Bitter Business (20 page)

A battered pickup appeared around the bend in the road and pulled up to the bam. Two men in overalls and baseball caps jumped out of the rear, the backs of their necks sunburned from hours behind the wheel of a tractor.

“Howdy, Mr. Cavanaugh. We just come back from checking the road over by the grave just like you asked. I’m thinkin’ maybe we should put down some of that sand we’ve got bagged up in the yellow barn on account of there’s bad mud in a coupla spots, but it’s up to you.” Peaches took the reins from my hand and led my mount into the bam. I followed her, not eager to be caught in further conversation with Eugene.

“Sometimes I just can’t abide any of them,” Peaches announced from between gritted teeth as she bent to unbuckle the double straps of Scarlet’s girth. “He thinks that because when he says ‘jump’ the factory workers all answer ‘how high?’ that he can order everyone else around as well. It’s sickening how they’re all always assuming----And it’s not just Eugene. Take Philip. It’s true that he’s going to be the boss after Jack’s dead, but the greedy little bastard just can’t wait.”

I reached up and pulled the saddle off my horse’s back with a grunt, staggering a little under the sudden weight.

“It goes in the tack room, over there. You’ll see the spot,” Peaches instructed, clipping a lead line to the horse’s halter and leading it toward the paddock behind the barn. I lugged the saddle into the dusty tack room and followed her outside, blinking in the sunlight.

Lydia’s son, Peter, was standing with one Doc Martened foot on the split-rail fence, chewing on a piece of hay.

“I was wondering if you could give me a lift back to my mom’s house?” he asked. “I was going to go with Tom and J.T., but Uncle Eugene’s sending them back to the bam to get some sand and they can’t take me until they’re done.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Peaches replied. “What have you been up to?”

“Actually, I’ve been trying to avoid my mother. We all have. When Uncle Eugene asked me to help out with the new puppies, I jumped at the chance. But I have to get back and get cleaned up for dinner. Mom’s invited Nursey, so we all have to be on our best behavior and pass inspection.”

“Nursey’s the old housekeeper who came to work for Jack after Eleanor died,” Peaches explained. “Her husband, Lucas, was killed in a fire and so she agreed to come up to Chicago and help Jack with the children. She lived with the family until Lydia went away to college. Now that she’s retired she lives down here with her sister.”

“My mom always says that Nursey’s her real mother. Don’t you think that’s a weird thing to say?” Peter inquired, kicking the dirt.

“I’m sure she means it as a compliment,” Peaches replied firmly. “Her real name is Henrietta Roosevelt, but everyone calls her Nursey, even Jack. She really is a part of the family, especially for your mother. She must be eighty if she’s a day—and half-gaga, but still, terribly sweet.”

“More like terribly gaga and half-sweet,” grumbled Peter, sticking his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and heading toward the car.

It was obvious that Jack Cavanaugh had already put away a fair amount of bourbon before dinner. It wasn’t that he was acting drunk, but he had the slow, measured speech of a man who’s taking pains to appear sober.

“You know what I’m going to miss most about Daniel Babbage?” he asked, pouring himself another drink. Peaches had turned in early with a headache. Someone had made us a couple of bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for our dinner. Jack’s sat on his plate, untouched.

“What?” I asked, putting my hand over the top of my glass, indicating that I was still fine.

“Babbage understands guys like me. Now, I’m sure that you’re one hell of a lawyer—Daniel’d never have asked me to hire you if you weren’t. And I know that you’re going to make sure that all my
is
are dotted and my is are crossed. But from what everyone tells me about your background, it sounds like you’ve been handed every single goddamn thing in your whole life. Am I right?”

I had learned from experience that there’s no answer to that question, so I said nothing.

“Nobody ever handed me anything,” he continued. “I was seventeen when my father died. He was killed in a bar fight in an argument over a woman. Not many people know that. He left me a factory that was practically falling down, half a dozen other pieces of property that he owed back taxes on, and about two thousand dollars in bar debts—which in those days was considered a fortune. From that I built one of the biggest plating operations in the country. I have two hundred employees, a house in Chicago and this one down here and a plane that gets me between the two of them. You want to know how I did it?”

