I went into the kitchen and picked up the phone expecting to hear Cheryl’s voice, but was surprised instead to discover that it was Elliott on the line.
“Your secretary told me where to find you,” he said by way of greeting. From his voice I could tell he was excited. “You’ll never guess where I am.”
“Where?”
“The Laurel Acres Convalescent Home.”
“Is that where Nursey lives? I thought she had her own house.”
“She does. I’m heading there now. I couldn’t see her this morning because she had to go into Lawson for her clinic appointments.”
“So who are you visiting at Laurel Acres?” I demanded. The Cavanaugh children’s contentiousness must have been contagious. I was in a terrible mood.
“I’ve been to see Zebediah Hooker.”
“So who is he?”
“He’s the redneck drunk who Eugene Cavanaugh beat to within an inch of his life when they were both sixteen years old.”
“Whatever made him do that?”
“Eugene caught him in a bar one night telling anyone who would listen that Jimmy Cavanaugh killed Grace Swinton because she was carrying his child.”
In the end, I left the three remaining Cavanaugh children to duke it out while I went with Elliott to visit Nursey. In light of what he’d found out by visiting Zebediah Hooker, I figured it was going to be much more enlightening than listening to Philip, Lydia, and Eugene cover the same ground over and over again. As we drove Elliott told me how he’d found him.
“I just went to the feed store and asked. The feed store’s the center of the universe in a place like this. All I had to do was mention the name and three guys in John Deere caps were falling all over each other to tell me the story. In a small town like this, you can’t go to the bathroom without people knowing what color it is. And Eugene Cavanaugh savagely beating a good old boy like Zebediah certainly caught everyone’s attention. I didn’t even really need to go out to Laurel Acres, but it was close and I had time to kill.”
“So what did he have to say to you?”
“Who? Zebediah? Not only did Eugene break just about every bone in Zebediah’s body, but he cracked his skull in so many places that he left him a vegetable. Zebediah doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t said anything since the night he shot his mouth off in front of Eugene in that bar.”
Nursey was a shriveled-up crone with a tight perm of snow-white hair that stood out in stark contrast to the wrinkled ebony of her skin. She must have already been an old lady the day she came to Chicago to work for the Cavanaughs. Under a crisply ironed red dress, she was all skin and bones, but aside from being a little deaf, she seemed both intelligent and alert.
Her sister, who looked every bit as old and frail as Nursey, served us sweet iced tea with lemon in plastic tumblers and then left us on the porch to chat. By city standards, the home of the two elderly sisters was little more than a shack with a bare wood floor and a tar-paper roof. But from what I could glimpse of it through the dark screen of the door, it seemed tidy and comfortably furnished.
“Don’t know what’s wrong with Lydia,” Nursey said sadly, after she’d finished telling Elliott about the nice banker who handled her monthly check from Mr. Cavanaugh and what the doctor had to say about the trouble she’d been having with her back. “Lydia’s always been a mean-spirited child, always wantin’ to believe that life’s done her wrong. Never could understand it. I know it’s hard losin’ your mama when you’s a baby. But you’d think from talkin’ to her that she’s the only person in the whole wide world has ever lost their mama, if you get what I’m say in’. I told Mr. Cavanaugh, I told him time and time again he should have let me take the hairbrush to her. I’d have smacked the wickedness right out of her, but he would never hear of it. She looked too much like his dead wife, she did. Every time he looked at her, he saw his Eleanor lookin’ back at him. That’s why he never could raise a hand to her. He spoiled her something rotten.”
“I understand she came down to see you in February,” I said. “Dagny told me that her sister came down to talk to you about some things that happened to her when she was little—”
“Phantasms!” Nursey exclaimed, with a disgusted wave of her hand. “Phantasms and made-up stories. One of those crazy psychiatrists got her believing that her father’d molested her. Now, I won’t say to you that kind of wickedness don’t happen, but I can tell you just like I told Lydia; nothin’ like that happened in that house, not while I was there. I watched those children like a hawk. I’d have known if there was anything like that going on.”
“She called you, though, the day she got back to Chicago,” said Elliott. “She called you late at night and talked for almost an hour. Would you mind telling us what you two talked about?”
