Bitter Business

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