“Yes,” I said. I really did want to know.

“I told my customers any lie that would get me their business and then I did whatever it took to make good on my promise. We didn’t have OSHA back then, or the damned EPA. We dumped our waste chemicals at night and had an accounting system that would have done credit to a call house. I stayed up nights working on a second ulcer trying to figure out a way to keep the unions out and the bank from shutting me down. Ask Daniel, he’ll tell you what it was like. He and I have been through a lot together. It’s hard to believe that we’re not going to be together through this.”

“I went to see him before I left,” I said. “I know that if he could be here, he would.”

“You know, I used to worry all the time that Dagny would get killed doing that rock-climbing stuff. That’s how her husband died. Slipped and bounced against the side of a cliff like a yo-yo. He was dead when they brought him down. I could never understand how she could do it, why she wasn’t afraid. She always told me that it didn’t scare her because she never thought about falling. She was always looking ahead of her, thinking about the next piece of rock she was about to climb. She was concentrating so hard on getting where she needed to go that she didn’t have time to worry about what would happen if she didn’t make it.

“That’s what running your own business is like. It’s not about rules and briefs and working in a fancy office on LaSalle Street with hot-and-cold-running secretaries. It’s about getting where you have to because you’re too stubborn or too stupid to listen to anybody who tells you that you can’t do it.

“Dagny loved the business. More than any of my children, she was the one who loved it the way I love it. They wanted her to go to Harvard, you know. Offered her a scholarship, the whole thing, but she wouldn’t go. You want to know why?”

“Why?”

“Because she didn’t want to leave Chicago. She went to Northwestern so that she could still work for the company on the weekends and over vacation. She’s been keeping the books since she was nineteen years old. I can’t believe we’re going to be putting her into the ground tomorrow....” His voice cracked and faded away.

I got up to get myself another drink. Not because I wanted one, but because I wanted to save him the embarrassment of my watching him cry.

I promised myself that this was the last case like this I was ever going to take. I liked meetings in conference rooms with lawyers who screamed and called you names. Lawyers who, when the negotiating was done, wanted to know whether you were free for lunch on Friday. This was too personal—too painful.

“She liked you, you know. She told me that the morning that she died. Philip and I were arguing about some stupid thing or other—I can’t remember; we’re always fighting—it doesn’t matter about what. We’ve been fighting so long we don’t know how to do anything else. Dagny came into my office and told me she thought you were a good lawyer—a good choice for the company—that you’d be able to handle this mess with Lydia and all the rest of it.”

“Have you talked to Lydia at all since then?” I asked. “She’s beside herself,” Jack replied. “She and Dagny were like this.” For a brief instant his two hands made a token marriage. “I’m sure that she’s completely forgotten that whole business about her shares....”

I remembered my conversation with her lawyer earlier that day, and his satisfaction in telling me that he’d just gotten off the phone with Lydia, who was determined not to allow her sister’s death to interfere with the sale of her shares. Ï looked at Jack Cavanaugh and could not tell him. It was an act of charity that I would soon come to regret.

Back in my room I took a long, hot shower. Riding exercises muscles that get no other use and I suddenly found myself aware of each and every one of them. I took two Advils and combed all the snarls out of my wet hair while I waited for them to work. I finished and changed into a pair of clean gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt, but I was still so sore that I knew I’d never be able to sleep, so I set off toward the main house to see if I could scare up a stiff scotch or, at the very least, some more of Jack Cavanaugh’s bourbon.

I was surprised to find all the lights on in the house and an ample woman with a stiff beehive of teased hair at Work in the kitchen.

“Howdy,” she said. “You must be the lawyer lady that’s come down from Chicago. I’m Darlene. What can I get for you, hon?”

I explained about the scotch and she obligingly pulled a bottle of single malt from a cupboard in the pantry and fetched me a glass.

