The Darling Dahlias’ annual talent show was held a few weeks after Violet came home from Memphis with Baby Dorothy and Frankie Diamond was extradited to Illinois on murder charges and Miss Jamison’s plea deal was successfully worked out between the Treasury (who needed Lorelei LaMotte as a witness against Capone and an honest Illinois judge, who was just as happy that the Blade was no longer roaming the streets). And as Mr. Moseley told Lizzy, the T-boys’ case against Al Capone was moving right along. They expected to be able to indict him early in the next year on charges of tax evasion. As for Miss Jamison’s safety, it was clear that the Chicago gangsters had no intention of sending another of their pals to Darling, where he might be subjected to an African slave song, a Rebel yell, and indefinite imprisonment in the Darling jail.

But of course, very few people in Darling knew anything about Frankie Diamond or Lorelei LaMotte or Al Capone’s unpaid taxes. Most Darlingians had met Baby Dorothy, though, and agreed with Doc Roberts, who gave her a good going-over and pronounced her the sturdiest, sweetest little cupcake he had ever seen. In fact, business at the diner was up by nearly ten percent over the past few weeks, since lots of folks wanted to come in and meet Cupcake, the enchanting little blue-eyed creature with (as it turned out) the most beautiful strawberry curls in all of Southern Alabama.

But if Darlingians knew very little about the momentous events of national significance that had transpired in their own small town, most of them thought they knew exactly what was coming when they settled into their wooden folding chairs in the Darling gymnasium, where the basketball floor had been covered with canvas to keep it from getting scratched. All the acts were listed in their programs, produced during several frustrating hours with the Academy’s old mimeograph machine, which had (predictably) eaten Lizzy’s carefully typed stencils. The audience had already seen almost all of the acts, anyway, because they were old favorites that appeared every year.