The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But after the stock market took its fatal nosedive, the Plain Dealer (and every newspaper, everywhere) stopped hiring. Worse, nobody wanted to buy a newspaper with a shrinking subscription list, declining advertising revenue, and a faltering job printing business—in a two-bit Southern town where a halfway decent story came along once in a blue moon. His father’s pride and joy was an albatross around Charlie’s neck.

  Well, the Boomer story, inconsequential as it was, filled out the rest of the page. In a couple of hours, Ophelia would take his stories and hers to the Linotype machine and begin setting up the four pages of what they called “home print”: the local news; the church and club news; births, deaths, marriages, and travel (mostly weekend visits to family on the other side of the county). There was also Liz Lacy’s Garden Gate column and whatever local ads Ophelia had been able to sell. That part of the job had to be finished in time to get the pages on the press late Thursday night.

  On Friday, the home print pages would then be folded together with the four pages of ready print that Charlie bought from a syndicate called the Western Newspaper Union, as did the hundreds of other little newspapers around the country. The ready print pages contained the national and international news (mostly dismal, these days), the financial news (still disastrous), the women’s column (twaddle), serialized fiction (trash), comics, and sports—although this year’s World Series would make it to the national page, with good reason. The St. Louis Cardinals had just squeaked past the Detroit Tigers four games to three, with pitching brothers Dizzy and Daffy Dean each winning two games for the Gas House Gang. They were still dancing in St. Louis, where after the game, August Busch’s new team of Clydesdales had paraded around the infield, pulling a shiny red beer wagon loaded with free bottles of Bud. This was the first wet Series since the “Thirsty-first” of July, 1919, when the National Wartime Prohibition Act had thrown three strikes at the beer industry.

  In fact, the ready print ought to be loaded with news this week. Over in Germany, they were still talking about the extravagant Nuremburg rally the Nazis had staged for their man Hitler, whom they were now calling their Führer. Back home, investigators were still trying to figure out the cause of the fire that destroyed the Morro Castle, leaving 137 passengers and crew dead. The latest cost-of-living figures were out. The average cost of a new house (if you could afford one) was $5,970, but if you were renting, you could figure on spending an average of $240 a year out of your average annual wage of $1,600. And there had been three more kidnappings in the past seven days. A plague of kidnappers had settled on the land, it seemed, snatching anybody whose family might be willing to pay a ransom.

  With any luck, the bundles of ready print would arrive from Mobile on the Thursday afternoon Greyhound bus, although that depended on whether the bus (which was no spring chicken) made the trip without breaking down. If all went according to Hoyle, the Dispatch would be in the mail carrier’s flivver and on its way to subscribers on the RFD routes by early Saturday morning. Charlie himself would fill the newspaper racks around the square in time to catch the Friday night moviegoers and Saturday shoppers.

  If there were any.

  Shoppers, that is.

  Business was picking up, thanks to the Darling Dollars scrip that Alvin Duffy, the new bank president, had persuaded people to accept, as well as the boost the merchants were getting from the CCC camp. But Charlie was convinced that the town would never again be anything like as prosperous as it had been before the Crash, which left the Dispatch in a big round hole.

  He ground out his cigarette in the overflowing glass ashtray that sat on his father’s 1909 Webster’s New International Dictionary, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out a bottle of warm Hires root beer. He missed the powerful kick he used to get from Mickey LeDoux’s tiger spit. But he had promised Fannie to stop drinking the hard stuff and he meant to keep that promise, even if it killed him. Which it very nearly did in the wee small hours of Friday morning, when he was finishing up the print run and—before he married Fannie—would have happily fallen into a jug of shine.

  These days, though, he went home to fall into bed beside his wife and sleep the sleep of the righteously sober next to her warm, soft, fragrant body—more than a fair trade for a daylong hangover.

