The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

Lizzy pulled in her breath. Beside her, Verna stiffened. “I knew it,” she muttered. “What a crook!”


Myra May turned back to the switchboard. “I’m sorry,” she said sweetly, “but that number is busy. Please try your call again later.” She broke the connection without waiting for a reply.

“Perfect!” Lizzy breathed out. “Now she’ll just keep trying, over and over again. Thank you, Myra May. Thank you!”

“So,” Verna said grimly. “That was Coretta’s plan all along. She’d give me the key, and then Scroggins would close in on me. Or he’d send the sheriff. It was a setup. A trap that I was supposed to step into.” She looked at Lizzy. “And you turned the trap around, to catch her. Thanks, Liz.”

Myra May took off her headset again. “You don’t think Coretta will go to Mr. Scroggins’ house, since she can’t telephone him?”

“He lives five miles out in the country,” Lizzy said. “I know for a fact that the Coles’ car has been out of commission for several months, and it’s too late to borrow a car from the neighbors. At least, I hope it is,” she added, under her breath. She had thought of this, and decided that—short of kidnapping Coretta and physically detaining her—there wasn’t anything they could do to stop her. If she desperately wanted to get in touch with somebody, she would. They’d just have to take their chances.

Verna nudged Lizzy. “We’d better get going, Liz. I’d like to get in and out of that office as fast as possible.”

“Is there anything else I can do?” Myra May asked. “Besides making sure that Coretta doesn’t connect with Mr. Scroggins tonight, that is.”

Lizzy chuckled. “Well, you might monitor calls to the sheriff’s office and pull the plug if the caller wants to report a break-in at the courthouse. It would be really good if we could keep Verna out of jail until she figures out who dunnit.”

“Jail?” Myra May shifted uncomfortably. “I hope it doesn’t come to that. You two be careful over there. You hear?”

“We hear,” Lizzy and Verna said in unison.





NINETEEN

Charlie, Lizzy, and Verna



Several glasses of Mickey’s tiger spit and half a pack of Luckys later, Charlie Dickens looked up at the old octagon Regulator clock on the wall and saw to his surprise that it was half past twelve. He remembered being vaguely aware, some while ago, that the courthouse clock was striking midnight, and he realized that his eyes felt grainy, his shoulders were stiff, and he’d had too much to drink. Time to head for bed. He could finish what he was doing—typing (and editing as he typed) Doris Trask’s messily handwritten piece about the Darling Mothers Club raffle—in the morning. Trivial stuff, in his opinion, not worth the ink and paper it took to print it. What he really needed, what would put the Dispatch on the map, so to speak, was a good story, a bombshell story like the one Ruthie Brant had brought him that afternoon, which he couldn’t publish because he didn’t yet have the facts.

Charlie finished the sentence and stopped typing, leaving the paper—a narrow three-foot-long role of newsprint a little wider than column width, which made it easier to write and edit a story to the right length—in the Royal. He put the whiskey bottle, half empty now, back in the bottom drawer of his desk, picked up his hat, and went to the door. The rain had stopped—no need of the umbrella after all—and the quarter moon shone silvery through a gauzy veil of clouds. The air had been rinsed cool and clean by the rain, and he filled his lungs with it. Good. The air tasted good. A dozen deep breaths of that good clean stuff and he’d be sober, more or less. He turned off the lights and locked the door.

It was very quiet out on the street. The clouds that raced across the moon cast fleeting shadows under the chinaberry trees on the courthouse lawn and splashed silver shimmers of moonshine on the puddles in the street, while the darkened windows of the stores and shops around the square caught the fleeting glimmers and flickered them back.