The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose Page 25

  But Myra May had already put on her headset and turned back to the switchboard. “Number please,” she said crisply, and paused. Then she turned back to Verna and Lizzy, putting her hand over her microphone. “She’s calling Mr. Scroggins.”

  Lizzy pulled in her breath. Beside her, Verna stiffened. “I knew it,” she muttered. “What a crook!”

  Myra May turned back to the switchboard. “I’m sorry,” she said sweetly, “but that number is busy. Please try your call again later.” She broke the connection without waiting for a reply.

  “Perfect!” Lizzy breathed out. “Now she’ll just keep trying, over and over again. Thank you, Myra May. Thank you!”

  “So,” Verna said grimly. “That was Coretta’s plan all along. She’d give me the key, and then Scroggins would close in on me. Or he’d send the sheriff. It was a setup. A trap that I was supposed to step into.” She looked at Lizzy. “And you turned the trap around, to catch her. Thanks, Liz.”

  Myra May took off her headset again. “You don’t think Coretta will go to Mr. Scroggins’ house, since she can’t telephone him?”

  “He lives five miles out in the country,” Lizzy said. “I know for a fact that the Coles’ car has been out of commission for several months, and it’s too late to borrow a car from the neighbors. At least, I hope it is,” she added, under her breath. She had thought of this, and decided that—short of kidnapping Coretta and physically detaining her—there wasn’t anything they could do to stop her. If she desperately wanted to get in touch with somebody, she would. They’d just have to take their chances.

  Verna nudged Lizzy. “We’d better get going, Liz. I’d like to get in and out of that office as fast as possible.”

  “Is there anything else I can do?” Myra May asked. “Besides making sure that Coretta doesn’t connect with Mr. Scroggins tonight, that is.”

  Lizzy chuckled. “Well, you might monitor calls to the sheriff’s office and pull the plug if the caller wants to report a break-in at the courthouse. It would be really good if we could keep Verna out of jail until she figures out who dunnit.”

  “Jail?” Myra May shifted uncomfortably. “I hope it doesn’t come to that. You two be careful over there. You hear?”

  “We hear,” Lizzy and Verna said in unison.

  NINETEEN

  Charlie, Lizzy, and Verna

  Several glasses of Mickey’s tiger spit and half a pack of Luckys later, Charlie Dickens looked up at the old octagon Regulator clock on the wall and saw to his surprise that it was half past twelve. He remembered being vaguely aware, some while ago, that the courthouse clock was striking midnight, and he realized that his eyes felt grainy, his shoulders were stiff, and he’d had too much to drink. Time to head for bed. He could finish what he was doing—typing (and editing as he typed) Doris Trask’s messily handwritten piece about the Darling Mothers Club raffle—in the morning. Trivial stuff, in his opinion, not worth the ink and paper it took to print it. What he really needed, what would put the Dispatch on the map, so to speak, was a good story, a bombshell story like the one Ruthie Brant had brought him that afternoon, which he couldn’t publish because he didn’t yet have the facts.

  Charlie finished the sentence and stopped typing, leaving the paper—a narrow three-foot-long role of newsprint a little wider than column width, which made it easier to write and edit a story to the right length—in the Royal. He put the whiskey bottle, half empty now, back in the bottom drawer of his desk, picked up his hat, and went to the door. The rain had stopped—no need of the umbrella after all—and the quarter moon shone silvery through a gauzy veil of clouds. The air had been rinsed cool and clean by the rain, and he filled his lungs with it. Good. The air tasted good. A dozen deep breaths of that good clean stuff and he’d be sober, more or less. He turned off the lights and locked the door.

  It was very quiet out on the street. The clouds that raced across the moon cast fleeting shadows under the chinaberry trees on the courthouse lawn and splashed silver shimmers of moonshine on the puddles in the street, while the darkened windows of the stores and shops around the square caught the fleeting glimmers and flickered them back.

