The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “Okay.”

  “What grade are you in, Morgan?”

  “Fifth.”

  “So that makes you, what, about ten?”

  “Nine.”

  “That’s right, your mom said that.”

  He wrote this down, too.

  “And you live here with your mother?”

  Morgan nodded.

  “Well, I assume she’s told you . . . there’s been an ‘incident’ here.”

  “Someone died.”

  “That’s right,” Lang said. “Someone did something very bad, Morgan, and my partner and I are here to find out what happened.”

  “And put someone in jail.”

  Lang looked over in Caren’s direction. “She’s sharp, this one.”

  Caren glanced at her watch. She would need them to move this along if she was going to be ready for a walk-through with Schuyler’s assistant at four. The waitstaff, hired out from a catering company in Baton Rouge, was due to arrive any minute now.

  Detective Bertrand stepped away to take a phone call.

  “Okay, Morgan,” Lang said, continuing. “Can you tell me if, in the last couple of days, you’ve seen any strangers around the plantation?”

  “There are strangers here every day,” she said. “It’s basically a museum.”

  Lang smiled, more tightly this time, his expression pinched by the reminder, from a preteen girl, no less, of the challenges inherent in this case. “Maybe a better way to put it is to ask whether or not you’ve seen or heard anything out of the ordinary in the past few days.” He was, without even realizing it, clicking the top of his ink pen up and down, up and down. The rhythm was catching. It set Caren’s nerves on edge.

  “Like, out of the ordinary . . . how?”

  “Well, you tell me. What comes to mind?”

  At first, Morgan hesitated, stealing a look at her mother. Then, she tested the room, starting with something small. “Well,” she said, “Pearl found a stray cat in the parking lot, and she’s been feeding it leftovers from the kitchen, and when Lorraine found out she got really mad ’cause she said it was just throwing good food away.”

  “Okay, Morgan,” Lang said patiently. “What else?”

  “Nikki and Bo Johnston were kissing in the Manette house.”

  Caren turned to her daughter. “Who told you that?”

  Morgan seemed to relish this telling of plantation gossip.

  “Oh, and Donovan quit school,” she said.

  A few feet away, Bertrand nodded to get his partner’s attention.

  “Nes,” he said, waving his cell phone in the air for emphasis. “We’ve got a preliminary from Dr. Allard, and that gal from the state lab is on her way down.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Lang said.

  To Morgan, he asked, “Where did you hear that? About Donovan?”

  This was news to Caren as well. “Morgan?”

  Morgan looked from her mother to the two police detectives.

  They were all staring at her, waiting. It was clear that something, though Morgan seemed uncertain as to what, hinged on her answer. For the first time, she looked nervous about the police interview, the big men in suits, and the questions.

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “No,” Caren said before Lang had a chance to. She wanted her daughter to tell the truth.

  Lang nodded. “It’s okay, Morgan,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Danny told Eddie Knoxville.”

  “When?” Caren asked.

  “Yesterday. They were smoking cigarettes behind the kitchen.”

  “Okay,” Lang said, making a note on the nearly empty top sheet of his pad, listing one of the few details he’d gathered from this interview. “Now, your mom tells us your bedroom is above the library. I need to know if you heard anything last night, some sound or something out of the ordinary that might have woken you up.”

  “You mean like the wind shaking, spooky stuff like that?”

  “She’s heard ghost stories,” Caren volunteered.

  “Something particular to last night, Morgan,” Lang said. “Did you hear anything last night?”

  “Just the rain.”

  “Before the rainstorm, Morgan,” Lang said, wanting to clarify. “Sometime between midnight and two in the morning . . .” It was their best guess as to a timeline, Caren knew, of when the woman was killed. They’d asked her the same question during her second interview late this morning. They’d gone over this point several times, Lang circling around it, like a seagull hunting for something in the sand. Morgan was in bed by nine, she’d said. Caren had checked her e-mail and was asleep herself by ten-thirty.

  “Did you hear anything about that time last night?”

  Morgan shrugged. “Like what?”

  “Strange voices, arguing, something like that?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “What about screams?”

  Morgan shook her head.

  Lang closed his notepad. “Okay, then.”

  From the seat of a nearby folding chair, which was serving as a makeshift desk, he lifted a thin sheet of sketch paper. On one side was a pencil drawing, the smudged lines of which suggested an image made in haste. The mouth was closed, and the eyes had been brightened by the artist’s rendering . . . but it was her all right, the woman from the grave. Her eyes were small, set close to the bridge of a thin, pointed nose, and there were soft, feathered lines around her eyes. There was a single star-shaped earring in her left earlobe. She was young, much younger than Caren, in her twenties maybe.

  “You seen this woman before?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  Lang looked at Caren next. She shook her head. “No.”

  “Okay, then.” He stood, still holding the picture.

