The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Verna didn’t bother to object (again) that he wasn’t her Mr. Duffy. She said instead, “Maybe we’d better start with his business affairs. Does Alvin Duffy work for Delta Charter?”


“Oh, yes,” Ima Gail said promptly. “As far as that goes, he’s entirely on the up-and-up. Jack’s friend says that he’s in the acquisitions end of the business. That is, he goes around shopping for banks to buy, which seems to be a booming business these days. Given the Crash and the Depression and all, there are a lot of them for sale. And according to the guy Jackie talked to, Duffy really knows his stuff. He’s made several good acquisitions. As far as Delta Charter is concerned, he’s their fair-haired boy.”

Verna felt deflated. She had convinced herself that Mr. Duffy was not what he seemed. Now, that appeared to be wrong. She had misjudged—

“However,” Ima Gail went on crisply, “there’s something you ought to know, Verna. The way this works—buying up banks, I mean—is that when a little bank is in trouble, a big bank can come in and buy it cheap, at a fire-sale price. It transfers the little bank’s assets to its own ledgers, dumps the liabilities, and then, sometime later, it lowers the boom. There’s more to it than that, of course. But that’s the bottom line.”

“Lowers the boom?” Verna asked uneasily. “What does that mean?”

“The big bank closes the little bank,” Ima Gail said in a significant tone. “Liquidates. Shuts the doors and walks away. Forever.”

Verna felt her heart sink. “Forever? Does that mean that the Darling Savings and Trust might—” She swallowed, not wanting to speak the words out loud. Darling would be a town without a bank. It might take a while for the worst to happen, but Darling would become a ghost town.

“That’s what it means,” Ima Gail said ominously. “At heart, you know, I’m still a Darling girl. I hate the idea that our little Savings and Trust might be stomped into the dust. I don’t want Darling to dry up and blow away!”

“Neither do I,” Verna said helplessly. “But what can we do about it?”

Ima Gail dropped her voice, as if she didn’t want someone on her end to overhear. “We can’t do anything, Verna. Not a blessed thing. And there’s more. Jack’s friend says that the scuttlebutt at Delta Charter is that Alvin Duffy has egg on his face about the Darling deal. He’s in the doghouse.”

“Egg on his face?” Verna asked, feeling rather confused. “What’s he done? Why is he in the doghouse?”

“Well, apparently Duffy is the one who thought it would be a grand idea to acquire the Darling bank. He assured Delta Charter that it was on a solid footing. Not swell, of course. No small-town banks are in real swell shape these days. Relatively speaking, though, it looked good. But appearances were deceiving. Once Duffy got into the books, he found out that there was a huge problem.”

Violet unplugged the call she was working on, and Verna was aware that she might be listening. “What kind of problem?” she asked, lowering her voice. She thought of Mr. Johnson and the threat of tar and feathers—or worse. “Not . . . embezzlement, I hope.”

“Jack’s informant said he didn’t think so, but nobody seems to know, exactly. Listen, if I tell you this, you have to promise to keep it under your hat. Darling is a small town, and this isn’t the kind of thing you want people talking about.” Without waiting for an answer, she hurried on. “The bank’s owner wasn’t a very good manager, apparently. There was some trouble a couple of years ago—a dishonest teller—that never got completely cleared up. The bank records weren’t as up to date as they should have been. And there were way too many nonperforming assets on the books, bad loans, defaulted bonds, not enough collateral, that kind of thing.”