Bitter Business (19 page)

Once we were ten minutes from the airport, the road narrowed to two lanes and traffic dwindled to an occasional pickup truck. On either side of us the soil was a vivid terra-cotta, red like a gash between the blacktop and the grass. Above us, trees shot up, their dark branches bursting with new leaves and swinging with Spanish moss. The buildings grew sparser and disappeared completely save for the odd shack of weathered planks and tarpaper that we glimpsed in flashes through the trees.

We’d been driving for half an hour before we turned onto an unpaved road. The trees were so thick that they blotted out the sun, casting the rutted red soil of the road in perpetual shadow while suicidal rabbits dashed in front of the car. Every hundred yards or so I’d see a metal sign, nailed high up onto a tree near the road. For about ten minutes they all said the same thing: POSTED—BRADFORD. Abruptly they changed to POSTED—CAMERON. I asked what it meant.

“It’s shorthand for ‘posted, no trespassing,’ ” explained Sally. “All the property we’re passing through is Ken Cameron’s land. Next we’ll go through Fran Goldenberg’s until we get to Tall Pines, which is all Cavanaugh property. They put up the signs so that the poachers won’t be able to use the excuse that they didn’t know whose land they’re on.”

“Not that it stops them,” complained Philip.

“Tall Pines is more than sixty thousand acres with only one road through it. Now all the locals have four-wheel drive, so there’s no stopping them.”

“You can’t begin to imagine the damage they do. Last year Eugene caught the three Grisham boys drunk as skunks, hunting deer at night with assault rifles.”

“It was a mercy that no one was killed,” added Sally, shaking her head.

“You can say that again,” chimed in the driver, speaking for the first time. “They must have caught one of Eugene’s charitable moods.”

The word plantation conjures up images of Tara, of white-columned mansions set at the end of tree-lined drives. Tall Pines was wilder than that—a plantation for hunting rather than for cultivation—but there was a rugged beauty to the place that made me understand why Dagny Cavanaugh would choose it for her final resting place. From a sudden clearing in the trees I caught my first glimpse of the main house, an attractive low-slung building that I realized, as I got closer, was in reality two houses connected by an airy, covered walkway with a rustic pine-hewn railing and a terrazzo roof.

The van I was riding in stopped just long enough for me to extract my bags from the rest of the luggage and then continued up the road to where Philip and the other Cavanaugh children had their houses. Peaches met me at the door of the house she shared with Jack. She looked tired but even more striking in jeans and half the makeup she’d worn when I’d seen her in Chicago.

“I hope you had a good trip down,” she said. There was more Georgia in her voice now, but none of the animation that I remembered from our first meeting. Dagny’s death, I reflected, had tom the heart out of every member of the family.

Peaches led the way into the house, which, though large, was unpretentiously furnished in the style of a hunting lodge. I would be staying in the guest wing, which, Peaches explained, was the newer end of the house.

“How’s Jack managing?” I asked as I followed her through the breezeway.

“It’s very difficult,” she replied, shaking her head. “About an hour ago I finally convinced him to take a sleeping pill. He’s been so wound up, fighting with everybody about releasing the body and screaming at the people at the funeral home.”

She stopped at a door of polished wood and pushed it open. My room was large and L-shaped, with a high-beamed ceiling and long windows commanding a spectacu-lar view of rolling hills dotted with dogwoods and magnolias in full flower. I set my suitcase at the foot of the four-poster bed and pronounced the accommodations lovely.

“I was wondering if you’d like to go for a ride with me before dinner?” Peaches asked, almost timidly. “Now that Jack’s asleep and doesn’t need me, I thought I’d call down to the bam and have them saddle up my horse. Do you ride?”

“Some.”

“Then why don’t you come with me. There’s really no better way to see the place,” she urged. There was no mistaking the loneliness in her voice.

“I think I stuck a pair of jeans into my bag,” I ventured, unsure.

“Good, it’s settled, then.”

