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

Darling, unwelcome changes, in her opinion. She remembered when people could sit out on their front porches in the evening—or during the day, for that matter—and not hear any noise at all, except for the laughter of the children at their games, or the barking of one of the neighborhood dogs, or the soft clop-clop of a horse’s hooves in the dust of the street. Oh, they might hear the railroad train, but the tracks were on the other side of town, and the train ran only once a day.
    Now the motor cars were everywhere, and trucks, too, and motorcycles. And even airplanes flying low overhead on their way between Mobile and Montgomery, or landing at the grassy airstrip out at the county fairgrounds. Barnstormers might delight the young boys in town, but when the planes did loop-the-loops over the town, the earsplitting noise rattled everybody’s windows and scared the horses and dogs. And while Bessie liked their own radio, she wasn’t all that fond of the across-the-street neighbors’ choice in music. Jazz, and they turned it up so loudly that half the neighborhood complained. Bessie often longed for the days before the Great War, when the world seemed so much quieter and slower than it did now. But she was enough of a realist to know that modern life was upon them. The world was whirling like a kaleidoscope, faster and faster, everything blurring together. Nobody could stop what was happening—and worse, nobody seemed to want to.
    When nine o’clock came, Miss Rogers (always the first to leave, since she wanted first turn in the bathroom) closed her book, and went upstairs. Mrs. Sedalius yawned and said that tomorrow was going to be busy, since the visiting nurse would be in town and it was her day to volunteer. “And with the Cartwright ghost wandering around, we’d all better get into our beds,” she warned, stuffing her knitting into her bag.
    “I’d personally be more concerned about that escaped convict,” Maxine said. “He could be hiding out in half a dozen places around town.”
    “Why would he hang around here, where somebody could catch him?” Leticia asked reasonably. “He’s probably in Memphis or Nashville by now. Or Chicago.” She jotted some numbers on a slip of paper. “You owe me thirty-seven dollars, Maxine.”
    Maxine, who hated to lose, scowled at the piece of paper. “I thought it was thirty-four. You’d better add it again, Let-tie. Don’t forget what happened last time.”
    “What happened last time was that you added wrong,” Leticia replied. She grinned amiably. “Come on, Max. Don’t be a sore loser. Fork it over. Thirty-seven dollars.”
    “Not until you add it up again,” Maxine retorted, but she began counting her pieces of colored cardboard.
    Mrs. Sedalius got up. “You girls can sit here and argue all you want. I am going to make my nightcap and go to my room, where I don’t have to worry about that ghost.” She went off to the kitchen to heat up a pan of milk on the gas range and make herself a cup of Ovaltine. It helped her sleep, she claimed, although everybody knew it was really the bootleg rum that she kept under her bed that put her to sleep.
    The business about the ghost was nonsense of course, although Bessie didn’t contradict her. Roseanne, however, was deathly afraid of ghosts, so she went quickly to her room and shut the door and put a chair against it—a practice Bessie discouraged (in case of fire) but could not stop.
    By the time Mrs. Sedalius carried her nightly cup of Ovaltine out of the kitchen, Leticia and Maxine were headed in that direction to make the toasted cheese sandwiches and cocoa that they enjoyed before bedtime. Bessie and Roseanne were partial to popcorn, and they always made sure that there were enough of these little treats on hand so that everyone could have what she wanted. The world might be going to hell in a handbasket, as Bessie’s father liked to put it—in fact, judging from the stories she read in the Dispatch about people losing their jobs and their houses, that was exactly what was happening. But if they could afford just a few little treats, Bessie told herself, maybe they could fool themselves into feeling that they were rich. Or at least, not poor. You couldn’t be poor if you had a toasted cheese sandwich and cocoa every night.
    Bessie herself always put up her gray hair in spit curls before she went to sleep, sitting at her dressing table and twisting the hair neatly around her finger and pinning the