The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “So what are the cops saying?”

  “Only that it was a woman who was killed,” she said. “She was dumped along the fence line, down by the cane fields.”

  “She one of Hunt’s?”

  “It looks that way, yes.”

  “They know who did it?”

  “Right now they’re just asking a lot of questions.”

  “My God,” Raymond mumbled. “You talk to Schuyler yet?” Giles Schuyler was the host of tonight’s prepaid event and CEO of Merryvale Properties, the real estate development firm that designed the town of Laurel Springs. “Maybe we ought to think about canceling his deal tonight.”

  “The detectives seemed to suggest that we would be able to conduct business as usual,” she said, knowing on some level, even then, that nothing about Belle Vie would ever be the same. “They’d already finished the staff interviews before I left.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear,” he said, though he sounded vaguely displeased.

  “Let’s keep a lid on this as best we can, Gray,” he went on. “No reporters, hear?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is just awful. I mean, the timing couldn’t be any worse.”

  There was a coolness in his voice that caught both of them by surprise. It was callous and unkind, and Clancy immediately fell silent. There was nothing but the sound of the highway humming along beneath her car. In the rearview mirror, she saw the red truck again, only this time the sight of it bothered her. She’d seen that truck before, hadn’t she? It had been passing by, riding slowly, back and forth, on the farm road, the one right outside the gates of Belle Vie—or it was certainly one that looked just like it. It was odd, noteworthy to say the least, to see the red truck now, trailing behind her on the highway, never more than a single car-length away. She couldn’t make out details about the driver, only that it was a man, a sun visor shielding the better part of his face.

  Raymond cleared his throat then, searching out a more sober tone. “Listen, Gray,” he said. “I’d just as soon not have Daddy know a thing about this, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, though she thought that went without saying.

  She hadn’t spoken to Leland Clancy in years, not since she was first hired for the job in 2005. Already well into retirement by then, he used to drive down from his house in Baker for lunch a few times a week. Lorraine would make him a hot plate—chicken and gravy or crawfish with red beans and rice or sometimes just pea soup and biscuits. And after, Leland would sit with a book under one of the old oak trees, his long legs stretched out toward the river. Or some days he would take a nap in the library. He was newly widowed then and alone a lot during the day, and he seemed to appreciate the company he found at Belle Vie, where someone was “always home,” as he put it. He took a particular liking to Morgan, plying her with peanut butter candies, which seemed to stream in an endless supply from the pockets of his patched cardigan sweaters, which he wore year-round, and sometimes he read storybooks to her in the rose garden. He asked after Helen from time to time, forgetting she was gone.

  Caren liked Leland, always had.

  It often pained her to ask him to please move from his post on the front lawn so they could set up chairs for an outdoor wedding reception or request that he not park in the spots reserved for school buses and chartered vans. He always did as he was told, thanking her for the job she was doing. But his demeanor struck her as lonely and displaced; he could spend whole afternoons wandering the grounds of his property, as if he were searching for something he’d lost. He’d inherited Belle Vie from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, a long line of ownership that went back to Clancy’s ancestor William P. Tynan, who acquired the land after the Civil War. Leland raised his own family there for a while, until his growing law practice in Baton Rouge required them to move. The family eventually settled into a four-bedroom split-level ranch just north of the capital, and Belle Vie became his wife’s pet project, in time lovingly restored to its original antebellum glory, and eventually becoming a state showpiece—a long way from the overgrown land, weather-beaten and forgotten, that had been Leland’s boyhood home. Though the Clancys were beloved in Ascension Parish for what they had done, making the land available to the public and preserving the history for posterity (not to mention the scholarships they had endowed, the money they poured into local, and mostly black, schools), he once confessed to Caren that he wished he’d never bothered with any of it, turning Belle Vie into an events venue and tourist stop. He was eighty now and in failing health, and once a month Lorraine carried a plate up to his house in Baker, as Caren’s mother had done, in the years when Lorraine was her number two.

  Caren had made the trip with her mom only once before, when she was barely a teenager. Twelve years old, she’d ridden in the front seat of her mother’s white Pontiac, finally working up the nerve to ask her mother something painfully delicate. She knew Helen didn’t like her spending so much time with Bobby Clancy, didn’t like the way he sometimes looked at her, lingering sideways glances that hadn’t escaped Raymond’s attention either, even though she and Bobby were both just kids, more brother and sister than anything. And once that last thought took hold, Caren locked on to it and wouldn’t let it go. It was an answer, maybe, an explanation for the life that kept them both pinned in place, tethered to a plantation. Caren told herself she could accept it, her mother’s job, her devotion to Belle Vie, if she could just make sense of it. And that day, on the car ride, she asked her mother, point-blank, if Leland James Clancy was her father. Helen laughed out loud, the muscles in her neck rolling like waves, up and down. “Oh, ’Cakes,” she said. And then just as suddenly she fell into a cold, stony silence. She barely spoke to Caren for three days after that, pulling into herself. Caren had felt shamed by the incident, but also confused.

