Bitter Business

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