The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “I think,” she said, “that there may be a basic misunderstanding here.” The clock in the courthouse tower cleared its throat and began striking noon. “I have to go—I need to make a long-distance phone call. But would you mind if I dropped just a word or two in Mr. Dickens’ ear? I won’t say anything that would embarrass you, I promise. But if he understood how you feel—”

  “Oh, thank you, but I don’t think so, Verna,” Fannie said quickly. She picked up a piece of fabric and began turning it in her fingers. “I shouldn’t have worried you with my problems. It’s best just to leave things as they are. Most people have probably forgotten about my foolish claim to an engagement. And I don’t want Mr. Dickens to feel that I’m still carrying a torch for him, like some impressionable young schoolgirl. Even if I am,” she added, with a wry twist to her mouth.

  Verna persisted. “Well, then, could you agree to leave it to me? The next time I see him, I could raise the subject, and if he seems to want to discuss it, I could approach it very . . . well, discreetly. He would never know that you and I have talked.”

  Fannie bit her lip. “Are you—are you sure?” She darted a glance at Verna. “I really wouldn’t want him to think I—”

  “He won’t, I promise.” Verna picked up the bag with her beret in it. “I’ll check back with you later. Okay?”

  Fannie gave her a long look. “Oh, all right,” she said with a sigh. “But I’m sure it won’t do any good.”

  After Verna left, Fannie went back to work on the hat she was making—a fanciful creation that she planned to send to Lilly Daché, the glamorous French milliner who had happened to see her work in Atlanta and commissioned one or two hats a week for her shop on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Mme Daché also had a shop in Hollywood, where she designed hats for actresses to wear in the movies. With a smile and a wave of her hand, she had said that Fannie’s hats were très glamorous, and confided, “Glamour is what makes a man ask for your telephone number. But it also is what makes a woman ask for the name of your milliner.”

  Of course, the hats that Fannie was sending to Mme Daché would be sold under Mme Daché’s internationally famous name, not Fannie’s. But Fannie didn’t mind this little deception in the slightest—she was just glad to have the work. Her hats sold quickly and for very good prices, and she didn’t need the recognition. All she wanted was to continue to do the creative work she adored and to live in Darling, the town that held her heart. She would have been happier, naturally, if she could live with the man she loved. But she couldn’t, so she would just have to learn to adjust.

  Now, it might be hard for some to understand why Fannie had given her heart to that gruff, sometimes caustic newsman, Charlie Dickens. But love is often a complete mystery. Who can explain why we settle our hearts on one person and not another, or why some of our attachments are tossed away by the slightest wind, while others endure through the most savage hurricane?

  Fannie’s love for Charlie might be inexplicable, but it was deep and strong and had survived his brutal rejection.

  * * *

  Five minutes later, Verna was going into the Dispatch office, where she met Mr. Moseley on his way out. He tipped his hat and held the door open for her. “Hello, Mrs. Tidwell.” Over his shoulder, he called, “I’ll meet you at the Johnsons’ in an hour or so, Dickens,” and left.

  After a few moments, Mr. Dickens came to the counter, where Verna was waiting. His shirt was rumpled, he needed a haircut, and he looked as if he’d been out on the town all night. What in the world does Fannie see in this man? Verna wondered. Couldn’t she have given her heart to someone who didn’t pour his cares into a bottle?

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Tidwell?” He gave her a wry smile. “If you’ve brought me a story for the Friday paper, I’ll try to fit in it. If not, I’ve already got plenty.”

  Verna took a deep breath. “I’m here to meddle in something that’s none of my business,” she said briskly. “If you’ll let me explain, I’ll try to be brief.”

  She was. She didn’t pull any punches, either.

  * * *

  A few moments later, at the Telephone Exchange, Verna pulled up a chair beside Violet Sims, who had the noon shift on the switchboard. The circuits were even busier than they were the day before, and it took nearly twenty minutes to get her call through to Ima Gail in New Orleans. She waited in goose-bumpy suspense, wondering what she was going to learn. But at last she heard her friend’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Did you find out anything about Mr. Duffy?” Verna asked.