  She hadn’t seen Leland in a long time.

  Raymond was the one who signed her checks.

  “Daddy ought not have any unnecessary stress, and that’s straight from the doctor’s mouth,” he said. “This kind of thing would just mess with his head.”

  “Sure, Raymond.”

  “Bobby neither, hear?” Clancy said, and Caren found it amusing that Raymond, all these years later, still imagined she and Bobby had some special connection, when the two of them had seen each other only once in four years, a brief encounter in town that had been awkward and somewhat strained. “Let’s keep him out of this, too. There’s a whole lot in this world my brother doesn’t hardly understand, and he’s liable to take something like this personal, somebody leaving that gal out there like that. He still calls the plantation home.” Caren nodded, though she suspected Raymond was working himself up for nothing. Until very recently, Bobby had stayed out of Ascension Parish, even skipping out on a seventy-sixth birthday party Lorraine had arranged for his father. “You let me break the news to him,” Raymond said.

  “Sure.”

  She glanced again at her rearview mirror.

  The red pickup truck was gone.

  A few minutes later, she got a second call on her cell phone, just as she was exiting State Highway 1 for the decorative gates of the town of Laurel Springs. It was Mr. Schuyler’s assistant, Patricia Quinlan, informing Caren that she would be arriving at least one hour before the guests, to make sure there were no more surprises.

  “Have they removed—”

  “The coroner took the body late this morning, yes,” Caren said.

  On the other end of the phone, Ms. Quinlan sighed heavily. “Well, Mr. Schuyler would greatly prefer if the news of this morning’s incident did not reach our guests.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good, then,” Ms. Quinlan said. “I’ll see you at four.”

  The kids were already pouring out of the elementary school when Caren pulled into the circle drive in front, into the crush of SUVs and minivans. The three schools, for grades pre-
K through twelve, were a mile past the Unitarian church. The campus spanned both sides of Main Street, with a raised walkway bridging the elementary school to the other buildings, all of which were done up in a vaguely neocolonial style, with lots of red brick and black shutters and eaves trimmed in white. The girls wore smock dresses of navy and green plaid. The boys were instructed to wear khaki pants. Otherwise, their tops were to be all white, polos or cotton button-downs only.

  Morgan was one of twenty black students in the lower school, which made her easy enough to spot in the crowd. She was sitting cross-legged on top of her backpack, set a few feet back from the curb, and she was reading a library book. She looked up once, scanning the line of cars in the circle drive, only to go right back to reading her book. She was, Caren knew, expecting Letty’s van. Caren honked her horn, even though that was generally frowned upon by the school’s staff. Morgan looked up again. She saw Caren this time, and smiled widely. She started to gather her things. By the time Caren reached the end of the curved driveway, Morgan was already waiting at the curb, her navy backpack over her shoulder. “Where’s Letty?” she asked.

  “Artie’s sick.”

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, an almost comic expression of skepticism on a nine-year-old. “She didn’t say anything to me about it.” She was standing at the open passenger window. She still hadn’t made a move to get into the car. Behind them, the line of waiting cars had grown even longer. “Just get in, Morgan, and we’ll talk about it, okay?” Caren said. This only served to confirm her daughter’s suspicion that something else was behind her unscheduled appearance at the school. Up ahead, the traffic guard was looking in their direction, waving the Volvo forward.

  “Get in, Morgan.”

  “Did you get my ticket?” Morgan said, changing the subject.

  Caren didn’t want to have this conversation right now.

  “Get in the car,” she said.

  Morgan pouted openly. She climbed into the backseat, tossing her backpack across the floor, and didn’t speak again until they were ten miles outside of Laurel Springs. She kept her eyes glued to the passing landscape, lined with bookstores and gun shops and roadside stands selling oysters on ice, which eventually gave way to naked Louisiana swampland, as they rode shotgun alongside the river. Morgan put a finger on the cool glass of her window, lifting it every few seconds to see the patch of heat and sweat left behind, then pressing down again.

  “You promised,” is all she said.

  Caren glanced at her daughter’s face in the rearview mirror.

  Morgan was still carrying some of her baby fat, which softened what would otherwise be duplicates of Caren’s own sharp features, the L-shaped jawline and cheeks like two wide conch shells beneath the skin, the heart-shaped hairline passed down from her mother. It used to embarrass Caren, how much they looked alike, as if she’d huddled alone in a dark room and sculpted the child from her own flesh. It seemed greedy, like she was taking more than her fair share. These days, Caren wore her hair long, tightly pulled and pomaded into a cottony ponytail or a single chignon-like braid on event nights. Morgan, on the other hand, had demanded to wear her hair short for as long as Caren could remember, even attempting to cut it herself when she was only four years old. Even then she seemed to sense that where a line couldn’t be drawn between them, only heartache and trouble would follow. In that way, she was a lot smarter than her mother, Caren thought. Now, at nearly ten, Morgan wore her curls in a short, floppy ’fro, pushed back by a headband—but she’d also been trying a myriad of different styles, pin curls one week, a flatiron the next, long afternoons spent in front of the bathroom mirror. Caren loved her desperately. To date, theirs was the most enduring relationship of her life, and one she was determined not to fuck up. This job, this life way the hell out in the country, it was all for Morgan, she told herself daily.

