The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush (6 page)

She said, “Yeah, July. Well, from the looks of her, I’d say that the city was just real good to her. New dress, new hat, and prettier than ever.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Charlie muttered. “It was just a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, really?” She chuckled again, and that perversity pushed her to shove the knife in and twist it, hard. “She said she’d had a real swell time with her friends there. Even got herself engaged.”

It was true, although Fannie had also said that she’d immediately thought better of the engagement and broken it off the day after she’d agreed to it, with no hard feelings on either side. But Charlie Dickens didn’t need to know that. Not right now, anyway. What he needed was to chew on her being engaged. And after he’d digested that, a good big piece of humble pie.

“Engaged.” He fumbled for his fork. “Engaged,” he said again, dismally. He sat there like a heavy lump inside his clothes, as wooden as the carved wooden Indian that used to sit on the bench in front of Mann’s Mercantile until one day some boys took him out to the fairgrounds and set him on fire. His eyes were the only things that moved, and his lips. “Who’s she engaged to?”

“Engaged?” J.D. crowed at Charlie’s discomfiture. “Serves you right, Charlie boy. Serves you damn right.”

“Who’s she engaged to?” Charlie repeated in a sepulchral voice, his eyes fixed on Myra May.

“She didn’t say.” Myra May straightened up, beginning to halfway repent. She made it a point never to meddle in other people’s business. What had provoked her to do it this time? “Look here,” she added, “it doesn’t really matter, does it? You’re making out just fine.” The taste of the words in her mouth restored her contempt. Yeah, Mr. Charles Dickens was making out, all right. He was making
money
. Making counterfeit money with Mr. Alvin Duffy to save the town from drying up and blowing away. “What do you care what Fannie Champaign does or doesn’t do?”

His mouth twisted and he pushed his full plate away. “I
don’t
care,” he gritted. “I don’t give a good goddamn, and don’t you dare tell her I do.”

He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a quarter and two nickels, and slapped them down on the counter. He got off the stool and went to the door, fumbling to get it open, then remembered his hat and fumbled it onto his head before he managed to get the door open again and went out, slamming it behind him. Myra May looked after him. She still felt contempt, but at the same time she was feeling sad and sorry for what she’d done.

J.D. leaned over, hooked Charlie’s plate with a gnarled right hand, and slid it toward him. “No point in lettin’ good chicken livers and mashed potatoes go to waste,” he said. “Seein’ as how they’re areddy paid for.” He picked up his fork and dug in.

“Order’s up,” Raylene called from the kitchen. Still thinking about Charlie Dickens and Fannie Champaign, Myra May went to the pass-through, put the plates and a full coffeepot on a large tray, and headed back to the corner table, where Jed Snow and Mr. Duffy were continuing to talk, their heads together.

She set the plates on the table and was about to refill Mr. Duffy’s coffee mug when the nearby door to the Telephone Exchange opened and Violet came out. She glanced around as if she was looking for someone, until she saw Jed. Then her eyes went to Mr. Duffy, and she came toward the table.

“Are you Mr. Alvin Duffy?” she asked tentatively.

Mr. Duffy looked up. His eyes lightened when he looked at Violet. “I am. And why are you asking, pretty little lady?”

Pretty little lady?
Myra May almost snorted. What kind of flattery was that? Violet knew how to put that jerk in his place.

But to Myra May’s surprise, she saw that Violet had lowered her head and was blushing. “Because you’ve got a telephone call at the switchboard. It’s long distance, from New Orleans. I guess the person who’s answering your telephone at the bank knew you were coming here for lunch.”

This sort of thing happened often. Myra May herself had once tracked Doc Roberts to the billiard parlor, where he’d had to finish his game in a hurry and deliver Sadie Frey’s twins. And just last Monday, she had called Levinia Frost on behalf of Mrs. Hancock at the grocery store, who wanted to know if Levinia would go next door and ask Mr. Biggens (who had no telephone) if he had any early strawberries he wouldn’t mind selling. Mrs. Burden, who was on Levinia’s party line, picked up the phone and volunteered that her daughter had some and would be glad to bring them in. The Telephone Exchange kept everybody in touch, one way or another.

