The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

by Susan Wittig Albert

  So he walked quickly around the building to the back, to the door with the painted sign announcing that he had arrived at the Darling Library (QUIET PLEASE). He opened the door and went in.

  The library’s small front room contained the librarian’s desk, a rack of narrow wooden drawers that held index cards with the titles and call numbers of every book, and a small table and chair where you could sit and read in front of the window. The desk was occupied by Miss Dorothy Rogers, who was about as stiff an old spinster as Charlie had ever encountered. He’d had one or two run-ins with her about overdue books. The last time, he’d had to pay a sixty-cent fine, which (in his opinion) was more than the book—The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes—was worth. It had been a good book, but sixty cents? He felt sure that Keynes would agree with him.

  Miss Rogers looked up. “Oh, Mr. Dickens,” she said, in a sprightlier tone than he had expected. “How nice to see you. What may we help you with today?” She wore, Charlie thought, an oddly hopeful expression and he wondered briefly, with more than a touch of condescension, what she was hoping for.

  Hoping to keep her job, he thought then, and his condescension disappeared with a jolt. Miss Rogers struck him as the kind of woman who lived for her part-time job at the little library. But he knew from his attendance at the town council meetings that there wasn’t likely to be a library much longer. City revenues were down all over Alabama, and the libraries were among the first victims to fall to the budget-cutting ax. It was a damned shame, but that’s how things were these days. Unless some sugar daddy came along and bailed them out, Miss Rogers and the library were about to come to the end of the road, at least until the economy turned around. And Charlie hadn’t seen any sugar daddies loitering around outside.

  “Thanks,” Charlie said in reply to her question. “I’m not looking for anything special.” He didn’t want to be bothered by a fidgety old lady fussing around, trying to show him this or that just to prove that she was earning her pittance of a salary. “I’ll just browse through the books, if that’s okay.”

  She nodded, trying not to look disappointed, and Charlie went into the other, larger room, where floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered all four walls, with two rows of back-to-back waist-high shelves down the middle. Until last year, the council had always set aside a few dollars for new book purchases. That wasn’t happening this year, but the Ladies Club and the Dahlias’ garden club had got together and raised some money with an auction and variety show. (Charlie didn’t have much use for ladies’ clubs, but occasionally they did something he approved of. Raising money for library books was one of them.)

  Miss Rogers had put the money to good use. She had bought The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (which Charlie had tried to read but got exasperated after the first dozen pages and gave it up); A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (an easier novel that Charlie had checked out more than once); and Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, who wrote in something called a stream-of-consciousness style that made Charlie dizzy. If you had a story to tell, just by golly tell the damn thing, he thought, with the impatience of the born newspaperman, and stop meandering around. The other books Miss Rogers had bought were more to Charlie’s liking—a mystery by a novice writer named Ellery Queen, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, and a new S. S. Van Dine. It appeared that Miss Rogers was as fond of a good mystery as any of the Darlingians who frequented the little library.

  But it wasn’t the newer titles that interested Charlie, not today, anyway. Several years before, Miss Rogers had reshelved all the books according to the Dewey Decimal System. The history books were all in the nine hundreds, so that’s where he started browsing. There were titles on Roman history, British history, and American history. And, yes, as he had expected, there was nearly a full shelf of Civil War history, including a leather-bound copy of a book called My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington by R. O’Neale Greenhow, published in London in 1863; a collection of newspaper clippings pasted into a flimsy scrapbook; and a history of Civil War battles written by an obscure Confederate officer. He carried all three books to the desk, expecting that Miss Rogers would object to his taking the scrapbook, which looked as if it might disintegrate when the pages were turned.

  But she only gave his gatherings a puzzled look, cautioned him to be very careful not to lose any pages of the scrapbook, and wrote his name and the due date on the white cards in the front of the books, then filed them in the tin box on the corner of her desk.

  “Two weeks,” she said, handing them back to him and adding, with an enigmatic significance, “I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for, Mr. Dickens.”

  Charlie was still trying to figure out what that was supposed to mean as he walked around the building and nearly stumbled over Miss Fannie Champaign, who was kneeling in the path, tending a flower bed. She was wearing a pale green straw garden hat decorated with green silk roses. Beside her was a basket half filled with weeds.

  She straightened up and looked at him, and he was struck once again by how pretty she was. Not beautiful, no, not that, but pretty in a comfortable sort of way, with the look of a woman who was at home with who she was and how she had got there. Miss Champaign had come to Darling some two or three years before. Many Darlingians had been deeply curious about her, especially since she was a single woman with no visible means of support and no friends and relations to welcome her to town. People were too polite to ask, but the questions were on everyone’s mind, for she was something of a mystery. Where did she get her money? Why had she come to Darling? Charlie had heard that she had been engaged once, when she was much younger, and that her work as a milliner often took her to Mobile and beyond, where she sold her hats to wealthy customers in fancy shops. More than that, he didn’t know, although of course he was as curious as anybody else.

