The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

“Tell him I’m here about my mother’s house,” Lizzy said, trying to keep her voice from quivering.

“Oh.” Mrs. Tate got up with alacrity. “I’ll see if he’s free.” A moment later, she was holding open the door to Mr. Johnson’s wood-paneled office with its rich Oriental rug and book-lined walls, and Lizzy was ushered in. Mrs. Tate closed the door firmly behind her. If this was the lion’s den, Lizzy was trapped in it.

Back in the old days, when the soil was still rich, the plantations still flourished along the river, and cotton was still king, the Johnsons had gloried in their position as one of Darling’s premier aristocratic families. The only son of his father, who was the only son of his father, young George E. Pickett Johnson—named for a Confederate general who fought under General Lee at Gettysburg—had been expected to do great things. And so he had, or at least he had gotten off to a strong start. He had graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans, returned to take up his father’s scepter as the president of the Darling Savings and Trust, and married (as expected) his childhood sweetheart, Miss Voleen Pearl Butler of the aristocratic Butler clan and a graduate of Sophie Newcomb College, the premier Southern college for young ladies, also in New Orleans.

But down the decades, the glory of the old days had been dulled by a series of debilitating disasters: the War Between the States, the Depression of the 1890s, the Panic of 1907, the advent of the boll weevil. If there had been any glory left for the local aristocracy, it was tarnished by the long, bitter drought of the late 1920s and the catastrophic Crash of ’29.

While many of the old Darling families had fallen apart under the weight of these difficulties, the Johnsons, however, had flourished. They and their bank had become the most admired and respected members of the community. Oh, there had been that fracas of a few months before, when it looked as if the bank might be in serious straits and people had waited in line outside the front door to withdraw their money so they could hurry home and hide it under their mattresses. But that little problem had been smoothed over and Darling was assured that the bank and their deposits were safe. In fact, Mr. Johnson had taken out a full-page ad in the Darling Dispatch to let everyone know that whatever minor concerns there might have been, all was well. The Darling Savings and Trust was as solid as a rock.

But things had changed. People could look around and see that Mr. Johnson’s bank now owned many of the houses and businesses in town and almost all of the plantations that had once belonged to the other aristocrats. The bank was the community’s most profitable business, and George E. Pickett Johnson, almost the last aristocrat left standing, was the richest man in Darling. These extraordinary financial successes had had a certain inevitable result, however, for the more properties that were acquired by Mr. Johnson, the less respected and admired he and his bank became. The Darling Savings and Trust was regarded as an adversary, rather than an ally, and Mr. Johnson was even more hated than he was feared—although of course there was quite a bit of envy mixed in, too.

But that was neither here nor there today, for Lizzy was on a mission. She had to save her mother’s house—from the lions, as she saw it. From Mr. Johnson and his bank.

“Ah, Miss Lacy,” Mr. Johnson said, and looked up from a tidy stack of papers—foreclosure documents, no doubt—on the desk in front of him. “You wanted to speak to me about your mother’s house, I believe you said? Please. Sit down.”

Lizzy was trying hard not to be afraid, but it was difficult. Mr. Johnson was a thick-bodied, broad-shouldered man with a jutting jaw and pointed chin; a thin dark mustache over thin, colorless lips; and black, oiled hair that was parted precisely down the middle of his scalp. Behind gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes were hard and glittery, like chunks of black coal, and his black eyebrows rose to a peak. He had a satanic look about him, folks in Darling said. And he had a satanic manner of dealing, too. He was not, people said, a man to be crossed.

“Thank you,” Lizzy said, seating herself. She folded her hands in her lap and tried to keep her fingers from trembling. “Mother has told me that you are about to foreclose on her house.”

Mr. Johnson scowled, rocked back in his leather-upholstered swivel chair, and twirled his pencil between his fingers like a drum major. “Let us be clear,” he said, in a voice that was like a fingernail scraped across a blackboard. It sent shivers up Lizzy’s spine. “I am not about to foreclose on her house. The bank is. The papers are being prepared as we speak.”