Bitter Business (21 page)

I never found out what else Darlene was going to tell me because she stopped in midsentence. Just then, from the other end of the house came the unmistakable sound of a woman screaming.

17

Darlene ran into the main section of the house, through the living room, and down the hall. I was right on her heels. We met Peaches coming from the opposite direction, clutching her pink satin bathrobe around her throat and shrieking like a freight train.

“What’s happened?” I demanded. I had seen too many emergencies in too few days and my heart was in my throat.

“There’s... there’s... there’s...” she gasped, pointing in the direction of the bedrooms.

“There’s what, sugar?” asked Darlene, putting a motherly arm around Peaches’s shoulder.

“A... snake!” she managed to blurt.

“Where’s the snake?” Darlene demanded. Relief flooded through me.

“In our bathroom,” Peaches replied, struggling to regain control of her breathing. “I went in to brush my teeth.... I heard it behind me, rattling.”

“Did you get bit?” Darlene looked Jack’s wife up and down.

Peaches shook her head no.

“Where’s Jack?” I asked. “Is he all right?”

“He’s in the bedroom. He’s on the phone calling one of the men.”

Jack marched into the hall and slammed the door quickly behind him. He was wearing black pajamas and knee-high rubber boots.

“Are you okay, honey?” he asked his wife, his voice still slurred from the bourbon. “It’s nothing to get upset about. Just a big old rattlesnake. Someone must have left a door open, that’s all.”

Peaches nodded, pulling her thin robe around her shoulders. Jack turned to me.

“Kate, you take Peaches into the kitchen,” he ordered. “I’ll heat up some water and make y’all some tea,” Darlene offered as we made our way toward the kitchen. “This time of year if we get a lot of rain, the snakes come looking for dry land,” she explained, filling the kettle from the tap. “Remember the time Mr. Philip had one?”

“Sally was in the kitchen,” said Peaches, smiling in spite of herself. “She turned around and there was a rattlesnake—it must have been as thick as my arm— slithering across her white tile floor.”

“They heard her screaming all the way down to Chapaloosa.” Darlene laughed.

“But what I want to know is how this one got into my bathroom?” Peaches demanded anxiously. “I’m so glad I decided to leave Snuggles in Chicago.”

“That little dog of yours would have been that snake’s dinner,” said Darlene.

“Ugh!” Peaches shuddered. “I hate to think of that horrible snake slithering through my house.”

We heard a car door slam outside and Darlene scurried off to greet Tom, the farmhand who had driven our van from the airport. He appeared in the kitchen wearing overalls over a bright red union suit and a pair of high boots. In one hand he held a long pole with a loop of rope at one end. In the other he carried a big blue plastic bucket with a lid. He scratched his head sleepily.

“Where’s the snake at?” he demanded. In the country, people go to bed early, and Jack’s call had obviously awakened him. His hair stood up comically on his head.

“It’s in the bathroom, right this way,” said Jack, bringing up the rear.

“Stay here with me, Kate,” Peaches begged. I was all too happy to comply. The men disappeared, and Darlene, not wanting to miss out on the action, followed.

“How are they going to catch it?” I asked.

“Tom’ll slip that loop over its head—it’s a kind of lasso for snakes. He’ll pull the rope tight and then just pick it up and drop it into the bucket.”

“It sounds like they’re prepared for this.”

“They do catch rattlers, especially this time of year. Tom’s got a lot of experience with them on account of the dogs.”

“Why’s that?”

“When they have a new litter of hunting dogs that they’re starting to train, one of the first things they do is catch a rattlesnake and kill it. Then they run an electric wire through its body. After that they let the puppies loose and let them come sniffing around. When one of them touches the snake they get an electric shock.”

“How terrible!”

“Not as terrible as being killed by a snake,” Peaches countered reasonably. “A hunting dog with a good pedigree costs thousands of dollars, and then they spend hundreds of hours training it. If the first time the dog goes out to flush game it gets killed by a snake, it’s a terrible waste.” From the bedroom we heard Jack’s booming voice. “Okay Tom, on the count of three!”

Safe in the kitchen, Peaches and I sat perfectly still, listening like stowaways. After a minute we heard a crash and then a bump followed by a shout of triumph. Jack led the procession, carrying the pail through the house. We could hear the angry rattle of the snake’s tail through the blue plastic.

“Don’t you ladies worry now,” Tom advised shyly. “We’ve got this feller where he won’t be doin’ nobody any harm.”

“You’re not going to be letting that thing loose near the house, are you?” Peaches asked anxiously.

“No, ma’am. I’m going to take it back down to the kennel. It’ll come in handy with those new pups. Just today J.T. caught a rattler up by Snake Crick, but he mustn’t have put the lid on real good because it got away before he got around to killin’ it. You just be careful about leavin’ those doors open, you hear? These rascals are on the move on account of it bein’ so wet, and there’s more rain in the forecast.”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as he took his gruesome prize out into the night.

Dagny’s funeral was small and sad. As a light rain fell, Father O’Donnell, who had, as a parish priest, offered Dagny Cavanaugh her first communion, spoke movingly about eternity while the mourners huddled tearfully underneath their umbrellas. Besides the family there was a cluster of local residents, people who worked at Tall Pines, like Darlene, and had also known Dagny since she was a little girl. People who’d stood in much the same place and watched them lower her brother Jimmy into the ground.

Claire stood bravely between her grandfather and the aunt who had helped raise her. Before them, the fresh-turned red of the Georgia soil stood out like a wound against the damp green of the grass. Behind her, Eugene wept openly, and even Philip could not contain his grief. Lydia, dressed like a cross between Morticia Addams and Coco Chanel, wore a heavy mantilla of black lace and hovered over an old, frail black woman whose rheumy eyes never strayed from the casket. The twins had blessedly been left at home.