  But then she had opened her hat shop and the Darling ladies fell in love with her romantic creations—floppy-brimmed hats with meringue puffs of ribbon-laced tulle and gardens of silk blossoms. Miss Champaign’s hats were very like those worn by Southern ladies before the War Between the States and very unlike the smart, sleek, head-hugging felt cloches that were all the rage just now, and everybody loved them—even the Darling men, who (truth be told) didn’t like those snug felt helmets much, anyway. Charlie agreed. A lady’s hat should make her look like a lady, not like a German artillery officer.

  He managed to stop before he actually stepped on her. “Good afternoon, Miss Champaign,” he said, and removed his Panama hat.

  She looked back down and pulled a handful of weeds. “Good afternoon, Mr. Dickens,” she said. And that was all.

  He took three careful steps around her, then paused, wondering if, after all, it might be worth trying again. Probably not. And if she said no again, it would be the last time. The very last time.

  He cleared his throat. “I was thinking of having dinner at the hotel this evening,” he said, although he hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort. “Perhaps you might join me?”

  She pulled another batch of weeds. The sunlight glinted on her russet hair. “No, thank you,” she said, and he thought he heard a hint of something like regret in her voice. Just a hint, but enough (despite his resolution) to embolden him.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he said, and thought about the Old Alabama’s menus, which were the same for every week. “Tuesday night is chicken night, as I remember. Baked with dressing.”

  “I don’t believe so, Mr. Dickens, but thank you for the invitation.”

  “You’re welcome,” Charlie said with resignation, and put his hat back on his head. He paused, and then said outright what was in his mind. “Miss Champaign, is there a ghost of a chance you will ever say yes to me—about anything?”

  She seemed startled by that but paused to consider for a moment, still holding her handful of weeds. “I don’t know that I can a
nswer that, Mr. Dickens. I suppose it would all depend.”

  He leaned forward, watching her. “Depend on what?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, and tossed the weeds into her basket.

  With a sigh, Charlie walked back to the newspaper office, where he sat down at his desk and began to turn the pages in the old scrapbook, which proved to be clippings from the Richmond, Virginia, Daily Dispatch of the early-to-mid-1860s. At the time, Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, of course. That’s what he was doing when Lizzy walked past the window without seeing him, on her way home from work.

  * * *

  Back in the library, Miss Rogers took out the cards she had just filed and studied them. When Bessie Bloodworth had returned from the Dispatch office that morning, she had reported that Mr. Dickens seemed to have some interest in the transcription of the symbols and numbers and had promised to look into the matter. When he had come into the library a little while before, Miss Rogers had felt a bright flare of hope, thinking that perhaps he had come to pursue his research into the secret code, if that’s what it was. Miss Bloodworth said that she hadn’t mentioned her name to him, so Mr. Dickens could have absolutely no idea that she was the owner of the embroidered pillow.

  She put the three cards on the desk and studied them. She knew the books he had taken, of course. She was intimately acquainted with all the books in her little library and felt toward them as she would have felt toward her children, if she’d had any. She had cataloged each one of them, dusted them daily, and had read a great many (even those that she felt were undeserving, for she hated for any book to feel neglected).

  She could tell you where the books had come from, too, for she included that information on their cards. My Imprisonment and the scrapbook of clippings had been the gift of a lady from Richmond, Virginia, who had lived out her last years with her Darling daughter. The history of Civil War battles was written by a Confederate captain named Adam Warren and had come from the collection of the founder of the Darling Academy, a nephew of the author. None of the three books, as far as Miss Rogers could see, had anything remotely to do with the transcription of symbols on her grandmother’s pillow. Mr. Dickens must have been exploring some other research topic when he borrowed them.

  With a feeling of deep disappointment, she put the three white cards back in the tin box and closed the lid, sighing heavily as she put the box in the drawer. It was time to resign herself to the bitter truth. The mystery of her grandmother’s embroidered pillow—what it meant and why it was made—would never be solved.

  FOURTEEN

  Lizzy, Verna, and Coretta

  Myra May’s large green 1920 Chevrolet touring car, aka Big Bertha, was parked in the ramshackle garage behind the diner. With twenty-five thousand miles under her wheels, Bertha was on her fifth set of tires and her second carburetor and she had a bad case of the rattles. But her green canvas top was still in one piece, the red painted spokes in her wheels were still bright, and she could purr like a kitten when she was feeling good. Lizzy had borrowed the car before, so she felt comfortable driving it. And the way things turned out, she was glad that she hadn’t asked Grady if she could take his Ford. She ended up making two trips out to the Murphy place that evening, one by herself and the other with Coretta Cole. And then there was that midnight adventure at the courthouse. Grady would never have understood.

  Lizzy made the first trip right after Coretta left her house. She ate a quick sandwich, then hurried to the diner, got Bertha’s key from Myra May, and drove the four miles out to the Murphys’ place to discuss Coretta’s offer with Verna. As she had expected, it was a hard sell.

  At first, Verna refused to even consider talking to Coretta. But at last she threw up her hands and said, “Well, it’s for damn sure that we’re not going to get anywhere the way things stand. I’m stuck out here, without a key to the office and no access to any of the records. So I guess I’m willing to listen to what Coretta has to say, if you think I should. But I don’t want her to know where I am—just in case she’s a double agent.”

