The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Did Price say what he was going to do—and when he was going to do it?” she asked.

  “If he doesn’t hear from Mr. Moseley by the middle of next week, he plans to call somebody else—another attorney, I suppose. He said he had a couple of names.”

  “Gerald Cankron and Homer Box.” Verna blew out a stream of smoke. “Either of them will be glad to cooperate with him, I’m sure, especially if there’s a little money involved.”

  “That means we have to do something pretty quick,” Liz said.

  “Right.” Verna pulled an ashtray toward her and tapped her cigarette ash into it. “You need to talk to Violet and Myra May this afternoon. Tell them about the phone call. Find out what really happened in Memphis, when Violet took the baby. Maybe she was afraid for Cupcake’s well-being. Maybe she knows something about the father that would cast doubt on his claim to the child.” She pulled on her cigarette. “After all, she and Myra May have had her for four years. Where has the man been? Why hasn’t he stepped forward before now?”

  “I was going to work on my newspaper column this afternoon,” Liz said. “But it’s not due until next Wednesday. And I see your point. Those are good ideas—and questions that have to be answered.” She gave Verna a grateful look. “Thank you. I feel better already.”

  “I’ll keep trying to think of something else,” Verna said practically. “But I’m afraid there aren’t a whole lot of options.” She cocked her head. “How about if I go with you to talk to Violet and Myra May? I can lend a little moral support. And maybe they’ll tell us something that will give us some more ideas—before you say anything to Mr. Moseley.”

  “I would love it if you would come, Verna,” Liz said emphatically. She glanced up at the clock over Verna’s desk. “Myra May and Raylene are busy with the lunch crowd right now, and Violet is probably giving them a hand. Maybe we should wait until the middle of the afternoon?”

  “I’ll meet you there at three,” Verna said. “I had to work late a couple of times last week, so I’m due to take a little time off. And the planning for the Christmas party is just about finished.” She paused, quickly scanning her to-do list in her mind. “Does Mr. Moseley’s Santa Claus suit need to go to the drycleaners? If so, you can leave it with Mrs. Hart. They’ll send it over to Monroeville.” The Harts ran Hart’s Peerless Laundry, cattycornered from the courthouse.

  “No, it’s fine.” Liz smiled. “Smells a bit like camphor, though. I took it out of the box and hung it in the closet to air out.” Her smile faded. “I’m afraid it won’t feel much like Christmas if Cupcake is gone. We have to do something.”

  “You’re right on that score,” Verna said fervently. “Whatever it takes, we have to keep that from happening.”

  Liz pushed her chair back and stood up. “Yes,” she said, with determination. “Whatever it takes.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “NOW, ABOUT THAT PROPOSITION”

  In the newspaper office across the street from the courthouse, Charlie Dickens pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his nose. It was nearly two o’clock. It would take him another half hour to finish making up page five, and Thursday was already sliding past at breakneck speed.

  Every Thursday night Charlie revved up the Babcock flatbed cylinder press—the cantankerous Black Beast, already old when his father bought her thirty years ago—and printed the week’s Dispatch. On Friday morning, he would feed the subscribers’ copies through the mailing machine to label them with names and addresses. Then he would haul the copies to the post office, so Tom Wheeler could deliver them to his RFD route on Saturday. (If Tom’s ancient Model T didn’t break down, that is. If that happened, Tom would hitch Old Fred to his buggy, and it might be late Saturday night before all the newspapers were delivered.) On Sunday afternoon, after church and a fried chicken dinner, the men would pull their rocking chairs up close to the stove and read the paper out loud while their wives (or mothers and sisters) did the dishes, then sat down to darn socks and sew on a few buttons. Unless they were Hardshell Baptists, that is, in which case the men read the Bible and the sewing got put off until Monday.

  The Dispatch was an eight-page weekly. Charlie bought the four pages of ready print (world and national news off the wire services, commentary, comics, the market report, and the women’s page) from a syndicate called the Western Newspaper Union. The weekly ready-print sections (pages two, three, six, and seven, with the other pages left blank) were produced by a shop in Mobile and shipped to Darling on the Greyhound bus. They usually arrived at ten on Thursday morning. If they didn’t (which happened more often than not, given the fact that the bus was about as old as the Babcock and the tires weren’t young, either), the paper didn’t go out until Monday. Or Tuesday.

