The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose (8 page)

The Exchange had started out with just one operator working part time. Now, almost everybody in town had a telephone and so many people made phone calls at all hours of the day and night that Myra May (who managed the switchboard) had to have an operator on duty around the clock. She was looking for somebody to replace Olive LeRoy (Maude LeRoy’s youngest daughter), who was moving to Atlanta to live with her cousin and work at the telephone exchange there. Henrietta Conrad, whose mother ran the Curling Corner Beauty Salon, was trying out for the job.

Actually, Myra May had said she was glad to lose Olive, who was inclined to be talky. She needed somebody who could be trusted to keep secrets, since every telephone conversation in Darling went through the Exchange. The operators knew who’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly on Saturday night, whose aunt had her appendix out over at the hospital in Monroeville, and whose daughter had eloped with a man twice her age. They weren’t supposed to listen in, of course, but everybody understood that this was pretty much unavoidable, since it was too much to ask any human being to sit in front of that switchboard for eight hours a day with her headphones on without overhearing
something.

But Myra May held her operators to a very strict code of ethics. She told them that if she heard so much as a whisper of gossip that could have come from the switchboard, she would fire the offending person on the spot, no ifs, ands, buts, or maybes. Of course, it might be hard to tell the difference between gossip that came from the switchboard and gossip that came from somebody’s party line, but Myra May was a hard woman when it came to loose lips. She didn’t mind holding the threat of firing over her operators’ heads.

“Coffee, Liz?” Myra May asked, picking up the mug in one hand and the pot in the other.

Lizzy considered, then shook her head. “I’ll have one of Euphoria’s doughnuts to take to the office, if you’ve got any left.” She looked at the doughnut plate, covered by a clear glass dome, and saw two doughnuts, shiny with sugar glaze. They were two for a nickel. “What the heck,” she said. “I’m treating myself this morning. I’ll take both of them.” She opened her handbag and fished out a nickel.

Myra May bagged the two doughnuts, then leaned over the counter, her face grave. “Heard anything from Verna in the past day or two?” she asked in a lower voice.

“Verna?” Lizzy took the bag. “I saw her on Saturday afternoon, when we worked at the Dahlias’ garden together. Why?”

Myra May straightened, rearranging her face. “Oh, no special reason,” she said, with studied casualness. “Forget I asked.” She glanced at the man seated on the stool next to Lizzy’s and picked up the coffeepot. “Mr. Gibbons, you ’bout ready for another cup of java?”

“No, really,” Lizzy persisted, beginning to feel alarmed. “Is Verna sick or something? Has she had an accident?” She knew that Myra May was on the switchboard on Saturdays and Sundays and even some nights, until she could find a replacement for Olive. What had she heard?

“Shhh,” Myra May said quickly. “Don’t talk so loud, Liz.”

She was looking past Lizzy with a strained expression on her face, and Lizzy turned to see Coretta Cole sitting at the nearest table, dressed in a close-fitting gray suit, white blouse with a floppy white bow, red hat, and red high heels. Her shiny black hair was as stylishly waved as if she had just stepped out of the door of Beulah’s Beauty Bower, and her large, luminous eyes were carefully made up. She looked a lot like Joan Crawford, whom Lizzy had recently seen in
Our Blushing Brides
.

Lizzy had known Coretta since high school, although they had never been what you’d call close friends. In fact, Lizzy had learned through a couple of painful tattle-tale experiences that Coretta couldn’t be trusted. Tell her a secret and she’d blab it all over school, exaggerating and twisting it to make you look bad and herself look good. It was like that game of telephone that people sometimes played at parties—or worse. By the time you heard your secret again, you scarcely recognized it, and you wanted to go off and hide in a corner somewhere.

Coretta had worked full time in Verna’s office until the county budgets were slashed and Mr. Scroggins cut her hours in half. Verna didn’t have a very high opinion of her, Lizzy knew. She complained that Coretta didn’t pay careful attention when she was given instructions, so that she messed things up and somebody else (usually Verna) had to spend valuable time making them right.

And now here was Coretta, big as life and twice as natural, having breakfast with Earle Scroggins, the county probate clerk and treasurer, and Amos Tombull, the chairman of the county board of commissioners. Mr. Scroggins and Mr. Tombull (who was decked out in his summer seersucker suit, although it was only April) had their heads together, talking in low voices, while Coretta perched uneasily on the edge of her chair, sipping coffee and looking fidgety and uncomfortable, as if she herself wasn’t sure what she was doing there.

