Bitter Business

Eugene’s been so strange since Mom died—angry and withdrawn. You heard that he sort of went crazy when my uncle Jimmy died. I think Vy’s worried having him down in Georgia. She doesn’t come out and say so, but I think she’s afraid he’ll crack up without her.”
    “I’m afraid they’ll all crack up,” I said, with more honesty than tact.
    “No they won’t, they’ll just tear each other’s hair out! You should have heard the fight they had the night of Mom’s party. Mary Beth and I were over at Peter’s house watching a movie and the yelling was so loud we couldn’t hear the TV.”
    “What were they fighting about?” Nora inquired.
    “According to what Mom told me afterward, it all started over a piece of jewelry that used to belong to my grandma. I guess Grandpa gave it to Peaches as a present and Aunt Lydia was really mad about it.”
    “That’s not that unusual,” Nora counseled. “Families fight all the time about who gets what. The thing to remember is that the jewelry, or the house, or whatever it is they’re arguing over, is not what the fight’s really about. Those arguments are always really about love and different people’s place in the family.”
    “Well, by the time they got back to Peter’s house, they were fighting about a lot more than that,” continued Claire. “I never realized how much Aunt Lydia hates Grandpa—I mean really hates him. She was screaming that he didn’t really love any of them, that he just wanted to control them—stuff like that. Lydia just went on and on, with Uncle Philip trying to calm her down. In a way it was neat to listen to, because Aunt Lydia dragged out all the dirty laundry and the three of us heard about a bunch of stuff the grown-ups never told us about—like that Grandma’s sisters wanted to take Philip and Mom and the rest of Grandpa’s kids away from him after Grandma died and all the stuff about how Uncle Jimmy really died.”
    “What about your uncle Jimmy?” I asked, thinking about the old documents that Madeline had unearthed from Daniel’s personal files.
    “I don’t know. By that time they’d stopped shouting and it got kind of hard to hear, but it sounded like Lydia was accusing Philip of knowing something that he wouldn’t tell—you know, some big secret that he was keeping for Grandpa.”
     
    Back at the office I pulled out the copy of the trust agreement that had been among the documents that Daniel had kept about the Cavanaughs. I read it through carefully. It was a straightforward document that set up a trust to pay for the care and maintenance of one Zebediah Hooker until the time of his death. Nowhere was there any mention of who Mr. Hooker might be, what he was being paid for, or where he might be found. From the notary’s seal I learned that it had been signed and witnessed in Thomas County, Georgia—a fact I didn’t find particularly enlightening.
    I still had it in my hand when Elliott Abelman appeared in my doorway. “I brought you a present,” he said. He set a small box wrapped in gold paper on the desk in front of me. “Pretty flowers,” he said, bending to smell the roses on my desk. “I guess they’re from him.”
    I didn’t say anything. Instead I went to work unwrapping the box. Inside, I found a small bottle of perfume in a red velvet box lined with white satin like a small coffin. The stopper of the bottle was made of frosted glass and shaped like a perfect rosebud. The name of the perfume was Forever.
    “Can I smell it,” I asked Elliott, “or will it kill me?”
    “There’s no poison in this one.”
    “But am I correct in assuming that this was the kind?” I asked, pulling the stopper from the bottle and giving it a sniff. Normally, I think it must have been a heavenly perfume, but for me there were too many associations. I remembered the scent distinctly and for me it would forever be linked with death.
    “This is the one.”
    Self-consciously I put my finger over the top of the bottle and turned it over to get some on my finger. I dabbed some quickly behind my ears—the same innocent gesture that had killed Cecilia Dobson and Dagny Cavanaugh.
    “What’s the occasion?” I asked lightly. “You’ve never come bearing gifts before.”
    “Jack Cavanaugh just called me up and fired me,”
    Elliott replied, Stretching his legs out in front of him. “Under the circumstances, I thought I should do something to mark the occasion.”
     

31
     
    “You’re kidding!”