The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “I don’t reckon we’re any different than anybody else in Darling, though,” Ophelia went on bravely. “Everybody seems to be having trouble making ends meet these days.” She straightened her shoulders and put on a quavering smile. “But we’ll get through. It helps to know that we’re not the only ones.”

  Lizzy patted Ophelia’s hand, knowing what it took for her friend to confess her family’s troubles. “We’re always glad for your optimism, Opie,” she said. “If it weren’t for you, we’d probably all be as gloomy as Verna.”

  “I’m not gloomy,” Verna protested. “I’m just realistic, that’s all. I’m pragmatic. I think we should all get down and dirty with the truth. If we’ve got to deal with a problem, it’s better to know exactly what it is than to try to cover it up or pretend it doesn’t exist.” Lizzy thought Verna sounded determined, and wondered if she was thinking about the thing that was worrying her, whatever it was. Maybe she would say something more.

  But Verna only handed Ophelia the plate of cookies. “Here, Opie. Have another one. It’ll make you feel better. Cookies always do the trick.”

  “Thank you,” Ophelia said in a small voice, and took a cookie.

  Putting down the plate, Verna narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute,” she said, cocking her head. “Did I just hear a drip?”

  “It can’t be,” Bessie exclaimed. “We have a new roof!”

  “You’re hearing things, Verna,” Ophelia said. “Or imagining them.”

  “I know a drip when I hear one,” Verna said flatly. “And that’s a drip.”

  Lizzy looked up. It was still raining but the wind had calmed a little and the thunder was moving to the east. The storm was rapidly blowing over. But there was no mistaking the plink-plank-plunk that they could all hear very plainly now.

  Dismayed, she looked toward the stove, where the worst of the leaks had been before the roof was repaired. And there it was. A puddle of rainwater on their new blue and white kitchen linoleum.

  “It’s a drip, all right,” she said.

  As if to prove the point, three more plinks followed in quick succession.

  “That’s not fair!” Ophelia wailed. “How much did we pay Mr. Carlson to put on our new roof?”

  “Enough so it shouldn’t be leaking again,” Verna replied bleakly.

  “It never rains but it pours,” Bessie said sadly, shaking her head. “I hope it’s not an omen.”

  But it was. The Dahlias didn’t know it, but things were going to get worse before they got better.

  Much, much worse.

  TWO

  Verna

  The storm had indeed blown over by the time the Dahlias left for home, and as Verna and Ophelia walked together down Rosemont, they were treated to the beautiful sight of gardens after the rain. Diamond drops sparkled amid the blossoms of dogwoods and crabapple and the floppy pink and white blooms of cabbage roses and peonies hanging heavy with wet.

  At another time, the sight of gardens washed by a rain would have made Verna smile. But today, she had something on her mind that weighed her down and silenced her. She wished she could cheer Ophelia, too, for she understood her friend’s financial worries. But she couldn’t think of anything to say beyond a sympathetic, “I hope things will get better soon, for all of us.”

  And since Ophelia wasn’t her usual effervescent self, either, the two of them walked as far as the Snows’ house without saying more than a few words. Then, with a brief hug, they said good-bye. Ophelia climbed the porch steps to her front door and Verna turned left on Larkspur, walking the rest of the way alone.

  Verna still lived in the small house at the corner of Larkspur and Robert E. Lee, the house that she and Walter had bought when they were first married. Her husband, a history teacher at the Darling Academy, had been killed when he absentmindedly walked out in front of a Greyhound bus on Route 12, a tragedy that left Verna a widow with no funds except her salary and Walter’s little bit of life insurance. To remedy that, Mr. Earle Scroggins, the Cypress County probate clerk and Verna’s boss, had encouraged her to invest the insurance payment in the stock market, which looked to be heading for a meteoric rise.

  “I’ll be glad to give you the name of my broker,” Mr. Scroggins had said, in the patronizing tone that Verna found so irritating. “You act right away, little lady, and you’ll make a killing. You’ll be rich for life. Guaranteed.”