  “Well, actually, I did,” Ima Gail said. “Or rather, Jackie-boy did. One of his drinking buddies knows your Mr. Duffy rather well. He’s apparently had more than his share of problems in the past several years. In his personal affairs, that is.”

  Verna didn’t bother to object (again) that he wasn’t her Mr. Duffy. She said instead, “Maybe we’d better start with his business affairs. Does Alvin Duffy work for Delta Charter?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ima Gail said promptly. “As far as that goes, he’s entirely on the up-and-up. Jack’s friend says that he’s in the acquisitions end of the business. That is, he goes around shopping for banks to buy, which seems to be a booming business these days. Given the Crash and the Depression and all, there are a lot of them for sale. And according to the guy Jackie talked to, Duffy really knows his stuff. He’s made several good acquisitions. As far as Delta Charter is concerned, he’s their fair-haired boy.”

  Verna felt deflated. She had convinced herself that Mr. Duffy was not what he seemed. Now, that appeared to be wrong. She had misjudged—

  “However,” Ima Gail went on crisply, “there’s something you ought to know, Verna. The way this works—buying up banks, I mean—is that when a little bank is in trouble, a big bank can come in and buy it cheap, at a fire-sale price. It transfers the little bank’s assets to its own ledgers, dumps the liabilities, and then, sometime later, it lowers the boom. There’s more to it than that, of course. But that’s the bottom line.”

  “Lowers the boom?” Verna asked uneasily. “What does that mean?”

  “The big bank closes the little bank,” Ima Gail said in a significant tone. “Liquidates. Shuts the doors and walks away. Forever.”

  Verna felt her heart sink. “Forever? Does that mean that the Darling Savings and Trust might—” She swallowed, not wanting to speak the words out loud. Darling would be a town without a bank. It might take a while for the worst to happen, but Darling would become a ghost town.

  “That’s what it means,” Ima Gail said ominously. “At heart, you know, I’m still a Darling girl. I hate the idea that our little Savings and Trust might be stomped into the dust. I don’t want Darling to dry up and blow away!”

  “Neither do I,” Verna said helplessly. “But what can we do about it?”

  Ima Gail dropped her voice, as if she didn’t want someone on her end to overhear. “We can’t do anything, Verna. Not a blessed thing. And there’s more. Jack’s friend says that the scuttlebutt at Delta Charter is that Alvin Duffy has egg on his face about the Darling deal. He’s in the doghouse.”

  “Egg on his face?” Verna asked, feeling rather confused. “What’s he done? Why is he in the doghouse?”

  “Well, apparently Duffy is the one who thought it would be a grand idea to acquire the Darling bank. He assured Delta Charter that it was on a solid footing. Not swell, of course. No small-town banks are in real swell shape these days. Relatively speaking, though, it looked good. But appearances were deceiving. Once Duffy got into the books, he found out that there was a huge problem.”

  Violet unplugged the call she was working on, and Verna was aware that she might be listening. “What kind of problem?” she asked, lowering her voice. She thought of Mr. Johnson and the threat of tar and feathers—or worse. “Not . . . embezzlement, I hope.”

  “Jack’s informant said he didn’t
think so, but nobody seems to know, exactly. Listen, if I tell you this, you have to promise to keep it under your hat. Darling is a small town, and this isn’t the kind of thing you want people talking about.” Without waiting for an answer, she hurried on. “The bank’s owner wasn’t a very good manager, apparently. There was some trouble a couple of years ago—a dishonest teller—that never got completely cleared up. The bank records weren’t as up to date as they should have been. And there were way too many nonperforming assets on the books, bad loans, defaulted bonds, not enough collateral, that kind of thing.”

  “So what else is new, Ima Gail?” Verna countered, turning away from Violet and lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “That’s why it’s called the Depression, isn’t it? Everybody’s assets are worth less than they used to be. I’ll bet most of the people in this country owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.”

  “I’m just telling you what Jackie-boy found out,” Ima Gail said breezily. “Anyway, Duffy is in the doghouse with his bosses because Delta Charter is afraid they’re going to lose a mint of money on the Darling bank. They’re ready to throw in the towel.”