And then, at that moment, Coretta turned and saw Lizzy. Her eyes, already wide, widened still further, and she squirmed uncomfortably. Yes, actually squirmed, like a catfish snagged and dangling on a fishhook, while the color rose in her cheeks. She caught Lizzy’s glance, held it for a measurable moment, then turned back to her coffee and the conversation at the table.

Lizzy frowned. This was unusual, wasn’t it? Why was Coretta Cole having breakfast with Amos Tombull, who pulled all the strings in county government, and Earle Scroggins, who was Verna’s boss? Lizzy herself wasn’t comfortable around Mr. Scroggins. He was well enough respected around town because he owned property and had the power to hire and fire, and he always managed to get himself reelected when the next election rolled around. But he wasn’t much liked, except by the few who profited from his patronage. Lizzy could guess why. She had seen another side of him once in a legal dispute. Mr. Moseley called him Snake Eyes.

She turned back around. “What’s going on, Myra May? Why is Coretta Cole having breakfast with Mr. Scroggins and Mr. Tombull?” She narrowed her eyes. “I’ll bet you heard something on the switchboard, didn’t you?”

But Myra May only pressed her lips together and shook her head. She poured coffee in Mr. Gibbons’ mug and took Lizzy’s nickel for the two doughnuts.

“Thanks,” she said briefly, and gave Lizzy a troubled smile.

Lizzy understood that something unusual was going on, something to do with Verna. But she also knew she wasn’t going to get another word out of Myra May. She would have to find out the truth from Verna herself when they had lunch together, although of course she wouldn’t say that Myra May had inspired her concern. She would, however, casually mention that she’d seen Coretta Cole having breakfast with Mr. Scroggins and Mr. Tombull. Lizzy had no idea what this meant, but it certainly seemed like something Verna ought to know.

Back out on the street, thinking about what she had just seen, Lizzy headed for the office. It was still early, but there was traffic on the square, with cars and a few old trucks parked, nose to the curb, in front of the diner and Musgrove’s and across the street at the courthouse. Farther down the street, tethered to the streetlight post in front of Hancock’s Groceries, she saw a big brown horse. The draft animal was hitched to a wagon, and a farmer in a pair of muddy denim overalls was unloading a bushel basket of collards and a bucket of turnips. A heavyset woman in a faded cotton dress and slat bonnet clambered down from the wooden seat with a wire bucket of eggs. Yard eggs were advertised for twenty cents a dozen these days, but she would likely sell hers for eight or nine cents, which she would take in trade. Many of Hancock’s customers, especially the farmers, bartered fresh-caught fish, butter and eggs, and garden truck for staples like flour, salt, coffee, and tea. Some also traded for white sugar, although at fifty-eight cents for ten pounds, sugar was almost three times as expensive as flour. Most farmers and even some townspeople used honey or molasses as sweeteners. If you knew where to look and weren’t afraid of getting stung, you could raid a bee tree, and many folks made molasses from their own sorghum.

As Lizzy walked past the plate glass window of the
Dispatch
building, she could see Charlie Dickens standing at the counter, talking to Angelina Biggs, who was probably handing in the copy for the Old Alabama Hotel’s menus for the upcoming week, which Charlie ran off on the old Prouty job press that filled one back corner of the print shop. Angelina managed the hotel kitchen, while her husband Artis was the hotel’s general manager. Charlie didn’t look up when Lizzy walked by, which was just as well, Lizzy thought. The copy for her “Garden Gate” column was due and she realized with a guilty start that she hadn’t given this week’s items even a moment’s thought. Then she turned and climbed the stairs at the west side of the building, up to the second-floor offices of Moseley and Moseley.

Benton Moseley (the youngest and now the only surviving Moseley) had hired Lizzy a few months after her high school graduation. She had been planning to work just until she and Reggie Morris, her high school sweetheart, could get married and move into a little house of their own. But Reggie had joined the Alabama 167th and marched off to France and—like so many other American boys—hadn’t marched home again.