  Except that this week, he wouldn’t be falling into bed beside Fannie, for the simple reason that she wasn’t there, which was partly responsible for Charlie’s gloom. Miss Champaign (to Charlie’s chagrin, his wife continued to use her professional name) was the proprietor of Champaign’s Darling Chapeaux, located on the west side of the courthouse square. She was also a professional milliner of some repute who had just completed thirty-some ladies’ hats, her “fall line,” as she called it. Charlie had helped her box them up and haul them to the L&N depot, to see them on their way to New York.

  Fannie herself had left yesterday for her meeting there with Lilly Daché, a celebrated French milliner who provided custom-made hats for the Hollywood studios. Through Mme. Daché, one of Fannie’s chapeaux had ended up in Grand Hotel, on the handsome head of leading lady Joan Crawford. Miss Crawford had been quoted in the Hollywood Reporter as saying that she “just adored” that “clever little hat.” Voilà! Fannie was famous, and her hats were now in great demand.

  Unfortunately, Fannie’s celebrity came at a price, which was why she was in New York and Charlie was sleeping alone. His wife had rented an expensive suite in the Biltmore Hotel where she planned to display her fall line, so all the big hat buyers in the city could come and take a look. If they liked something they saw, they would pay Fannie for the design, and her hat would be copied and sold to swanky department stores like Macy’s in New York and Wannamaker’s in Philly. Now that Roosevelt was making it possible for more people to have a few dollars more in their pockets, ladies’ hats were big business again.

  And Fannie was not just a creative designer of exquisite ladies’ hats, she was a businesswoman and a damned successful one, at that. Charlie didn’t know how much she was making, exactly. He just knew it had to be a lot.

  But while Miss Fannie Champaign might be a rising star in the millinery world, she was still Mrs. Charlie Dickens. And while Mr. Charlie Dickens certainly didn’t object to his wife’s career (he had been all for women getting the vote, hadn’t he?), he had expected that once they got married, she would give up junketing all over God’s green earth and settle down to her Darling hat shop, downstairs from their apartment and cattycorner across the courthouse square from his newspaper office.

  As far as Charlie was concerned, this was an ideal situation. Fannie had paid cash for the building, so they didn’t have to pay a cent of rent. And she liked to cook and do other housewifely things, which made her husband’s life exceedingly pleasant. After several years of living alone in the two upstairs rooms he rented from Mrs. Beedle (five dollars a week, clean sheets but no housekeeping, meals, or laundry), Charlie was at last (you might say) in clover. Which was one reason why batching it bothered him so much, even if it was for just a couple of weeks.

  But as Charlie’s dad used to say, a mule could be sweet as apple pie at one end and kick you crazy at the other, and something much more disturbing than Fannie’s absence had gotten under Charlie’s skin. He dearly loved his wife, but she had an independent streak a mile wide and two miles deep. She had kept her account book herself before they were married, and she insisted on doing that now. She refused to allow him to look it over, a fact that gnawed at Charlie no end. Now that they were married and would be required to file a joint income tax return for 1934, he thought he ought to at least have some idea of how much his other half was making and how well she was managing her money. Her money? Well, that was up for discussion, he thought. Now that they were married, wasn’t it their money?

  So when he came back from putting Fannie on the Sunday morning train, Charlie made a momentous decision—one that was about to disorder his relatively well-ordered life. He sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee
and Fannie’s account books and made a discovery that shook him all the way down to the soles of his wingtip shoes. In the previous year, his wife’s hat business had brought in some $2,400.

  Charlie stared at the number, scarcely believing his eyes. Twenty-four hundred dollars was a small fortune, fifty percent more than the average joe’s salary and twice as much as last year’s income from the newspaper! He gulped. He’d had no idea.

  Of course, he reminded himself, Fannie had to pay for her materials, advertising, and shipping, all of which were detailed in her precise hand in the expense columns. But those charges amounted to not much more than $400. She obviously kept her overhead costs low. Then his attention was caught by something else: a regular expense of fifty dollars a month, with no explanation. Just two letters. JC.

  Charlie was baffled. Fifty dollars a month? Fifty dollars a month? Why, that totaled up to $600 a year, a quarter of what her entire business brought in! Was JC a person or … or what? Was Fannie repaying a debt? Was she making payments on a piece of property? If it was real estate, where was it? If it was a person, who was he … or she? And even more importantly, why hadn’t she told him? What was she hiding?

