Bitter Business

going back and forth about Philip covering something up for their father—something that happened around the time their oldest brother died.”
    “What brother is that?”
    “His name was Jimmy. He drowned more than thirty years ago trying to rescue a girl who was trying to kill herself. The whole thing happened down in Georgia, where the Cavanaughs have a place. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with this; Lydia was just dragging out everything she could think of. But don’t you see? From the very beginning, these murders haven’t made any sense because nobody seems to have gained anything from them. We’ve always been thinking that because it was poison, it was a rational act, a planned crime, not a crime of passion. But think about it—the day of the party emotions in the Cavanaugh family went off the Richter scale. Dagny was furious at Lydia for forcing her to postpone the board meeting until she came back from Georgia and then didn’t even bother to pay attention to what was going on. Lydia was rabid about the necklace, and Peaches, no doubt, was horrified by the scene her stepdaughter had caused at what should have been a lovely party. Lydia then turned around and savagely attacked her brother. The whole day was filled with nothing but hatred. It can’t be coincidence that the very next day someone bought a bottle of expensive perfume, laced it with poison, and sent it off to Peaches. It just can’t be!”
    “But what about the poison?”
    “They all had access. They were all there when Philip showed them what the Fluorad could do. Really the only one who would have had even the smallest problem would have been Lydia, who didn’t as a rule come into the plant. But she could have stopped by and asked to borrow someone’s keys—she could have come up with some kind of excuse—and no one would have given it a second thought.”
    “But what was her motive?”
    “Malice. Hatred. According to Dagny’s daughter, Claire, Lydia went on and on that night about how much she hated her father. She’d just come back from Georgia, where she’d been trying to unearth evidence that she’d been assaulted as a child. Who knows? Maybe she had been. It would explain her desire to strike back at her father. Maybe she just decided that the best way to hurt him would be to kill Peaches—take away his last happiness as an old man. She also went through a real sick period right after Jack and Peaches were married; they caught her making nuisance calls to her father’s house in the middle of the night. Also she changed her appearance to look like Peaches. Maybe this is all part of the same thing?”
    “And you said Lydia had just come back from Georgia?”
    “Yes. The day of the party.”
    “May I use your phone?”
    “Sure. Why?”
    “Your mentioning Georgia just made me think of something.”
    “What?”
    “You know that Joe got the phone records for the Cavanaughs for the three months before the murders. He pulled records on all five houses on Astor—Jack’s and all four of his kids.”
    “And?”
    “And the night of the party there was a fifty-two-minute call from Lydia’s house to a rural exchange in Thomas County, Georgia.”
     

32
     
    Driving like a maniac, I managed to get Elliott to the airport just in time to catch the last plane to Tallahassee. He would rent a car at the airport and drive to Bainbridge first thing in the morning. That was the name of the little town where the woman the Cavanaughs called Nursey lived.
    I was certain that whatever happened the day of Dagny’s party for her father and Peaches was central to understanding why and by whose hand two women lost their lives. No one calls an old woman who lives in the country at nearly midnight to chat, and yet the phone records showed that Lydia had placed a call that lasted close to an hour to Nursey’s number on the night of the party. Elliott had sternly warned me not to get my hopes up, but I was convinced that Nursey held the key.
    Pulling up to the curb in front of the Delta terminal, I handed Elliott copies of the bank records for the annuity that Jack Cavanaugh still paid to his old housekeeper. I figured that questions about the account would be enough to get him through the door. From there he’d have to improvise. I thought it shouldn’t be too hard to get a lonely old woman to talk about the people she’d worked for all those years.
    As an afterthought, I dug into my briefcase for a copy of the Zebediah