The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But Verna was a devotee of true crime magazines, the reading of which she considered to be a good exercise for her inquiring mind and suspicious nature, and she now had something of interest to ponder. She had recently read a story in Best Detective Magazine about a ring of counterfeiters operating their own printing press on Chicago’s West Side, putting thousands of dollars into circulation. They got away with it for months and were taken out of business only when they ran afoul of Al Capone’s gang, over in neighboring Cicero. Capone didn’t take kindly to those who trespassed on his criminal turf.

  Verna hadn’t heard of any counterfeiters operating in Alabama, but when people desperately needed money, they weren’t too careful about how they got it. Still, she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that a bank vice president would be fool enough to think he could pull that kind of trick here in little Darling, and get away with it. And even granted that Myra May hadn’t heard it quite right, what in the world was he planning?

  Verna had thought about this off and on all afternoon, and she was thinking about it now as she prepared to leave the office. She was about to close the door behind her when the telephone rang. She hesitated, thinking she should simply ignore it—the office was closed, after all. Sherrie had gone to chair a meeting of Keep Our Darling Beautiful, and Melba Jean had left, too.

  But then, compelled by that annoyingly strict sense of duty that made her the responsible person she was, Verna went back to her desk and picked up the telephone. She was immediately glad she had. It was Amos Tombull, the chairman of the board of county commissioners—her boss.

  “Miz Tidwell,” he said, in his slow, gravelly Southern voice, “would you mind steppin’ across the street to the newspaper office ’fore you go home this afternoon? Mr. Duffy and Mayor Snow are here with me and Mr. Dickens. We’re fixin’ to come up with a way to avoid a shutdown of this entire town. We need you in on it. The front door’s locked but you just knock three times and Mr. Dickens’ll let you in.”

  Verna immediately thought of what Myra May had told her, but she didn’t hesitate for a single second.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I was just now locking up. I’m on my way, sir.” She hung up the receiver.

  It didn’t hurt to “sir” Amos Tombull—not out of respect, for Verna knew from personal experience that you couldn’t trust him any farther than you’d trust a canebrake rattlesnake. But he held the strings in Cypress County, and when he pulled them, people danced. Verna, being a practical person who intended to keep her job, liked to stay on his good side as much as possible. Which meant that while she didn’t do everything Mr. Tombull ordered, she usually let him think she did. He was so full of himself, he was easy to fool.

  And anyway, she thought as she made a quick detour to the powder room, she was curious. Those four men—banker, mayor, county commissioner, and newspaper editor—were an improbable gang of counterfeiters, if that was indeed what they were up to. She still found that idea very farfetched. Nobody would be that dumb. But they were up to something, and she wanted to know what it was.

  As Verna washed her hands, she gave herself a critical look in the mirror over the sink. Perms made her dark hair go all frizzy, and last week, when she went to the Beauty Bower, she’d had Beulah cut it in a short, sleek bob, with straight-across bangs. Beulah (a friend and fellow Dahlia) said it was a 1920s style and a little out of date.

  “Everybody’s doin’ loose hair these days, honey,” she’d said, fluffing her own beautiful blond hair. “Lots of curls. And curls are easy, with the new ’lectric perm machine.” She’d pointed proudly to the contraption in the corner, with all the wires dangling down. “I can perm you, too, Verna. You’ll be beautiful.”

  But Verna didn’t want curls. She was pleased with her new look. Her short, straight, easy-care hair was as polished and sleek as a helmet. She ran a quick comb through it, then took out her compact and powdered her nose. She didn’t usually bother with lipstick, but she’d found a red one at Lima’s Drugstore that complemented her olive complexion. She put it on, blotted her lips together, and regarded her image.

  Those men couldn’t really be planning to print counterfeit money.

  Could they?

  * * *

  The afternoon sun was half hidden behind a bank of dirty gray clouds and the air carried the scent of rain. Crossing Franklin in the direction of the Dispatch, Verna noticed that there were no cars or wagons parked in front of Hancock’s Grocery. This was a surprise, since Mrs. Hancock had the only grocery in Darling and there were usually three or four vehicles out front and people coming and going. Verna glanced in the other direction. There were no vehicles in front of the diner or Mann’s Mercantile, either. The entire town square was deserted, at five o’clock on a Monday, when the streets should have been full of traffic. She shivered, suddenly cold. The scene was eerie. Darling was a ghost town.