  But the buildings on the square were not completely dark. For as Charlie looked up at the courthouse, directly opposite the Dispatch office, he caught a glimpse of a dim electric light in one of the second-floor offices, the county treasurer’s office, he thought it was. As he watched, a shadowy shape, a woman’s shape, he thought, moved past the window. A moment later, the light went out and the window was dark—but not quite, for another light had gone on, in an inner room. And then that light disappeared, fast, as if a door had shut.

  Charlie hesitated, took another step, thinking that bed was what he really wanted and perhaps a nightcap from the bottle he kept stashed under the loose floorboard in his closet, where Mrs. Beedle wouldn’t find it when she cleaned. But then he stopped, frowning. It was after midnight and the offices in the courthouse were supposed to be locked up tight. The only person who ever worked late over there was Verna Tidwell, who had a habit of staying after hours and coming in on weekends, especially since Earle Scroggins had taken over DeYancy’s job and put her in charge of the treasurer’s accounts.

  But Verna Tidwell wasn’t working late tonight. In fact, Verna Tidwell wasn’t working in the treasurer’s office at all now, according to Ruthie Brant, who had dropped that information along with the bombshell about the state auditor’s report into Charlie’s lap that afternoon. Verna Tidwell had been furloughed. At least that was the story. Canned was more like it, Ruthie had said. And Earle Scroggins had changed the locks, so Verna no longer had a key. What’s more, the sheriff had tried to serve a warrant on her, but she had fled to Nashville to avoid being arrested.

  Charlie stood for a moment on the sidewalk, swaying just a little, his head cocked, looking up at the black window. It had been a long day. He was ready to head for bed, which now seemed to beckon with an almost seductive charm. The only thing better would be a woman in it.

  But somebody was in the treasurer’s office, somebody who didn’t want anybody to know that she (Charlie was sure that the figure had been a woman) was there. He knew it wasn’t Ruthie Brant. Ruthie liked to snoop but she was bone lazy. Once the workday was over, she was on her way home as fast as her feet could carry her. The other employee, Melba Jean Manners, was a stolid, silent woman who had about as much initiative as a snail, as far as Charlie could tell. It wouldn’t be her skulking around up there after hours.

  But Coretta Cole—now, Coretta was another matter, and Charlie raised his eyebrows, considering the possibilities. Ruthie had said that Coretta Cole had taken over for Verna. Charlie didn’t know Coretta Cole. Maybe she was like Verna, somebody who doted on work, or was so anxious to do a good job that she was willing to come in after hours, even stay all night if she had to.

  And then he thought of something. That story Ruthie had given him. He knew a few things and suspected more, but that was mostly what he had—suspicions. Maybe Coretta Cole would help him out, especially if he caught her by surprise and asked her a few probing questions. Ask in the right way, and she might even let him see that state auditor’s report. And that was what made up Charlie’s mind—the idea of catching Coretta Cole by surprise, at a moment when he might be able to provoke her into telling him what he wanted to know.

  Now, if Charlie had been completely, 100 percent sober, he probably wouldn’t have thought this was such a good idea. For one thing, the woman behind that window blind might not be Coretta Cole. For another, maybe Coretta Cole (if that’s who it was) would tell him to go to hell and how to get there, too. Or, if he surprised her and she panicked, she might just bash him over the head with whatever weapon came to hand—and call the sheriff, to boot.

  But while Charlie was sober enough to navigate, his judgment was what you might call slightly impaired. So, fueled by his whiskey-soa
ked idea of persuading Coretta Cole to substantiate Ruthie Brant’s claim, he headed across the street toward the side door of the courthouse, thinking that it was a good thing that he’d held on to that courthouse key.

  The previous year, Amos Tombull, the chairman of the county board of commissioners, had asked Charlie to do some historical research for a tourist pamphlet on the old gristmill out on Pine Mill Creek. Before they had run out of money and abandoned the project, Charlie had been given a key to the records vault in the basement, where he had spent several tedious hours looking for details about the mill, which was almost as old as Darling itself. The vault was like a dungeon, musty and foul-smelling, and the records were powdered with decades of dust and mold. Conveniently, the same key opened the building’s north-side door, and Charlie had kept it. No newspaperman ever returns a borrowed key, of course, because he never knows when it might come in handy. Like tonight.

