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

said, as casually as she could.
    “Hullo, Lizzy,” Grady replied brusquely, and strode past her. Then he stopped and turned and snatched off his hat, and the sternness in his high-cheekboned face softened. Somewhere in his family, far enough back so that nobody quite remembered where or when or who, there had been an Indian—Creek maybe, or Choctaw. The lineage might be forgotten, but the lines on his face were clear enough. “Sorry. It’s not you, doll. I’m in a hurry. I gotta talk to Charlie.”
    Doll. She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but there was no point in saying so—again. “What is it?” she asked, caught by the intensity of his expression.
    “Come inside,” he said, and pushed open the door, standing back so she could go first. Grady had graduated from ag school at Auburn and was educated in the latest farming methods, but he was still a Southern gendeman. Or at least he had been, until Saturday night.
    The Dispatch office was the size of Moseley & Moseley upstairs, but was just one large, tin-ceilinged room, with a wooden counter built across the space about ten feet from the front door. Behind it, Charlie Dickens was typing at his battered old desk, wearing his usual green eyeshade, a white shirt and tie, and a sleeveless gray vest. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth. Behind him, at the back of the room, the newspaper press sat silent—he wouldn’t crank it up and start printing until Thursday evening, after Lizzy and Mr. Moseley had quit for the day. It made a lot of noise.
    “Charlie,” Grady said urgendy. “Hey, Charlie.”
    Charlie glanced over his shoulder. He was a large man, past middle age, fleshy and half-bald, with hard, penetrating eyes that didn’t seem to go with the plump softness of the rest of him.
    “Hey, Grady.” Charlie stopped typing, rolled his chair back, and stood, stretching. “Afternoon, Lizzy. Say, Miz Search dropped off a page of tips on makin’ do for that pamphlet your garden club is compiling.” He began sorting through the litter of papers on his desk. “Now, whut the heck did I do with it?”
    Charlie’s skills as an editor and his command of standard English were impeccable, but he preferred to ‘talk ’Bama,’ as he put it. He said that folks felt a little easier talking to him if he didn’t put on the dog.
    Grady put his hat back on, all business. “Charlie, there’s been a bad accident. I was out having a look at Harvey Jackson’s hogs when his boys came in and said there was a car wrecked and somebody dead in it, down in Pine Mill Creek. Harvey and I drove over to look; then I hightailed it back here to town to tell the sheriff. Figured you might want to get out there and take some pictures. Looks like a newspaper story to met.”
    Charlie stopped messing with the papers on his desk and jerked off his eyeshade. “Get out where? Where’s the wreck?”
    “Where the bridge on the county road has been out for the past three weeks. A girl drove through the barrier and into the ravine. She’s dead.”
    Lizzy bit her lip. “Oh, dear! Oh, Grady, that’s awful! A girl? Who?” Darling was small and its families, neighbors, and kinfolk were all knitted together in a dense fabric of relationships. When somebody died, it left a hole. Everybody felt the loss, one way or another.
    “You can say that again,” Grady replied tersely. “Purely awful. The car rolled a time or two before it got to the bottom, and it landed on top of her. She’s smashed up so bad I couldn’t tell you who. She’s a blonde is all I can say.”
    A blonde? Lizzy stared at him, her heart beginning to pound.
    Charlie was reaching for his suit jacket. “Don’t have any film in my camera,” he said, shrugging into it. “Used it up on Saturday, shootin’ the Vo Ag boys out at the fairgrounds. Lester ordered it for me this mawnin’—be here on tomorrow’s bus. Lizzy, you got film in that Kodak of yours?”
    “Sure,” Lizzy said. “You can take my camera.” She was trying to sound normal. “What kind of car is it, Grady?”
    “Pontiac roadster, green, pretty new. It’s upside down in the rocks by the creek.”
    “Roadster?” Charlie frowned. “Whose ’ud that be? Didn’t know we had any Pontiac roadsters in town.” Darling was small enough so that everybody knew what everybody else was driving, how long they’d had it, and what they’d paid for it.
    “Dunno,” Grady said. “Didn’t recognize it m’self I can give you a lift