“Oh honey, it wasn’t Lydia that called me at eleven o’clock and woke me up out of a sound sleep. Scared me half to death. I thought it was one of my grandbabies who lives in Atlanta killed in a car accident, I swear to God. No, no. It wasn’t Lydia that called me. It was Eugene. All in a lather about Lydia telling him the truth about what happened to poor Grace Swinton.”
33
Philip, Lydia, and Eugene sat miserably on their father’s couch all in a row. They reminded me of the three little monkeys in that old proverb—see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. I wanted to strangle each of them. Elliott was standing by in the kitchen to be sure I didn’t do just that.
“So which one of you is going to tell me the truth about Grace Swinton?” I demanded.
“It’s none of your business,” Philip protested, rising to his feet.
“Sit down,” I commanded. The whole ride back to Tall Pines, I’d been so furious I was ranting. I was in absolutely no mood for games. As far as I was concerned, Dagny Cavanaugh and Cecilia Dobson were both victims of the Cavanaughs’ inability to be straight with one another. From here on in, there was only one thing I wanted from them and that was the truth. “Philip, you were there, why don’t you start the story?”
“She was a slut, a nothing, a piece of no-good white trash. I don’t see why you want to drag it all back up.”
“Tell me what happened,” I growled, suddenly wishing I had a gun. I fervently hoped that Elliott did.
“From the sound of it, you know already,” said Eugene.
“I want to hear it from you.” There was no disguising the contempt in my voice.
“Goddammit!” Philip burst in. “She was already dead when we threw her in the water. There! Are you satisfied? She went to Doc Prisser to get rid of the baby and something went wrong. I don’t know what. Things were different back then. By the time she got to the pond, she was just gushing blood. We didn’t know what to do. We were just kids, for Christ sake. She died in Jimmy’s arms.”
“And so you filled her pockets with rocks and decided on the suicide story.”
“We had to get rid of the body. We thought Dad would kill us. It was Jimmy’s idea to take her out in the rowboat and dump her. He knew how screwed up she was. It was his idea to say she’d killed herself.”
“So what went wrong?”
“It was the buttons on his shirt,” Philip replied. He sounded eager to be done with it. “They must have gotten caught in her hair. That’s how he got pulled under.”
“Why wasn’t there an investigation?”
“Dad took care of the police. That’s when I found out that he’d known all along. He was the one who’d paid for Doc Prisser.”
“And he made you promise not to tell.”
“He made me swear it,” Philip said miserably.
“It was just going to be your dirty little secret,” hissed Lydia. “But it’s hard to keep people from talking in a place like this. Daddy couldn’t buy everyone. The police dropped it, but there was no way he could stop people from talking.”
“So you knew, too,” I said to Lydia.
“Not at first, not everything. But I always knew that there was something funny about it, something that people we
ren’t telling. It wasn’t until my therapist helped me understand the real impact these childhood tragedies had on my psyche that I was motivated to find out the truth about what happened.”
“So you came down to Tall Pines in February to find out the whole story from Nursey.”
“Do you know what the funny thing is?” Lydia asked. “Everyone down here knew it already. Our big hush-hush family secret was common knowledge in this little hick town. Everyone knew that Jimmy was sleeping with Grace. Everyone knew about the botched abortion. Everyone knew that Daddy’d paid for it. Everyone knew that Daddy’d paid to have it covered up. The only people he was keeping secrets from were his own family. Everyone else knew.”
“But not Eugene,” I said slowly, the anger rising up inside of me. “No one ever told Eugene. Your father and Philip were terrified of what it might do to him if he learned the whole story. So Eugene didn’t know until the night of the party. I bet you just couldn’t wait to tell him, could you?”
“I was still very angry about it,” Lydia replied defensively. “When I’m angry I get emotional—it’s just the way I am.”
“So emotional that you never stopped to consider the impact it would have on Eugene. He’s never been able to handle things, has he? The trauma of your mother’s death left him unable to speak for nearly a year when he was a child. After Jimmy died, he got into all sorts of trouble— drinking and drugs. And then there was that unfortunate business about Zebediah Hooker. Poor man. A friend of mine paid a call on him today. What a sad story. All those years and he’s still a vegetable.” I turned to face Eugene. “I wonder how it made you feel when you realized that you’d done that to him just because he repeated what everyone else had been saying—when he repeated the truth about Grace Swinton. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t kill your father. Or Philip. Why didn’t you kill them right then?”
