The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

But Verna was shaking her head. “I would prefer to do this alone. The job isn’t likely to take all night, but it’s certainly going to take several hours. You could find it hard to explain that at home.”


“Well, if you think it really has to be tonight,” Coretta said slowly, “I’m afraid that leaves me out.” She turned to Lizzy. “I told Ted that you and I were going to a girls-only card party out in the country and that I’d be home in a couple of hours. I never dreamed that there might be—” She pulled down her mouth. “I guess I just didn’t think ahead, that’s all.”

Lizzy thought that Coretta looked genuinely disappointed. She couldn’t decide whether it was because the other woman had truly wanted to be a part of this adventure, or because she had been told to go along with the plan and report back to . . . well, to whoever.

Verna pushed her lips in and out, thinking. “I guess that settles it,” she said finally. She looked at Lizzy. “But it would be good to have a lookout. Liz, would you be willing to wait downstairs and let me know if anybody happens along? Of course, nobody has a reason to come to the courthouse late at night, but you never know.”

“Sure,” Lizzy said. “I can do that.” She wasn’t eager to spend a couple of hours hanging around the main floor of the dark courthouse, but she felt she needed to stand by Verna. And she did wonder whether it was smart to talk about their plans in front of Coretta, just in case she—well, just in case.

“Okay, then,” Verna said. “Tonight’s the night.” She grinned mischievously. “This way, it’ll be over and done with before I lose my nerve.” Her grin faded and she shot a surreptitious glance at Coretta. “At least, I hope it will,” she added, half under her breath.

When they headed back to Darling a little while later, Coretta was sitting next to Lizzy in the front seat of Myra May’s touring car, and Verna was riding in the back. But because Lizzy still felt she couldn’t trust Coretta, she had blindfolded her again. There was still a problem—a big problem—and Lizzy hadn’t quite figured out how to deal with it.

If Coretta was on their side, she would go home and go to bed and not say a word to anybody—well, except for maybe Ted. But if she was working for somebody else, the minute she got home, she’d be on the phone to whoever it was, telling them that if they hurried, they would catch Verna in the act of burgling the county treasurer’s office.

There had to be a way of keeping her from doing that. But how? They couldn’t put a gag in her mouth and hold her captive until Verna was finished going through the accounts.

Could they?





FIFTEEN

Charlie and the Dahlias



About the time Lizzy was making her early-evening trip out to the Murphy place to talk to Verna about seeing Coretta, Charlie Dickens was eating supper at the diner. As usual, he was perched on the stool at the far end of the counter, where he was least likely to be disturbed by people who wanted to bend his editorial ear about this pet peeve or that pet project. He was digging into a plate of Euphoria’s fried liver and onions, with generous sides of boiled green beans with fatback and onions, potato salad, and sliced fresh tomatoes, on special for thirty cents.

Charlie ate as he usually did, listening to the news on the Philco behind the counter while he read an article in the Atlanta Constitution about the likelihood of Governor Franklin Roosevelt’s nomination at the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago. Although the convention was more than a year away, the Constitution was already optimistic. “As far as the South goes,” Senator William J. Harris of Georgia was quoted as saying jubilantly, “it’s all Roosevelt.”