The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

“Yes. But not half as pretty as those naked ladies in front of old Miss Hamer’s house.” Verna pointed across the street, where a two-story frame house, weathered gray with green shutters and in need of a coat of paint, was fronted by a few rosebushes and a mass of leggy lilies in a rainbow of colors: pumpkin orange, sunshine yellow, sizzling scarlet, as well as the quieter mauve, blush, and white. Verna chuckled and imitated Miss Rogers’ high-pitched voice. “Lycoris squamigera, girls. ‘Naked ladies’ is not a respectable name for a plant.”


“My mother calls them ‘resurrection lilies,’ ” Lizzy said, and laughed a little. “When I was a girl, I always thought they were sort of magical, the way the leaves died in the summer and then the stalks poked up out of the ground, all of a sudden, and in the next day or two, here came the blooms—poof!” She waved her hand. “Maybe the new people will clean up the front yard a little,” she added. “Those naked ladies deserve a place to show off. You can hardly see them for all that grass and weeds.”

“The new people?” Verna asked, raising her eyebrows. “You mean, somebody has moved in with old Miss Hamer?”

Miss Julia Hamer had to be eighty if she was a day and probably older, although nobody knew for sure, except possibly Bessie Bloodworth, the town’s unofficial historian and genealogist, who knew everybody’s family tree as well as she knew every branch of the flowering dogwood just outside her kitchen window. Bessie, who lived next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse, had written up Miss Hamer’s family story in the collection of local histories she had gathered years before. Miss Hamer’s father had been among Darling’s early settlers, and the old woman had lived in the house on Camellia Street, across from Mrs. Blackstone and Bessie Bloodworth, since long before Lizzy was born.

There were other women in town who didn’t go out much, but as a recluse, Miss Hamer without a doubt took the cake. She hadn’t been to church for forty years, which was scandal enough to raise all the Darling eyebrows, and when the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers made their annual round of visits to inquire about the state of her eternal soul, the door was always shut in their faces, and not very politely, either. Miss Hamer’s colored maid, DessaRae (an aunt of Lizzy’s mother’s maid, Sally-Lou), took the weekly grocery list to Hancock’s Groceries, but the household’s milk, eggs, and ice were of course delivered right to the door and the bills regularly paid by mail. Old Zeke was employed to mow and trim the yard twice a year, not often enough to keep it neat but just enough to keep the weeds from taking over. And if Miss Hamer sat outside on a warm summer evening, as most folks did in Darling, she sat in her daddy’s old pine rocker on the back porch, where she couldn’t be seen because the backyard was entirely enclosed by a holly hedge so dense that not even the neighborhood children could peek through it. Nobody except Bessie Bloodworth, Doc Roberts, and DessaRae had so much as laid eyes on the old lady for a very long time, except as a pale shadow moving slowly behind the drawn window shades in the evening, after the kerosene lamps were lit.

And now she was no longer living alone.

“They moved in last Saturday,” Lizzy replied, in answer to Verna’s question. “Two ladies. Miss Hamer’s niece and her friend, Miss Lake. Miss Jamison—that’s the niece—is doing some legal business with Mr. Moseley. He’s handling the sale of her house back in Illinois, and he’s been corresponding with her. I met her when she came into the office right after she and her friend arrived, and she’s been back a time or two.” Lizzy wrinkled her nose. “She’s kind of a cool customer.”

“Two women, moving into Miss Hamer’s house?” Verna said, shaking her head incredulously. “Don’t you find that a little surprising, Liz? After all, she’s lived by herself—with DessaRae to help out, of course—for decades.”

Lizzy shrugged. “Miss Jamison told Mr. Moseley that her aunt invited them. Maybe Miss Hamer needs more help than she’s getting from DessaRae, who has a bad back, Sally-Lou says. And Miss Jamison is family.” Which of course explained it, Lizzy thought, since family usually pitched in to help when things got difficult.

“Well, I’m sure there’s room,” Verna said in a practical tone. “That house must have at least three bedrooms upstairs. So you’ve met them. What are they like?”

Lizzy raised her eyebrows. “Well, I haven’t met Miss Lake, so I couldn’t say about her. But when it comes to Miss Jamison, you’d really have to see her to believe—”

But just at that moment, the front door of the house opened and a woman came out onto the porch. She was dressed fit to kill in a stylish fire-engine red dress with a dropped waist and a pleated skirt that came just to the knee. A filmy red scarf was wrapped several times around her neck, the ends flowing loose. A chic red felt hat with a floppy red bow on one side perched on her platinum blond hair. She was wearing black gloves and red suede high-heeled shoes with four-inch French heels and narrow ankle straps, and carried a red-and-black pouch handbag big enough to stuff a live chicken into.

“That’s her,” Lizzy said. “Miss Jamison.”