“It wasn’t like that!” Eugene protested in a voice that was close to a scream. “I put it in the Lord’s hands. I prayed for guidance.”
“And the Lord didn’t tell you to forgive them?” I demanded.
“An eye for an eye,” answered Eugene. “The Lord exacts a price. Jimmy was the most important person in the world to me. He told me to take Peaches from my father the way my father took Jimmy from me!”
“Oh God! Eugene!” Lydia gasped, horrified.
Eugene leaped to his feet. I braced myself for impact, but he rushed past me and ran from the room.
“Elliott!” I screamed, turning to race after him, but I wasn’t fast enough. He made a mad dash for the bathroom and slammed the door in my face.
I heard the sound of running water.
“Eugene!” I shouted. “Come out of there now!” I beat my fists against the door as Elliott came running. We heard the sound of something heavy falling—the crash of bone against porcelain. Elliott pushed me out of the way and kicked down the door.
We found him on the floor. He was writhing in pain, his body rocked by a seizure, his head banging sickeningly against the base of the sink.
“Help me get him out of here!” commanded Elliott, bending to grip his shoulders.
I grabbed his legs and staggered backward under the impact of their disjointed kicking. Together we dragged him out into the hall. Lydia and Philip stood by like terrified children. Elliott ordered them to phone for an ambulance, but we both knew that it would never come in time. We had both seen the container of white powder on the sink in the bathroom—the odorless, tasteless powder that looked as harmless as laundry detergent.
I’m sure that Elliott had seen worse in Vietnam. He bent to the task without hesitation. Unflinching, he stuck his fingers down Eugene’s throat to make him vomit. That done, he cleared his airway, stuck a washcloth in his mouth to keep him from biting through his own tongue while he seized. Together we tried to hold him down to keep him from hurting himself as he lay thrashing on the floor.
Philip came back to report that the ambulance was on its way from Bainbridge, nearly thirty miles away. From the other room we could hear the ragged sound of Lydia’s hysterical sobbing.
It was all over in a few minutes.
Wordless, Elliott helped me to my feet. I don’t remember what I felt; a lot of things I suppose; anger, pity, grief.... But mostly what I remember is the overpowering relief that the killing would be over.
* * *
We stayed only long enough to make our statements to the police. I’d had a bellyful of the Cavanaughs. All I wanted was to get as far away from them as I could. I practically threw myself into Elliott’s rental car, shivering despite the heat, desperate to get away.
We made the drive to Bainbridge in silence; neither of us felt much like talking. After all, what was there to say? Eugene had sent perfume laced with poison to his father’s wife. He meant to wound him with her loss the way he’d been wounded by Jimmy’s. An eye for an eye. I had no idea how he’d managed to live with himself once he realized he’d poisoned Dagny instead. Perhaps, seeing his father in his grief, he figured he’d come close enough. I really didn’t care. I had no interest in analyzing the finer points of tragedy.
When we got back to Elliott’s hotel we went back to his room so that he could call Joe Blades. I stood mutely by the door and listened as he explained what Eugene had done. That finished, he came to where I stood.
Without a word, he took me into his arms. I feared that I was lost. My own need completely overwhelmed me. In a world that had recently seemed so scrambled, tainted by tragedy and loss, Elliott’s mouth, his strong hands against my skin, seemed to feed a deep and insistent hunger.
I forced myself to be free of him, to put my hand against his cheek and tell him I must go. In his embrace I knew I’d stepped up to a line that, once crossed, could only lead down a tangled path. Looking back, I realize that I ran from him the same way I’d wanted to run from the Cavanaughs.
From the pay phone in the lobby, I telephoned Stephen to tell him that I loved the apartment and couldn’t wait to move in.
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was literally foaming at the mouth as Philip and Eugen bundled her out the door.”
“Wow.”
“So now you understand why Jack thinks that Lydia started this business about selling her shares in
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Bitter Business Page 28