After the final prayers were said, an elegantly athletic man of forty with a shock of black hair and a dark Armani suit walked with Claire back to the house. When I asked who he was, Peaches explained that he was Dagny’s rock-climbing friend from Belgium. I remembered the night we spent talking before the fire in her living room and the chocolates we had eaten the night before she died.

Here, under the graceful awning of willow trees, it might seem easy to imagine that it was some gentle hand that had laid claim to Dagny Cavanaugh. But for me, nothing would ever obscure the final agony of her death or my anger at seeing her taken from her family.

Back at the house I did not join the others for pie and coffee, but instead went back to my room to pack and organize my papers. Earlier that morning, as we prepared to leave the house for the funeral, Jack Cavanaugh had surprised me by announcing that he’d called a family meeting for one o’clock.

He refused to answer any of my questions about what he intended to discuss, and under the circumstances I’d felt uncomfortable pressing him. But all morning long I’d felt a sense of impotence mingled with foreboding. Try as I might, I could think of no good that could possibly come of a face-to-face meeting of all the Cavanaughs.

I will never forget the strain and pretense in the room that afternoon after Dagny’s funeral. My experience in corporate work had not prepared me for what emotions, laid raw by the death of one daughter and the dark heart of another, could whipsaw through a family bound together by blood and business. I’d seen CEOs plead with directors for their jobs and corporate officers beg bankers for mercy. I’d been bullied and screamed at, and had listened to whispered threats. None of it compared with Jack Cavanaugh pleading for his children’s love under the thin guise of corporate unity.

I knew that words did not come easily for Jack Cavanaugh. He doled them out carefully, as if each one exacted a price. Yet he managed to speak movingly about his dream of having his children work together in the business he’d labored his entire life to build. He begged them to put aside their differences and work together, if not for his sake, then for their children’s. He spoke of Dagny’s love of the company and her dedication over the years, and told them that Superior Plating’s continued success would be the most fitting of memorials.

As he spoke I watched the faces of his family. Eugene fiddled with his collar like a little boy being forced to sit quietly in church. Philip’s face was impassive, a mask of attention hiding endless calculation. Beside him on the couch sat his wife, Sally, her knitting needles clicking out her wordless disapproval.

Lydia, the red lipstick of her mouth set in an expression of discontent, did not even bother to feign interest. Instead, she rearranged her hair in the reflection of the polished brass of a nearby lamp or methodically lined up the bracelets on her wrists. Of all of them, Arthur Wallace was the only one who listened. He sat motionless at his wife’s side, hands clasped on his lap, his eyes never leaving his father-in-law’s face.

How many years, how many wrong turns had it taken to bring a family to this? I wondered, wishing, not for the first time, that Daniel Babbage were here.

Jack Cavanaugh finished and pulled a sheet of white paper out of his pocket. The rattle of the paper seemed unnaturally loud. He cleared his throat to begin what I assumed was the formal portion of the meeting.

“Dagny’s loss has left us with a serious gap in the management of the company. As chairman of the board and CEO, I have made some decisions that I feel will not only help fill the vacuum but will also equalize responsibility across the management team so that we can move the company forward confidently for the next generation.” Sally paused in her knitting. In the strained anticipation in the room, it seemed almost difficult to breathe.

“First,” Jack Cavanaugh continued, “Lydia will be appointed to the newly created post of director of communications, accompanied by an increase in salary. At the same time Eugene will be promoted to the position of vice-president in charge of operations with responsibility for purchasing, procurement, and procedures. My son-in-law, Arthur Wallace, will assume the position of acting chief financial officer.”

By the time he got to Arthur Wallace, all the color had drained out of Philip’s face. He stared at his father with a look of undisguised disbelief. However, the same shock that had paralyzed Philip propelled his wife, Sally, to her feet.

“How can you do this?” she demanded. Her voice was loud and shrill. “When you told us you were going to have a family meeting, we all assumed you were finally going to step down and turn the company over to Philip like you’ve been promising all these years. Now you’re telling us that you’re going to just lay more burdens onto his shoulders and load up the payroll with more dead wood. He’s worked sixteen hours a day for twenty years for half of what he’d earn at any other company, and this is what he gets? You talk about family unity, but what you really want is for Philip to kill himself so that everyone else can have a free ride. You expect everyone to lie down while you walk all over them!”

“Sally, please,” implored Peaches.

“You stay out of this!” Philip snapped savagely to his stepmother. “This is none of your business.”

“What else are you going to let Lydia get away with?” Sally demanded. “What about next time? A year from now, when Princess Lydia decides she wants to sell her precious shares again, what are you going to do? Are you going to tell Philip he has to step down so that Arthur can be president of the company?”

“I just can’t believe that you’d do all this without consulting me!” Lydia shouted, clearly unwilling to see the spotlight fall on her sister-in-law. The role of family bad girl was clearly hers and she set out to reclaim it. “This is exactly why I want my money out of this stupid company. You think that you can treat me like a child for the rest of my life, Daddy. But you’re wrong. You can’t just make these edicts about what we’re going to do. Arthur has his career, his clients. You can’t expect him to drop everything and come to work for you just because you snap your fingers.”

Jack Cavanaugh’s features turned to granite as he watched the family meeting disintegrate into a shouting match, with each child clamoring to have his or her own point of view heard, but none seemingly willing to listen. Looking back, I still can’t believe that I did it, but I climbed up and stood on the seat of my chair, put two fingers into my mouth, and let out an earsplitting whistle.

Astonished faces were lifted toward me.

“Dagny would have been ashamed of all of you,” I declared indignantly. “And you should be ashamed of yourselves. Now go home, all of you. Your father will reconvene this meeting when everyone has had a chance to come to their senses.”