Bitter Business

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