“Yes, she did. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I was wondering if you knew what was behind Dagny’s decision to name her brother Eugene executor of her estate?”
“As you say, he was her brother,” Kurlander replied, playing coy.
“I know. But I’d have thought that Philip would be the more obvious brother to choose. After all, we’re talking about managing a considerable number of assets, not the least of which are the shares in Superior Plating. Assuming that Dagny believed it likely that she would survive her father, Philip is the only other family member that has the financial skills for the job. And if I know you, Ken, you laid that out pretty straight with her. So the question remains—why didn’t she choose Philip?”
“Eugene’s wife, Vy, took care of Claire from the time she was an infant so that Dagny could go back to work. Claire is exactly the same age as Vy and Eugene’s oldest daughter, Mary Beth. From what I gather, the two girls are almost like sisters. In Dagny’s mind there was never any question that Eugene and Vy would be named Claire’s guardians.”
“I understand,” I replied, wondering whether Kurlander was being deliberately obtuse. “That’s not what’s bothering me. Let me put it another way. Dagny Cavanaugh was the chief financial officer of a large manufacturing company. In short, exactly the sort of person you’d expect to be a very savvy testamentary planner. So why did she leave control over her only daughter’s financial future to the least educated, and arguably least capable member of her family? Why not give guardianship to Eugene and Vy, but name Philip executor?”
“Dagny and I did discuss that possibility at length, but in the end she decided against it.”
“Was she afraid that there would be friction between Eugene and Philip over what was best for Claire?”
“There is always that danger when one person has the authority to make decisions about matters of travel and education and someone else controls the money, but that wasn’t the overriding concern.”
“What was?”
Kurlander clasped his hands together and leaned forward across the polished surface of his desk. “Dagny did not want her brother Philip to control that many shares of Superior Plating stock, even temporarily,” he breathed confidentially. “She was afraid that if her father died and left his shares divided among his four children, and then she passed away before Claire turned eighteen, Philip would have effective control of fifty percent of the shares if he were Claire’s trustee.”
“And she felt that would make him too powerful in the company?”
“She feared that Philip would make any kind of deal he could with either of the surviving siblings in order to gain complete control of the company—even if it meant not acting in Claire’s best interest.”
I thanked Ken for his time and walked slowly back to my own office. The Medicis, I reflected, did not live in a world more filled with intrigue.
15
It was an awkward group that gathered in the passenger lounge of the executive terminal at Midway Airport. Earlier in the day Jack and Peaches had taken the Superior Plating jet to accompany Dagny’s body to Tall Pines. Jack had chartered a plane to take the rest of the family down, and confronted with the Cavanaughs en masse, I was sorry I wasn’t flying alone on some anonymous, commercial flight.
Philip’s wife, Sally, acted as self-appointed hostess, making introductions and filling me in on the details of the travel arrangements. We were, she pointedly explained, still waiting for Lydia and her family. From her tone of voice it was clear that waiting for Lydia was something at which the rest of the Cavanaugh clan had a great deal of practice.
Sally Cavanaugh was everything that Elliott had said— a stem, large-knuckled woman with parade-ground posture and disciplined hair. Looking at her, I couldn’t decide which was more incredible—that Philip had waited until meeting Cecilia Dobson to seek the comforts of another woman, or that he’d gotten up the courage to do it at all. He actually seemed careful when he was near her, the way you would be around a large, bad-tempered dog.
I had not seen Eugene since those few moments right after Dagny died. He still seemed pulled taut by grief, and my heart went out to him. He paced restlessly along the perimeter of the waiting area, a pair of hunting dogs slavishly at his heels. Eugene’s wife, Vy, a girlish woman with long brown hair and a simple cotton dress, sat quietly in the background, surrounded by her children. I counted six—from the oldest, Mary Beth, who was Claire’s age, all the way down to a little boy, still in diapers, who toddled happily between his father, the dogs, and the rest of his family, a toy truck clutched in each chubby fist. Between Vy and Mary Beth sat Claire. The three women seemed ill with grief.
When Lydia finally arrived it was like the circus pulling into town. Three taxis drew onto the tarmac outside the gate. Arthur emerged from the first as soon as it came to a stop, sauntered disinterestedly into the waiting area, and wordlessly pulled a cellular phone from his pocket and began dialing.
Lydia was left to supervise the unloading of what looked like enough paraphernalia for a yearlong cruise—strollers, car seats, boxes of diapers, duffel bags, tricycles, and one of every piece of luggage made by Louis Vuitton. Two-year-old twins seemed to escape from one of the taxis, their faces smeared with chocolate, and were pursued by their harried au pair. Peter brought up the rear, sullen and wretched. Vy made room for him beside his cousins—a heart-wrenching reunion of the Mount McKinley Expedition.
Lydia made her entrance preceded by three hyperactive shih tzus, whose barking escalated to a frenzy at the sight of Eugene’s dogs. The pointers, who had turned to assert their domination over the newcomers, dropped to the floor at a single word from Eugene. In the meantime Lydia’s dogs ran in circles around each other, threatening to hang themselves on their leashes.
By the time we all finally boarded the Jet Stream, it was packed to the bursting point. In the air, the twins seemed intent on occupying every minute of the flight running up and down the aisle with their grimy hands and runny noses, alternately taunting their exasperated relatives and their mother’s yappy little dogs. By the time we touched down in Tallahassee, we were all scrambling over each other to get off the plane.
Three identical minivans had been sent to pick us up. Lydia’s family took the first one while Vy and Eugene loaded their well-mannered brood and Claire into the second. I rode with Philip, Sally, and Lydia’s overflow baggage.
Up until this point my entire experience of the South had consisted of trips to my grandmother’s house in Palm Beach and one wild, sketchily recollected road trip to the Kentucky Derby with three friends during college. I found myself completely unprepared for how beautiful it was. After the eternity of the Chicago winter and the indifference of the Chicago spring, the warm Florida air was like a fragrant blessing. I rolled down the window of the van and drank it in.
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 a
nd 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.”
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