The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Yes, but the risk—”

  Coretta lifted her chin. “Some things are worth taking a risk for, Liz. I do have my principles, you know.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t,” Lizzy said, although that was exactly what she was thinking. Coretta had never struck her as the type to take a risk on principle.

  “You didn’t have to,” Coretta replied regretfully. “I can tell.” She became very serious. “Anyway, I don’t believe Verna took that money. But like I said, I’m going to need help to prove it.” She gave Lizzy a straight, hard look. “Actually, Liz, I’m going to need Verna’s help. Before I can do anything, I need to sit down and talk to her, so we can make a plan.”

  “Talk to . . . Verna?” Coretta sounded convincing, but all their past history rose up in Lizzy’s mind like a dark shadow. Maybe she was working for Mr. Scroggins—or for the sheriff. Or both. Maybe this was a ploy, a trick to find out where Verna was, so the sheriff could come and arrest her.

  “Yes, talk to her,” Coretta insisted. “I need to sit down with her and map out a strategy. Like right away.” Her voice became emphatic. “Like tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Lizzy asked. “But Verna has taken the train to Nashville. You can’t—”

  “Uh-uh,” Coretta interrupted, shaking her head definitively. “I know for a fact that she didn’t take that train to Nashville.”

  Lizzy shifted uneasily in the swing. This wasn’t going the way she wanted it to. “I don’t understand. What makes you think she hasn’t—”

  “Because,” Coretta broke in, “I telephoned Mr. Gilmer, over at the depot, and asked him if Verna Tidwell was on the noon spur train to Monroeville. That’s the train she’d take if she was going to Nashville. But she didn’t. Mr. Gilmer says he hasn’t seen her.” Coretta gave Lizzy a penetrating look. “Of course, if it occurred to me to check out her story, Liz, it could occur to the sheriff as well.”

  That was true, Lizzy thought, with a cold feeling in her stomach. Maybe Sheriff Burns had already talked to Mr. Gilmer. But she tried to parry.

  “Well, then, maybe she got a ride to Monroeville with Mr. Clinton. She does that sometimes, when she goes shopping. She could have caught the train at the L and N depot.”

  Mr. Clinton drove an old red Ford two-seater back and forth between Darling and Monroeville, twenty miles away. Two trips in the morning, two trips in the afternoon. He charged fifteen cents for a one-way trip, a quarter if you wanted to go both ways. It might be a little crowded, since Mr. Clinton was known to put as many as four riders in the backseat, along with all their packages. Sometimes people had to sit on other people’s laps.

  “Uh-uh.” Coretta shook her head. “On my way here, I happened to see Mr. Clinton letting people out at the diner. He said he definitely didn’t give Verna a ride today. So if she didn’t take the spur train and she didn’t ride with Mr. Clinton, she’s still here. In Darling, I mean. Hiding out.” Her voice tightened. “And you know where she is.”

  Lizzy stared at her, torn between two perplexing possibilities. It was possible, just possible, that Coretta really wanted to help Verna find out what was going on and that she was willing to take a big risk to find out who had taken that money. On the other hand, she could just as easily be working for Mr. Scroggins, and she wanted to learn Verna’s whereabouts so she could turn her in to the sheriff. She had said she needed money—maybe she had been promised a reward. Or maybe she figured that she could put Verna out of the way permanently, and she would get Verna’s job. Which was it? Was Coretta telling the truth, or was she lying?

  Coretta stood up. “Look, Liz, all I want to do is to help Verna out of this tight spot. Honest to God, I truly do. But to do that, I have to talk to her. I want to show her the auditor’s report—that’s why I smuggled it out of the office.” Her voice became more demanding. “Are you going to help or not?”

  Lizzy sat limp for a moment, not knowing how to respond. She had always had a way with words. But for once in her life, she didn’t know what to say.

  THIRTEEN

  Charlie

  When Lizzy walked past the Dispatch office on her way home from work, Charlie Dickens didn’t look up and wave at her for the simple reason that he had his nose in a book—a library book. Or to be more precise, a scrapbook, one that he had borrowed from the library.

