Earlynne Biddle was not at her best, having spent the better part of the evening at The Flour Shop making bread—not her favorite thing to do.
Her hand on the light switch, she took one last look around the bakery kitchen. The counters were clean, the pine-topped baking table was scrubbed, the dishes were washed, the supplies were returned to the pantry, the electric refrigerator was humming contentedly, and the linoleum floor was swept. It was almost nine and time to go home—finally.
Earlynne was working late tonight because Zelda Clemens was home sick with the flu that was making the rounds in Darling. Which meant that Earlynne herself would have to be back in this kitchen at five-thirty tomorrow morning, in order to bake the twenty loaves needed to fill the glass display case out front, as well as prepare those wonderful French pastries that were her specialty: croissants, beignets, éclairs, macaroons, madeleines, crepes, and petit fours. Which, along with sticky buns and tarts and cookies and pocket pies, brought customers flocking to The Flour Shop.
Now, this was all well and good. Very good, in fact, except for the unfortunate fact that Earlynne hated making bread. It was the croissants that were her favorites, and she made them with the dedication of a zealot: mixing the dough with a devout attention, reverently rolling it out, then rolling the chilled butter to just the right size and layering the butter and the dough, turning it tenderly, folding it into something that resembled a book. And then doing it again and then again, until at last she cut the layered dough into lovely little triangles, shaped the triangles into gorgeous croissants, and popped them into the oven. For Earlynne, the baking of croissants was an art, and she was Leonardo.
Bread, on the other hand, was boring start to finish. Consequently, Earlynne had never quite managed to master the craft. (She did not consider it an art.) Somehow, over the many years she had fantasized about opening her very own bakery, it had never occurred to her that a bakery was expected to sell bread. And that to pull the loaves of hot bread out of the oven first thing in the morning, the sponge would have to be set the night before. And that baking twenty or thirty loaves of bread at a time might not be any sort of fun. It would forever and always be a job—a boring job that she really did not want to do.
As it turned out, her partner, Mildred Kilgore, didn’t want to do it either. Aunt Hetty Little and the Dahlias had pitched in to help during the rocky few weeks after The Flour Shop opened, contributing loaves of bread they baked in their own kitchen ovens. Under Aunt Hetty’s energetic tutelage, Earlynne finally got the hang of it, more or less. But while she improved to where she could make a passable loaf, she never found it anything but boring. Many times, as she told her husband Henry, she had thought about throwing in the sponge (to make an unfunny joke). What good was owning a bakery (well, half of it) if you had to bake bread when you wanted to be making croissants?*
Who knows what might have happened if Liz Lacy hadn’t introduced them to Zelda Clemens, a Darling girl who had gone to Chicago to seek her fortune but was now back home, empty handed and looking for work. As Earlynne and Mildred learned, Zelda had been one of the regular bakers at Roeser’s Bakery in Humboldt Park, on the west side of Chicago. Roeser’s was famous for its bread, and Zelda demonstrated what she had learned there by producing six amazingly symmetrical sample loaves, beautifully browned and divinely fragrant. Earlynne and Mildred gobbled down half a loaf between them, the warm slices drenched with butter. They had held a brief two-minute executive meeting and hired Zelda on the spot.
Now, as Earlynne switched off the light, locked the deadbolt on the kitchen door, and started for her car in the alley behind the bakery, she found herself wishing Zelda a swift and complete recovery. In fact, they had just talked on the telephone and Zelda thought she might be back tomorrow, if she could come later, around noon. Earlynne had agreed. Zelda could keep the bakery open while Earlynne and Mildred went to hear Senator Long’s speech, which was now scheduled for the baseball field.
When she thought about this, Earlynne felt a stab of justifiable pride mixed with an understandable nervous apprehension, for she was the president of Darling’s Share Our Wealth Club and responsible for introducing the senator tomorrow. She was going home right now, to write out her speech. Not much of a writer, she only hoped she’d be able to come up with something worthy of the great man.
She also had to talk with her son, Benny, who was one-half of Darling’s new radio station WDAR (Benny’s friend Tommy Lee Musgrove was the other half). Benny was responsible for what the boys called “remote broadcasting.” He would be setting up the equipment that allowed the senator’s speech to be heard, via telephone and the air waves, as far away as eight or ten miles—all the way out to Miss Tallulah LaBelle’s plantation, they hoped. This seemed like a miracle to Earlynne, who had never understood air waves and was pretty sure she never would. She still couldn’t quite get her mind around the fact that it was her boy Benny—that freckled kid with the buck teeth and the fire-engine red cowlick that wouldn’t stay down no matter how many little dabs of Brylcreem he slicked on it—who was making this miracle happen. While Benny certainly had his faults (and no mother would ever overlook a son’s faults), the fact that he could command the airwaves was little short of amazing.