“Ah, yes,” Mr. Duffy said, putting his napkin down and pushing his chair back. “The call I’ve been waiting for.” He looked at Jed. “A lot hangs on this call, Mayor Snow. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the future of Darling, but that just might be the case.” He stood up and put his hand on Violet’s arm. “Would it be all right if I take the call at the switchboard, Miss—?”

“Sims,” Violet said, with a smile that showed her dimples. She raised her eyes to Mr. Duffy’s face and Myra May thought that the blush in her cheeks had deepened. “Come on back. I’ll get you all fixed up with a headset.”

“Wonderful! Lead on, Miss Sims. It is
Miss
Sims, isn’t it?” He fished in his pocket. “And here’s a dime for my phone call.”

“Oh, you don’t need to do that, Mr. Duffy,” Violet said. She gave him another quick smile. “It’s on the house.”

Myra May, coffeepot in one hand and Mr. Duffy’s mug in the other, stood and watched them go into the Exchange office. Mr. Duffy closed the door behind them.

Beside her, Jed Snow chuckled grimly. “Better keep an eye on that fella, Myra May. Comes to women, I hear he’s just real slick. Don’t know how he does it, but they just seem to fall at his feet, some way or other.” He turned down his mouth. “Even my wife says he’s a charmer.”

Myra May couldn’t think of anything to say. Feeling an unfamiliar knot tighten deep in her stomach, she poured Jed’s coffee, splashing it all over the table.

Verna Tidwell Goes to a Meeting

Monday, April 10

The clock on the wall said it was five minutes after five. Verna took one last look around the office and flicked off the light. She had been working on the second floor of the Cypress County courthouse for over fifteen years now—first as a mere records clerk, right out of high school, then as an assistant clerk, and now as the county probate clerk and acting county treasurer. She could find her way around in the dark, even in that windowless back room where the county map, enlarged, took up almost one wall, and where the plat files were stored in large, shallow drawers. In fact, she could probably find the right plat drawer blindfolded and pull out the exact plat she was looking for, assuming that it had been put back where it belonged.

But being able to find her way around the plat room in the dark was not going to pull Cypress County out of its current grim predicament. For that, Verna would have to be a magician, pulling fistfuls of fifties and hundreds out of a hat instead of rabbits. A year or so ago, she had discovered that the previous county treasurer had been up to some pretty ingenious monkey business with the county’s funds. After she got that mess straightened out, she had consolidated the county’s accounts (which had been scattered around in several different banks, some of them over in Monroeville) in the Darling Savings and Trust. The county would get a better interest rate on the larger single deposit and the money would be easier to manage.

Lately, however, Verna wished she hadn’t been so quick to dump all the county’s eggs into one basket, so to speak. As acting treasurer, she was responsible for every cent that went into and came out of the county’s account. So she had held her breath when the Alabama legislature, back in February, had granted Governor George Miller the power to shut down all the banks in the state. She had breathed again only when the governor, challenged by the large banks in Mobile, admitted that the closure was “advised” and not mandatory. The Darling bank stayed open and everybody’s checks were good.

But Verna had learned from that experience. When she heard that President Roosevelt was thinking of closing all the banks in the country, she had pulled enough cash out of the county’s accounts to meet the payroll. That planning had helped Cypress County weather FDR’s national four-day bank holiday, from the sixth of March, two days after his inaugural, through the tenth. The Darling bank had been closed for another couple of days after that, but it had passed muster, and she had relaxed. The situation wasn’t good, of course. People weren’t paying their taxes, the county was losing revenue, and she’d had to propose an across-the-board pay cut for all employees. But it wasn’t awful, either. She thought—or perhaps she hoped—that they had weathered the worst.

And then, abruptly and without notice, the Darling Savings and Trust had shut its doors, catching her completely by surprise. Today was Monday the tenth, the payroll was due on Friday the fourteenth, and she didn’t have any reserve funds to cover it. The county employed fifty-four people: the men who worked on the roads and in the vehicle maintenance shed; the janitor at the courthouse and the building maintenance man; and the records clerks, including Melba Jean Manners and Sherrie Brindley, who worked in Verna’s office. Everybody was paid twice monthly, on the Friday closest to the first and the fifteenth. Fifty-four families wouldn’t have a paycheck on the fourteenth of April. And those fifty-four families had already cut their spending pretty close to the bone. When the fourteenth rolled around, they wouldn’t have a cent left.