  So Charlie tried to put the key into the lock and turn it. When it wouldn’t work, he realized that he was putting it in upside down and corrected the problem. The door, unlocked, gave easily, with only the slightest creak and he stepped inside. At that moment, he thought he heard the dull sound of another door thudding, somewhere upstairs, and furtive footsteps.

  Charlie frowned again, his newspaperman’s nose twitching. The treasurer’s office occasionally kept sums of money overnight, if a cash tax payment came in after the bank closed, for instance. It would be easy for somebody, an employee, maybe, to come in and take the money. It was risky, but if that person knew what she was doing and took a moment to doctor the records, she could probably get away with it.

  He pursed his lips. He was standing in a long, narrow corridor that ran the length of the building. There were stairs at either end, up to the second floor and down to the basement—not that Charlie could see them, for the place was black as the inside of a tomb and the air was thick and stale, like the air in a closed vault. It settled over his head and shoulders like a heavy caul, making it hard to breathe.

  Charlie wouldn’t have admitted it, of course, but there was something more than a little frightening about this dark. It probably had to do with the history of the old courthouse, which had been built back in 1897. The following year, it had been the scene of a dreadful double murder, two women shot to death at the stroke of noon in the courtroom that occupied the center part of the building. The killer had run up the stairs to the bell tower and jumped off, killing himself.

  Not the end of the story, of course. The ghosts of the murdered women were said to be pursued through the halls of the building, even during the daylight hours, by the ghost of their murderer. Every year, several people—even people who hadn’t heard about the killings—claimed to have seen them on the stairs or in a hallway. Then, in 1907, on the tenth anniversary of the murders, at the stroke of noon, a violent tornado had reached down out of the sky and ripped off the bell tower. The tornado’s timing was just too coincidental for some folks. The following Sunday, the minister at the Baptist church said it was the good Lord’s retribution for the horrible double murder and suicide. Whatever you thought of this explanation, the ghosts of the two women continued to reappear from time to time after the tower was rebuilt, but the ghost of their killer had disappeared. It was never seen again.

  Charlie himself had never encountered the ghosts, of course, not even when he went down to the archives vault to look for the information on the gristmill for the commissioners’ pamphlet. He didn’t believe in ghosts—in fact, Charlie had long ago decided that he didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t see, touch, smell, or hear. But just the same, the dark felt thick and heavy with a sinister presence, and his fingers were trembling slightly when he put out his hand to feel along the wall for the light switch that he knew was to the right of the door.

  But suddenly, somewhere in the dark, he heard the scurry of light footsteps, a scuffling sound, and a whisper, a woman’s urgent whisper. “No, don’t come down! Somebody’s here.”

  Charlie froze. But this was no ghost, and he recognized the voice.

  “Liz Lacy,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silence. “What the devil are you doing here, at this hour? Who’s with you? Who’s that upstairs?”

  The sound of footsteps, coming down the stairs. “Charlie? Charlie Dickens, is that you?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s me.” A flashlight shone suddenly in his face. “Put that thing down,” he said, adding, “Please,” as an afterthought. Liz Lacy turned the light away and set it upright on a stair. Its dim glow provided enough light so that he could see her, standing now in the hallway. “What are you doing here?” he repeated.

  Liz took a breath. “I could ask you the same question,” she answered, raising her voice and glancing over her shoulder, up the stairs. She was clearly stalling for time. “What are you looking for? Why are you here?”

  “Just doing my job,” Charlie replied. “I was working late, across the street. I saw a light upstairs, in the treasurer’s office. I came to investigate.” He grinned amiably. “That’s what a newspaperman does, you know. He investigates. That’s how he gets his stories.”

