make the most of whatever the good Lord had given them, whether it was a little or a lot. She was a perky, pretty blonde with a passion for all things artistic—not just hair, but drawing, painting, sewing, and flower arranging. She loved flowers with big, floppy blooms, especially cabbage roses and dahlias and sunflowers, and crowded as many as possible into her backyard.
    After a couple of years of being eagerly courted by a great many Darling males (during which time she was thought pretty “fast”), Beulah married Hank Trivette. Most people were surprised, since they’d expected her to fall for one of the rowdy crowd that hung out at the Watering Hole, going out to the parking lot every now and then to pass their bootleg bottles around. Hank was a settled young fellow without much in the way of looks or gumption and he didn’t spend much time at the Watering Hole. He couldn’t dance, either, and pretty much steered clear of the Dance Barn.
    But Hank (who had a few hitherto undemonstrated sterling qualities) endowed Beulah with something she wasn’t likely to get from her other suitors: respectability and a marketing opportunity. Hank was the youngest son of the pastor at the Four Corners Methodist Church, where Beulah confessed her sins and joined on the Sunday before the wedding, wiping the slate clean and getting the marriage off to a good start. Before long, all the respectable Methodist women were coming to Beulah to get their hair shampooed and set, and then the Pentecostals joined the beauty parade, and finally even the Presbyterians. Beulah was on her way.
    After the birth of Hank Jr., Hank (who knew a good thing when he saw it) bought a larger house on Dauphin Street, between Jeff Davis and Peachtree, and enclosed the screened porch across the back so Beulah could have herself a real shop. He installed a shampoo sink and haircutting chair and big wall mirror and wired the place for electricity for that new Kenmore handheld hair dryer that Beulah wanted.
    That done, Beulah wallpapered the walls with big pink roses and painted the wainscoting pink. She painted the wooden floor pink, too, but pretty quickly discovered the problem with that and spattered it with gray, blue, and yellow. Then she painted a beautiful sign, decorated with a basket of pink roses, and hung it out front. Since Dauphin Street was the way most people came into town, lots of people saw the sign.
    After a few months, the Beauty Bower was such a runaway success that Beulah had to put an advertisement in the Dispatch for somebody to help her out with shampoos and manicures. Bettina Higgens applied, demonstrated her skills on Beulah’s very own hair and nails, and got the job. She was definitely not a pretty woman herself (she was tall and her brown hair was irredeemably thin and lanky) and she didn’t have the advantage of cosmetology school. But she was a fast learner and Beulah was a good teacher, and within two weeks, they were working shoulder-to-shoulder at the now-twin shampoo sinks and haircutting stations.
    The Beauty Bower opened promptly at nine in the morning, after Beulah saw Hank Jr. and daughter Spoonie off to school. Then she took out her hair curlers (she had traded her bob for