The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

“It was the front seat,” Beulah corrected, “and she’d just come off her shift at the Exchange.” She knew it didn’t matter, though. Leona Ruth never met a fact she couldn’t ignore. She would rummage up the family secrets of every sausage she ate and pass them along to everybody at her table, and if a fact or two didn’t fit her story, she changed them or just left them out. Beulah picked up her scissors. “Earlynne, how short do you want to go today?”


“About here, please.” Earlynne held a finger up to her ear. “I’m working at the plant this summer, and it’s like a blast furnace out there.” Earlynne’s husband, Henry Biddle, was the manager at the Coca-Cola plant, and she worked in the office. She glanced at Beulah in the mirror. “Poor Bettina must just be beside herself, Rona Jean being her roommate and all.”

“That’s the good Lord’s truth.” Beulah began to snip. “Bettina said she was up all night, worrying. Rona Jean gets off the switchboard at eleven, and it’s no more than six blocks’ walk. But she never got home.”

Bettina had telephoned just as Beulah was sitting down to breakfast, to say she couldn’t make it in to work that morning. Myra May had just called Bettina to tell her the tragic news about Rona Jean. She was sobbing when she relayed the story.

Beulah had been shocked almost speechless. “Oh, Bettina, honey,” she gasped. “What a horrible thing to happen! I am so sorry!”

She was, too, very sorry—but at the same time, maybe just the teensiest bit not surprised. Of course, it went without saying that murder, right here in Darling, was utterly unthinkable. But Beulah had felt from the very beginning that Bettina was making a serious mistake to ask Rona Jean to move in with her, even if it did cut the rent in half. The two girls were both in their early twenties, but they were badly mismatched, personality-wise. Bettina was shy and didn’t make friends easily (at least with people her own age—she was fine with the ladies at the Bower), while Rona Jean was just the opposite. She wasn’t any prettier than Bettina—her face was plain as a tin pie plate and her brown hair wouldn’t any more hold a curl than a horse’s tail. But she had . . . well, what Beulah would call a buxom figure, which made her popular with a certain kind of boy. As a result, Rona Jean always had more dates than she could shake a stick at, while poor Bettina didn’t go out with a boy more than once in a blue moon. Beulah had felt that there was bound to be some friction and unhappiness over this disparity, sooner or later. Now wasn’t the time to say so, though. Now was the time to stand by Bettina, in her hour of greatest need.

“I want you to go right back to bed, Bettina,” Beulah instructed. “You’ve had a terrible shock. We’ll miss you, but the Bower will survive without you for a day or two—or however long you have to be gone.”

Of course, it was a terrible time for Bettina to be away from her comb and scissors. With the new CCC camp going great guns outside of Darling, people had more money to spend, there were more doings to attend, and the beauty business had picked up. For instance, there was a dance every Saturday night at the camp, so the younger girls were coming in this afternoon to get their hair done. And coming up on Wednesday was the Fourth of July, always an exciting event in Darling, with a parade around the square and speeches on the courthouse steps and fireworks at the fairgrounds. Beulah knew that Monday and Tuesday would be a madhouse, with all the ladies wanting to look their best for the Fourth.

“Oh, I won’t be out that long,” Bettina said quickly. “Just a couple of hours, I hope. The only reason I can’t be there this morning is that Buddy Norris is coming over to ask me some questions.”

“Buddy Norris?” Beulah asked blankly. Then she remembered that Buddy had recently been elected sheriff. It was a little hard to think of him with that much responsibility, though. He’d always been kind of a big kid, zooming around on that red motorcycle and not very serious. “Questions about what?”