The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

Reaching for his pack of Lucky Strikes, he said, “Well, hullo there, Ruthie. Got somethin’ new for the readers of the Dispatch?”


“Have I ever,” Ruthie replied, with a lopsided grin that brightened her sallow face and gave her the look of a sly puppy that has just polished off the beefsteak her master left too close to the edge of the table. “Have I ever, Mr. Dickens. The state auditor’s report came today. You are goin’ to like this. It’s a bombshell.”

State auditor’s report! Ruthie had kept Charlie informed about the two visits from the auditor’s office, so the report itself wasn’t much of a surprise. But if it was indeed the bombshell that Ruthie thought it was, this might be news he could use. He shook out two Luckys and offered Ruthie one and a click of his cigarette lighter.

“That’s good, Ruthie,” he said, hooking the toe of his shoe around the rung of a straight chair and pulling it toward his desk. “That is real good. Now, you just sit yourself right down in that chair and tell me all about it. From the top. With facts, of course. I need the facts.” He said this emphatically, because while Ruthie could string together an intriguing narrative, she often needed to be prodded for the facts.

“I’m supposed to be taking a break from the office, so I don’t have a lot of time,” Ruthie said, leaning back in her chair, stretching out her rayon-stockinged legs, and pulling on her cigarette. “This’ll have to be quick.”

“The quicker the better,” Charlie said, thinking about the empty inches in the right-hand column above the fold on page one. He twirled the Royal’s platen to roll the narrow, column-width roll of newsprint he was typing on to a clear spot, and hunched over the machine. “Okay, Ruthie, my girl,” he said around his cigarette. “Shoot.”

Ruthie shot. And it was a doozey.

The trouble was, Ruthie’s bombshell was all story. And while the story was full of intriguing surprises and fascinating speculations, it suffered from a distinct shortage of facts.

And for the life of him, Charlie couldn’t think of a way to confirm what Ruthie was telling him.

*

A half hour later, still thinking about the bombshell Ruthie Brant had dropped in his lap, Charlie put his Panama hat on his head, shrugged into his suit jacket, and locked up the Dispatch office. Then he headed over to the Darling library, which was located on the west side of the courthouse square, at the back of Fannie Champaign’s milliner’s shop, Champaign’s Darling Chapeaux. The little library had its own separate entrance, so that patrons did not have to go through the millinery shop, a fact for which Charlie was grateful. He was in no mood to see Fannie Champaign today, or any other day, for that matter.

Not that Fannie had ever actually said no when he asked her to go to a movie or out to dinner. She just hadn’t said anything, which in Charlie’s mind—well, in anybody’s mind—was as good as a no. He had met plenty of stubborn women in his time, but Fannie was the stubbornest by far, with an independent streak a mile wide and two miles deep. He had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her, and he knew it.

So he walked quickly around the building to the back, to the door with the painted sign announcing that he had arrived at the Darling Library (QUIET PLEASE). He opened the door and went in.

The library’s small front room contained the librarian’s desk, a rack of narrow wooden drawers that held index cards with the titles and call numbers of every book, and a small table and chair where you could sit and read in front of the window. The desk was occupied by Miss Dorothy Rogers, who was about as stiff an old spinster as Charlie had ever encountered. He’d had one or two run-ins with her about overdue books. The last time, he’d had to pay a sixty-cent fine, which (in his opinion) was more than the book—The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes—was worth. It had been a good book, but sixty cents? He felt sure that Keynes would agree with him.

Miss Rogers looked up. “Oh, Mr. Dickens,” she said, in a sprightlier tone than he had expected. “How nice to see you. What may we help you with today?” She wore, Charlie thought, an oddly hopeful expression and he wondered briefly, with more than a touch of condescension, what she was hoping for.