  Detective Bertrand was waiting just inside the doorway to the schoolhouse, texting on his cell phone. Lang held out his right hand to Morgan, who seemed unsure of what to make of the gesture from a grown man, a cop no less. She gingerly shook his hand, barely making contact. “You be sure to let your mom know if you think of anything else.” Then he nodded to Caren, motioning her into a private conference, out of her daughter’s earshot. She patted Morgan’s leg before standing to follow him, wanting her daughter to know that she did well. Caren was glad this part of it was over. She crossed the old schoolhouse, the heels of her boots sinking on the loose boards of the plank floor. The building had originally been used as a chapel: a house of worship for the master’s family and a temporary sanctum for any traveling preachers wandering through the parish. It earned its current name sometime after the Civil War when the Freedmen’s Bureau ran a school for ex-slaves, during the years when the federal government held brief ownership of the land. Colored schoolteachers, earnest, mostly unmarried women devoted to uplift and a life of learning, came south in droves. There was a pretty schoolteacher at Belle Vie in those days, a Miss Nadine something or other, as Caren’s mother had often told the tale. Next to the kitchen, Helen Gray loved the old schoolhouse best of all. Men had learned to read in this room. Men like Jason. Using their laps for a desktop, they practiced their letters, struggling with a whole new set of tools. Nadine taught them to make the marks that make the letters that make the words. It was a system, like the making of sugar from cane.

  Lang stopped near the table that held the play’s programs. He put his hands on both hips and sighed heavily. “We need to get a hold of that young man.”

  “Donovan?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve had no luck so far with the numbers you gave us.” There was a faint hint of accusation in his voice, as if he thought it was altogether possible that Caren was shielding the boy.

  “Those are the only numbers I have, his cell phone and his grandmother.”

  “Well, I imagine there are ways of get
ting him on the telephone,” Lang said, lowering his voice some. “Say, if you left a message for Mr. Isaacs about some trouble with his paycheck, I imagine he wouldn’t waste any time calling you back.”

  “The state pays his checks, not us.”

  It was a plain statement of fact, but Lang took it as an inclination toward noncooperation. “Well,” he said, “it was an idea.” He stared at her for a long while, trying to read something about her that wasn’t immediately clear to him. Caren could smell his musky cologne, mixed with the scent of stale coffee and hair grease. He was nearing sixty, she guessed, his skin a tawny Cajun hue that was hard to date.

  “Let me ask you something, ma’am,” he said. “Did you happen to know of Mr. Isaacs’s legal troubles before you hired him?” He pinched his lips together, waiting on her answer. He appeared to be rolling something over in his pocket, coins maybe.

  So that’s what this is, Caren thought.

  Donovan’s criminal record.

  She couldn’t help feeling that something had shifted in the cops’ investigation since she’d gone and returned to the plantation, that they were now circling around a specific, but as yet unstated theory. And Caren didn’t like it. No matter her personal feelings about Donovan, she didn’t think it was fair. Donovan was a lot of things, and law-abiding was not necessarily one of them. But murder was murder, a theft of a soul, requiring a depravity touched by something not of this world. Caren didn’t think Donovan had it in him. He was a simple kid, both feet planted in the material world.

  “I knew about it, yes,” she said. “It was on his application.” Not that it would have disqualified him, she might have added, not at this end of the employment pool.

  “Oh, he’s got a record all right,” Lang said, rolling and rolling those coins in his pants pocket, so that she thought she might go dizzy trying to follow the sound. “Some property crimes and misdemeanors,” he added. “But he also spent time in the parish jail down to Donaldsonville on battery charges last year.”

  She knew all of this.

  Lang lifted and replaced his slim necktie, smoothing it down along the center of his shirt. “Look, I’ll be honest here and say we’re up against it with this one. We’ve got a pretty good read on the time of death. It’s the where of this crime that’s causing us trouble. That rain came down hard last night, and as far as we can tell, washed out any trace of a workable crime scene. There’s no blood, no sign of a struggle, nowhere to start. That’s why the more information we can get from you folks about what you know or what you may have seen, the easier it’ll be for us to put this one down.” He smiled here, really selling it, his implied offer of something like a partnership, he and Caren playing for the same team. “If you could help us get a hold of Donovan—”

  “Don’t push it, Nes,” his partner said.

  Lang looked at Detective Bertrand, but said nothing.

  Then he looked again at Caren.

  “You’re Helen’s girl, right?”

  He smiled, not waiting for an answer. “It took me a minute to put it together.”

  Congratulations, she thought.

  She did not want to talk about her mother, not like this, and not with him.

  She glanced back at Morgan, who was folding the hem of her plaid skirt across the palm of her hand and kicking one of her sneakers against the edge of the stage. Caren felt tired all of a sudden, aware in every bone that her day had started at dawn. She saw that woman’s face again, those narrow, black eyes, that one, tiny star-shaped earring, the other lost along the way. She wanted to take her girl and go home.

  “She was a good woman, your mother,” Lang said. “Loyal.”

  Caren nodded vaguely.

  “Thirty-two years at Belle Vie,” he said, whistling at the breadth of it. “And Leland Clancy never had any trouble with her,” he said, glancing at Detective Bertrand, who was following this bit of the conversation with a kind of detached appreciation for his partner’s style and approach. “How long ago did she die again?” Lang said.

  “I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with your investigation?”

