The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (Berkley Prime Crime) by Albert Susan Wittig

Author:Albert, Susan Wittig [Albert, Susan Wittig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2010-05-25T22:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Myra May Learns Some Startling Facts

Myra May Mosswell’s daddy had been a doctor. When he died, he left his only child a small house and a nice little bundle of money, not very big, but big enough to get her started in a business. Myra May, who was a practical sort of person with a good head on her strong shoulders, spent several months considering in a logical, rational way what she wanted to do with her inheritance. Did she want to move to a big city that would offer exciting opportunities for a woman of ambition and common sense? Memphis, maybe, or Mobile or Atlanta? Or did she want to invest her money in Darling and live in a small, comfortable, but essentially boring town for the rest of her life?

While Myra May was turning these important questions over in her mind and trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life, she was managing the dining room and kitchen at the Old Alabama Hotel. As things turned out, however, staying in Darling was not a calculated decision based on a commonsense approach to planning for the future. It was sheer, random happenstance—a bit of luck. Or, as Myra herself said afterward, a piece of stunning good fortune. Just before Labor Day brought a close to the long, hot, boring summer (during which Myra had just about decided she’d be better off in Atlanta) a young woman got off the Montgomery-Mobile Greyhound bus and came into the hotel looking for work. Her name was Violet Sims. She had curly brown hair and a sweet voice and she was very pretty.

Now, Myra May was not what anybody would ever call pretty. She had a strong jaw, a broad forehead, a firm mouth, and a way of looking at people—especially men—as if she might bore a hole right through them with her eyes. When men were around her, they had a tendency to stumble and mumble and make themselves scarce as soon as they could. She had never yet met a man she wanted to marry and by this time (she could see thirty in the rearview mirror) she was pretty sure that she never would. Women liked her because she was strong and a straight shooter, but they were afraid of her, too, although not as much as the men.

Violet, as it turned out, was not at all afraid of Myra May. She had been born and raised in Memphis and had seen enough of the city, as she put it, to last her for a couple of lifetimes. She and Myra May hit it off at once—“It was just like we’d known one another forever,” Myra May said in astonished delight—and for the next six months, they worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the Old Alabama dining room and kitchen. By Halloween that year, Violet had moved into Myra May’s house, and by Christmas, Myra May had decided that she definitely wanted to stay in Darling, at least as long as Violet was there.

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