Ladies of the Lake

By Haywood Smith

Dahlia was her grandmother's favorite grandchild. Cissy, the grandmother, encouraged Dahlia to study ballet and she was very proud of Dahlia's accomplishments as a professional dancer. However, in her later years, her mind began to fail, and in the beginning of this story, she tries to shoot Dahlia and one of her other sisters when she mistakes them for rapists. And thus begins this story of four sisters living together for one summer in the house their now deceased grandmother left them.
For Cissy has stipulated in her will that the four women cannot inherit her property, which is worth millions, unless they spend three months together in the house. Cissy, even though it appeared she favored Dahlia best, still wanted the sisters to have better relationships with each other and hit upon this method to achieve her goal.
Dahlia gets along best with her sister Violet, has a neutral relationship with sister Rose and doesn't get along with sister Iris at all, which is mainly the fault of Iris, who has always been jealous of all the attention Dahlia's talent as a dancer has gotten her. Violet, Rose and Iris all have stable marriages but Dahlia's marriage is kaput. Dahlia's husband ran off with his secretary and all his and Dahlia's money, including a refinance of their home, which has left Dahlia hanging on by the skin of her teeth. The money from the sale of Granny's lakeside acres will enable Dahlia to hang on to her home and keep her ballet school up and running.
Staying at the old house brings back lots of memories of their childhoods spent at the lake. Various complications arise, including Dahlia's weird health problems and allergies, the discovery of two long dead bodies in a bricked up root cellar in Granny's basement, and Dahlia getting attacked by chiggers and later on by a rapid raccoon. Dahlia gains a love interest in local boy done good Clete Slocum, who, it turns out, knew old Granny better than anyone in her family, including her favorite, Dahlia.

This was a pretty good story. Dahlia is very weird, what with the ballet moves she does when she is bored or distracted, the quoting of lines from movies, her strange health problems and allergies, her religiousness and her propensity for getting herself into trouble. Iris is just plain mean. Violet and Rose don't play much of a role in the story, Violet mainly threatens to pound Iris and Rose tries to keep the peace. The granny's relationship with Clete and his relatives was also strange, she was more involved with them than with her own family. She had a whole thing going on with them that her real family never even knew about. Also Dahlia's decision to dump Clete to go back to her marginal life in Atlanta didn't really make a lot of sense either. There where a lot of things in the story that just didn't ring true. Like Dahlia is so religious she stops to pray at the drop of a hat yet sees nothing wrong with breaking the law when it suits her: she talks the sisters into taking the bodies from the basement and dumping them in a park because she doesn't want to slow down the possible sale of Granny's land and she see nothing wrong with routinely driving faster than the posted speed limit. And the granny so concerned with her granddaughters relationships, yet spent more time helping out the neighbors than she did with her own relatives. And Clete being so hung up on Dahlia who he really doesn't know at all and yet keeping all kinds of secrets from this woman who is supposed to be the love of his life. And the cops not following up on their discovery of who dumped the bodies in the park.
Despite this, it made for a pretty good story, even though I thought Dahlia was a pain and a pill and if I'd been her sister I probably wouldn't have been able to stand her either. Some parts of the story were pretty funny, like when Dahlia got all eaten up with chiggers or when she started doing ballet moves at the hardware store. So even though I didn't really like Dahlia very much, I did like the story and I enjoyed reading it, though I was disappointed that the dead bodies in the cellar plot turned out so tamely.