  But naturally mistrustful as she was, Verna suspected that no matter what Mr. Scroggins said, the market could go down just as easily as it could go up. So she had used the money to pay off the mortgage, figuring that the best insurance she could have was a roof over her head. Of course, the four-room house was small, with only one bedroom. But it was comfortable and homey. And since she and Walter had no children, its size was just right for her.

  For her and Clyde, that is. Clyde was the affectionate black Scottie with whom Verna had shared her home for the past three years. He had shown up at the back door, footsore and bedraggled and begging for something to eat, and she’d fed him, bathed him, and fixed him a place to sleep under the stove in the kitchen. Within a day, Clyde had made himself perfectly at home and, within a week, had declared that he’d rather sleep on her bed, thank you very much. Now, he met her at the door, yelping with the ecstatic delight that always made her smile, no matter how low she might be feeling. She scooped him up with a hard hug, burying her face against his silky black fur while he washed her cheek with an eager tongue. Then she put him out into the fenced yard to take care of his business while she went to the bedroom to change from her sweaty gardening clothes into a green-printed wraparound cotton housedress and sandals.

  Pausing in front of the bureau for a moment, Verna glanced at herself in the mirror. Nobody had ever accused her of being the typical sweet Southern belle. She was tall and thin, her brown hair was cut in a no-nonsense style, her skin was olive-toned, and her chin and mouth were decidedly firm. She paid no attention to fashion and beauty fads, since she disliked the idea of changing any part of herself just to court somebody’s approval. She had married Walter when she was too young to know any better, but he’d turned out to be a pretty good husband, all in all. After he was gone, she hadn’t seen any reason to look for a replacement.

  After all, why would she want another man in her life? She had her own home, a job that paid the bills and kept her brain sharp, good friends for fun, and Clyde for companionship. She even had a nice little bundle of money in the bank, thanks to an aunt she’d never met. Not being a typical Southern belle might have mattered when she was seventeen and wasn’t sure whether she could take care of herself. Now, though, she saw her self-sufficiency, financial and otherwise, as an asset. At least she had something to fall back on, if—

  She turned away from the mirror, not wanting to finish the sentence that was running through her mind, and went to the kitchen, where she took down the red metal Hills Bros. coffee can. She put four scoops of ground coffee into the percolator basket, filled the pot with water from the tap, and put it on the gas stove burner. While she was waiting for it to perk, she sat down at the kitchen table, took out a Pall Mall, and lit it. She could definitely use a cup of coffee. In fact, she felt she could use something a good bit stronger this afternoon.

  But Verna prided herself on being a law-abiding person, and since the law prohibited her from possessing liquor, she didn’t—although her next-door neighbor, Deputy Buddy Norris, had several bottles of the local white lightning, collected from the local moonshiners as payoff for keeping his mouth shut about the locations of their stills. She had seen it in the pantry when she took a batch of chocolate cupcakes to old Mr. Norris for his birthday. But of course, half the pantries in Darling were stocked with bottles of corn whiskey, which was brewed in the backwoods along the Alabama River. Darling whiskey was fierce, fiery, and explosive. It had an excellent reputation, and the moonsh
iners had plenty of customers.

  At the back door, Clyde whined plaintively. Verna got up and let him in, then went back to her cigarette at the table. Normally, she wouldn’t be sitting down while she waited for the percolator to perk. She’d be putting the breakfast dishes away or heading out to the garden for salad greens or reading a few pages in her current library book. (She was halfway through Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, with the detective Hercule Poirot.) Normally, Verna was the kind of person who liked to keep busy.

  But nothing felt normal to Verna. Not today. And not since she had begun to smell trouble.

  Some weeks ago, Verna had started to suspect that something very odd—something she didn’t understand—was going on in her office. Which all by itself was odd, because Verna had a first-rate mind, a suspicious eye, and a talent for spotting something wrong when everybody else had already agreed that whatever-it-was was perfectly all right, in fact, couldn’t be better. If anything had been seriously amiss, you’d think she would have noticed it already.