  The front blind was pulled down at the Dispatch and the door was closed. Feeling a little unnerved, Verna knocked three times, and a moment later, Charlie Dickens let her in, closing the door quickly behind her. The green-shaded lamp on the editor’s desk cast a tinted light and the large room was dim. The newspaper printing press and the Linotype machine were hulking shadows in the dark corners.

  Alvin Duffy and Jed Snow were perched on chairs in front of Charlie’s desk. Mr. Duffy wore a natty brown suit and vest and a blue tie and was smoking a cigarette in a long plastic holder, like FDR. Jed wore his familiar blue plaid shirt and a worried look. Charlie was in shirtsleeves, badly rumpled and bleary-eyed, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. He looked, Verna thought, like he’d been having some of the hair of the dog that bit him—or more likely, the whole dog.

  Mr. Tombull, also in shirtsleeves, a green bow tie, and blue and yellow suspenders, was seated in the chair behind Charlie’s desk, smoking a cigar. His face above his bow tie was red and round, and beads of sweat stood out on his upper lip. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the desk in front of him. Verna didn’t see any glasses and decided that the men had been passing the bottle.

  And there was a fifth man, seated a little distance away, smoking a pipe, one leg crossed over the other knee. Verna was startled when she saw him. It was Mr. Benton Moseley, from the Moseley law office upstairs over the print shop. Mr. Moseley employed her best friend, Liz Lacy. He was in his early forties, an attractive man with neatly clipped brown hair, regular features, and a ready smile—it was no wonder that Liz had once had a crush on him as big as the state of Alabama. Mr. Moseley was the most popular lawyer in Darling, not just because he was gallant in the old Southern way (which he was), but because he was shrewd and knew his way around. A few years back, he’d been elected to the state legislature in Montgomery, and you didn’t survive in that den of vipers unless you knew how to quickstep through the snakes, the power brokers who ran the state’s affairs.

  But Benton Moseley came from a long line of lawyers and had learned from his daddy and granddaddy before him that a sharp axe worked better than a big muscle. He had one of the sharpest axes Verna had ever seen. But he also had a reputation for being square as well as being shrewd, and Verna had relied on his advice more than once over the past few years. If Mr. Duffy and the others were cooking up a counterfeiting scheme, Mr. Moseley would soon set them straight.

  Each man got up and shook her hand politely, and Jed Snow, mumbling a greeting, offered her his chair, dragging over a high stool for himself. She sat down, took her Pall Malls out of her purse, and lit one, very deliberately, blowing out a stream of smoke that swirled into the haze that hung over their little group. The green-tinted lamp, the blue haze, and the intent expressions on the men’s faces made her think of an outlaw gang huddled around a campfire, plotting their next bank robbery.

  She broke the silence with a question. “Well, gentlemen, what’s on our agenda this afternoon?” With variations, this was her usual way of staking a claim to
her place in a meeting, and she had learned to ask it first, before somebody else laid claim to the agenda.

  Mr. Tombull spoke around his cigar. “The bank’s closed and the town’s in trouble,” he said, stating a fact. “We have got to do something. Mr. Duffy here has had a brainstorm he thinks will save our bacon. Mr. Moseley is here to give us his thoughts on the matter.” He swiveled to look at Mr. Duffy. “You tell Mr. Moseley and Miz Tidwell here what you got in mind, Alvin.”

  Mr. Duffy spoke up. “I’ve been doing some research and have come up with a plan to provide liquidity to the townspeople in this current crisis,” he said. Verna reflected that he looked and sounded exactly like a stuffed shirt. “Now that Mr. Johnson has been removed—”

  “He has?” Verna put in, narrowing her eyes. Now was the time for everybody to lay all his cards on the table, and if the men weren’t going to ask, it was up to her. “Why was he ‘removed’? Who had the authority to remove him? And what’s going to happen to the bank?”

