Bitter Business

smudged and faded; handwritten notes from Jack’s father, who was as uneducated as he was tough. I flipped through the oldest boxes just to say, if challenged, that I’d done it. The nitty-gritty of actually inventorying the contents I’d leave to Cheryl. Once she was done with this term’s exams, I’d have her come in over the weekend. I knew she’d be grateful for the overtime.
    It wasn’t until I came to the pile of things that Madeline had turned up in Daniel’s office that my task got interesting. The material fell into two categories: private documents that fit into no neat category in a corporate file, and memorabilia. In the former category were the records that made up the kind of client’s dirty laundry that every lawyer accumulates over the years: personal-loan documents between Jack Cavanaugh and his children—Dagny seemed to have been the only one who’d never had to go to her dad for money; a document setting up something called the Zebediah Hooker trust to the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, signed by Jack Cavanaugh and witnessed by Daniel Babbage more than twenty-five years ago; even a copy of Jack and Peaches’s prenuptial agreement, surprising in that it had obviously been drafted to protect her assets from Jack and his children, not the other way around. I also came across a file jammed with bank records, including a set that appeared to pertain to the payment of some sort of ongoing annuity through a Georgia bank. I put it with the old trust agreement with a note to ask Madeline about them later.
    The cardboard box that held memorabilia was the most interesting of the lot. There were old photographs, some of them black-and-white and crumbling with age. They were all of Daniel Babbage with various members of the Cavanaugh clan. There was a young Jack Cavanaugh, his hair a sandy brown and his brow less wrinkled, but with the same bulldog expression, his arm flung around Daniel’s much-younger shoulders. There was Daniel in hunting attire, shouldering a twelve-gauge shotgun and surrounded by teenaged Cavanaugh boys. I recognized the barn at Tall Pines in the background and the unformed features of Philip and Eugene. Eugene was gazing adoringly at a tall youngster with broad shoulders and a winning smile who I assumed was Jimmy Cavanaugh, the older brother who’d died trying to rescue Grace Swinton from drowning. I tried to guess from the picture how old they all were and decided that Jimmy couldn’t have been more than fifteen, which would have meant the photo was taken about a year before the tragedy.
    There were more recent photos as well. Snapshots of Daniel shaking hands with Eugene in military uniform. Yellowing thank-you notes written in a child’s shaking hand, speaking of gratitude for a birthday gift and signed by Mary Beth, Eugene’s oldest. More recently there was a copy of an article about Peaches clipped from the newspaper, under the headline TV REPORTER STALKED BY DERANGED FAN, and another follow-up piece detailing the arrest of a west-side food-service worker who’d broken into Peaches’s north-side apartment claiming to be her estranged husband. I read it with interest, but it seemed like tabloid stuff.
    I found a photograph of Dagny and Claire, both still in climbing harness, standing arm in arm in jubilation at the summit of some mountain, and a copy of an engraved invitation to the party celebrating Jack and Peaches’s first wedding anniversary. No doubt to help Daniel overcome his well-known aversion to parties, Dagny had written on the front of the invitation in her bold hand: It just won’t be the same without you!
    I sat looking at the invitation for a long time, seeing a kind of epitaph in her words. Finally, I set the card upright against the base of my desk lamp, propped the photograph of Dagny and Claire beside it, and forced myself to move on to another file.
     

27
     
    Lydia refused to come to my office, so I had to go to hers. The new offices of the Illinois Foundation for Women were in a building on Wacker Drive where the Chicago River bends south just opposite the Merchandise Mart. They were still in the process of moving into their new space, so our conversation was punctuated by painters walking through with ladders and telephone installers asking questions about where Lydia wanted the lines put in. But I suspected that Lydia could not wait to show off her new digs—currently in the process of being painted an alarming shade of salmon, in