What’s more, on Friday she had been told confidentially by Amos Tombull, the chairman of the county commissioners, that there was a big change coming at the bank. It was likely that it would be closed for at least two more weeks while they sorted things out. She had no idea what he meant, although she suspected that it had something to do with Mr. Johnson’s sudden removal. Two more weeks! That could mean that she would not only miss the April 14 payroll, but she would miss the one that was due on April 28. The county employees were living paycheck-to-paycheck now. Two missed checks would simply doom most of them, and they’d end up on the street. Something had to be done. But what?

Now, it has to be said that Verna Tidwell was not a sentimental person. During their brief marriage, her husband, Walter, was forever complaining about her lack of sentiment—not that he had a lot of it himself, of course. Walter taught history and civics at Darling Academy and lived in a world that was built on a foundation of indisputable facts and known quantities that he could teach and his students could learn. Verna couldn’t bring herself to trust Walter’s faith in a world of facts, and their marriage had not given her what she wanted (although she had never been sure exactly what that was). If he hadn’t absentmindedly walked out in front of a Greyhound bus, northbound on Route 12 on that rainy afternoon some eleven years ago, they would probably have gotten a divorce.

As it was, she had missed him briefly, mourned his passing for a respectable period, and then gotten on with the rest of her life. In lieu of the child Walter had never wanted, she adopted a little dog, a black Scottie named Clyde who knew nothing at all about indisputable facts and was certain only that Verna was the center of the known universe. She settled down to life as a career woman with a steady job and the firm intention of never again inviting a male (other than Clyde, of course) to share her life. Most Darling widows made every effort to trade their widowhood for wifehood as quickly and advantageously as possible, but Verna cherished hers. She found it protective, like a suit of armor. It shielded her from distracting, costly relationships—costly, that is, in terms of time and emotional energy.

Verna’s lack of sentiment had stood her in good stead in her job as the county probate clerk and acting treasurer. In fact, she took great pride in her reputation as a no-nonsense, tough-minded businesswoman who did whatever had to be done—such as cutting everybody’s salaries across the board, rather than letting one or two people go. This meant serious hardship for some, of course, and there were the inevitable bad feelings, especially among those who didn’t fully understand the mathematics of the situation and who blamed Mrs. Tidwell for the loss of a few dollars in their paychecks.

All in all, Verna was not the best-loved person in Darling—and she knew it. This didn’t bother her, though, and she certainly didn’t feel that her lack of sentiment was a fatal character flaw. It was just part of her nature, along with her habit of wanting to know what motivated people to do the things they did, especially the unsavory and unlawful things, such as cheating on their property taxes. “Why?” was one of her most frequently asked questions, along with “Who told you?” and “What makes him think he can get away with that?”

So it was in Verna’s nature to ask herself what was likely to happen after the county missed two payrolls in a row, and she didn’t like the answers she came up with. She had been sitting at her desk midway through the afternoon, thinking about this bleak scenario, when Chester P. Kinnard—the federal revenue agent for this part of Alabama—came into the office.

Kinnard was tall and stoop-shouldered, with a pitted, unsmiling face, sharp eyes that seemed not to miss a trick, and a softly careful tread, no doubt the result of years of creeping through the woods to the sites of secret stills. He was dressed in a wrinkled brown business suit and a wide-brimmed brown hat that he never took off, and he lit one cigarette after another, constantly. He had come to the office several times before to study plats of Cypress County and ask questions (and make notes) about land ownership. He had never said why, but Verna had no difficulty guessing. Moonshiners usually built their stills on their own property or on property that belonged to relatives or friends, where they could booby-trap the access or at least set up some sort of warning system. The ownership of a certain piece of property might be the necessary clue that would lead Agent Kinnard and his deputies straight to a hidden operation.

The agent spoke in a soft, low voice. “Afternoon, Miz Tidwell.” He dropped his Camel cigarette in the spittoon beside the door and tipped his hat. “Thought I’d spend some time in the plat room, if I won’t be in your way.”

“Not at all,” Verna said. “Do you need any help?”

“Thank you.” He pulled a crumpled pack out of his coat pocket, tapped a cigarette on his sleeve, and lit it with a flick of a match. “I b’lieve I can find my way around.”