  For fifteen years, Verna Tidwell had noticed pretty much everything that went on in the Cypress County Probate Clerk’s Office, both the little everyday things that didn’t matter a hoot and a holler to anybody, and the big, important things—like property taxes and elections—that mattered a whole lot to everybody. Normally, when Verna smelled trouble, she figured out what was wrong and she fixed it. Now, she smelled trouble, but she didn’t know what the trouble was or how to fix it, or even whose trouble it was. This was bothering her a lot.

  Sensing that Verna was not her usual self, Clyde jumped up on her lap and licked her chin, whimpering anxiously. He always knew when she was upset and tried to show her how much he cared. Verna hugged the little dog’s muscular body close to her and rested her cheek on his head.

  “Everything will be all right, Clyde,” she said, wanting to reassure him. “Whatever is going on, I’m sure I’ll figure it out—eventually.”

  Except, of course, that she wasn’t sure, which all by itself was a very unsettling thing, since Verna was the kind of person who was always sure about everything. Her lack of confidence had come to a head when the state auditor had descended on the office two weeks before.

  Now, normally (there was that word again), the state wouldn’t bother to audit the records of the probate clerk, except in the case of an election irregularity. But Verna’s office had changed in the last twelve months, and its new responsibilities were much broader than ever before.

  A few months earlier, the Cypress County treasurer, Mr. Jasper DeYancy, had suddenly and unexpectedly died at his home, Sour Creek Plantation. According to the coroner, the deceased (the widely respected son of Colonel Montague DeYancy, an acclaimed Confederate officer who fought to the last battle alongside General Robert E. Lee) had succumbed to alcohol poisoning. This was dreadfully embarrassing for Mr. DeYancy’s wife of forty-one years, a sweet Southern lady who was very active in the Presbyterian Church. Tearfully, she insisted that her husband had never imbibed, did not imbibe, and would never, under any circumstance, imbibe.

  But there it was, alcohol poisoning, right on the death certificate, and nobody could quarrel with that. It was widely speculated throughout Darling that Mr. DeYancy had fallen accidental victim to tainted corn squeezin’s, although the more mistrustful wondered whether one of his opponents on various issues (there might have been one or two) had supplied a jug of a fatally potent brew. It was certainly true that accidents happened, since once white lightning was bottled and hauled to the nearest town, there was no way of telling who had distilled it or what exactly was in the jug. Moonshining was an exacting process (some wanted to call it a science) that required experience and good judgment, but not all moonshiners possessed either, both, or both at the same time. This sometimes resulted in mistakes and miscalculations, and since moonshine was odorless and colorless, it was all too easy to pass off the heads or tails (the highly toxic first and last few quarts out of the still) as the pure and perfect middlin’s. Accidents happened, and one of them might have happened to Mr. DeYancy.

  But while Mr. DeYancy had a long-standing reputation as a good and faithful servant who discharged his official duties with devoted attention, there was at least one person who wondered. Charlie Dickens was a veteran newsman who had grown up in Darling, moved away, and came back to take over the Darling Dispatch from his ailing father. Over the twelve months prior to Mr. DeYancy’s death, Charlie had written several editorials questioning some of the policies and procedures in the Cypress County treasurer’s office. The editorials were not your usual hit-and-miss, running skirmishes, either, but thoughtful, targeted, and detailed. In fact, Charlie Dickens exhibited such a firm grasp of the details that a few suspicious folks speculated that there must be an informant in the courthouse, an insider who was handing the Dispatch some confidential dope.

  The editorials did not accuse Mr. DeYancy of wrongdoing. Charlie was a seasoned newsman (he’d worked on newspapers around the country) and knew better than to make unsubstantiated accusations. But he did point out that the county’s roads and bridges were badly neglected. And since the county commissioners (of whom Mr. DeYancy was one) kept saying that there just wasn’t enough money to do everything, he demanded that the county’s financial records be opened to public examination and scrutiny. Those who read the editorials carefully came away with the idea that somebody in county government was up to something and that Charlie Dickens intended to find out who and what it was.