  “She must have missed you something awful when you went off,” the detective said. “Dillard, then two years at the law school at Tulane. You spent time out there working in a legal clinic, isn’t that right?” So Donovan’s wasn’t the only background they’d looked into, she thought. “Kind of strange, you not mentioning that fact.”

  “You asked me if I was a lawyer, and I answered the question correctly.”

  “Didn’t mention your mother working here neither.”

  “Didn’t think it was relevant.”

  “ ‘Relevant,’ ” Lang said, playing the word back to her. He glanced down at the tips of his black dress shoes, which were marred now with damp grass and dirt. He was still fiddling with the coins in his pocket. “Well, Tulane,” he said. “I sure hope you weren’t gone so long as to forget where you came from, what this land means for the Clancys, who’ve been very good to people like your mother, Ms. Gray, people like you. We’re hoping we can count on you to do the right thing here. Point of fact is, somebody killed that girl out here. Now, my gut on this deal is that we’re talking about somebody local, someone who knows the landscape out here, and who might well come back. We need all the cooperation we can get, and that includes getting a hold of Donovan.”

  “Dumped her here, you mean,” Caren said, correcting him.

  Detective Bertrand shook his head. “We considered that, ma’am.”

  “But thing is,” Lang said, “you already told us the gates were locked last night.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Every entrance, everything was locked, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means, ma’am,” Lang went on, laying out the facts as gently as possible, sensing he had not been as forthcoming as he should have been, like a doctor speaking of surgeries and pills and next steps, without ever mentioning the word cancer. The danger they were potentially in was a lot closer than she thought. “It means I don’t think we’re talking about someone getting inside these gates with a body, but someone who was trying to get out with it. That fence out there is, what, five feet?”

  “It’s four feet, ten inches,” she said flatly. She’d once had it measured for a bride who wanted a line of Douglas firs to greet her guests for a Christmas wedding.

  “And that gal out there was well over five feet tall and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds. Even a particularly strong man would have had a hard time lifting that amount of dead weight over a vertical fence, without leverage of any kind. My guess is somebody killed that girl here, on the property, and then tried to move her out. And we believe,” he said, glancing at Bertrand, “it was the fence that stopped them.”

  “Mom,” Morgan said, “can I walk over to the kitchen now?”

  “No, you stay right there.”

  Morgan slumped in her seat, rolling her eyes.

  Caren turned back to Detective Lang, feeling a flush of heat all of a sudden.

  “It’s more likely than not, ma’am, that we’re talking about a murder that happened here last night, on the grounds of Belle Vie, while you and your daughter were sleeping . . . so I would think you’d want to help us solve this in any way you can.”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  The words were a mere exhale, taking with them the last of Caren’s strength. She felt fear, of course. But also a choking dread, creeping up like floodwater, rising from her navel to her neck before she had a chance to take a second breath.

  She knew the trouble that was coming, for all of them.

  She would try to find Donovan, she said.

  “ ’Preciate that, ma’am,” Detective Bertrand said.

  “And we’ll keep Deputy Harris on duty, at least through the night.”

  “The kid in unifor
m?”

  Lang buttoned his suit jacket, even though the air in the schoolhouse had grown thick and hot, and Caren was by now sweating openly. “You couldn’t be in better hands,” he said. “And anyway, we’ll be back first thing in the morning with the search warrant.” He let those last words float in the air, hanging like smoke between them.

  5

  She told her daughter none of this, of course, as they started for home, veering together off the main path and walking through grass shaded by a grove of willow oaks. The branches were lifted, once and then again, by a stiff late-afternoon breeze. It woke the leaves, stirring them to conversation, the wind like a whisper over their heads.

  It would be dark soon.

  She’d ask Gerald to stay, put him on post right outside their front door.

  Detective Lang had made it plain. There was a killer on the loose.

  Morgan was a few feet ahead of Caren. She was humming a song her mother didn’t recognize, her overstuffed backpack hanging by a strap in her right hand, swinging and knocking against the backs of her bare knees. “I’m hungry,” she said when they were past the rose garden and the library was in sight. Their apartment was on the second floor of the building, which was made of painted brick and stone. It was without columns or a balcony, but in every other way resembled the main house, only in miniature. The black shutters on the top corner window opened to Caren’s bedroom.

  The house had been Tynan’s once, the plantation’s overseer.

  The man was seen as a hero around here, cited in all the literature of Belle Vie and in the coffee-table books sold in the gift shop, and featured heavily in the staged play The Olden Days of Belle Vie. The original owners had fled during the war, and Tynan was eventually hired by the United States government to manage the cane farm. Grant’s administration had seized Confederate land all across the South, Belle Vie included, for the purpose of establishing schools and a cash-based labor system for ex-slaves—but also keeping some of the sugar profits for itself. Tynan did well by the feds, and it was therefore a surprise to no one when the government deeded him the title to the land. In this parish, Tynan was regarded as an industrious planter who, by the good Southern values of hard work and discipline, had wrested back the land from a greedy federal government and made it something good again. He lived in this very building until the day he died, turning over the main house to his youngest daughter as a wedding gift on the eve of her marriage to a man by the name of James Clancy. The newly married Clancys had been the first occupants in the big house in nearly a decade.