  “A double agent?” Lizzy asked, mystified.

  “A spy who says she’s working for one side but is secretly working for the other,” Verna said. She grinned. “Really, Liz, you should broaden your horizons. Try The Thirty-Nine Steps. It’s a great spy novel.”

  “But how are you going to talk to Coretta if you don’t want her to know where you are?” Lizzy asked reasonably. “You can’t talk on the phone, it’s a party line. And if I bring her out here—well, she’ll know where you are.”

  Verna waved her hand airily. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something, Liz. Use your imagination. I’ll talk to her. But it’s my way or no way.”

  It took some thinking, but Lizzy had come up with a solution. By eight fifteen, when the sun had set and the April night had fallen like a dark, sweet-smelling cloak over the streets and houses of Darling, it was time to get started.

  Big Bertha made such a clattering racket that Coretta Cole heard the car coming a block away and didn’t wait for Lizzy to squeeze the ooga-ooga horn when she pulled up in front of the house. Wearing a dark brown sweater over a print dress, her handbag on her arm, Coretta hurried down her front steps and climbed into the front seat beside Lizzy.

  “Here I am,” she announced, adding expectantly, “Where are we going?”

  “You have the auditor’s report with you?” Lizzy countered. “Verna asked me to be sure.”

  “It’s right here.” Coretta reached into her bag and produced the envelope. Lizzy took Myra May’s flashlight out from under her seat, checked to see if all three pages were there, then handed it back.

  “Good enough,” she said. “Now, hold still.” She whipped out a large red-and-blue-striped bandana. “I’m going to tie this over your eyes.”

  “A blindfold?” Coretta squawked, holding up her hands. “I don’t want to wear that thing! It’s ridiculous!”

  “You don’t have any choice, Coretta,” Lizzy said firmly. “You are wearing this, or you’re going right back into your house and I’m heading home. Which is just fine with me. It’s been a long day. I’d just as soon have the evening to myself.”

  “You don’t want me to know where Verna is staying,” Coretta accused, pouting. “You don’t trust me to keep it secret.”

  “How did you guess?” Lizzy asked grimly. “Now, turn around.”

  Awkwardly, still protesting, Coretta turned in the seat. Lizzy folded the bandana over Coretta’s eyes and knotted it securely in the back.

  “At least it’s dark and none of the neighbors can see me,” Coretta grumbled, scrunching down in the seat. “I must look like an idiot.”

  “You look like somebody who’s about to embark on a dangerous spy mission,” Lizzy said with a laugh. Then she put Big Bertha into gear and they chugged off down the street.

  The Murphy place was about four miles outside of town, heading south. Earlier, Lizzy had taken the quickest way, straight out Jericho Road. But that wasn’t the route she took now. She drove out to the north side of town, weaving from one street to another, until she got to Sherman’s sawmill. The freshly sawn pine boards had a distinctive odor, and somebody was running the sawmill, getting out a big order of sawn boards. If Coretta had a lick of sense, she would recognize the smell and the sound and think that they were heading for a destination north of town.

  They weren’t. Lizzy circled around and drove back into Darling, making a right turn onto Franklin, past the courthouse, then turning left on Rosemont. By that time, she figured that Coretta must be thoroughly confused, so she took the next right and headed south on Briarwood Road, past the Dance Barn, until she got to Jericho Road. When they reached the Murphys’ place, Lizzy brought Bertha to a stop and turned off the motor. She climbed out and opened the passenger door.

  “Can I take this off now?” Corett
a asked plaintively, reaching for the blindfold.

  “Nope,” Lizzy said, and escorted Coretta up the dirt path to the porch. The old frame house was unpainted and needed some repairs, but after Lucy joined the Dahlias, each member of the club had given her several plants and volunteered to help fix up the yard, badly neglected since the death of Ralph Murphy’s first wife. The weeds had been replaced by a row of rosebushes in front of the porch, some azaleas, and even a few camellias. They had planted gladiolas along the fence and fancy-leaved caladiums and gloriosa lilies under the big trees. Out back, Lucy planted a large vegetable garden, and behind that, she and Ralph had put in an orchard of young green peach trees. Lucy hoped to make a little extra money by selling peaches at the market.

  When Lucy answered Lizzy’s knock at the door, Lizzy held her finger to her lips. Lucy stepped back with a conspiratorial nod, a scruffy gray tabby cat winding himself around her ankles. Lizzy was sure that Coretta had never met Lucy and wouldn’t recognize her voice, but there was no point in taking that risk. She led the blindfolded woman inside.

  In the front bedroom, Verna was sitting cross-legged on the bed, reading a book. She looked up. “Well, Coretta,” she said pleasantly. “Did you and Lizzy have a nice ride out here?”

  “It was a long way,” Coretta said in a complaining tone. “This place must be ten or twelve miles out in the country.” She reached for the blindfold again. “Can I take this off now?”

  “Uh-uh,” Lizzy said. “We’ll just leave it on. You don’t need to see Verna to talk to her.” She steered Coretta to a rocking chair near the bed, then opened Coretta’s handbag and took out the manila envelope. “Here, Verna. Take a look at this. Coretta says it’s the auditor’s report.”