The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Charlie frowned. Over the past few days, half of his advertisers had come to him with the same question. “As soon as people start spending their scrip, you mean,” he said with resignation. “And then I suppose you’ll pay me in scrip.”


“It’s not a dirty word, you know,” Mrs. Mann said reproachfully. “But we probably have something on the shelves you could take in trade. A new dress shirt, maybe. We’ve got some in just your size.” Without waiting for his answer, she pulled the advertising copy out of her big red pocketbook. “We’d like our usual half page. Here are next week’s sale items.” She put the handwritten sheet of paper on the counter.

Charlie raised an eyebrow. Trade, by golly. But it wasn’t a dress shirt he had in mind. It was a bottle or two of Mickey’s finest. Good as gold, it was—and just about as legal, since keeping gold was now against the law. He was tickled by the idea that booze and gold were on equal footing as far as the government was concerned, and he suppressed a smile as he picked up the ad copy and scanned it. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll bill you for a half page and we can dicker. I’d rather take trade than scrip, as long as I can choose what I want.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Mann said gratefully. She closed her pocketbook and half turned, then turned back. “Oh, I almost forgot!” She opened her pocketbook again and took out another handwritten sheet. “It’s a wedding announcement,” she added with a diffident smile. “Kind of interesting, actually.”

With a sigh, Charlie reached for the paper. Once upon a time, far back in the dim, distant past, he had been a newspaperman, a real newspaperman. He had written feature stories for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun—undercover stories, investigative stories, in-depth stories that challenged the status quo and made people think. He had dug up dirt on local politicians, blown the whistle on some serious police corruption, and triggered a federal investigation that ended with a big-time crime boss going to jail. Unfortunately, that last adventure hadn’t set too well with some of the powers that be, and Charlie had found himself out of a job.

And then his father—the longtime owner and editor of the Darling Dispatch—had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and Charlie had come home to see him through his last days. The old man died a couple of months after the stock market took its final, fatal dive, and after a futile year of trying, Charlie decided that finding another newspaper job was impossible. He might as well stay where he was for the duration. He had no illusions about living happily ever after in Darling, which (he said) was nothing more than a two-bit Southern town that figured it was worth twenty-five dollars. Taking over the Dispatch and print shop wasn’t a very alluring prospect, either, since he had no experience in running an antique newspaper press or managing a rural newspaper with a shrinking subscription list, weak advertising, and a faltering job printing business on the side. But as his father used to say, a blind mule isn’t afraid of the dark, so here he was, groping his way from one day to the next, reduced to printing phony money for the town banker and running wedding announcements that were “kind of interesting.”

But when he looked at the paper Mrs. Mann had handed him, he found it interesting, indeed. “Grady Alexander is marrying who?”