The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

But lately, he had begun to fear that he was losing his newshound’s nose for a good story. There was very little crime in Darling, a tame, two-bit town that was a newsman’s arid desert. For months on end, what happened was so unexciting, so unremarkable and utterly non-newsworthy that Charlie could write the stories in his sleep.

And if Darling was a two-bit town, it had to be said that the Dispatch was a two-bit newspaper. Charlie had inherited it when his editor-publisher father died of cancer. He had never intended to keep it, planning to invest just enough effort to keep it going until he found a buyer for it. That plan might have worked, too, but then the Crash came and nobody wanted to put scarce money into a small-town newspaper with a serious shortage of paid advertising and an even greater shortage of news. Like it or not, Charlie was stranded here in Darling, a realization that had not done wonders for his disposition—until Fannie Champaign had agreed to marry him, that is. After that, things were noticeably different. Better. Much better.

Now, Charlie loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, put on his green celluloid eyeshade, and sat down at his battered old wooden desk. He opened the bottom right-hand drawer and pulled out a bottle—a bottle of warm, flat Hires Root Beer. Last year at this time, it would have been a bottle of Mickey LeDoux’s best, but not now. For one thing, Mickey’s still had been busted and a young boy killed (that was the last big news story Charlie had written), and Mickey had spent eleven months or so in the slammer. He would be up and shining again in a few weeks, though, and many in Darling would raise their glasses in celebration. But Charlie wouldn’t be celebrating. He would be drinking Hires. He had promised Fannie to leave the booze alone, and he meant to keep his promise.

Charlie swigged his warm root beer, shaking his head at the thought of himself, a crusty bachelor newspaper reporter who had lived to chase stories and who had never had the least intention of settling down, now a married man who had sworn off the hard stuff. His nomadic experiences had given him a slantwise, skeptical view of settled, small-town life, and he’d seen too many bad marriages to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of marital happiness. But now that he and Fannie were married, he was by God going to make her happy and hope that some of it would rub off on him.

He polished off the last of the root beer and tossed the bottle into the wastebasket with a loud clank. And maybe, just maybe, one of the stories he was chasing right now would turn out to be the story. The story he’d been waiting for ever since he’d been marooned in Darling by his father’s death.

And it just might happen. For the astonishing fact was that at this very moment, Charlie had two stories to work on, either or both of which might prove to be a real doozy, something that the AP or UP wire services would pick up and distribute around the country. Or, better, that he could sell as a bylined special to the Atlanta Constitution.