  “They’re blaming him?” Verna asked in surprise. “But it’s not his fault, is it?”

  “Maybe not, but he bought it. If it’s broken, he’s got to fix it or he’s out. They’ve told him to find another buyer, somebody with money, to pick up a substantial portion of the bank shares.”

  “A substantial portion? What’s that?”

  “Fifty percent. And it’ll probably have to be somebody local. Another big bank wouldn’t touch a financial property that Delta Charter has already valued as a loss.”

  Verna chuckled sarcastically. “Somebody local with money? Like who? Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy Warbucks, who always comes up with enough cash to solve the problem? Nobody in this county has enough money to buy a bank.”

  But as she said those words, she thought of someone she knew who just might have enough audacity—and maybe enough of the family fortune—to do it. The likelihood was pretty remote, but it might be worth a shot.

  “Afraid you’re right,” Ima Gail said regretfully. “But if Duffy doesn’t come up with a buyer, he’s out on his ear, too, since Delta Charter is pinning the blame on him. Doesn’t look good, whichever way you slice it.” She paused. “Well, that’s the scoop—on the business side. You want to hear the personal stuff?”

  Verna sighed. “I don’t know,” she said glumly. “Do I?”

  “Depends on your point of view. Turns out that this guy is a three-time loser. To tell the truth, I kinda feel sorry for him.”

  Ah-ha, Verna thought bleakly. Now she would get the dirt she’d been looking for. Except that she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Not after the bad news about the bank. But Ima Gail was waiting.

  “Okay,” she sighed. “A three-time loser. So what did he go to jail for?” Probably some kind of fraud, she thought. Cheating a wealthy widow out of her fortune, or—

  “Not that kind of loser,” Ima Gail replied seriously. “A real loser, I mean. He lost his first wife to cancer two or three years ago, right after their little boy was killed by a trolley car on St. Charles Avenue. Really tore him up, Jack said. He was quite a family man, and losing both of them was very hard on him. He must have been lonesome, for he married a second time, within the year. But he’d only been married a few months when his new wife—Claudia, her name was—decided that she was in love with his best friend. His best friend, mind you!” Ima Gail sounded shocked. “To make things even worse, before Claudia ran off to Reno and got a quickie divorce, she charged thousands of dollars in clothes and jewelry and perfume to Duffy’s accounts. So he was double-crossed by his best friend and betrayed by his wife, and he had to pay off all her bills. And now there’s this problem with the bank. The poor guy must feel like he’s been snakebit.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” Verna sucked in her breath. “Divorced . . . and widowed?” This wasn’t at all what she had expected to hear. She felt the way an overconfident Ellery Queen felt in The Greek Coffin Mystery, when he had come up with the wrong solution to the crime—not once but several times. She had been wrong on both scores, professional and personal.

  “Yep. And now his ex and his best friend are married.” Ima Gail tut-tutted. “Maybe your Mr. Duffy is lonely. Maybe he’s looking for somebody to help him forget. Or somebody to help him get a new start.”

  “Maybe,” Verna replied uneasily. She was beginning to wish she hadn’t asked about any of this, or that she hadn’t been told. It didn’t feel quite right, having all this . . . this secret personal information. How was she going to look Mr. Duffy in the face now, knowing all she knew?

  “Yeah. Well, maybe he’s looking for somebody he can trust,” Ima Gail said, in a significant tone. “Are you on his list, Verna?”

  “Hardly,” Verna said with a brittle laugh. “He’s not my type.”

  “Well, he might not be a bad catch,” Ima Gail remarked. “That is, unless he loses his job with the bank, in which case he’ll be dead broke and you should probably look for somebody else. But you’ve got to remember what I said yesterday, Verna. Lower your sights. Nobody’s perfect, you know. Settle for what’s available and stop holding out for Mr. Ideal Husband.”

  “But I’m not holding out for—” Verna began to protest.

