The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

“Let’s not talk about Miss Tallulah,” Earlynne said impatiently. She leaned forward. “Now, Verna.”


“Now, what?” Verna asked. She blew a perfect smoke ring, which drifted toward the ceiling. Lizzy smoked sometimes, but not as often—or as expertly—as Verna. Her mother always said that smoking made women look “tough,” as if that were synonymous with “immoral” or “wicked.” Lizzy thought it made Verna look confident, as if she could do anything she darned well felt like doing, and be good at it, too. Lizzy admired confidence in other women, because she didn’t always feel it in herself.

“You said you were going to tell us whether Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson stole money from the bank,” Bessie replied. “That’s what.”

“No,” Earlynne said, sipping her tea. “She’s going to tell us that he’s going straight to jail for what he did. Where he belongs. And that’s the blessed truth.”

“Oh, but she didn’t say that,” Lizzy put in diffidently. “Not quite, anyway.”

Lizzy was wondering just how much Verna actually knew about the situation. Verna worked all day on the second floor of the courthouse, where she got to hear a lot of things that most of the other Dahlias knew nothing about. In the same way, Lizzy herself, working in Mr. Moseley’s office, knew more about what was going on behind the scenes in Darling than a lot of other people.

But Lizzy and Verna had different approaches to what they heard. Lizzy usually tried to tune out the worst of it, figuring that life would be a little brighter if she didn’t clutter it up with all that dark stuff. The world was full of things she didn’t need to know. When she locked the door to Moseley’s law offices, she left it all behind and went home to her pretty little house and her beautiful garden and her dear cat, Daffodil, and did her best to forget all that unhappiness until the next day.

Verna, on the other hand, had a dim view of human nature to start with. Her suspicions were usually fed by her habit of peering “under the rocks,” as she put it, on the lookout for people’s dirty doings. Since Verna’s job required her to collect the county taxes and pay the county’s bills, her habit usually paid off. It never surprised her to discover that a county employee had helped himself to a load of gravel from the pile out behind the road maintenance building, or that the contractor who built the new road out past the sawmill had double-billed the county for over a hundred hours of labor.

“That’s just people for you,” she’d say with a little shrug. “They’ll do anything they think they can get away with. If you turn a blind eye to their dirty tricks, they’ll figure they can get away with even more.”

Verna never turned a blind eye, though. And when she found out about the gravel or the double-billing, you could bet your bottom dollar that the perpetrators were going to be called to account, even if they were big shots. Big shots had never impressed Verna Tidwell.

“Well, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Mr. Johnson did steal a lot of money,” Bessie said darkly. “I heard that the bank examiners grilled him for hours and hours before they closed the bank.”

“And Hank says that the state attorney’s office has decided to throw the book at him,” Earlynne put in. She looked at Verna. “So what’s going on, Verna? Do tell.”

With a glance at Lizzy, Verna pulled on her cigarette. “What I can tell you,” she said quietly, “is that Voleen Johnson took the train to Montgomery this morning. She says she’s going to stay with her sister for a few weeks.”