They always exchanged exactly the same words. Verna understood that Agent Kinnard didn’t want anybody looking over his shoulder—not even the county clerk, who might be related to the owner of the very still he was looking for. She suspected that he’d had a lot of practice finding his way through plats in county courthouses all over his district, searching through old land records and poring over county maps. This time, he spent only twenty minutes in the plat room, and when he came out, he wore a satisfied expression. Verna suspected that he had found whatever he was looking for, and wondered what it was.

She didn’t have long to think about it, though, because Agent Kinnard had no sooner left than Miss Tallulah LaBelle swept in, followed by her chauffeur, Tobias, who stood respectfully by the door while his mistress came to the counter to do her business. A friend of Aunt Hetty Little, the old lady—a Darling legend—wore a lace-trimmed gold-colored dress that must have been the height of fashion during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration and a wide-brimmed hat swathed in yards of fine tulle and decorated with white silk rosebuds, a red ostrich floss, and loops of gold velvet ribbons. Miss Tallulah always reminded Verna of European royalty of the long-gone Edwardian era, especially when she caught a glimpse of her tooling along in her custom-built town car—a bright red 1924 Packard with a closed rear compartment for herself and an open front compartment for Tobias. Red was her favorite color.

Miss Tallulah had come, as she did once every year, to pay the property tax on the LaBelle plantation, over a thousand acres of rich bottom land along the Alabama River. Of course, she could have had her bookkeeper make the payment or sent it in with Tobias. But it was the kind of thing the shrewd old lady liked to do herself—and she always paid in cash. She did not trust banks, and today, Verna didn’t blame her. What’s more, she thought as she wrote out the receipt, she was very glad to get Miss Tallulah’s tax payment. It wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent in the payroll problem, but it was something. The two of them chatted amiably for a few moments, then Miss Tallulah swept out again.

That transaction was barely completed when Myra May dropped in, bearing two pieces of Raylene Riggs’ strawberry-rhubarb crumb pie—made, Myra May said, from the Dahlias’ rhubarb. Since Myra May rarely left the diner in the middle of the day, this unusual event made Verna suspicious. And after several moments of squirming in her chair and beating around the bush, Myra May got around to telling her why she’d come.

“I need to warn you,” she said in a low voice, “about something I overheard at the diner on Saturday. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind because it’s . . . well, odd. Have you met Mr. Duffy from the bank—the new vice president?”

“Alvin Duffy? I’ve seen him at the bank and on the street, but we haven’t actually met.”

Verna had been as astonished as anybody else when Mr. Johnson named the stranger as the new vice president on the very day that old Mr. Conklin retired, turning Sam Stanton’s career plans topsy-turvy. Why, the man had just arrived in Darling, and nobody knew a thing about him. By itself, this was highly unusual, for in Darling, people were identified by their family connections and the places they came from. (Verna often ran into people who would say, “Why, I know who you are! You’re Maybelline Lynch’s third girl, Verna!” or “I went to school with your Walter’s sister. I was so sorry to hear of his passing.”) And now this outsider, whom nobody had ever heard of, was the vice president of the town’s only bank. It was all very strange.

But Myra May had said something else. Verna frowned. “What do you mean, you need to warn me? Warn me about what?”

Myra May looked over her shoulder to see whether anyone else was close enough to overhear. Melba Jean was at her typewriter, industriously clackety-clacking. Sherrie Brindley was at the filing cabinet on the other side of the room. Sherrie, who had curly dark-blond hair and a ready smile, was a Darling booster. In her spare time, she organized Darling Clean Up Days, Keep Our Darling Beautiful, and other town events. If something was happening in Darling, Sherrie was bound to be in on it, so Myra May especially didn’t want her to hear. She lowered her voice.

“Well, Mr. Duffy and Jed Snow were having lunch together on Saturday. While I was waiting on them, I overheard them hatching a scheme. I couldn’t believe it, Verna, but they are planning to start counterfeiting money.”

Verna rolled her eyes. “Oh, go on, Myra May. You’re kidding.”

“No, seriously, Verna.” Myra May was earnest. “I worried about it all weekend, and then I finally decided I had to talk to you. Mr. Duffy says they need to print enough money to keep Darling afloat until the bank reopens. And
your
name was mentioned—I heard it! They’re planning to get you involved.”