The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Midway down the room on the wall to Charlie’s right stood a rusty potbellied stove, the ghost of winters past. Its stovepipe poked through the roof, and a few sticks of wood and a kerosene can lay on the floor beside it. The teacher’s desk and chair stood on a scarred wooden platform at the front of the room, with a blackboard on the wall behind it, topped with a frieze of large, precisely formed alphabet letters in Spencerian script, designed to show the children how to make their ABCs.

  Above the blackboard hung several grimy rolls of pull-down maps; beside it hung pictures of an Egyptian pyramid and the Taj Mahal and a framed photograph of a sour-looking Calvin Coolidge, president from 1923 to 1929. “Silent Cal,” he’d been called, because he said very little and smiled less. Charlie half grinned at a story he remembered, about a society matron who was seated beside the president at a dinner. To Coolidge, she said, “Mr. President, I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose,” and returned his attention to his potato. Charlie thought with pity of the poor children who had to do their schoolwork in this gloomy room, under the president’s sour stare.

  There were door openings at either side of the back wall, bookending the blackboard. These were the entries to the cloakroom, Charlie knew, which ran across the back of the building. Rows of big hooks on the walls waited for the children to hang up their sweaters and coats, and several long shelves offered space for stowing books, boots, and sack lunches: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (if they were lucky), or split biscuits smeared with lard and sprinkled with sugar, or chunks of cold corn pone and baked sweet potato. The luckiest ones got a tomato or a peach or an apple and sometimes a cookie.

  The carpet of thick dust that stretched the length of the aisle was undisturbed. He’d wait at the teacher’s desk, Charlie decided, where he could see his informant as she came in. Now that he was here and thinking about the meeting, his curiosity was overcoming his apprehension. He had been puzzling about the identity of this woman for days now, and at last he was going to meet her. Who was she? She had to be somebody from town, somebody he already knew, since he knew everybody in Darling. But what was her connection to the camp? How had she come by the details that she was—presumably—about to share with him?

  He began walking to the front of the room, his steps echoing hollowly on the wooden floor. He had almost reached the teacher’s platform when a woman spoke. Her voice was slightly muffled, but her words were quite clear.

  “That’s far enough, Mr. Dickens. Why don’t you just sit down on one of those kids’ desks, and we’ll have ourselves a talk.”

  Charlie pulled in his breath, startled, and the gooseflesh raised on his arms. Mata Hari—he would have to call her that until he found out who she really was—was in the cloakroom. She had likely come in through a back door, and he chastised himself for not having gone around to the back of the building where her car was probably parked. She must be able to see him, he thought, and he searched the wall on either side of the blackboard for what he knew was there: a peephole. His teachers had had one, so if they retired briefly to the cloakroom, they could keep an eye out for misbehaving pupils. After a moment, he spotted it, beneath Calvin Coolidge’s photograph. Just a round hole in the wall, an inch or so in diameter. He couldn’t see an eye at that hole, watching, but he knew it was there, and it made him wary. And apprehensive.

  “Sit down, Mr. Dickens,” Mata Hari said sharply. “Right there.”

  “Whatever you say,” Charlie agreed, trying to sound casual. He pulled out his handkerchief and brushed the dust off a desk next to the aisle. He sat on the desk, his feet on the bench of the desk in front, directly in line with the peephole. He took a drag on his cigarette and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

  “But you are gonna come out here and talk to me, aren’t you?” he asked. “I sure would like to know who you are.” As if to emphasize his remark, there was a sudden, electric-blue flash of lightning, bright enough to briefly illuminate the room, which had grown perceptibly darker since he had come in.

  In answer, he heard a ripple of amused laughter. “Not on your life, Mr. Dickens. If I’d’ve wanted you to know who I am, I would’ve told you before now. I’m staying back here in the cloakroom and you are staying right where you are.” Her words were punctuated by the loud clap of thunder that followed the lightning. It rattled the glass in the old building’s windows—what was left of them.