  Mr. Duffy gave her a startled look, as if a piece of the furniture had suddenly come to life, asking questions and demanding answers. He cleared his throat. “Shortly after the first of the year, Mr. Johnson sold the Darling Savings and Trust.”

  “Mr. Johnson sold the bank?” Verna asked incredulously. She hadn’t known it was his to sell. In fact, she had no idea who actually owned the bank. It had always just been there, like Mobile Bay or the Louisville & Nashville Railroad—until suddenly it wasn’t.

  “Who’d he sell the bank to?” Charlie put in.

  Mr. Duffy looked again at Verna. “Two years ago, Mr. Johnson bought out the other stockholders and became the sole owner of the Savings and Trust.” He turned to Charlie. “He sold it to the Delta Charter Bank of New Orleans, for which I work. I was sent here to manage the transition and—”

  “Ah,” Jed said in an accusing tone. “So that’s how you wound up as the VP, instead of Sam Stanton, like everybody figured.”

  Ah-ha, Verna thought. She was beginning to understand.

  “That’s more or less what happened,” Mr. Duffy replied, shifting uncomfortably. “I anticipated that the changeover would go smoothly, but it was interrupted by the bank holiday in early March. And then when the auditors came in—”

  “I thought so,” Charlie Dickens interrupted, grinding his cigarette out under his heel. “Then they’re not state bank examiners.” As he reached into his shirt pocket for another Camel, he looked even more tired and dispirited than usual. He’d been looking that way since Fannie Champaign left town, Verna thought. He must know that she was back, though. She wondered if he had talked to her.

  “No, they’re not state examiners. They’re auditors sent by Delta Charter pursuant to the conclusion of our purchase,” Mr. Duffy replied. “When they began work—”

  “How come you let on that they were state examiners?” Charlie asked, lighting a book match with his thumbnail and putting it to his cigarette. “You trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes?”

  “It’ll all come out if you just let the man tell his story, Charlie,” Mr. Tombull said in a schoolmasterly tone.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Tombull,” Jed Snow put in, “but I’d like to hear the answer to that question.” He was frowning. “Nobody told the town council that our Darling bank was being taken over by some foreigners. If we’d’ve known, we wouldn’t have—”

  “New Orleans is hardly a foreign country,” Mr. Duffy interrupted.

  “Sez you,” Charlie muttered. His Camel in the corner of his mouth, he went to the desk and picked up the bottle. He eyed it for a moment, then put it down with an expression half of longing, half of distaste. Catching the look, Verna thought it would be good if Charlie could quit drinking.

  Mr. Moseley took his pipe out of his mouth, rapped it on the heel of his shoe, and began to fill it with tobacco from the pouch he took out of his pocket. Verna waited for him to say something. When he didn’t, she spoke.

  “When the auditors from Delta Charter began work . . .” she prompted, bringing them back to the issue at hand.

  Mr. Duffy regarded her again, this time with interest. One eyebrow went up, one corner of his mouth quirked.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Tidwell. Yes. Well, when they got started on the books, they found quite a number of delinquent loans—far more than Delta Charter had anticipated. To put it simply, the bank may not have enough assets to cover its obligations. As a result all accounts are necessarily frozen and will remain so until we have it straightened out, which the auditors have told me may take quite some time. I am not suggesting that there’s been any criminal activity.” He cleared his throat and added, slowly and deliberately, “Although it is entirely possible that this bank will be unable to reopen.”

  The words hung in the air like a sword, light glinting along the unimaginable sharpness of its blade. Verna drew in her breath. She had read about the bank failures that had been happening all across the country since the stock market crash in ’29. Most people didn’t understand the role of the bank in their town. They just took it for granted—until it failed, that is. And then they saw, pretty quickly, that a town without a bank was a dead town, a town where people were unable to do business. A ghost town.

