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

that was probably made up by her cook, Lucretia, with stuffed tomatoes and stuffed squash blossoms arranged around it so that it looked like something out of Better Homes and Gardens, where Mrs. Johnson had won a dollar the year before (and kept it, too) for Lucretia’s butterscotch pie recipe. Most of the Dahlias didn’t have time to stuff squash blossoms, even for a party, but they had brought their usual dishes of pickled okra and watermelon pickles and pickled eggs, along with spiced figs, pear compote, and fresh strawberries. Verna Tidwell brought molasses cookies, Mildred Kilgore brought her famous ribbon cake with peach filling, and Lizzy brought some of those little thumbprint cookies filled with raspberry jam made from the berries from the patch behind her house. Ophelia Snow had brought a couple of gallons of cold rosemary lemonade. She had extra ice from Friday’s delivery, so she brought that, too, and the lemonade was frosty cold. When their plates were full, the Dahlias carried them into the parlor and settled down to enjoy their friends’ cooking.

    You’re probably curious about the Dahlias’ new clubhouse and gardens, so while they’re eating and chatting, we’ll have a quick look around. The house isn’t very large, just two rooms in front, the parlor where everybody is sitting in wooden chairs, and the front bedroom, wallpapered in green and white roses. This room has been turned into a sitting room featuring photographs of old Mrs. Blackstone and her beautiful garden—the way it once was, years before—and shelves that now contain the club’s gardening library. On the wall is a big gold-toned plaque from the Darling Town Council naming Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone Darling’s Woman of the Year. She earned the plaque three years running, 1926, 1927, and 1928, which annoyed Mrs. Johnson, who has never gotten it even once.
    Behind the front bedroom is the pink-check-papered bedroom, which the Dahlias are planning to use as a workroom. Behind the parlor is the kitchen, which has a gas range (installed just a couple of years before) and an icebox on one side, a sink under the window, and cabinets and a pine table with white-painted legs. The house, built sometime in the 1890s, is on city gas and water and there’s an indoor bathroom at one end of the back porch. It also has electricity, for back in the mid-1920s, Ozzie Sherman installed a Delco generator to power his sawmill just outside of town. A smart businessman, he talked the Darling City Council into installing streetlights around the square and letting him run electricity through the town. Last year, the council took over the Sherman Electric Company and bought two new generators. If the money held out, they planned to run electricity all the way out to the Cypress County Fairgrounds.
    Mrs. Blackstone’s garden is much larger than the house itself If you stand on the back porch and look down toward the creek, you can probably see why it has been written up in the Montgomery Advertiser and the Selma Times-Journal and who knows where else over the years. Back there beyond the trees are the ruins of what was once the splendid Cartwright mansion, Mrs. Blackstone’s mother’s family home. Built in the glory days of Old King Cotton, it burned to rubble after the Union troops occupied Darling during the War Between the States. Later—in the 1880s and 1890s—its manicured lawns and lovely gardens were carved into town lots along what is now Camellia Street. A row of houses stands there now, each one fronted by a white picket fence.
    Mrs. Blackstone inherited the largest lots and a piece of the Cartwright gardens, which was only right, since her mother was the sole surviving Cartwright. Her share of the garden is full of blooming shrubs and trees—including another large cucumber tree—meandering down the hill and into the pines. Inside the fence that encloses the backyard are Mrs. Blackstone’s wide, curving perennial borders, filled with iris, larkspur, phlox, and mounds of Shasta daisies and sweet alyssum. Mrs. Blackstone was sick the last few years of her life, so the borders are unkempt now and full of weeds, and the lilies she loved—Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and those common orange ditch lilies—need to be dug and separated and replanted. There are tangles of sweet peas and cardinal climber and honeysuckle on the fences, and roses, roses, roses everywhere. Mrs. Blackstone was always very fond of roses,