The stables were about two miles from the house, down the same dirt road that we’d taken from the airport, but in the opposite direction. Peaches drove us in a white Jeep Cherokee with Georgia plates, pointing out Lydia’s house as we passed it. It was incongruously modem, all angles and panes of glass. On the lawn was an enormous sphere of polished brass at least eight feet in diameter.

“I wish that Lydia would keep her taste for modem art in Chicago, where it belongs.” Peaches sighed. “They had to take all the seats out of the plane to get that thing here. Of course, all the people down here who work on the plantation refer to it as the bowling ball and laugh at her behind her back. Now, back over that rise you can see Eugene’s house.”

I saw a rambling house built of logs with a porch ranting all the way around it.

“It looks more rustic from the outside than it really is.

It’s actually gorgeous inside. Eugene did most of the work himself.”

Peaches stopped the car in front of a functional and well-kept bam next to a neat paddock. Opening the door, I smelled the familiar scent of horses and heard the cacophonous barking of dogs.

“That’s the kennel over there,” said Peaches, pointing to a whitewashed building that looked like a big henhouse. “We keep about fifty hunting dogs. I love the horses, but the dogs are Jack’s pride and joy.”

A jeaned and cowboy-booted farmhand brought out mounts, a set of reins in each hand. Peaches took the bridle of a pretty palomino, stroking its neck and talking quietly as she led it out into the sunshine.

“You’ll be likin’ Scarlet, ma’am,” the hand advised me with a self-conscious pull at his cap as he handed me the reins to the bay. “She’s a real push-button horse. You don’t need to be tellin’ her what you want more’n once.” He laced his fingers together to give me a leg up. I put my foot into his palms and managed to hoist myself up on the first try, giving a grunt as I swung into the big western saddle.

“Water’s real high over by the river, Mrs. Cavanaugh,” he advised Peaches as he shortened up my stirrups. “And them banks are gettin’ real soft on account of all the rain we’ve been gettin’. I’d take the path that leads out by the big pond if I was you.”

“We’ll do that, Tom. Have you heard anything about the weather?”

“More rain’s supposed to be comin’ through tomorrow afternoon.”

“Well...” Peaches sighed. “Let’s just pray the Lord keeps the rain away until after the funeral.”

Then she turned her horse and gave him a kick.

* * *

It had been a while since I’d last been on a horse, and for the first few minutes I fought down the uneasiness that comes from sitting on the back of an animal much bigger—and stupider—than yourself. But after a few minutes I found my seat and fell into a comfortable slow trot beside Peaches. Jack’s wife, obviously at home on a horse, turned her high-spirited palomino onto a rough track that ran through fields planted with alfalfa.

We rode for a while without talking, adjusting stirrups and shifting saddle blankets. I am, as a rule, a city girl at heart. There is something undeniably frightening about the country. It is full of shadows and secret places, natural violence, and no one to hear your cries for help. But after everything that had happened over the last few days, I found in the silence and the space of the Georgia countryside a kind of relief.

“The police said that you were there both times,” said Peaches, finally breaking the silence. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I can’t discuss it with Jack. It’s too painful for him. But even if we don’t talk about it, it’s all we think about. What do
you
think killed them?”

“I wish I knew, but I’m convinced that whatever it was happened to them both. The similarities were just too striking for it to be otherwise. Dagny was lying on the same place on the floor in virtually the same position as Cecilia was when we found her. It was almost as if Dagny was trying to copy her secretary.... I don’t know. The whole thing is eerie.”

“When the police came to the house they kept asking us if Dagny ever used drugs. We kept on telling them no, but I’m not sure they believed us. I know what cops are like from when I used to do the news. All they deal with all day long are lowlifes, addicts, and thieves. Still, if it wasn’t drugs, what was it?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the test results come back.”

