Free The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star by Susan Wittig Albert Page A

I’d known you were still here, I would have brought pie and coffee for you, too.”
    “On my way upstairs,” Lizzy said, and got up. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said, and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
    “Yeah,” Charlie replied. “Good luck.” To Ophelia, he said, “What kind of pie did you bring me? Chocolate, I hope.”
    “Raisin was all they had,” Ophelia replied apologetically.
    “Dang,” Charlie muttered. “I miss Euphoria already.”

FIVE

    Lizzy Spills the Beans
    Lizzy climbed the outside stairs to the Moseley law office and let herself in. Mr. Moseley had gone to Montgomery on business and wasn’t expected back until the following week, so the office was empty and all hers, which suited Lizzy just fine, because she wanted time to think.
    From one angle, her talk with Charlie Dickens had been a real eye-opener. She’d had no idea about Charlie’s relationships with women in the past, and this glimpse into his life revealed a web of intriguing mysteries. It was, she thought, like opening a friend’s photograph album somewhere in the middle and trying to connect the random snapshots on the page to the real person sitting in front of you.
    From another angle, the talk had been troubling, and she sat down at her desk to mull over what she ought to do. She really should speak to Mildred Kilgore—but should she be direct or beat around the bush? Should she telephone, or would it be better to have a face-to-face talk? And what, if anything, should she say to poor Fannie Champaign to prepare her for what might be a great shock, if Lily Dare reignited Charlie Dickens’ old torch? It wasn’t in Lizzy’s nature to meddle in other people’s business, and some of Mr. Moseley’s cases had shown her the unfortunate outcomes to which meddling could lead. So these were serious questions.
    Lizzy took a deep breath and looked around the office. The dusty old rooms had their own special character, with their creaky wooden floors and wood-paneled walls hung with certificates and diplomas and the gilt-framed oil portraits of the three senior Mr. Moseleys—Mr. Benton Moseley’s great grandfather, his grandfather, and his father, all now deceased. The junior Mr. Moseley refused to sit for his portrait. “All traditions have to come to an end sometime,” he said. “And I am putting a stake through the heart of this one right now. Anybody wants to know what I look like, they can by God take a gander at my
face,
not at my portrait.”
    But still, Lizzy loved the paintings, as much as she loved the sepia prints of maps of Cypress County and the old framed documents and the floor-to-ceiling shelves of law books and the fact that the office door was always open during working hours. When she first came to work here, it had seemed to her that the books and the documents and the dignified wood-paneled walls and—yes, even the open door—symbolized justice itself: stable and established and reliable and trustworthy and readily available to anybody who needed it. And if she needed another reminder of justice, there was the Cypress County courthouse right across the street, a beautiful redbrick building, foursquare and sturdy and solid, with white trim and a white-painted dome with a clock and a bell that rang out the hours with such regularity that you could set your mantel clock by it and so loud and clear that everybody in town could hear it, even when the doors and windows were shut.
    In the past few years, though, Lizzy had begun to feel that her ideal of justice and the law might be a bit naïve and unsophisticated, for the more she saw of the law, the more elusive
justice
seemed. There were too many cases where the rich got all the “justice” they wanted and the poor got none at all, even though Mr. Moseley did the very best he could to get a fair hearing under the law for every one of his clients, rich and poor. And then there were the colored folks over in Maysville, who