  The cloakroom. So that was why they were meeting here, Charlie realized. She had deliberately chosen this place so she could conceal herself while they talked and watch him through that peephole. He was disappointed, but he reminded himself that this was only the opening inning of their little game. Just because Mata Hari intended to get things started this way didn’t mean they had to end this way. No question about it, he needed to know who she was and what her connection was to the camp. His story would carry a lot more weight if he could quote his source and say how she got her knowledge. But to entice her out where he could see her, he first needed to make a move that would establish him as in control of their meeting.

  “Any way you want it,” he said with a shrug of one shoulder. He dropped his cigarette into the dust of the aisle, got off the desk and stepped on it, and sat back down again. “Personally, I think it’d be friendlier if we could talk eye to eye. You know, friend to friend. But you can stay back there if that’s how you want it.”

  “That’s generous of you,” she said with a dry irony.

  “Yeah. I’m a generous person.” He pulled out his wallet and removed the handwritten four-sentence note she had sent him earlier. “Let’s start off with what you wrote to me. It’s actually pretty explosive stuff.” He unfolded it and read aloud, raising his voice over another growl of thunder.

  Dear Mr. Dickens,

  I think you ought to know that the purchasing program at the CCC camp is totally crooked. To get a contract, a farmer or supplier has to hand over a percentage of what he expects to get paid. Sometimes it’s ten percent, sometimes fifteen or even twenty, but he has to pay it before he gets the contract. Nobody dares to blow the whistle on this dirty dealing because everybody wants the money they get for whatever they’re selling.

  There. That was it. That was what they were here to discuss. Corruption in the federal program. Kickbacks at Camp Briarwood.

  “So tell me, Mata Hari.” He glanced up at the peephole under Silent Cal. “Far as you’re concerned, those claims are all still true?” He chuckled loudly, so she could hear him. “By the way, ‘Mata Hari’ is pretty cute. You got my attention with that one.”

  She disregarded the compliment, if that’s what it was. “Yes, it’s true,” she said grimly. “It’s been going on ever since the camp started buying milled lumber for the buildings. It’s still going on.”

  Charlie reached into his shirt pocket for his notebook and pencil. “Hope you don’t mind if I take a few notes. My recollection’s not as good as it used to be.”

  As he found a clean page in his notebook, he was sorting through his memories of women’s voices, trying to place this one. It wasn’t easy, though. Southern women tended to sound alike. This voice was familiar—it belonged to one of the Dahlias, he thought. That garden club seemed to get tangled up in everything that went on in Darling. But whose was it? From what he’d heard, half of the club members were working or teaching out there at the camp and could be expected to know something about what was going on. Ophelia, of course, but also Bessie Bloodworth, Verna Tidwell, Liz Lacy, Lucy Murphy, Earlynne Biddle, Miss Rogers, and maybe a couple of others he didn’t know about. Mata Hari could be any one of them. Well, not Miss Rogers, who was a prissy old thing with a voice like a squeaky violin string. No, definitely not her. But any one of the rest. Verna Tidwell was the most likely, he thought.

  “Take all the notes you please,” Mata Hari said. “It’s important that you get it right.”

 
Her words were followed by a lightning flash that made Charlie blink, and the thunderclap followed in seconds. The sky outside the windows was darker, too, and the wind, gusting across the stovepipe, had set up an eerie, vibrating wail, like a kid blowing across a bottle. The storm was getting closer.

  “Okay.” He held his pencil poised. “To start with, how come you didn’t contact the sheriff instead of sending that note to me? What we’re talking about here is a crime. Shouldn’t you have gone to Buddy Norris?”

  There was a silence. “If I’d known what I know now, I would have.” Mata Hari’s voice was bleak. “Given what’s happened, I wish I had. I think . . . I’m afraid you’ll have to.”

