The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

But Verna prided herself on being a law-abiding person, and since the law prohibited her from possessing liquor, she didn’t—although her next-door neighbor, Deputy Buddy Norris, had several bottles of the local white lightning, collected from the local moonshiners as payoff for keeping his mouth shut about the locations of their stills. She had seen it in the pantry when she took a batch of chocolate cupcakes to old Mr. Norris for his birthday. But of course, half the pantries in Darling were stocked with bottles of corn whiskey, which was brewed in the backwoods along the Alabama River. Darling whiskey was fierce, fiery, and explosive. It had an excellent reputation, and the moonshiners had plenty of customers.

At the back door, Clyde whined plaintively. Verna got up and let him in, then went back to her cigarette at the table. Normally, she wouldn’t be sitting down while she waited for the percolator to perk. She’d be putting the breakfast dishes away or heading out to the garden for salad greens or reading a few pages in her current library book. (She was halfway through Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, with the detective Hercule Poirot.) Normally, Verna was the kind of person who liked to keep busy.

But nothing felt normal to Verna. Not today. And not since she had begun to smell trouble.

Some weeks ago, Verna had started to suspect that something very odd—something she didn’t understand—was going on in her office. Which all by itself was odd, because Verna had a first-rate mind, a suspicious eye, and a talent for spotting something wrong when everybody else had already agreed that whatever-it-was was perfectly all right, in fact, couldn’t be better. If anything had been seriously amiss, you’d think she would have noticed it already.

For fifteen years, Verna Tidwell had noticed pretty much everything that went on in the Cypress County Probate Clerk’s Office, both the little everyday things that didn’t matter a hoot and a holler to anybody, and the big, important things—like property taxes and elections—that mattered a whole lot to everybody. Normally, when Verna smelled trouble, she figured out what was wrong and she fixed it. Now, she smelled trouble, but she didn’t know what the trouble was or how to fix it, or even whose trouble it was. This was bothering her a lot.

Sensing that Verna was not her usual self, Clyde jumped up on her lap and licked her chin, whimpering anxiously. He always knew when she was upset and tried to show her how much he cared. Verna hugged the little dog’s muscular body close to her and rested her cheek on his head.

“Everything will be all right, Clyde,” she said, wanting to reassure him. “Whatever is going on, I’m sure I’ll figure it out—eventually.”

Except, of course, that she wasn’t sure, which all by itself was a very unsettling thing, since Verna was the kind of person who was always sure about everything. Her lack of confidence had come to a head when the state auditor had descended on the office two weeks before.

Now, normally (there was that word again), the state wouldn’t bother to audit the records of the probate clerk, except in the case of an election irregularity. But Verna’s office had changed in the last twelve months, and its new responsibilities were much broader than ever before.

A few months earlier, the Cypress County treasurer, Mr. Jasper DeYancy, had suddenly and unexpectedly died at his home, Sour Creek Plantation. According to the coroner, the deceased (the widely respected son of Colonel Montague DeYancy, an acclaimed Confederate officer who fought to the last battle alongside General Robert E. Lee) had succumbed to alcohol poisoning. This was dreadfully embarrassing for Mr. DeYancy’s wife of forty-one years, a sweet Southern lady who was very active in the Presbyterian Church. Tearfully, she insisted that her husband had never imbibed, did not imbibe, and would never, under any circumstance, imbibe.