Benny’s father was of the opposite opinion. He would shake his head and grouse that the boy was never going to amount to a hill of beans if he didn’t get busy and find something more productive to do than messing around with that dad-blamed radio station, which only broadcast foolishness and would never amount to a hill of beans. If you wanted news, it was the Dispatch you turned to. If it was music you were after, there was the First Methodist choir, and if it was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for everybody else. So when Benny asked his father if the Coca-Cola bottling plant (which was under Mr. Biddle’s management) would pony up for a commercial, it was a hard sell.
“Radio?” his father snorted. “Think anybody’s going to buy anything they hear on that little radio station of yours?” But he paid for a commercial because . . . well, because Benny was his son. And because it was Coca-Cola’s advertising money he was spending, not cash dollars out of his own pocket.
Earlynne, on the other hand, was convinced that there was great economic potential in what Benny was doing. She was confident that, in a few years, WDAR would be as big and important as WALA down in Mobile or WSFA up in Montgomery. Why, the boy might even end up in Atlanta or New York with one of the big broadcasting companies, NBC or CBS or somebody like that. Earlynne was of the opinion that, given Benny’s outstanding brain, all things were possible.
And anyway, it was better than drinking beer with those rowdies at Pete’s Pool Parlor, wasn’t it? Or mooning after Rowena Rose Wilson, that flirty little girl who worked at the telephone exchange and whose highest ambition had already been achieved when she was crowned as Darling’s Junior Miss Sweet Potato of 1934.
Tomorrow would be a big day for WDAR, with Benny managing the remote broadcast of the senator’s speech and Tommy Lee back in the studio, doing the announcing. Earlynne had her fingers crossed that there wouldn’t be a lot of static, the way there’d been when Benny tried to do a remote broadcast from the bakery just last Thursday. They’d had Bessie Bloodworth and Ophelia Snow come in to tell everybody about the Darling history Bessie was writing for Ophelia Snow’s Federal Writer’s Project. It had been a dark and stormy morning and the airwaves apparently didn’t like lightning when it happened in the neighborhood. Earlynne was hoping for clear weather tomorrow. Senator Long was bound to be impressed that their little town had a radio station of its very own. He might even recommend the boys to bigwigs he knew in the radio business over there in Louisiana, which he practically ran single-handed from Washington DC, according to the newspapers.
Still thinking about static and airwaves and Benny’s promising future, Earlynne arrived at her car—a pretty little 1928 Nash, light blue, bought just before the Crash turned everybody’s world upside down. She put a hand into her pocketbook for her car key, which was on Henry’s stamped leather Fraternal Order of Odd Fellows key fob, along with the key to the bakery. But she couldn’t find it in the jumble of coins, comb, hairbrush, lipstick, face powder, pencil, notebook, aspirin bottle, a slightly used handkerchief, and a paper sack containing a half-dozen eggs. She was short on eggs for Henry’s and Benny’s breakfasts this week so she had borrowed the eggs from the bakery’s refrigerator. She left a note saying she would pay them back from the next dozen she bought at Mrs. Hancock’s, with an extra egg for interest.
Well, bother, she thought, putting her pocketbook on the hood of her car and beginning a serious search among the loose coins. She hoped she hadn’t locked those keys in the cash register, the way she’d done a couple of weeks ago. If she had, she’d either have to walk the eight blocks home, or walk over to the Exchange and call Henry to come and get her. Neither offered an inviting prospect, especially since by now it was very nearly full dark.
Earlynne had pulled just about everything out of her purse and strewn it across the hood when she became aware of a strange odor. The sack of eggs in her hand, she lifted her head, sniffing the air. It was an odd time of the night to be burning trash, wasn’t it? The only businesses on this side of the courthouse square—the Darling Savings and Loan, The Flour Shop, and Fannie Champaign’s hat shop—were all closed, and everybody was home in their parlors, listening to Lum and Abner (straight from the hills of Pine Ridge, Arkansas). Or Major Bowes Amateur Hour, which was said to be getting ten thousand applications a week from country musicians desperately hoping to hit the big time in New York City or get the Major’s nod to go on the road with one of his Amateur Hour troupes.