  Why was she hiding it?

  Didn’t she trust him?

  And then he thought of something else. There had always been a bit of a mystery about Fannie, for she had simply gotten off the Greyhound bus one day, carried her suitcase across the courthouse square, and started making hats. Darling had been deeply curious about her because she was an unmarried woman with no friends or family to welcome her to town—and no apparent reason to choose Darling over Mobile or Montgomery, or any other town for that matter. What’s more, she made it abundantly clear that she was an independent woman who didn’t need a man to support her or make her happy. And since Fannie was quite attractive, this fact alone was enough to make people take notice.

  Now, Darling loves nothing in the world so much as it loves gossip, so plenty of rumors had been floating around since Fannie’s arrival. Out of the blue, people said, or Really, out of nowhere. Various “informed sources” had told Charlie that Miss Champaign had been engaged once, that she had been married twice, that her fabulously wealthy husband had died, that her mobster husband had gone to prison for tax evasion and she had divorced him, and that she had inherited a potful of money from her father, who made an illicit fortune running guns from the Florida Keys to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He had even heard that her mother was a rebellious heiress (possibly a Vanderbilt or maybe a Carnegie) who had given birth to Fannie out of wedlock and sent her to be raised by a couple in Atlanta.

  But whether this was fact or fiction had mattered not a whit to Charlie. He had been so besotted with love and so eager to marry this beautiful lady that he had never once asked her who she really was and why she had come to Darling, and she had never volunteered the information. She was still a mystery—and up to now, it hadn’t mattered. For all he cared, his wife could have killed somebody. Why, she might even be on the lam from the law. But regardless of who she was or what she had done, she was still Fannie. His Fannie.

  But now, confronted by this unexplained, inexplicable six-hundred-dollar annual expense and given the empty pages in his wife’s life history, Charlie found that he did care. He cared a very great deal, and his natural cynicism and reporter’s instinct seized on the very worst possibility.

  This payment … was it … could it be … blackmail?

  What had Fannie done, that she was paying for it so dearly?

  Baffled, Charlie had closed Fannie’s account book with something like a sense of despair. And then he had gotten up from the table and done something he never imagined he would do. He wanted to find those canceled fifty-dollar checks, so he went into their bedroom and searched the closet, Fannie’s dresser drawers—her stockings, her undies, her lacy chemises, her nightgowns, her shirtwaists—and the drawers in the night-stand next to her side of the bed.

  But there were no checks to be found, canceled or otherwise. Which meant that she must be keeping them with all her other paperwork in the little office at the back of her hat shop. But Fannie had locked the shop up tight and must have taken the key with her, for it was nowhere to be found, either. The only window was the front display window, and he couldn’t get in that way. He considered breaking the lock, but that would be costly, and (he had to admit) hard to explain.

  Charlie was in a quandary. He had thought he knew the only important things there were to know about his wife: that she was sweet, loving, patient, and generous to a fault—witness her dealings with Rona Jean Hancock (the Eleven O’Clock Lady)—a few months before. Now, all he knew for sure was that Fannie was hiding a secret, and at this point, it really didn’t much matter what the secret was or whether it was good or bad. The fact was that it was a secret. And as his father used to say, there isn’t a helluva lot of difference between a hornet and a yellow jacket when he is raising Cain under your shirt.

  The Regulator clock on the wall of the newspaper office cleared its throat, whirred, and began to strike nine. At her desk, Ophelia stopped typing, pushed back her chair, and stood up.

  “Are you ready for me to put the local stories on the Linotype?” she asked.

  “They’re all there,” Charlie said, pointing to the trays. He picked up his Hires and took a swig. Of course, he could always just come straight out and ask Fannie where that $600 a year was going, and why. But she would ask him how he knew about it, and he would have to confess he had looked at her accounts, which would probably make her so angry that she would—

  He couldn’t begin to guess what she would do, but he knew that telling her would destroy the trust they had built up between them. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop to ask himself whether his interest in (or perhaps more accurately, his obsession with) the way she spent her money signaled a lack of trust on his part. He just kept asking himself how he could discover who was getting Fannie’s six hundred dollars a year. He was an investigative reporter, wasn’t he? He had dug up hundreds of bigger secrets than this one, hadn’t he? He ought to be able to figure this one out.