  “Listen, sweetie, I gotta go,” Ima Gail interrupted. “When are you coming to New Orleans? Make it during Mardi Gras, and we’ll paint the town. Better yet, why don’t you leave Darling and move over here? Why, with your experience, I’ll bet you could snap up a really good job in nothing flat.” She giggled. “There are plenty of good-looking guys here, too—and they do like their fun. You could go dancing every night.”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Verna lied. New Orleans might be a good place for a few days’ vacation, but the big city, with all of its crowds and dirt and noise, didn’t appeal to her—and she wasn’t much of a dancer. Of course, life in Darling might not be very pretty, either, if the bank was permanently closed. That would make a huge change in everybody’s life. Nobody would be dancing.

  “Thank you, Ima Gail,” she added. “And tell Jack thank you for me, too. I really appreciate the information.”

  She said good-bye and cut the connection. And then she sat for a moment, thinking about what she had heard, about the bank and about Alvin Duffy’s losses. Before today, she had pretty much made up her mind that he was a Casanova, and a crook on top of that. She had been way off the mark, and she felt ashamed.

  Next to her, Violet gave a discreet cough. “I couldn’t help but hear,” she said. “You said something about Mr. Duffy being widowed . . . and divorced?”

  Verna blinked. Had she said that aloud? She hadn’t meant to, but she must have.

  “I’m sorry, Verna.” Violet gave her a rueful smile. “I shouldn’t have been listening. I just . . . well, is he? Not that I care,” she said hastily. “But Myra May does. I’m afraid she’s just a teensy bit jealous. With no reason at all,” she added. “And if you tell me, I promise I won’t say a word to anybody else—except for Myra May. I don’t keep anything from her. And I do want her to know that she’s got nothing to worry about, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Yes, he’s divorced,” Verna said. “And widowed.” She was suddenly tempted to tell Violet that he had lost his second wife to his best friend, and that his first wife had died of cancer and his son had been killed by a trolley car. But her wiser self prevailed. These were Mr. Duffy’s personal and very private woes. She had no business knowing them, let alone sharing them. If she hadn’t been trying to out-Ellery Ellery Queen—

  “I like him,” Violet said thoughtfully. “In a friendly way, I mean. Some people might think he’s a flirt, but that’s just his big-city ways. I think he’s more respectful of women than Darling guys are—guys like Buddy Norris, I mean.” She eyed Verna with a sudden
interest. “Hey, now I know why you look so different, Verna. You’re wearing a red cap!”

  “Yes, Fannie made it for me. Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” Violet said with enthusiasm. “It looks really swell on you.” She cocked her head. “It makes you look . . . well, jaunty. You know, snappy. Jazzy. Sexy, even.”

  “Sexy?” Verna laughed and tipped her newsboy’s cap forward, at an angle. “I’ll settle for jazzy, I guess.” The cap made her feel younger and livelier, too, she thought.

  “Yeah. It’s funny how hats can change the way you think about yourself, isn’t it? Fannie made a big straw hat for me with lots of flowers. When I’m wearing it, I swear I hear banjos playing ‘Dixie.’ I’m right back on the old plantation, in a long white dress with a half-dozen petticoats, a mint julep in one hand and a fan in the other.”

  “You’re right,” Verna said, smiling at Violet’s imagery. “I never thought of it that way before.” She glanced down at her wristwatch. “Oops—it’s later than I thought. I’ve just got time for a quick bite before I have to get back to the courthouse. Maybe a grilled cheese sandwich—that would be fast.”

  She had barely gotten seated at the diner counter when Myra May was sliding a plate in front of her. A grilled cheese sandwich, coleslaw, and a pickle.

  “Raylene said she thought you were in the mood for something quick,” Myra May said. “If you’re in a tearing hurry, we can wrap up that plate and you can take it with you.”

  Verna chuckled. “You tell Raylene she’s been reading my mind again. I’ll eat this here, but you can put a couple of those oatmeal cookies in a bag for later.”

  Myra May handed her a bag. “Already done,” she said with a grin. “Raylene thought you might want a snack along about three o’clock.” She frowned. “You look different, sort of. What have you done to—” Her frown cleared. “Oh, I know. It’s that red cap, and your new hairstyle. Makes you look ten years younger, Verna.”