The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

But the Darling library might. Like most small-town libraries, its holdings consisted mostly of fiction and some fairly recent nonfiction. But it had been given several collections of antique books by people who had inherited them and didn’t want to keep the musty old things, which of course nobody in his right mind would want to actually sit down and read. Charlie thought he might be able to locate something that would help him remember what he had forgotten about somebody named Rose and a secret code and the First Manassas. The library would be open from two to five that afternoon. He would drop in and see what he could find.

And having settled the matter for the time being, Charlie went back to his two-finger attack on his old black Royal. But not for long. He had just started work on a story about the Darling town council when he was interrupted first by Ophelia Snow, looking for a job, and then by Artis Biggs, needing help with his wife, who (it turned out) had popped her cork in Mr. Moseley’s law office and was threatening to sue both of them, Artis for divorce and Charlie for sexual assault. And on the way back to the hotel with Angelina, who was dragging her feet and shrieking like a crazy woman, Beulah Trivette had come along with her story about the diet pills. At first it had seemed pretty far-fetched, but by the time Beulah had finished telling them about what was in the pills and about Angelina’s hair falling out, both he and Artis were convinced, especially since they could see a big bald spot on the side of Angelina’s head.

After Charlie left Artis to put his crazy wife to bed, he strode back across the street with a lighter step and relief in his heart. Angelina wasn’t going crazy after all, and she wasn’t really in love with him. And Artis (or so he claimed, and Charlie believed him) wasn’t carrying on an affair on the second floor of the hotel. He was merely checking the rooms to see what kind of job the maids were doing.

Charlie sat down at his typewriter again and knocked out the lead for the town council story. He was leaning back, scratching around in his brain for the first sentence of the second paragraph, when the alley door opened and Ruthie Brant slipped in. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure she hadn’t been observed and closed the door behind her. If anybody did happen to see her and wondered why an employee from the county treasurer’s office was going into the Dispatch through the back door, Ruthie would explain that she was dropping off a story about the latest bridge club meeting and thought it was quicker to come down the alley instead of along the street. Ruthie Brant was not by any stretch the best-looking girl in Darling, but she could make up a tale faster than green grass goes through a goose.

However, it was not what Ruthie Brant did or didn’t look like that interested Charlie and brought him to immediate attention whenever she came sneaking in through that back door. It was what Ruthie Brant knew, and the tales she had told him over the past months were never made up. They were the good Lord’s honest truth.

In fact, it was Ruthie Brant’s covert operation as an informant that had provided the foundation for the scathing editorials about the county treasurer’s office that appeared in the Dispatch and gave the county officials, especially Mr. Amos Tombull, such heartburn. The editorials had been laced with enough facts to startle a few Darling folks and raise a few Darling eyebrows. And—more to the point—they had frightened Mr. Jasper DeYancy into believing that the editor of the Dispatch knew a lot more than he was saying and was prepared to tell the whole story when the time was ripe.

For while he had not one stick of proof to buttress his conclusion, Charlie had convinced himself that Mr. DeYancy’s death was a suicide disguised as an accident, cleverly designed to allow the Widow DeYancy to collect her husband’s considerable life insurance. (In Charlie’s opinion, “accidentally” drowning yourself in a gallon of chain lightning was a good deal more pleasant and a great deal less messy than “accidentally” blowing off your head when you were cleaning your gun, which was the way other Southern gentlemen had elected to leave this life.)

And while Charlie regretted Mr. DeYancy’s untimely end, he did not feel guilty about it or even one whit responsible, for when a man sets out to deceive the public that elected him to office, he deserves whatever tree limbs or boulders might fall on his head or whatever newspaper editorials might appear in his path. He ought to be man enough to stand up and take it, instead of looking for the exit.

And furthermore, even though Jasper DeYancy was dead and unavailable for comment and his deceptions (if any) could not be proved, Charlie’s suspicions about the operation of the county treasurer’s office had lingered on like a bad smell out behind the barn—had been heightened, even, with the appointment of Earle Scroggins to the post.

Now, seeing Ruthie (whom he thought of as a kind of secret agent, his secret agent), Charlie felt an anticipatory tingle in his typing fingers and his nose for news began to twitch, the way it used to when he was doing a piece of investigative reporting for the Baltimore Sun or the Cleveland Plain Dealer—back in the days when he was a real reporter on a real news beat.