  Charlie had not been thrilled that morning when Bessie Bloodworth had handed him that transcription of the indecipherable symbols and numbers some little old lady had embroidered on a pillow, wondering whether it might be some sort of “secret code.” In fact, at first, he had thought the whole thing was pretty silly. He had even teased her a little about it, but she hadn’t been offended. And when she smiled, he’d noticed the laugh wrinkles crinkling around her mouth. It occurred to him that Bessie Bloodworth was an attractive lady—for her age, of course. She had gone to school with his sister Edna Fay, he remembered, which made her just three or four years younger than himself. While Charlie preferred his women even younger (around the age of Fannie Champaign, for instance) he had to admit that Bessie had taken a lot better care of herself than had Angelina Biggs. At the thought of Angelina Biggs, he had shuddered and made himself stop thinking of women. Women could get a man in trouble.

  After Bessie left, Charlie had given her paper another skeptical look. Secret code? He seriously doubted it. He’d had considerable experience working with codes and ciphers when he was in France during the Great War. And when the fighting was over and he’d been sent back to Washington, he’d been interested enough to do some historical research on the topic. In his experience, people just didn’t go around embroidering secret codes on pillows. As for the symbols and numbers on that piece of paper, well, yes, he supposed they might look to the untrained eye like some sort of cipher. But more likely, it was only some sort of silly female exercise. Some Southern lady showing off her fancy needlework skills. A strange sort of sampler, nothing more.

  But then Charlie had seen the name and the date—Rose, July 21, 1861—and something, some fragment of memory long buried under the detritus of facts that filled his mind, had begun to stir, like a seed swelling and growing and reaching toward the light.

  July 21, 1861. The day every schoolboy in the South was taught to hold dear. The day of the First Manassas (the Battle of Bull Run as the Union called it), the first battle of the War Between the States and perhaps the Confederacy’s most glorious day.

  The battle was fought between General P. G. T. Beauregard’s unseasoned Southern army and the equally untested Northern troops commanded by General Irvin McDowell. The two forces met at Manassas Junction, just twenty-five miles to the west of Washington, near a stream called Bull Run, which eventually flowed into the Potomac. Since it was Sunday and Manassas was so close to the city, throngs of Union supporters had made a grand holiday of it, driving across Aqueduct Bridge in their elegant black carriages, laden with picnic baskets and bottles of fine wine and silver flasks filled with bourbon. They were all there, the cream of Washington society, senators, cabinet members, and their gaily garbed ladies, out to enjoy the spectacle of a splendid Union victory, the first and last battle of what they confidently predicted would be a very short war. Hawkers and peddlers lined the road, selling everything from sandwiches to spyglasses and battle maps and clever canes that unfolded into a seat. A correspondent from the Times of London was there to report on the battle. And so was Mathew Brady, already famous for his photographs of illustrious people. Determined to be the first man in history to photograph a battlefield, he had loaded a wagon with his large camera and plate holder, put on his straw hat and saber, and joined the crowd heading for Manassas Junction.

  Early word filtering back from the battlefield gave General McDowell’s federal troops the victory, but the truth was something very different and entirely unexpected. By evening, it was clear that the South had triumphed. Back in Washington, S
ecretary of War Seward reported to President Lincoln that he had received a telegram saying that McDowell was in full retreat and pleading for General Scott to rally his troops and save Washington from the attack that was sure to follow. There was nothing between the victorious Rebels and the defenseless capital but crowds of wounded and disorganized stragglers, jostling for road room with a stampede of panic-stricken fleeing spectators—including a frightened Mathew Brady, who had narrowly escaped capture. The battle had been a rout, a clear, decisive Confederate victory that had left the North defeated and demoralized and the South in jubilant celebration.

  A Confederate victory. Charlie frowned and scratched his head. But there was more. Some recollection was tugging at him, had been tugging at him ever since he had seen that name and the date. A memory of an unusual circumstance of that battle and the name Rose—and particularly about a secret code. What was it? What?