  Morgan saw it differently.

  She was presently in the early stages of a growing resentment about their living arrangements, especially the distance from her father. She would sometimes go days without talking, often alarming her teachers and the few school friends she’d made. The school’s staff sent home notes, worried over her shy and withdrawn nature. But Caren knew better. Morgan could be quite charming when she wanted to be, winsome even, when she wanted someone’s attention. At Belle Vie, that usually meant Lorraine, but especially Donovan. She had probably seen The Olden Days of Belle Vie at least fifty times, and Donovan’s part she could recite by heart, from start to weepy finish. Caren had long suspected that Morgan was developing something of a schoolgirl crush on Donovan—harmless but for the fact that it further signaled the limits of her maternal influence. She had dreams in those days of following her daughter through an endless series of rooms, round and round short corridors, walking in a tight, coiling circle.

  “ ’Cakes,” she said.

  They were almost to Modeste, and she was running out of time.

  “I need to talk to you about something, okay? Something important.”

  Morgan was busy tracing her finger along the rear window’s glass. She didn’t even look at her mother. “There’s been an incident at Belle Vie,” Caren said, because she couldn’t immediately think of another way to put it. “Someone’s been hurt badly.”

  In the rearview mirror, she caught her daughter’s eye.

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody died.”

  In the backseat, Morgan was silent a moment. “Oh,” she said finally.

  “There’ll be police officers there when we get home,” Caren said, making an effort to keep her tone even and flat. She didn’t want to scare her, but she needed her daughter to understand how serious this was. “They’re going to want to talk to you.”

  In the mirror, their eyes met again.

  “I want you to know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, no one thinks you did anything wrong. They’re talking to everyone at Belle Vie, and because you live there, they want to talk to you, too. It’s going to help them understand what happened. And I’ll be with you the whole time.”

  “Who died?”

  “It’s no one you know. Everyone at Belle Vie is fine.”

  Morgan didn’t say anything. She twirled her index finger on the smudged glass, moss-covered cedars along the highway casting shape-shifting shadows across her face, like dark clouds passing over, then breaking wide again. “I have to prep for an event tonight,” Caren said. “But after that we can talk about your plane ticket, okay?”

  “My dad said he would pay for it.”

  “I know. We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  A car shot around them on the two-lane road, passing at eighty miles an hour, at least. It raced ahead of them, growing smaller in the distance. Caren couldn’t read the license plate number, determine the make or model. But it was a red pickup truck, she was sure.

  4

  In the time it took her to drive to Laurel Springs and back, the detectives had turned the old schoolhouse into a base of operations. They were each on their cell phones when she and Morgan entered, Morgan with her backpack in her hands, pressed against her chest. Some of the chairs had been rearranged, and Lorraine had sent over coffee on a room-service tray meant for the guest cottages. Caren put an arm around her daughter and waited for one of the detectives to notice them. The bigger cop, Detective Jimmy Bertrand, was off the phone first. He told them to have a seat. Caren reached for Morgan’s hand, holding tightly as Morgan pressed herself into Caren’s side. They chose two seats near the raised platform where the play was performed. By then, Detective Lang was off his phone as well. He joined them near the stage. He smiled at Morgan and asked if she’d like something to drink, water or juice, though Caren wasn’t sure just where he thought that was going to come from. There were no vending machines at Belle Vie, and it was a ten-minute walk to Lorr
aine’s kitchen. Morgan shook her head; Caren could feel a damp heat radiating from her small, round body. Lang opened a clean page in his notebook, then looked again at Morgan. “So,” he said, starting with the barest of facts. “Morgan Gray?”

  “It’s Ellis,” she said, correcting him. “Morgan Ellis.”

  Lang looked briefly at Caren, but she offered no clarification on this point.

  This interview was merely an act of courtesy, a show of good faith.

  Lang looked at Morgan again and smiled. “I’m Detective Nestor Lang, Morgan, and this is my partner, Detective Bertrand.” Morgan looked back and forth between the two men. Bertrand was on his feet, a hand on his waist. Caren could see a patch of sweat growing in the pits of his dress shirt while he sucked down a cup of black coffee. Detective Lang had meanwhile pulled a chair in front of Morgan. “We just want to ask you a few questions,” he said to her. “This shouldn’t take too long at all.”