  “Well, you can stop investigating,” Liz said irritably. “It’s only Verna Tidwell. She works here. She . . . she forgot something in her office and came back to get it. I’m waiting for her.” She raised her voice a notch, cautiously. “Verna, it’s okay. It’s just Charlie Dickens.”

  “Forgot something?” Charlie chuckled sardonically. “Forgot something? Forgot she’d been furloughed, did she? Forgot that she was supposed to be in Nashville?” He paused and hardened his voice. “Where’d she get the key, Liz? I heard that Earle Scroggins changed the locks so she couldn’t get in.”

  “Charlie Dickens?” another voice asked, and Verna Tidwell came down the stairs, pausing on the last tread. “What are you doing here at this hour of the night?”

  “That question has already gone the rounds a time or two,” Charlie said with a chuckle. He leaned one shoulder against the wall. The alcohol that had fogged his brain had evaporated and in his now-sober state, it occurred to him that Verna Tidwell might be a lot more willing to talk than Coretta Cole would have been. And if she’d had the time to go through the records upstairs and find whatever she was looking for, she might know a great deal.

  “I suppose you were looking for that state auditor’s report,” he hazarded.

  In the silence, Charlie heard Liz pull in her breath. Then Verna said, low and steadily, “Who told you about that?” When he didn’t immediately answer, she raised her voice. “Who told you?”

  “Oh, word gets around,” Charlie said carelessly, now very sure. Grinning, he pushed himself away from the wall. “Hey, how would you two ladies like to come over to the Dispatch office for a drink and a little conversation? I think we might be able to do some business. What do you say?”

  “I really don’t think we—” Liz began, but Verna stopped her.

  “Just what kind of business did you have in mind?” she asked warily.

  “You might call it a little trade,” Charlie replied. “I mean, look at it this way, Verna. I’m sure you don’t want Earle Scroggins and the county commissioners to know that you’ve been working late tonight—after you were furloughed and locked out of the office. And when you’re supposed to be in Nashville, where the sheriff can’t get at you.” He raised his hand against the flurry of her protests. “I have some questions I want answered, for a story I’m working on.”

  Nobody spoke for the space of several breaths. “A little trade,” Verna Tidwell said at last. “Your silence for my answers.”

  “That’s blackmail, Charlie,” Liz said in a reproving tone. “I thought you were above that.”

  “Blackmail?” Charlie raised both hands. “Whoa, now, Liz. Watch who you’re callin’ a blackmailer. Me, I prefer to think of it as a trade. I’ve got som
ething you want, you’ve got something I want.”

  “You’re writing a story,” Verna said speculatively. “Is it anything like those earlier editorials you wrote about Mr. DeYancy and the county treasurer’s office?”

  “Something like that,” Charlie answered evasively. “All I need are a few confirmations and a fact or two. So . . .” He shrugged. “How about it?”

  Lizzy looked at Verna. “I guess it’s your call,” she said.

  “I’m willing to discuss it,” Verna replied guardedly. “But I won’t make any promises about confirmations. Or facts.” She glanced at Lizzy. “It might be better if we used Mr. Moseley’s office, though. It’s less . . . well, public than the newspaper. Somebody might see me and wonder why I’m not in Nashville. Is that okay, Liz?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Lizzy said. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “Coffee sounds swell.” Charlie opened the door, then stepped aside. “Ladies first.”

  TWENTY

  Lizzy, Verna, and Charlie

  Lizzy plugged in the electric percolator and began making a pot of coffee while Verna and Charlie Dickens sat down on either side of the table in Mr. Moseley’s conference room. Lizzy was glad that Verna had suggested coming to the office, where they couldn’t be seen from the street. And Charlie definitely didn’t need another drink. What he needed was coffee, and plenty of it. She could use some, too. It had been a long day, and from the way things looked, it wasn’t over yet.

  Verna must have decided to share at least some of what she knew. As Lizzy came into the conference room and set the mugs on the table, she was saying, “In addition to identifying how much is missing, the auditor’s report pinpoints which bank accounts the money came from. Two of them, actually, both in Monroeville, at different banks.”