  But the ready-print pages had arrived that morning, so Charlie knew he’d be working late that night. He would warm up the Babcock and print the four home-print pages (one, four, five, and eight) on the blank pages of the ready print. Page one was local news, four was local news and an editorial, and five and eight were ads and whatever local news was needed to fill the columns.

  The home-print pages were all compiled right here in the shop. Charlie and Ophelia Snow, his roving reporter, collected the news and wrote the stories. Ophelia sold ads and operated the Linotype machine. Charlie did the final edits, made up the pages from Ophelia’s Linotype slugs, and ran the press. The end result was a quite respectable small-town newspaper, if Charlie did say so himself, with something in it for every reader in the county.

  At least, that’s how the newspaper had been operating. Charlie showed up every day and spent Thursday nights running the Black Beast, praying it wouldn’t break down. Ophelia came in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and worked Tuesdays and Fridays in the commandant’s office at Camp Briarwood, the Civilian Conservation Corps camp a few miles outside of town.

  Recently, however, Ophelia had hit Charlie with some very bad news. Captain Campbell, the Briarwood commandant, had offered her a full-time job—at double the money Charlie was paying her. She had given him two weeks’ notice.

  Charlie felt like he’d just been sucker punched. With Ophelia in the office, things had been running more smoothly than ever before, especially with advertising and subscription sales. She was a halfway decent reporter, too, at least where the smalltown doings were concerned. And she wrestled that cranky old Linotype like a pro. He got a lump in his throat at the thought of losing her—and he flinched at the thought of finding somebody to replace her. He knew just about everybody in town, in the whole county, for that matter. Nobody had Ophelia’s skills.

  As for Ophelia, she was obviously torn. “I’ve loved working here, Charlie,” she said sadly. “And I feel just terrible about leaving you in the lurch. But with two kids in high school, Jed and I really need the extra money.”

  Charlie knew that she might have added “And with my husband’s business going down the drain,” but she didn’t. Snow’s Farm Supply was in deep trouble, because the farmers who depended on Jed Snow for their livestock feed couldn’t pay him and pay their grocery bills, too. Charlie knew that Jed hadn’t wanted his wife to take even one job, and that he cringed every time he thought that she was keeping the family afloat. But Jed had had to face facts: if it weren’t for Ophelia’s two jobs, the Snows would be dead broke—and in debt to boot.

  Charlie had to face facts, too. So he dredged up a grin from somewhere and said, “Well, Opie, you gotta do what you gotta do. Don’t worry about me. I can handle things here.”

  “Are you sure?” she said doubtfully.

  “No,” Charlie had said, and grinned. “Hell, no, I’m not sure. You know how I hate that damn Linotype. And I’m not worth a plugged nickel when it comes to selling ads. But that’s life. We do what we gotta do and get on with it. You tell Campbell I told you to take that job. And tell him if he fires you, I’ll kill the sonuvabitch.”

  “Thank you,” Ophelia said, misty-eyed. Then, to his surprise, she leaned forward a
nd kissed him on the cheek. He sighed, turned, and busied himself with the papers on his desk, hating the thought of managing the Dispatch on his own.

  A longtime newsman with investigative reporting experience in such premier newspapers as the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun, Charlie had reluctantly assumed his father’s place as editor and publisher of the Dispatch after the old man died a few years before. In fact, he had intended to sell the paper and the in-house job printing business and go back to the big city, where there were crimes to report and fires and train wrecks and political corruption to write about. The city was where headlines happened. Charlie had grown up in Darling, and he knew that nothing happened there. Ever.

  But then the Crash happened on Wall Street and the Depression happened everywhere. The Dispatch subscribers’ list was reduced by more than half, and the job printing business was nearly wiped out. At that point, Charlie couldn’t give the damned newspaper away, much less sell it. He was stuck in Darling and stuck with the Dispatch. He had the sour, empty feeling that his life was over.