There were only two buildings on the other side of the alley. One was Mrs. Cooper’s old barn. The other was the garage that Benny and Tommy Lee rented from Mr. Barton for the WDAR studio and office. Mr. Barton had sold his beloved 1928 DeSoto when he couldn’t make the payments on it, so he’d agreed to rent the garage to the boys for only four dollars a month. The place had a dirt floor, but it was wired for electricity, had a small wood stove, and the roof only leaked a little. Most importantly, it was less than a block from the Darling water tower, on top of which—forty-some feet from the ground—the boys had installed one end of their long T-wire antenna. They hoped that the tower would provide enough height to allow WDAR’s signal to reach as far as Miss Tallulah’s Atwater-Kent cathedral-model radio in the sitting room at the LaBelle plantation. That was important because the lady had made a sizeable investment in the radio station’s equipment and might make another, if she could hear WDAR when she turned on her radio. Of course, if Earlynne had known that Benny was up there risking his life on the top of that tower, she would have been a nervous wreck until he was safely on the ground. And then she would have given him a piece of her mind for scaring her to death, and another piece on general principles.
Now, she took a deep sniff. Smoke. Yes, this was definitely smoke. But where in the world—
And then she saw it, a bright tongue of flame licking hungrily at the far corner of the back wall of Mr. Barton’s garage—the home of WDAR. The Darling firebug had been at it again! And if the Hot Dogs didn’t get there quickly, the ramshackle old garage, dry as a bone and easy to burn, would go up like a tinderbox, and with it all of Benny’s and Tommy Lee’s hard work and Miss Tallulah’s investment and the money the boys had borrowed from Mr. Duffy at the bank and the little bit their parents had contributed.
Earlynne’s first impulse was to yell for help, which she did, at the top of her lungs. “Fire!” she screamed. “Help! Fire! Somebody, please—fire! Fire!”
Her second thought was to grab the key to the bakery and dash back inside and use the telephone to call the Exchange and report the fire. She whirled toward the bakery. But as she turned, she heard a car engine start—very close to her, just a few yards away, probably—and she whirled. A black Model T Ford, its headlamps off, pulled out of the dark space behind Mrs. Cooper’s barn, right in front of her. As it made the ninety-degree left turn onto the alley, it was almost close enough for her to touch, and she could see that there was what looked like an EVERY MAN A KING poster in the back window. If only it hadn’t been so dark, she would have been able to read the license plate.
With a sudden, sharp conviction, Earlynne knew that the driver, whoever he was, had to have set the radio station on fire. If she only had a rock, she could throw it through his back window and maybe hit him in the head. There wasn’t a rock anywhere in sight. But she did have the paper bag containing Henry’s and Benny’s breakfast eggs. She snatched it up and hurled it at the car as hard as she could.
But by that time, the Ford was speeding away from her, tires spinning in the loose gravel of the alley. The bag hit the spare tire mounted on the car’s rear end. It split open, the eggs smashed, and the raw yellow yolks dripped messily down through the tire’s wire spokes.
Less than a minute later, Earlynne was fumbling the key into the lock on the back door of the bakery. Two minutes later, in the kitchen, she had that flirty little Rowena Rose Wilson on the line, telling her that she needed to turn on the courthouse fire siren and telephone Archie Mann, or whoever was fire chief this week.
“It’s Mr. Barton’s garage that’s on fire,” she said, stumbling over the words. “Tell Mr. Mann to bring the fire engine to Mr. Barton’s garage.”
“Where?” Rowena Rose asked, sounding confused. “Whose garage? I don’t—”
“It’s WDAR!” Earlynne yelled into the phone. “It’s the radio station, you silly girl!” In desperation, she added, “Where Benny Biddle works.”
“Oh, Benny’s place,” Rowena Rose trilled. “Sure. I know where that is, over behind the bakery. I’ve been there.” And in another breath, she was adding, “Hey, Benny, some lady says your radio station is on fire. Do you know which fire chief I’m supposed to call? And maybe you can tell me which button to push to make that siren thing work.”
Wincing, Earlynne put down the phone. Benny was at the Exchange right now, mooning after Rowena Rose? But he was a Hot Dog, so he would have an idea of what to do, even if that foolish girl didn’t. Twenty seconds later, when the fire siren began to split Darling’s quiet night with its fierce shrieks, Earlynne was glad he’d been where he was when she called, although she didn’t like to think what he and Rowena Rose might have been up to.
Anyway, there wasn’t time to think about that now. She looked around. The galvanized scrub bucket sat in the corner, together with the mop. But the tap in the kitchen sink was slow as molasses in January, and by the time she filled that bucket, the garage could be gone. Then she thought of something else. She opened the refrigerator and grabbed the two big pitchers of milk from the top shelf.
When it came to putting out a fire, milk was just as wet as water, wasn’t it?
* For the full story of Earlynne and Mildred’s bread-baking misadventure: The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle.