The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose (4 page)

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 that 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.

In another way, the expansion had been difficult, for the treasurer’s office had responsibility for all of the county’s money, which seemed to be held in a scattering of different accounts. And to make things even more confusing, Verna quickly discovered that the county’s money was on deposit not just in the Darling Savings and Trust but in all three of the banks over at Monroeville, the nearest big town, which wasn’t even in Cypress County. When she got things under control, Verna planned to recommend that the Monroeville bank accounts be moved back to Darling where they belonged. But she didn’t think it was wise to do that until she had everything figured out and knew what was what.

Normally, of course, Verna would have turned for help to the two longtime employees in the treasurer’s office, Melba Jean Manners, a rather stout, double-chinned lady in her mid-fifties, and Ruthie Brant, twenty years younger than Melba Jean and as skinny as Melba Jean was stout. But Melba Jean and Ruthie didn’t seem to know very much about the way the treasurer’s accounts were organized. According to them, all they did was deposit the money where Mr. DeYancy told them to put it and pay it out to whomever he told them to pay it to, recording the transactions in the big leather-bound account books that were kept on wooden shelves in the storage room. Mr. DeYancy, it seems, had been the kind of boss who liked to keep all the office business under his hat. He apparently hadn’t shared it with the county commissioners, either, because when Verna inquired of them, all she got were blank stares.

As far as Verna was concerned, why Mr. DeYancy did this, whether it was because he was secretive by nature or had certain secrets he wanted to keep, didn’t much matter. What mattered were the accounts. And although Melba Jean and Ruth knew perfectly well how to do their jobs, they couldn’t tell Verna a blessed thing about
why
those accounts were organized the way they were, which was what she needed to know in order to decide whether to change the process or keep on doing it the way it had been done. Since Mr. DeYancy was dead, she couldn’t ask him. And since Mr. Scroggins didn’t know anything more than she did (and seemed to care a whole lot less), she couldn’t ask him, either. The whole thing was, to put it simply, a tangled mess.

Verna was the soul of neatness, and this snarl of accounts had been harassing her since she had inherited it, to the point where she was having nightmares. Sometimes she dreamed that she was trying to balance a dozen different checkbooks drawn on a dozen different accounts, and every time she thought she’d just about got it all figured out, somebody came and dumped a bushel basket of tens and twenties in front of her and told her to put the money where it was supposed to go. If she didn’t put it into the right accounts, she’d be fired.

Or she dreamed that she had just got all the checkbooks balanced when the banks started telephoning to say that a mysterious person dressed all in black had come in and withdrawn all the money. Every account was down to zero and all the county employees would have to go without their paychecks until she figured out where to get the money to cover the loss. If she didn’t find out who had it and put it back, she’d be fired.

Poor Verna had begun to feel as if she were lost in a dark and treacherous swamp, much darker and more treacherous than Briar’s Swamp, over by the river, where panthers and black bears were said to prowl amid clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. And beneath every cypress tree, there was nothing but snakes and occasional alligators and bottomless pools of black water and the smell of something rotten. The smell of trouble.

But even in her worst nightmares, Verna never dreamed that the State of Alabama would send somebody to audit the Cypress County treasurer’s accounts—and not just one somebody, but two.

The first auditor had appeared on a Wednesday morning, unannounced. He flashed a wallet card with his identification and asked Verna to bring him the county books. He spent the day going over them quickly, making cryptic notes. When the clock struck five, he put his suit coat back on, tipped his bowler hat, and disappeared, muttering that somebody from the main office would be in touch if there were further questions.
Further
questions? Until the auditor appeared, Verna had not known that there were any questions at all—except for her own, of course, which were legion.

Melba Jean and Ruthie had spent the whole day nervously watching the fellow. The minute their visitor left, they collapsed into their chairs with huge sighs of relief. Verna felt like doing the very same thing, but she didn’t like to appear concerned in front of the employees.

“What in the
world
do you think that man was looking for?” Melba Jean cried, all her chins rippling.

Ruthie laughed, twisting her mouth. “Maybe he thought we’ve been stealing money and he was trying to catch us.” Her laugh was grating, like the sound that chalk makes when you squeak it on a blackboard. “Maybe he thought we’d get on an ocean liner and sail off to Paris for a long vacation. Or Rome.” Her eyes glinted. “I’ve got me a hankerin’ to see those fountains.”

Verna winced. “Don’t talk like that, Ruthie,” she said sternly. “I am sure the man wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. It’s nothing but a routine audit. They do it all the time. Now that it’s over, we can get back to work.”

She didn’t know whether the audit was routine or not. She did, however, know that Melba Jean had a tendency to gossip about office business. In Verna’s opinion, this was a very dangerous thing, especially when the gossip had anything to do with money. People could get the wrong idea all too easily, and no telling where
that
would lead.

“And I don’t want you two talking about this visit outside the office,” she added emphatically. “There is no point in getting folks all excited when there’s nothing to get excited about. This was just a routine bit of business, that’s all. Happens every so often, in every county in this state. You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the two women chorused dutifully.

But from the glances they exchanged, Verna suspected that they had already spread the word when they went to lunch, which they always ate with a couple of women who worked in the Cypress County Title Company office across the street. The news would probably be all over Darling by the time for church on Sunday.

But if that happened, Verna didn’t get wind of it. The auditor’s office didn’t get back in touch, either, and she was so busy doing her work that the episode slipped into the back of her mind. She was still troubled about those tangled accounts, of course, but her nervousness over the audit eventually died down.

Until, that is, the second auditor showed up, also unannounced. Where the first fellow had been polite and laconic, the second was a fussy little man barely five feet high. He had a bald head, gold-rimmed glasses, a habit of walking on the tips of his toes, and the manner of a bossy banty rooster. He arrived early one morning with a brown leather briefcase in his hand, introduced himself as Mr. Daniel Beecham, Senior State Auditor, and appropriated Mr. Scroggins’ desk (which didn’t much matter because Mr. Scroggins rarely used it). He hung his brown felt bowler hat on a peg, draped his suit coat over the back of Mr. Scroggins’ chair, and fastened red elastic garters above his elbows, like a bank teller. Then he opened his briefcase and took out a pen, a bottle of ink, and a yellow tablet and ordered Verna to bring out the records, one large volume after another.

Mr. Beecham sat at Mr. Scroggins’ desk for a full week, which of course was a week of pure hell for Verna. For the first several days, he methodically worked his way through the records of the money that the county had collected in the past four years: sales taxes, property taxes, licenses and fees, and all funds received from the state. He examined every ledger entry, dipping his pen into his ink bottle and jotting columns of figures on his tablet. He went through the records of the various checking accounts and spent a full day examining the county expenditures. Verna, whose desk was next to his, could hear the sound of the pages turning, the irritating
scritch-scratch
of his pen, and an occasional sigh, whether of weariness or impatience, she couldn’t tell. It was all terribly unsettling.

Mr. Beecham was nothing if not punctual. He came in promptly at eight every morning and left with his briefcase at five every afternoon. He ate lunch at the desk, a sandwich and an apple packed for him by the cook at the Old Alabama Hotel, where he was staying. As he worked, he hummed tunelessly to himself, but he never said a word, except to ask for this or that ledger—and on the last day, to request that the office mechanical adding machine (a genuine Dalton that Verna had recently purchased for seventy-three dollars and ninety-five cents) be placed on his desk. He sometimes stopped to blow his nose into a white handkerchief, or sip coffee poured into a cup from a Thermos bottle. But otherwise, the little man did nothing but read and write for hours on end. Until the last day, that is, when he operated the Dalton nonstop, all day long, adding the columns of figures on his tablet.

Verna prided herself on being able to size people up, and she watched Mr. Beecham’s face carefully, trying to read his reactions. But she had no luck whatsoever. The little man was as stone-faced as the Sphinx. And when he left for the last time, at four fifty-nine p.m. on Friday afternoon, he said not a word of good-bye. He folded up the adding machine tape, put his tablet, pen, and ink bottle into his briefcase, put on his coat, slapped his hat on his head, and briskly left the office.

“What do you suppose will happen next?” Melba Jean asked fearfully.

“We’ll all three be lynched,” Ruthie said, with her grim gallows humor. “Or tarred and feathered.”

“Nothing at all will happen,” Verna said stoutly, summoning all her confidence. “I will see you both on Monday morning. I hope you have a very good weekend.”

She had been right, at least for a short while. Things went on just as usual, with Mr. Earl Scroggins popping in only once, to pick up the quarterly treasurer’s report that Verna had prepared for him to take to the county commissioners’ meeting. Verna had continued as usual, too, shopping for groceries, doing her laundry, borrowing S. S. Van Dine’s
The Benson Murder Case
from Miss Rogers at the library, mowing her grass, and helping the Dahlias with their new vegetable garden.

But all through the first few days after Mr. Beecham’s visit, Verna held her breath, especially when Ruthie handed her the mail from the post office. She went through the stack carefully, not wanting to see an envelope from the state of Alabama but at the same time wanting to see it. The suspense was killing her.

And to make things worse, she couldn’t talk to anybody about her worries. Definitely not to Melba Jean and Ruthie, for she felt she couldn’t trust either of them not to spill the beans all over Darling. And not even to her best friend, Liz Lacy. A long time ago, she had pledged to herself that she wouldn’t whine about her job, no matter how bad it got. A job was a job was a
job
and you did it, come hell or high water. Complaining was a sign of weakness. Verna had never broken that rule, and she wasn’t going to start now.

Anyway, as the days went by and no letter arrived, she had more or less convinced herself that things were more or less hunky-dory and she began to feel a little easier—at least as far as the audit was concerned. But she still couldn’t decide how to deal with the bewildering multiplicity of bank accounts. And those awful nightmares just kept coming.

Now, Clyde lifted his head and licked Verna’s chin as if to reassure her that whatever happened, she could count on him. He would always be around to take care of her and make sure that nothing bad ever happened. She was hugging him gratefully when the telephone on the wall startled her with a brassy
brriingg-brriingg-bring.
Two longs and a short. Her ring. Probably one of the Dahlias calling.