Heartbroken, Lizzy had moved the little diamond Reggie had given her from her left hand to her right. She kept on living in her mother’s house and working in Mr. Moseley’s law office, which quickly became the center of her life. After all, the law office was where important things happened, where people came to get their problems solved and their mistakes fixed—or not, as the case may be. Benton Moseley was smart and progressive and (most of the time) treated Lizzy almost as an equal. For her part, Lizzy was bright and eager, a quick study, presentable behind the reception desk and pleasant on the telephone, and more talented than she knew. They got along well.

That was the good part. The other part was rather unfortunate, for Lizzy had developed a fierce adolescent crush on Mr. Moseley. She suffered the pains of unrequited love in silence, always half worried that she might slip and blurt out, “Oh, Mr. Moseley, I
love
you!” Heartened by the goose-bump-raising thrill of a stray glance or an accidental touch of his fingers, she had even imagined that Mr. Moseley might care for her, too.

But that was silly. Romances like that happened only in the novels Lizzy liked to read. And then it all became academic, anyway, for Mr. Moseley married a beautiful blond debutant from Birmingham, who quickly became one of Darling’s acknowledged social leaders. When Mr. and Mrs. Moseley hosted a dinner party or attended a function at the country club, everybody oohed and ahhed and said what a perfect couple they were.

A perfect couple, that is, until Mrs. Moseley took their two pretty little girls and went back to her parents. Lizzy couldn’t decide whether to be sorry or glad about the divorce. She’d grown up with the idea that marriage was forever, and she hated the thought of Mr. Moseley being lonely and the little girls missing their father. But she had to admit that it was downright silly for people to stay in a marriage that didn’t make both of them happy. And now that Mr. Moseley was single again, perhaps—

But that wasn’t a thought that Lizzy allowed herself to think very often, and certainly not on this bright Monday morning, when
she
was in charge of the office. She unlocked the door and let herself in. She hung her felt hat on the peg she usually used, then with a little smile, moved it to the peg where Mr. Moseley always hung his fedora. She put her handbag and lunch into her bottom desk drawer and looked around the room, feeling quite a wonderful sense of belonging. She loved the office, the polished wooden floors and the worn but still pretty Oriental rug, the glass-fronted bookcases filled with thick leather-bound law books, the diplomas and certificates and awards of three generations of Moseleys that hung on the wood-paneled walls.

And when she went into Mr. Moseley’s office to adjust the venetian blind, she stood still for a moment as she always did to admire the view of the Cypress County Courthouse across the street, where the American flag hung on one pole and the Alabama flag on the other. Lizzy’s spirits always lifted at the sight, for the courthouse seemed to her to represent all that was good about the America in which she lived. It stood for law and order and justice. And not justice only for some but for all, whether you were rich or poor, male or female, a resident or just passing through—like the hungry boy who had stolen Earl Ayers’ green peaches. Lizzy wasn’t naive enough to think that the law was always right in every single instance. But as she had learned right here in this office, the law could be trusted to stand up for the innocent and right the wrongs done to them.

Leaving Mr. Moseley’s door open, she went back to the reception room. She raised the windows to let the cool morning breeze freshen the air, then made coffee in the electric percolator, used the feather duster on the bookshelves and furniture, and ran the carpet sweeper over the rug. Usually, she checked the court calendar and Mr. Moseley’s appointment book and got out the case files he would need. But Mr. Moseley wouldn’t be coming in this week and she had caught up the office billing and filing on Friday. Lizzy was at loose ends.

So she poured a cup of coffee, put the bag of doughnuts on the desk, and sat down in front of her typewriter, thinking that she ought to work on her “Garden Gate” column. But she would have her coffee and doughnut first. That was when she heard the hurried footsteps coming up the wooden stairs.

Quickly, Lizzy opened the drawer and dropped the doughnut bag into it, thinking that since she had booked no appointments for Mr. Moseley this week, this must be a new client. Who else would be coming so early on a Monday morning? And if this was a new client, how would she handle the situation, now that she was in charge? If the matter could wait until Mr. Moseley got back, there would be no problem. But what if it were urgent? What if—?

But it wasn’t a client. It was Verna. She was wearing her usual working outfit of dark skirt, dressy-but-practical blouse, and low heels. But she wore no makeup and her hair, usually neatly combed, was uncharacteristically disheveled. She looked distraught.