  And then something else happened, something quite miraculous. Her name was Fannie Champaign, and Charlie fell for her, hard. He was a crusty old newspaperman without a smidgeon of romance to soften his cynical soul. But somehow, beneath all of his pessimism and distrust, Fannie found his heart and touched it—and changed his life. It was still the case that important headlines didn’t happen in Darling, but Charlie was reconciled to that discouraging fact as long as he could go home to Fannie every day.

  What’s more, he had even found a renewed interest in the Dispatch, especially in the past year, for he had begun to realize that the little newspaper was the emotional glue of Cypress County. In good times, good news gave people something to celebrate. In bad times, bad news made them feel connected to their neighbors. Even though they might have differences of opinion, they felt as if they were all in the same boat, everybody trying to make it through rough waters. Some pessimists said that radios and Movietone newsreels would make newspapers obsolete in a few years, but Charlie didn’t believe that. People would be reading newspapers until kingdom come, because that’s where they found the news. And good or bad, the news gave them something to hold on to.

  There had been a whale of a lot of news lately, coming from all corners of the globe. In Canada, all five of the amazing Dionne quints were reported to be “safe and snug for the winter.” In Great Britain, Winston Churchill, always the worrywart, was sounding yet another alarm about Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party. “Germany is arming,” he announced in stentorian tones, “secretly, illegally, and rapidly.” And Japan, he warned, had military ambitions. But nobody liked Churchill after he got so many boys killed at Gallipoli. And nobody was listening, anyway. They were too busy watching Windsor Lad win the Derby, the Queen Mary take to the seas, and the Edinburgh-to-London Flying Scotsman become the first steam locomotive to reach a hundred miles an hour. Britain, Britons thought, was on top of the world.

  But a few of them may have acknowledged that Churchill was right. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler had declared himself Führer and required members of the Wehrmacht—the German armed forces—to swear the oath of loyalty to him instead of the German constitution. And in faraway Japan, the Imperial Navy (already the third largest in the world, after Great Britain and the United States) had just launched the fifth of five cruisers and destroyers to be built that year.

  There was news from the United States, too. In Washington, DC, the government reported that the economy was improving. Unemployment had fallen to 22 percent (from a high of 25 percent the year before), while the gross national product had risen by 8 percent. But even as the New Dealers put down their pencils and congratulated each other on the brightening economic situation, they looked up in the sky and saw dark clouds of tumbling topsoil, blown all the way from the Dust Bowl to the Atlantic. And in Virginia, clouds of a different sort had gathered. A federal grand jury had recently indicted nineteen moonshiners and nine corrupt local officials, including the county sheriff, in what newspapers all over the country were billing as the “Franklin County moonshine conspiracy.”

  Distractions helped. In New York, Babe Ruth hit his seven hundredth home run. On Broadway, the new Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes, starred Ethel Merman, whose voice was every bit as powerful as the Babe’s bat—and maybe more. In Chicago, the final head count at the Century of Progress Exposition was reported to be nearly thirty-nine million visitors, a record turnout for any World’s Fair. In Hollywood, Will Rogers, Clark Gable, and Janet Gaynor were stealing the box office, but little Shirley Temple was stealing everyone’s heart. The six-year-old was already a goldmine for Fox Studios, which was about to release her latest movie. It was called Bright Eyes and would be playing at Darling’s Palace Theater early next year. Word was already spreading that Fox planned to sponsor Shirley look-alike contests across the United States and that (in addition to the cash prizes) the studio had the option of sending the winner to Hollywood as a movie double for Shirley. Mothers everywhere were rolling sausage curls and teaching their daughters to tap.

  The Cypress County news wasn’t nearly so exciting, and Charlie knew that there wouldn’t be any big local headlines between now and the end of the year. Oh, there was lots going on—it just wasn’t news, that’s all. Miss Rogers, at the library, was organizing a jigsaw puzzle tournament. The merchants were holding a window-decorating contest, with a prize for the most attractive holiday-themed window. The annual children’s Christmas party would take place as usual on the courthouse lawn, with Benton Moseley playing Santa. A couple of women with more energy than sense—Earlynne Biddle and Mildred Kilgore—were opening a bakery on the north side of the square, next door to Fannie’s hat shop.