  He was about to ask why, but she drew a regretful breath and sighed it out. “You see, when I wrote to you, I was thinking that this was a federal thing, involving a federal employee, and maybe more than one. Yes, there are some local people involved, but mostly it’s federal. So the sheriff wasn’t . . . well, he wasn’t relevant.”

  “Wait a minute,” Charlie said, looking up at Silent Cal. “What do you mean, what you know now? What’s changed?”

  “We’ll get to that. But later.” There was a moment’s silence. “Anyway, I was thinking that Buddy Norris is a pretty nice boy, but he’s new on the job, you know, with almost no experience, and no connections out there at the camp. So what’s he going to do but go straight to the head guy? And for all I know, Captain Campbell himself might be in on this. It may be his idea. He may be taking a big cut.”

  She paused, and Charlie asked, “Do you have any evidence that he is?”

  “No, and I’m not saying he is. But if he doesn’t know anything about it, people will say that he should, since it’s his camp and he’s responsible for what happens in it. Either way, it’s bad for him. His reputation is at stake. He won’t want anybody poking around, especially the local law. Give him half a chance and he’d probably sweep the whole thing under the rug.” She paused again. “And go after anybody who might have squealed.” With the last sentence, her voice had changed, almost imperceptibly. It held something that Charlie thought sounded like fear.

  “I see.” Charlie was scribbling fast, trying to get her words down verbatim. “So you wrote to me instead of the sheriff. You didn’t stop to think that I might go straight to the head guy?”

  But he now had a different, and rather unsettling, perspective. He was looking at the situation from her point of view. Whoever she was—and she could be any one of a half-dozen women—her knowledge made her vulnerable. It put her in danger, like . . . The image of the woman he had seen this morning, dead, strangled, flashed into his mind, and he frowned. Why had he thought of that? There wasn’t any connection between Rona Jean Hancock and what was going on at the camp. Was there?

  Mata Hari gave a humorless chuckle. “Of course you won’t go to the head guy. You won’t go to anybody, not on this. You don’t want to solve a crime or put somebody in jail. You don’t get paid—or get elected—for doing that. You just want a story. And that’s what I want, too. If you write this up the way I tell you and run it in the Dispatch, they won’t be able to ignore it out there at the camp, or pretend that it’s not happening. What’s more, that’ll keep me safe. The bad guy—or guys, or whatever—might suspect me of telling, but they won’t dare touch me.”

  Charlie wondered at that. There could be a lot riding on this. Why wouldn’t the “bad guy” (singular or plural) try to silence her, to keep her from telling what she knew? He started to say this, but a heavy thud of thunder interrupted him, and when the reverberations had died away, Mata Hari was hurrying on.

  “But even better, if you do a really, really good story on this, it might get picked up by a bigger paper. Maybe somebody will start an investigation. And when that happens, this swindle will stop. There won’t be any more kickbacks.” Half under her breath, she added, “At least, that’s what I was thinking when I wrote you that note.”

  “It’s good thinking,” Charlie said approvingly. It was. She had thought this all the way through, and her conclusions were pretty much in line with his own thoughts on the matter. “But if I’m going to run a story, I can’t do it just on your say-so. I don’t even know who the hell you are, or whether what you’re telling me is the truth or a passel of lies. I have to run a background check on your information. I have to confirm it with other sources, the more, the better. But first, I’m going to need everything you’ve got—names, dates, amounts, everything you know. Don’t hold anything back. And let’s start with your name. Your real name.”

  Of course, Charlie had already begun to work on that background check. That was why he’d put Ophelia Snow on special assignment and why she was out there at the camp today, getting the confirmation he needed. At least, that’s what she was supposed to do, assuming that everything was going according to plan. Which it didn’t always.

  The wind blew eerily down the stovepipe again, and ashes puffed out into the room, wraith-like, the ghostly remains of long-dead fires. Somewhere toward the entry to the building—in the belfry, maybe—a board pulled loose and took up an annoying arrhythmic banging.