  But while Charlie was deeply and fervently interested in many things—contemporary politics, and the disastrous state of the economy, and the crying need for a stronger and more progressive hand at the helm than Hoover’s—Civil War history had been of only passing interest, back when he was a schoolboy and still felt a patriotic stirring for the Confederacy. So he put Bessie Bloodworth’s paper aside and went back to his typewriter, pausing only occasionally to attempt (unsuccessfully) to remember what it was about the First Manassas that he might once have known but by now had almost completely forgotten. Almost, but not quite.

  An avid reader, Charlie Dickens possessed an extensive personal library of books he had collected over the years. In his opinion, books were the most important pieces of furniture—furniture of the mind—that a man could own. His bookshelves included several books on codes and ciphers, but he knew there was nothing in them that would help him decode (if there was any message to decode, which was still doubtful) the symbols on the paper Bessie Bloodworth had given him. And he possessed not a single book on the Confederate victory at Bull Run.

  But the Darling library might. Like most small-town libraries, its holdings consisted mostly of fiction and some fairly recent nonfiction. But it had been given several collections of antique books by people who had inherited them and didn’t want to keep the musty old things, which of course nobody in his right mind would want to actually sit down and read. Charlie thought he might be able to locate something that would help him remember what he had forgotten about somebody named Rose and a secret code and the First Manassas. The library would be open from two to five that afternoon. He would drop in and see what he could find.

  And having settled the matter for the time being, Charlie went back to his two-finger attack on his old black Royal. But not for long. He had just started work on a story about the Darling town council when he was interrupted first by Ophelia Snow, looking for a job, and then by Artis Biggs, needing help with his wife, who (it turned out) had popped her cork in Mr. Moseley’s law office and was threatening to sue both of them, Artis for divorce and Charlie for sexual assault. And on the way back to the hotel with Angelina, who was dragging her feet and shrieking like a crazy woman, Beulah Trivette had come along with her story about the diet pills. At first it had seemed pretty far-fetched, but by the time Beulah had finished telling them about what was in the pills and about Angelina’s hair falling out, both he and Artis were convinced, especially since they could see a big bald spot on the side of Angelina’s head.

  After Charlie left Artis to put his crazy wife to bed, he strode back across the street with a lighter step and relief in his heart. Angelina wasn’t going crazy after all, and she wasn’t really in love with him. And Artis (or so he claimed, and Charlie believed him) wasn’t carrying on an affair on the second floor of the hotel. He was merely checking the rooms to see what kind of job the maids were doing.

  Charlie sat down at his typewriter again and knocked out the lead for the town council story. He was leaning back, scratching around in his brain for the first sentence of the second paragraph, when the alley door opened and Ruthie Brant slipped in. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure she hadn’t been observed and closed the door behind her. If anybody did happen to see her and wondered why an employee from the county treasurer’s office was going into the Dispatch through the back door, Ruthie would explain that she was dropping off a story about the latest bridge club meeting and thought it was quicker to come down the alley instead of along the street. Ruthie Brant was not by any stretch the best-looking girl in Darling, but she could make up a tale faster than green grass goes through a goose.

  However, it was not what Ruthie Brant did or didn’t look like that interested Charlie and brought him to immediate attention whenever she came sneaking in through that back door. It was what Ruthie Brant knew, and the tales she had told him over the past months were never made up. They were the good Lord’s honest truth.

  In fact, it was Ruthie Brant’s covert operation as an informant that had provided the foundation for the scathing editorials about the county treasurer’s office that appeared in the Dispatch and gave the county officials, especially Mr. Amos Tombull, such heartburn. The editorials had been laced with enough facts to startle a few Darling folks and raise a few Darling eyebrows. And—more to the point—they had frightened Mr. Jasper DeYancy into believing that the editor of the Dispatch knew a lot more than he was saying and was prepared to tell the whole story when the time was ripe.