  He was still trying to come up with ways to unravel this mystery when the telephone on his desk rang. He pulled it toward him and lifted the receiver from its cradle. “Dispatch office,” he said curtly, into the mouthpiece. “Dickens here.” He listened for a few seconds, then transferred the earpiece to his left hand and picked up a pencil.

  “When did this happen?” he asked, and began jotting notes in the reporters’ shorthand he’d used back when he was a real reporter and had real events to report. “Did you call the sheriff’s office?” He jotted another line or two. “Do you know who—”

  But the call had been abruptly cut off—whether because the caller had said all there was to say or because the switchboard had dropped the connection, Charlie had no way of knowing.

  “Damn and blast,” he muttered. Dropped connections happened too often these days. He should get Ophelia to dig into the problems at the Exchange. It would be an easy story for her, because she was friends with Myra May and Violet—they were all members of that garden club—and could get them to tell her what was going on.

  But not now. He dropped the receiver in the cradle, grabbed his notebook and Rolleiflex camera (a relic of his real newspaper career, when he carried it everywhere) and pushed his chair back.

  “Ophelia!” he shouted, reaching for his hat and his seersucker jacket. “Something’s come up. Go ahead and get started on the local pages, but we may cut something. There’s going to be another story.”

  And before she could ask him whether somebody’s house was burning down or somebody had gone and got himself shot and killed, Charlie had shrugged into his jacket, jammed his fedora on his head, and was dashing out the door.

  It was just a few minutes past nine.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LIZ HANDLES A CRISIS

  Business had been pretty slow in Mr. Moseley’s law office lately, which gav
e Liz Lacy plenty of time to work on the garden column she wrote for the Dispatch. This week, she planned to write a piece on “lucky” plants in recognition of Darling’s Lucky Four Clovers. She had already gotten a good start on the column, because she was using material from a talk that Miss Rogers had recently given at a meeting of the Dahlias.

  But today—Monday—had begun with a bang: a frantic eight-fifteen phone call from a panic-stricken lady whose voice Lizzy didn’t immediately recognize. She had tried to get her to calm down and say who she was and why she was calling, but the woman just kept repeating, frantically, “I’ve been trying and trying to get through, but there must be something wrong with the darn phone system. I have to talk to Mr. Moseley right now, please. Right this minute!”

  And when Liz was finally able to make her understand that Mr. Moseley was out of town and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days, the caller wailed, “But he promised I could call him any time, day or night!”

  “If it’s terribly urgent,” Liz said reluctantly, “I can give you the number for Mr. Jackman’s office in Montgomery. That’s where he’s working.” Mr. Moseley wouldn’t like the interruption, but Liz thought the woman sounded so frantic that she should try to help.

  “Thank you,” the woman said breathlessly. “I wouldn’t ask, but I simply have to talk to him!”

  Lizzy hung up, finished the last two bites of the cinnamon-sugar doughnut she’d picked up at the diner on her way to work, and then got out the yellow legal pad that contained Mr. Moseley’s notes on his private meeting with a client the previous week. Their discussion concerned a certain painful domestic matter, some of it quite sensational, by Darling standards, anyway. It wasn’t every day that the subject of divorce came up.

  It was Lizzy’s job to type the notes, which she did quite rapidly, paying only enough attention to make sure she didn’t make any mistakes. In the years she had worked for Mr. Moseley, she’d trained herself to mechanically reproduce his notes without recording the content in her brain. She did it by keeping her mind focused on another subject while her fingers transcribed Mr. Moseley’s scrawls. Occupying her mind with something else made it easier for her to ignore the content of what she was typing, for of course she had to keep it confidential. Attorneyclient privilege was one of Benton Moseley’s most sacred principles. And since it was his, it had to be hers.