The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

Lizzy’s Key Lizzy said good-bye to Verna, turned, and walked east along Camellia. She crossed Robert E. Lee, went another block, and turned north on Jefferson Davis. This was a pretty part of town, and even though the houses weren’t as big and fancy as the newer ones out near the country club, they were painted white or gray with blue or red shutters, and the front porches were furnished with a rocking chair or a porch swing and wreathed with honeysuckle. There were lawns, too, with grass that was green in the spring and turned brown in the dry, hot summer. It was early October and the lawns were brown now, but most of the houses had flower beds out front, and in the dusky evenings, people sat on their porches, knitting or reading the newspaper and watching the little girls jumping rope and the boys playing baseball or tag in the dusty street.

Glancing at the houses, a stranger might find it hard to tell that times were so tough and money was so hard to come by. But if he looked more closely, he’d see that half the shingles on Mrs. Weber’s roof had been ripped off in a wind storm and hadn’t been replaced yet. Mrs. Weber didn’t live there anymore. She had lost the house to foreclosure and had gone to Mobile to live with her daughter. And three doors down, the house with the two broken windows in the front had been vacant for so long that the bank’s faded For Sale sign was hidden in the withered grass. People who couldn’t pay their rent or make their mortgage payments were moving in with family—with their children or their parents or their brothers or their sisters. They had to. They had no place else to go.

But Lizzy wasn’t thinking about this. She was thinking about what Verna had told her. A pair of vaudeville stars had moved to Darling! And if Verna was right (Verna usually was), one of them had come a long, long way. To go from being plain-Jane Miss Nona Jean Jamison of Monroeville, Alabama, to Miss Lorelei LaMotte of the Great White Way must have been an incredible journey.

And then a wonderful idea suddenly popped into Lizzy’s head. The Naughty and Nice Sisters act wasn’t suitable for the Dahlias’ talent show, but wouldn’t Miss LaMotte make a splendid subject for a feature story in the Darling Dispatch? Wasn’t this exactly the kind of article that Charlie Dickens, the newspaper’s editor, would love to print?

Why, of course it was! It was one of those uplifting, heartwarming, hometown-girl-makes-good stories that everybody likes to read, especially in hard times. And while Darling wasn’t Miss LaMotte’s hometown, Monroeville was, and Monroeville was only fifteen miles away. Lizzy shivered a little, thinking of the exciting possibilities. She could do an interview with Miss LaMotte about her life, starting with her small-town girlhood as plain-Jane Nona Jean Jamison. And then her move to New York, where she had enjoyed a huge success in the glamorous and competitive world of vaudeville, catching the eye of Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld himself. Miss LaMotte had doubtless taken a few hard knocks along the way, which Lizzy could use to show how dedicated she was to becoming a dancer and how hard she’d worked to get to the top. The article could end with her decision to leave her big-city life and move to tiny Darling, Alabama, where she planned to care for her aging aunt and lead a life of quiet and peaceful retirement, far from the madding crowd. It would be a charming true-life story that everybody in town would read and talk about for weeks, maybe months.

And she—Elizabeth Lacy—was the perfect person to write it, wasn’t she? For the past five years, she had written a garden column for the weekly Dispatch. Lizzy loved writing about plants and people’s gardens and the passing of the seasons and the sweltering heats and sudden storms of their Alabama climate. She enjoyed doing research and corresponding with other Southern gardeners.

But in May, she had written a feature story about a young woman who had been shot in a green Pontiac roadster that belonged to a dentist and the car pushed into Pine Mill Creek. The story was based on her own investigation into the life and death of Eva Louise Scott, the girl in the car, and everybody told her what a great piece of reporting it was. It was a sad story, too, for Bunny—that was the girl’s nickname—had been beautiful and gay and young. And even though she was a bit reckless and heedless and wanted jewelry and other pretty things more than was probably good for her, Bunny hadn’t deserved to die, which of course was the main point of Lizzy’s article.

After that successful debut as a feature writer, Mr. Dickens had told her that if she came up with another interesting story idea, he’d be glad to consider it. Lizzy had thought of several, but none seemed to be exciting enough. The summer had passed with its customary sedateness, with nothing more explosive than the fireworks blowing up at the Elks’ Club Fourth of July picnic or more tragic than the swimming hole drying up in the long August drought or more unexpected than the out-of-the-blue emergency landing of a Cessna Model A airplane on the grassy airstrip near the county fairgrounds—none of which put a match to Lizzy’s creative fire.