  “In the meantime,” Mr. Duffy was saying, “I am deeply concerned about the emergency situation that is likely to develop here in Darling, when people realize that not only are their bank accounts frozen, but they’re not going to get their paychecks, because their employers’ accounts are frozen, too. So I have a proposal to make. I’ve discussed it with Mayor Snow, and we think—”

  “You can forget that ‘we’ business,” Jed said sourly. “I already told you what I think, Mr. Duffy. The idea of passing that phony stuff off like it was real money is going to stick in folks’ craw. They won’t have it.”

  Verna covered her astonishment with a made-up cough. So Myra May had been right after all! The shadows in the corners loomed more ominously and the smoke lowered and swirled around them, eddying in the greenish light. Why didn’t Mr. Moseley say something? Surely he couldn’t approve of anything like this!

  “But it is real money,” Mr. Tombull asserted. He picked up the bottle and took a hefty swig. “Leastwise, it’s real, far as this town is concerned. O’course, we don’t aim for folks to take it over to Monroeville or down to Mobile, or anywheres else. They’re gonna keep it right here in this town, where it’ll pay the rent and buy the groceries people need to keep on feedin’ their families. That’s the good thing about this idea, seems to me. People need to be reminded to keep their money right here at home, ’stead of buyin’ from the Monkey Ward catalog and sendin’ their good, hard-earned cash money up to Chicago.” He set the bottle down with an emphatic thump.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Duffy said, with evident satisfaction. “And if their currency is spent right here in our community—”

  “It’s not your community, Duffy,” Charlie put in heavily. “You’re from New Orleans.” He said the words with distaste.

  Mr. Duffy’s face tightened and he spoke tersely. “If this bank survives, I am here to stay, Dickens, whether you like it or not. As of last Friday, I am the president of the Darling Savings and Trust. And I’m willing to lay odds that I have a bigger stake in this town than you do. The bank has hundreds of property loans on its books, more than half of them delinquent. I intend to see them paid off.” His voice took on a new authority. “What’s more, I intend to see this bank succeed. And nothing is going to stop me.” With a severe look at Charlie, he leaned back in his chair. “Nothing.”

  The new president! Verna let out a long stream of blue smoke, feeling that the entire picture had just changed right in front of her very eyes. No wonder Voleen Johnson had left town. Now that her husband was no longer a bank president, all her social prestige had melted away, like a crust of morning ice on a March puddle. But you wouldn’t think a newly minted bank presi
dent would want to get himself mixed up with a counterfeit scheme. She hazarded a glance at Mr. Moseley. He was smoking his pipe unconcernedly, arms crossed over his chest, eyes half closed.

  “Attaboy, Alvin!” Mr. Tombull boomed. “And that’s ’xactly why scrip is the answer.” He laid the wet, chewed butt of his cigar on the glass ashtray so he could gesture with his fat white hands. “We can call it Darlin’ Dollars. Every soul in town will understand that the scrip comes d’rectly from the payroll of our local merchants, like Musgrove’s Hardware and the diner and the Old Alabama Hotel and the Academy. And the county, too, o’course.” He nodded at Verna. “You got that, Miz Tidwell? You follow me?”

  And suddenly, for Verna, it all made sense. Myra May’s initial misunderstanding of what she had overheard had sent them both down the wrong road. This wasn’t a counterfeit scheme. Mr. Duffy and Mr. Tombull were talking about creating an alternative currency, the way it had been done over in Atlanta, and out in Clear Lake, Iowa. And down in Key West, Florida, too, where retailers had organized a “home dollar” campaign, reminding their customers that when they bought from local businesses, they were creating local prosperity, and the money they spent in their hometown improved conditions for everybody. “The dollar you spend at home stays at home and works at home,” they’d said, and most people understood and agreed—except for a few holdouts, like Jed, who didn’t like the idea of being told where they could spend their money.

  “I do follow you, Mr. Tombull,” Verna said. “You’re talking about issuing scrip in anticipation of the county’s prospective tax receipts. Is that it?”

  “That’s it.” Mr. Tombull beamed proudly. “That’s my girl. I knew you’d climb on board with us.” He scowled at Jed. “You hear that, Mr. Mayor? Miz Tidwell sees the picture. She’s got horse sense.”