  For while he had not one stick of proof to buttress his conclusion, Charlie had convinced himself that Mr. DeYancy’s death was a suicide disguised as an accident, cleverly designed to allow the Widow DeYancy to collect her husband’s considerable life insurance. (In Charlie’s opinion, “accidentally” drowning yourself in a gallon of chain lightning was a good deal more pleasant and a great deal less messy than “accidentally” blowing off your head when you were cleaning your gun, which was the way other Southern gentlemen had elected to leave this life.)

  And while Charlie regretted Mr. DeYancy’s untimely end, he did not feel guilty about it or even one whit responsible, for when a man sets out to deceive the public that elected him to office, he deserves whatever tree limbs or boulders might fall on his head or whatever newspaper editorials might appear in his path. He ought to be man enough to stand up and take it, instead of looking for the exit.

  And furthermore, even though Jasper DeYancy was dead and unavailable for comment and his deceptions (if any) could not be proved, Charlie’s suspicions about the operation of the county treasurer’s office had lingered on like a bad smell out behind the barn—had been heightened, even, with the appointment of Earle Scroggins to the post.

  Now, seeing Ruthie (whom he thought of as a kind of secret agent, his secret agent), Charlie felt an anticipatory tingle in his typing fingers and his nose for news began to twitch, the way it used to when he was doing a piece of investigative reporting for the Baltimore Sun or the Cleveland Plain Dealer—back in the days when he was a real reporter on a real news beat.

  Reaching for his pack of Lucky Strikes, he said, “Well, hullo there, Ruthie. Got somethin’ new for the readers of the Dispatch?”

  “Have I ever,” Ruthie replied, with a lopsided grin that brightened her sallow face and gave her the look of a sly puppy that has just polished off the beefsteak her master left too close to the edge of the table. “Have I ever, Mr. Dickens. The state auditor’s report came today. You are goin’ to like this. It’s a bombshell.”

  State auditor’s report! Ruthie had kept Charlie informed about the two visits from the auditor’s office, so the report itself wasn’t much of a surprise. But if it was indeed the bombshell that Ruthie thought it was, this might be news he could use. He shook out two Luckys and offered Ruthie one and a click of his cigarette lighter.

  “That’s good, Ruthie,” he said, hooking the toe of his shoe around the rung of a straight chair and pulling it toward his desk. “That is real good. Now, you just sit yourself right dow
n in that chair and tell me all about it. From the top. With facts, of course. I need the facts.” He said this emphatically, because while Ruthie could string together an intriguing narrative, she often needed to be prodded for the facts.

  “I’m supposed to be taking a break from the office, so I don’t have a lot of time,” Ruthie said, leaning back in her chair, stretching out her rayon-stockinged legs, and pulling on her cigarette. “This’ll have to be quick.”

  “The quicker the better,” Charlie said, thinking about the empty inches in the right-hand column above the fold on page one. He twirled the Royal’s platen to roll the narrow, column-width roll of newsprint he was typing on to a clear spot, and hunched over the machine. “Okay, Ruthie, my girl,” he said around his cigarette. “Shoot.”

  Ruthie shot. And it was a doozey.

  The trouble was, Ruthie’s bombshell was all story. And while the story was full of intriguing surprises and fascinating speculations, it suffered from a distinct shortage of facts.

  And for the life of him, Charlie couldn’t think of a way to confirm what Ruthie was telling him.

  * * *

  A half hour later, still thinking about the bombshell Ruthie Brant had dropped in his lap, Charlie put his Panama hat on his head, shrugged into his suit jacket, and locked up the Dispatch office. Then he headed over to the Darling library, which was located on the west side of the courthouse square, at the back of Fannie Champaign’s milliner’s shop, Champaign’s Darling Chapeaux. The little library had its own separate entrance, so that patrons did not have to go through the millinery shop, a fact for which Charlie was grateful. He was in no mood to see Fannie Champaign today, or any other day, for that matter.

  Not that Fannie had ever actually said no when he asked her to go to a movie or out to dinner. She just hadn’t said anything, which in Charlie’s mind—well, in anybody’s mind—was as good as a no. He had met plenty of stubborn women in his time, but Fannie was the stubbornest by far, with an independent streak a mile wide and two miles deep. He had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her, and he knew it.