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

Manor—so quiet, in fact, that the younger folks (the ones who liked to go out to the Watering Hole or the Dance Barn to dance and drink bootleg booze in the parking lot) might have called them dull. Bessie didn’t see it that way, of course, for her days were full of chores, sunup to sundown. When supper was over and the evening work was done, she was glad to go out to the front porch and join the Magnolia Ladies (that’s what they called themselves) for a relaxing hour or two before bedtime.
    Besides Bessie herself, there were five other ladies living at the Manor at the present time: Dorothy Rogers, Mrs. Sedalius (the one who had heard the Cartwright ghost digging in the Darling Dahlias’ garden), a retired schoolteacher named Leticia Wiggens, Maxine Bechdel, widow of the previous editor of the Dispatch , and Roseanne, the Negro lady who had cooked and cleaned for Bessie’s family for over forty years.
    None of the Magnolia Ladies was “well fixed,” as Leticia put it delicately, and all of them had their own chores at the Manor, to help out with the cost of running the old place. Roseanne did the cooking and the laundry, as she had done for many years. Leticia and Maxine washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Sedalius cleaned the upstairs, Miss Rogers dusted the downstairs, and Bessie did the downstairs floors, the shopping, and the outside work.
    In addition, everyone (even Miss Rogers) worked in the garden that supplied the Manor’s table, and they all helped to tend the dozen hens that gave them their breakfast eggs. One year, they had a milk goat named Belle, but while everyone loved Belle for her sweet manners and soft ears, none of them was crazy about her milk (“tastes like old socks,” Miss Rogers said). So Belle lived a lazy life in her backyard pen and Roseanne walked the two blocks to Mr. Wellgood’s barn every morning and brought back a quart of straight-from-the-cow milk for breakfast.
    Magnolia Manor was the name Bessie had given to her family home after her father died, taking with him to the grave the Civil War military pension that had supported them both. Trying to come up with an idea that would earn some money, Bessie turned the place into a boardinghouse, which suited her own minimal needs and brought in enough to pay the taxes, buy coal and electricity, and buy meat and such staples as flour, sugar, coffee, and tea.
    The ladies didn’t pay much, because they didn’t have much. Mrs. Sedalius’ son (a doctor in Mobile) sent a small check once a month (just the check, never a letter). Miss Rogers earned a few dollars a week at the library. Leticia was a Civil War widow and got her husband’s pension, while Maxine owned two small houses and the tenants usually (but not always) paid rent. Roseanne had once lived in Maysville, but after her husband died and her daughters got married, she moved in with Bessie and traded her cooking and laundry talents for board and room. Both Roseanne and Bessie were satisfied with the arrangement, especially Roseanne, who was scared to death of ending up in the poorhouse. Cypress County had a poorhouse, of course—all the counties in the state were required to have one—but there wasn’t enough money to manage it right and nobody in her right mind wanted to end up there.
    Bessie had once read that in England, the government gave its elderly citizens an old-age pension. She thought this was a very good idea and wished that America would do this, too, the sooner the better. In fact, she had recently written an urgent letter to Senator Bankhead, telling him that he ought to get behind Huey P. Long’s proposal that everybody over sixty should receive a pension. But she wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get an answer. Huey Long thought that the government should guarantee every family in the nation five thousand dollars a year, and that nobody should earn more than a million dollars a year. People who had money didn’t like him. They thought he was dangerous, and he probably was, and a Communist and maybe he was that, too (although he said he wasn’t). But Bessie liked his ideas and wished that Huey P. Long could come over and take charge of Alabama, because Louisiana did not deserve him.
    She had even heard Huey P. Long on the radio. Two Christmases before, Mrs. Sedalius’ son (who probably felt guilty because he never came to visit) had sent his mother a Crosley five-tube table model radio. The ladies were