The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

And why shouldn’t they be? Earle Scroggins was one of the most successful and capable businessmen in Darling, so it was easy to suppose that he would be a first-rate county treasurer as well. A stout, amiable man with a booming voice, a bald head, and a tobacco-stained white moustache that curled jauntily at either end, Mr. Scroggins could be seen smoking his cigar in the dining room at the Old Alabama Hotel or attending meetings at the Darling Savings and Trust, where he was on the board of directors. He owned a cottonseed oil mill near the river, a cotton gin on the south side of town, and a half-dozen rental properties. These enterprises demanded a great deal of his attention, however, and he rarely bothered to come to the office more than once or twice a week. But that was fine, because he could see that Verna was smart as a whip and could do the job every bit as well as he could, so there was no reason under the sun not to leave her alone and just let her get on with it—while he took all the credit, of course.

Mr. Scroggins’ benign neglect of the probate clerk’s office had suited Verna right down to the ground, for she preferred to set her own rules and work on her own, without interference. Of course, she always kept Mr. Scroggins pretty well up on things, saved a few papers for him to sign when he came into the office, and never let on that he was anything other than the boss. But Verna liked being in charge and she was good at it. In fact, she was so good at being in charge that folks who didn’t know any better actually believed that she was the probate clerk.

Recently, however, even the efficient Verna had begun to feel a little bogged down with work. Mr. Scroggins’ appearances in the office had not increased when he was appointed acting county treasurer, but Verna’s workload certainly had, for she was now in charge of both offices. And since the county (like almost every other county in the state, and probably in the entire U.S.A.) was having trouble collecting taxes, budgets were very tight. Mr. Scroggins had already cut Coretta Cole, Verna’s coworker, back to part time. Verna was doing most of Coretta’s work as well as her own.

In one way, the expansion had been an easy process, since the treasurer and the probate clerk were neighbors on the north side of the second-floor hallway in the county courthouse. All they had to do to make the two offices into one was to uncover a boarded-up doorway in the wall, move a couple of desks and a filing cabinet, and presto, they were all one big happy family.

In another way, the expansion had been difficult, for the treasurer’s office had responsibility for all of the county’s money, which seemed to be held in a scattering of different accounts. And to make things even more confusing, Verna quickly discovered that the county’s money was on deposit not just in the Darling Savings and Trust but in all three of the banks over at Monroeville, the nearest big town, which wasn’t even in Cypress County. When she got things under control, Verna planned to recommend that the Monroeville bank accounts be moved back to Darling where they belonged. But she didn’t think it was wise to do that until she had everything figured out and knew what was what.

Normally, of course, Verna would have turned for help to the two longtime employees in the treasurer’s office, Melba Jean Manners, a rather stout, double-chinned lady in her mid-fifties, and Ruthie Brant, twenty years younger than Melba Jean and as skinny as Melba Jean was stout. But Melba Jean and Ruthie didn’t seem to know very much about the way the treasurer’s accounts were organized. According to them, all they did was deposit the money where Mr. DeYancy told them to put it and pay it out to whomever he told them to pay it to, recording the transactions in the big leather-bound account books that were kept on wooden shelves in the storage room. Mr. DeYancy, it seems, had been the kind of boss who liked to keep all the office business under his hat. He apparently hadn’t shared it with the county commissioners, either, because when Verna inquired of them, all she got were blank stares.

As far as Verna was concerned, why Mr. DeYancy did this, whether it was because he was secretive by nature or had certain secrets he wanted to keep, didn’t much matter. What mattered were the accounts. And although Melba Jean and Ruth knew perfectly well how to do their jobs, they couldn’t tell Verna a blessed thing about why those accounts were organized the way they were, which was what she needed to know in order to decide whether to change the process or keep on doing it the way it had been done. Since Mr. DeYancy was dead, she couldn’t ask him. And since Mr. Scroggins didn’t know anything more than she did (and seemed to care a whole lot less), she couldn’t ask him, either. The whole thing was, to put it simply, a tangled mess.

Verna was the soul of neatness, and this snarl of accounts had been harassing her since she had inherited it, to the point where she was having nightmares. Sometimes she dreamed that she was trying to balance a dozen different checkbooks drawn on a dozen different accounts, and every time she thought she’d just about got it all figured out, somebody came and dumped a bushel basket of tens and twenties in front of her and told her to put the money where it was supposed to go. If she didn’t put it into the right accounts, she’d be fired.