  Ah, Fannie. Charlie’s wife, and both the source of his joy and—these days—the source of his perplexity. When he married Fannie, the first thing he’d had to get used to was her independence. The next was her astonishing ability to make money. You’d think that a newspaperman would be open-minded and even progressive about women’s rights, wouldn’t you? Well, Charlie was certainly no old fogey with his head buried in the sand. But he was still trying to come to terms with the fact that his pretty wife was now able to vote when he discovered that her ladies’ hat business was bringing in some $2,400 a year.

  Twenty-four hundred dollars! By any measure, this was a small fortune. It was fifty percent more than the average American male earned in a year. It was twice as much as Charlie was making from the newspaper and his job printing business put together. And she made it by making ladies’ hats!

  Fannie had always been reticent about her accomplishments. When they got married, Charlie had no idea that her hats (which he viewed with a patronizing masculine amusement) had already been made famous by Lilly Daché, a renowned French milliner, or that leading lady Joan Crawford had worn one of her millinery creations in the movie Grand Hotel. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Miss Crawford as saying that she “simply adored Miss Fannie’s clever little hat” and caused quite a hullabaloo when she stole it from the studio wardrobe department to wear to one of Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood parties. After that, Fannie’s fame went up like a Fourth of July rocket. She had to hire three girls from the Academy to help in the shop after school, but she still couldn’t begin to make enough hats to fill the demand.

  But Fannie’s earnings weren’t the only surprise in Charlie’s life. Back in October, he had discovered that she was shelling out the astonishing sum of fifty dollars a month to someone who went by the initials J. C. He had learned this on the sly, so to speak, when he was surreptitiously going through Fannie’s account books. This secret monthly payment perplexed him no end. But what bothered him even more than the fact of this payment was the mystery of it.

  Damn it all, why was she keeping it from him? Didn’t she trust him? Or was she afraid to tell him because it involved some terrible secret from her past? Was she paying blackmail? This was an appalling thought, but it got lodged in his brai
n and he couldn’t shake it loose.

  And because he had made this discovery when he was poking his nose where it didn’t belong, he couldn’t just come straight out and ask his wife who the devil was getting six hundred dollars a year from her, and why. It was a lot of money, really, especially in these challenging days. And it rankled. Oh, it rankled.

  But just yesterday, and quite by accident, Charlie had made some unexpected progress in his research into this frustrating domestic puzzle. He had happened on a cancelled check that Fannie had dropped on the floor beside her desk in the little cubby she called an office, behind her hat shop salesroom. It was made out in the amount of fifty dollars, payable to the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. In the memo line at the bottom of the check, she had written the name J. C. Carpenter.

  Charlie had stared at the check with a bemused astonishment. He knew very well what the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation was—he had done a story about it some years ago, when he was a reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Franklin Roosevelt had been partially paralyzed by polio in 1921 and was determined to restore himself to health. In 1924, he visited Warm Springs, a complex of thermal springs in the foothills of Pine Mountain in west Georgia. The springs were long reputed to have healing properties, and an inn and a collection of rickety resort cottages had been built around them.

  After a few days in the pools, FDR felt that his paralyzed legs had greatly improved, and he began to make extended visits to the remote springs. Then an article appeared in the Atlanta Journal, saying that FDR was “swimming his way to health.” Polio was a much-feared scourge, Roosevelt was already famous, and the article got national attention. Other “polios” began to flock to Warm Springs. A couple of years later, Roosevelt bought the place, created the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, and built a house for himself on a hillside near the pools. Now known as the Little White House, it was a personal retreat where the president could go for working vacations. The foundation constructed a school, a chapel, an infirmary, and a cafeteria and administrative building, and physicians and physiotherapists worked with the polios to improve their chances of recovery.