  “No,” Mata Hari said in a determined voice. “I am not going to tell you who I am. But I’ll tell you everything else I know. Get your pencil and start writing.”

  And for the next few moments, while the lightning flickered, the thunder banged like an orchestra’s percussion section, and the wind—and now and then the rain—whipped against the old building, that’s what she did, reciting the names of a half-dozen local suppliers who had paid kickback fees, the amount they had forked over, and the kind of items that were being supplied to the camp. Charlie—who hadn’t known what to expect in the way of serious information, real information—was impressed. Whoever she was, she knew her stuff. He was talking to an insider.

  When she paused for breath, he said, “How did you get all this? The names, I mean. The amounts. I need to know what kind of access you had.”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said. “And I don’t want to tell you.”

  He frowned. “Why?”

  She didn’t answer right away, and when she did, she spoke reluctantly, as if she would rather not answer the question but felt compelled to. “It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t honest, what I did. I didn’t play fair.”

  He frowned, wondering what she had done that she was ashamed of and wanting to make her feel better, to reassure her. “Look, Mata Hari.” He gave the name a special emphasis. “You’ve given yourself a spy’s name, and maybe you’re thinking there’s something dishonorable about spying. But the kickback scheme—it’s dishonest, start to finish. Illegal and immoral, too. So what does it matter if you didn’t play fair?”

  “It matters to me,” she said quietly. “I didn’t set out to be a spy. I only did what I felt I had to do. So don’t ask how I did it. Just believe me. Give me credit for telling the truth. If you could get the records, you’d see that everything I’m telling you is accurate.”

  “Well, then, how about the way the scheme operated?” Charlie said, moving on. After all, Ophelia was supposed to be getting the records. With luck, he’d have plenty of corroborating material, maybe as early as this evening. “Give me the big picture.”

  She seemed happier to talk about that part of it, in the intervals between the lightning and thunder, which seemed to be coming at an accelerating clip. But she was focused on what she was saying, and she ignored the storm. At the camp, the various departments and divisions turned in their orders to the quartermaster’s office, which ran a regular advertisement in the Dispatch for what was needed. (Charlie knew all about this, of course. Corporal Andrews, the quartermaster’s assistant, brought the ads in a couple of times a month. The additional advertising revenue was definitely welcome.) The advertisement spelled out what was needed and invited bidders. Once the bids were in, the liaison officer (Ophelia Snow, as Charlie also knew) went to work,
“qualifying” the bidders, who were then selected by the quartermaster.

  “Sometimes they’re picked on price,” she said. “The low bidder gets it. But as time goes on, they’re usually picked on the basis of performance on a previous contract. That is, if your vegetables were fresh and good and you delivered on time, you’d get another contract. If you were still the low bidder, that is. It’s been pretty competitive.”

  It sounded like a standard operation, Charlie thought. “You’re a supplier, I take it,” he said.

  “Yes.” She hesitated, then in a lower voice, said, “No. Not now.”

  Charlie heard the change in her tone. “Not now,” he repeated. “Why is that?”

  She sighed. “Just listen,” she said, and went on to tell him in detail how the kickback system worked. The contract would be offered to the supplier, who would be told before he signed it that there was a fee involved, which would have to be paid out of the proceeds. If the supplier balked at this or seemed reluctant, he would be told that the contract would go to the next person on the list. There was nothing overtly intimidating about any of this, the woman said. It was presented to the would-be supplier as a simple step in the process and delivered with a friendly smile, so that people would think that this was just the way business was normally done in the CCC.

  “And of course, once the suppliers have accepted the terms,” Mata Hari said, “they’ve broken the law, too. They’ve become criminals, and if they balk, they’ll be reminded of that fact.” Charlie could hear the bitterness in her voice. “Which means that nobody’s going to tell what he’s done. Everybody will keep on bidding and keep on paying the bribe. Even if they don’t get another contract, they’ll keep their mouths shut.”