  Then Mr. DeYancy died and any questions about his conduct as county treasurer became moot. Whatever the unknown and unknowable facts of his untimely death, Cypress County now found itself in need of a treasurer. Since the dead man had recently been elected to his fourth term and the county commissioners didn’t want to spend the money to hold a new election, they decided to appoint an interim successor, someone they already knew and felt comfortable working with.

  As the whole county might have guessed, the commissioners already knew and felt comfortable with Earle Scroggins, the elected probate clerk and Verna’s boss, currently in his eighteenth year in office. (Men who got elected to office in Cypress County tended to stay in office as long as they remembered who had put them there. Mr. Scroggins, who had a very good memory for favors rendered, was no exception.) So nobody was surprised when Mr. Scroggins got the nod as acting treasurer to fill out Mr. DeYancy’s term. People just shrugged and said, “Well, whaddya expect?”

  Charlie Dickens wasn’t surprised, either. But he didn’t like it. He wrote an editorial charging that the commissioners were just a tad bit too comfortable—he actually dared to use the word cozy—with Mr. Scroggins. This was to be expected, however, since Charlie Dickens had been in the habit of criticizing the former county treasurer and everybody figured he’d probably roll up his sleeves and lay into the new one, too. That was the way newspapermen operated in the big city, and while Charlie was Darling born and Darling bred, he had worked on newspapers in Cleveland and Baltimore and New York, and that’s where he’d learned those habits. That’s what people said, anyway.

  But most Darlingians had a few other urgent things to worry about, such as keeping their business afloat or paying the weekly bill at Hancock’s Groceries. If they had been asked, they would no doubt have approved the treasurer’s appointment, regardless of what Charlie Dickens wrote. Mr. Scroggins had a reputation for running a tight ship in the probate office, although the folks who worked there knew that it was really Verna’s ship, not his. The county commissioners probably knew this, too, but that didn’t count for much because they were eager to have Mr. Scroggins take on the treasurer’s job.

  And why shouldn’t they be? Earle Scroggins was one of the most successful and capable businessmen in Darling, so it was easy to suppose that he would be a first-rate county treasurer as well. A stout, amiable man with a booming voice, a bald head, and a tobacco-stained white moustache tha
t curled jauntily at either end, Mr. Scroggins could be seen smoking his cigar in the dining room at the Old Alabama Hotel or attending meetings at the Darling Savings and Trust, where he was on the board of directors. He owned a cottonseed oil mill near the river, a cotton gin on the south side of town, and a half-dozen rental properties. These enterprises demanded a great deal of his attention, however, and he rarely bothered to come to the office more than once or twice a week. But that was fine, because he could see that Verna was smart as a whip and could do the job every bit as well as he could, so there was no reason under the sun not to leave her alone and just let her get on with it—while he took all the credit, of course.

  Mr. Scroggins’ benign neglect of the probate clerk’s office had suited Verna right down to the ground, for she preferred to set her own rules and work on her own, without interference. Of course, she always kept Mr. Scroggins pretty well up on things, saved a few papers for him to sign when he came into the office, and never let on that he was anything other than the boss. But Verna liked being in charge and she was good at it. In fact, she was so good at being in charge that folks who didn’t know any better actually believed that she was the probate clerk.

  Recently, however, even the efficient Verna had begun to feel a little bogged down with work. Mr. Scroggins’ appearances in the office had not increased when he was appointed acting county treasurer, but Verna’s workload certainly had, for she was now in charge of both offices. And since the county (like almost every other county in the state, and probably in the entire U.S.A.) was having trouble collecting taxes, budgets were very tight. Mr. Scroggins had already cut Coretta Cole, Verna’s coworker, back to part time. Verna was doing most of Coretta’s work as well as her own.

  In one way, the expansion had been an easy process, since the treasurer and the probate clerk were neighbors on the north side of the second-floor hallway in the county courthouse. All they had to do to make the two offices into one was to uncover a boarded-up doorway in the wall, move a couple of desks and a filing cabinet, and presto, they were all one big happy family.