“I sure hope the weather holds for the funeral tomorrow,” she volunteered as I poured. “You wouldn’t know it from all the sunshine we had today, but we’ve been having more rain than anyone knows what to do with. My Tom said that when he ran into Chuck Zellmer over at the feed store, Chuck told him that he’s got twenty acres already under six inches of water. Now, Zellmer’s property lies closer to the river than Tall Pines, but I can tell you if we get much more rain, we’re going to see flooding as bad as we saw in sixty-nine—you mark my words.”

“What happened in sixty-nine?” I asked, not wanting to seem rude.

“Snake Creek went right up over its banks and the dam over by Chapaloosa didn’t hold. Half of Tall Pines was waist-deep in water. We had so much water in this here kitchen you couldn’t see the tops of the counters. Then, of course, when it finally went back down the mud was worse than the water. The men had to come down in here with shovels. There was dead catfish in Mr. C’s bedroom. Lord, you can’t believe the mess. Let’s just pray that don’t ever happen again, but I’ll just be happy if the rain holds off until after Miss Dagny’s funeral.”

“Is that what you’re baking all these pies for?” I asked, looking at the half dozen or so that sat cooling on the counter.

“Yes, ma’am. Last time I baked this many pies it was for the party we had for Miss Lydia’s wedding. Her second one, that is, not the first—nor the third neither, for that matter. And the time before that it was for Mr. Jimmy’s funeral.” She put her hands on her hips and drew a deep breath.

“You worked for the Cavanaughs back then?” I asked, pulling a stool up to the counter where Darlene was rolling out pastry with a rolling pin.

“My mama kept house for Mr. Cavanaugh until her arthritis got too bad for her to get around. I’ve been helpin’ out ’round this house since I was big enough to swing a broom. I was just a little slip of a girl when Jimmy died, but I remember it like it was yesterday. We all do. Mama and I stayed up all night right here in this very kitchen baking pies and cookin’ for after the funeral. We cried our eyes out, we did. It was such a terrible thing. He was such a fine young man. We thought Mr. C. would die from the shock.”

“It must have been terrible for the girl’s family as well,” I said, thinking that there seemed to be a forgotten victim in every tragedy: the girl who’d tried to kill herself and ended up taking Jimmy Cavanaugh to the bottom of the pond with her; Cecilia Dobson, whose death would seem forever eclipsed by the loss of Dagny Cavanaugh.

“I don’t know if they felt nothin’.” Darlene sniffed. “According to my mama, the Swintons was the worst sort of white trash there is. They all moved away right after it happened. Grace’s mama ran off when she was just a baby and her dad was an old drunk who only held down a job for as long as it took to get money for his liquor—that’s when he wasn’t out poaching or moon-shining.... Grace was a pretty thing, though. I remember that. Big blue eyes and hair like com silk. She sure was something to look at. I remember how Edna Tibbets was always squeezing lemons onto her hair and sitting out in the sun until she drew flies, trying to get her hair to go the same color as Grace Swinton’s...

“Why did she kill herself?” I asked, thinking about the pond where we’d galloped earlier in the day. I was suddenly struck by the fact that, sitting in the middle of Tall Pines plantation, inaccessible by any road, it would make a rather inconvenient spot to choose for taking your own life.

“There was lots of talk, of course. There still is, for that matter. You’d think that folks’d have better things to do than to sit around and jaw about what happened all those years ago—but you know what folks are. And after what happened to Miss Dagny, the old talk will start right back up again. Just this morning I heard ’em talking out there at the Dairy Pik over by Pinkerton about how the Cavanaugh family is cursed.”

“So what do they say about the girl who killed herself?” I asked.

“They say that Grace Swinton was carrying Jimmy Cavanaugh’s baby,” breathed Darlene conspiratorially.

“And was she?”

“Nobody knows,” Darlene replied, wiping floury hands on the front of her apron, “least of all the folks that’s doin’ all the talking. The only people who really know are Grace Swinton and Jimmy Cavanaugh and they’re both dead. But—”