The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree by Susan Wittig Albert Read Free Book Online Page A

backyard. Now she grew vegetables and a few flowering annuals and roses around front and felt like these were all the garden she wanted. More than she needed, actually. Which was why when she was done hoeing, she picked a tin lard pail full of green beans and carried it through the gate to the Norris house.
    “Yoo-hoo, Mr. Norris!” she called, standing on the back wooden steps. She called loudly, because Mr. Norris was hard of hearing. “It’s Verna, from next door. You here?”
    Mr. Norris came to the screen. He had a water bucket in his hand and was on his way to the well pump on the cistern. Their street had been on the water main for ten years, but he refused to have city water. City lights, either, or city gas. Coal oil lamps had been plenty good for his momma and daddy, he said, and they were plenty good for him.
    “Got somethin‘for me?” he asked, and peered into the lard pail. “My, my, them’s a nice mess o’ beans, little lady.” He eyed her mischievously. “Got some fatback to go with ’em?”
    “Little lady” was a joke between them, because Verna was five-foot-eleven (taller, when she wore dress pumps with heels) and Mr. Norris, now in his seventies, was stooped, standing no higher than her chest. What’s more, since she usually wore Walter’s baggy old pants, she couldn’t rightly be called a lady. And “fatback” was meant to be funny, too, because Verna didn’t eat pork and Mr. Norris knew it. She had raised a pet pig when she was a girl and pork never seemed to taste right to her after that. Which was why she knew she shouldn’t tell Clyde what was in his can of Ken-L Ration.
    Verna walked to the well with Mr. Norris and watched him hang the bucket on the pump spout and raise and lower the handle. The water gushed out, clear and cool and every bit as good as the water that came out of the city mains. The full bucket was heavy and she took it from him.
    “Buddy’s not around to fetch water for you?” she asked. “He’s out lookin’ for a lady-friend?”
    Mr. Norris’ son’s philandering was another joke, although sometimes not very funny. Buddy had got himself in serious trouble a couple of months before, when his wandering eye lit on another man’s wife and the man took exception. Buddy had ended up with a broken arm and a black eye, which you might’ve thought would be embarrassing for a deputy sheriff.
    But not for Buddy, who was never embarrassed by anything. He had gotten the deputy’s job because he’d ordered a how-to book on scientific crime detection from the Institute of Applied Sciences in Chicago, Illinois, and had taught himself how to take fingerprints, identify firearms, and make “crime scene” photographs. When Deputy Duane Hadley retired earlier in the year and moved over to Monroeville, about fifteen miles to the east, to live with his married daughter, Buddy applied for the job. Sheriff Burns had been so impressed with his knowledge of fingerprinting and photography that he hired him on the spot.
    Of course, the fact that Buddy rode a 1927 red Indian Ace motorcycle was probably the deciding factor, since Sheriff Burns had heard that the New York Police Department bought nothing but Indian Aces for their crack motorcycle police squad. Buddy’s motorcycle gave Verna a headache every time he came roaring up to the house. But it gave Roy Burns the right to brag that Darling had the only mounted sheriff’s deputy in all of southern Alabama.
    “Buddy?” Mr. Norris shook his head. “Naw, he’s out on a case.” He liked this, so he said it again, louder. “He’s went out on a case. Sheriff come by in his automobile and told him to ride out to the Ralph Murphy place. At the end of Briarwood Road, out by Jericho.”
    “What’s going on out there?”
    “Jailbreak.” Mr. Norris was enjoying himself
    “From the prison farm, I reckon.” Prison farm guards with rifles sat on their horses and watched the work parties, but occasionally somebody, or a pair