“But what I want to know is how do we live until then?” Peaches demanded bitterly. “Jack is drinking too much and he can’t sleep without pills. I don’t think Claire has eaten since her mother died. Vy and Eugene are doing their best, but they were both close to Dagny and they have their own grief to deal with. Their pastor, Father O’Donnell, is coming down tomorrow to say the funeral mass and Vy wants us all to talk to him, but honestly I can’t imagine what he’ll say....”

I knew what he’d say. I’d heard everything that anyone ever said to the grieving. None of it ever helped, but I thought it best not to say so.

“There’s a good place for a gallop coming up,” Peaches announced suddenly. “There, just over the rise. Do you feel up to it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and gathered up the reins.

It is as close as I’ll ever come to flying, that glorious combination of speed and freedom that comes when you’re standing in the stirrups, balanced over the withers of a galloping horse. We thundered up a gentle hill, along a grass-covered earthen dam, and the entire way around a large pond. The water was so glassy and still that we could see our reflections. When Peaches finally reined in the palomino and I followed suit, slowing to a walk, it was with a real pang of regret. It was only after we’d walked for a minute that I realized I was winded, felt the horse’s heaving sides beneath my legs, and saw the flecks of foam along its flanks. We must have galloped for miles, but in my mind it had only taken seconds.

I looked up at the sky. The sun had dropped lower on the horizon. Clouds were gathering.

“This is the place where Jack’s oldest boy drowned,” said Peaches. “I’ve only been down here once or twice. Jack won’t go near the place. Dagny’s dying has brought it all back to him as if it were yesterday. You can’t imagine the hurt.”

“I can’t imagine anything worse than losing a child,” I said. “Now Jack’s lost two.”

“And the ones who are left hate my guts,” said Peaches in a voice ripe with bitterness. “When I fell in love with Jack I didn’t expect the world to understand. It’s not just that he’s so much older, but he’s also a hard man and rough around the edges. I know what people think— you’re blond and you work in TV, so you must have the intellectual capacity of a hamster. But I’m not stupid, and I really thought I was ready for what the world was going to throw at me when I decided to marry Jack. So the whispers didn’t bother me, or the assumption that he must have left his wife for me. But the one thing I never anticipated was the extent to which I have been vilified by his children. I never expected them to run to me with open arms and call me Mommy. But the level of their animosity never ceases to astonish me. Dagny was the only one who was ever fair to me, and now she’s gone. I can’t even begin to imagine what we are going to have to endure from Lydia over the next few weeks.”

“You never know,” I offered. “Sometimes it takes a tragedy like losing Dagny to bring a family together, to make them realize what’s really important.”

Looking out over the still water of the pond, I found myself fervently hoping that what I’d just said was true, that the Cavanaughs would somehow find a way to pull together in the wake of their loss. But I knew from experience that the physics of tragedy more often works in the opposite direction.

16

I swung my leg across the saddle and slid down to the ground, feeling suddenly short after having surveyed the world from the top of a horse for the last two hours. Following Peaches, I led my mount up to the hitching post, not surprised to find that I’d developed the rolling cowboy gait that I knew preceded a pair of very sore legs. Standing with one hand on the saddle horn and the reins in the other, I was startled to see Eugene Cavanaugh charging across the stable yard toward me, his face distorted with fury.

“Who said you could ride that horse?” he demanded furiously.

I was completely taken aback. It was Peaches, emerging from the shadow of the bam with a bridle over her arm, who answered him.

“I asked Tom to saddle Scarlet for Kate,” she answered with a steely edge of warning to her voice.

“That’s Dagny’s horse! How dare you take it out without permission!”

“Whose permission?” Peaches inquired with studied sweetness. “I was under the impression that all of these horses belong to your father, or am I wrong? Maybe you and I should go back up to the house and ask him whether it was okay for me to let Kate ride one.”

Eugene stood mutely rigid, furious at the rebuke but unable to reply. Peaches may have married into a nest of vipers, I reflected, but it was obvious that she was more than able to defend herself.