The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “I’ll bring you a plate from the kitchen,” Caren said, as they approached the front door, which was always unlocked during business hours. There was no separate entrance for the upstairs living quarters, but up until now safety hadn’t been much of an issue. Tourists never made it back this far, only Danny and his laptop. She had a sudden vexing thought about his gate key, his freedom to come and go as he pleased.

  “You have homework?” she asked her daughter.

  “I already did it.” Caren glanced at her daughter’s backpack, aware that it was likely filled with library books and magazines instead of textbooks, plus the cookies she saved from her lunch tray at school. Morgan was a straight-A student and therefore allowed a lot of leeway on the subject of academics. Still, Caren always swore she would never raise a child who lies.

  “All of it?” she said.

  “Yep.”

  Morgan pushed in the front door with her elbow.

  Caren slid out of her muddy ropers before crossing the threshold.

  Inside, the front parlor was dark, waning sunlight casting dusty gray shadows about the room. She turned on a floor lamp, then crossed to each of the room’s front windows, closing the velvet drapes. “I want you to stay inside tonight, Morgan.”

  She was rifling through the drawers of an antique writing table.

  She seemed to remember there being a spare key inside. “Letty’s not here, and there’s an event in the main house, and I want to know exactly where you are.”

  The key, she realized, wasn’t there.

  “Can I watch TV?” Morgan said.

  There were two doors off the main parlor, on opposite sides of the room. To the right was the doorway that led to Belle Vie’s Hall of Records, a room the size of a walk-in closet, lined with storage cabinets and bookshelves. To the left was a closed door leading to the first floor of their apartment. There was a small kitchenette when you first walked in, next to a narrow, poorly carpeted stairway that led to four rooms upstairs: a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a small living area. It was not wired for cable and the “TV” was really a desktop computer on which Morgan downloaded programs she heard girls talking about at school. She was not allowed a Facebook page, and there was a parent-protection lock on the computer, a program that had taken Caren all of one afternoon and into the next to install on her own. She was a single mother out here, leaning on Letty and any other help she could get to raise her girl as best she could. “ ’Cakes,” she said. “I want you to tell me if you hear about things going on around here. Bo and Nikki Hubbard, they’re not supposed to be going into the cottages, no matter what they were in there doing.” She stopped there rather than get into any specifics about what all she thought they were doing. “If you hear of somebody breaking the rules, I want you to tell your mother about it, okay?”

  “Uh-huh,” Morgan said, in a way that suggested she had no intention of ever doing any such thing. She had no playmates out here, no kids her own age; all the students from her grade school lived miles away, in Laurel Springs. Instead of friends, Morgan had the staff: a cook, two gardeners, and a cast of slaves. And she spent nearly every moment out of her mother’s sight in their company, preferred it most days.

  Caren walked into the kitchen.

  She didn’t find the spare key in any of the drawers in there either.

  But by then her mind was made up. “I’m going to lock that door, Morgan.”

  In the parlor, Morgan was leaning her rump against one of the leather armchairs, fingering a line of brass tacks on the chair’s left arm and following her mother’s movements with her eyes. “I’ll have my cell phone with me,” Caren said, picking up her daughter’s backpack from the floor and setting it on the chair. “You can call me if you need anything, and I’ll have Gerald stay with you until I come back.”

  She unhooked her key ring from the belt loop on her jeans.

  The library’s key was sandwiched between the one for her aging Volvo and the small, round-tipped brass key that used to open the front door of their place in Lakeview, one half of a Victorian duplex, a building that didn’t even exist anymore. Four years had passed, and she still couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. There were twenty or so work keys on her ring: the short brass one for the main house; the color-coded keys to the cottages, Manette and Le Roy; plus the dull silver one that opened the groundskeeper’s shed. She paused over this one . . . the key to Luis’s shed. Inside, she knew, there was a cabinet that housed a 12-gauge shotgun and a .32-caliber six-shooter, a weapon small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of her hand. They’d only ever been used for killing snakes or wood rats in Lorraine’s vegetable garden—shotgun or pistol, depending on Luis’s mood, or the size of the creature in his sights. Caren was the only one with a key to the cabinet—the shortest on her key ring, the one with the tiny diamond-shaped head. This was the first time, in all the years she’d worked here, that she’d thought to go into that cabinet on her own, without a word to anyone else. It was the first time at Belle Vie she’d felt the need to have a gun on hand.

  She turned toward her daughter. “Why don’t you come with me tonight?” she said, already running the calculations in her head, how she could do her job and watch her daughter at the same time. Surely, the night’s hosts wouldn’t mind a nine-year-old girl tucked in some quiet corner of the ballroom, a book in her lap. Morgan lifted her legs off the ground, letting her soft, pudgy body fall into the center of the armchair. She sank down into the cracked leather, pulling her scuffed knees under her chin. She looked distracted, worried about something. “Why isn’t Donovan here?” she said.

  “I don’t know, ’Cakes.”

  Then she repeated her earlier idea. “Why don’t you stay with me in the main house tonight? Or you could sit and watch Lorraine in the kitchen,” she said.

  But Morgan was surprisingly uninterested.

  She shook her head. “I’m tired, Mom.”

  Caren kissed the top of her daughter’s hair, which smelled of wet grass and thick, late-day clouds, the salted sweat of recess. She couldn’t believe that come December Morgan would be ten years old. She could still remember whole afternoons when Morgan wouldn’t leave her mother’s lap. She kissed her again, inhaling everything. It was Morgan who pulled away first. She yawned, sinking further into the leather chair, laying her head across the armrest. “I’ll have Gerald stay tonight,” Caren said. “And I’ll be back to take a shower and bring you some dinner.” Morgan nodded. It was a quarter to four when Caren closed the door, her only child on the other side.

  The Belle Vie Players had left for the day, all but Shauna and Dell, who would each earn an hourly wage for staying on as “greeters” for the night and part of the set dressing—which, at $10.75 an hour for standing around in tattered calico and a head scarf, was not a bad way to make some extra cash. Dell Blanchett, in her late forties, had a second job at an outlet mall off I-10 and a mountain of debt from a second marriage. Shauna was in her twenties and, as far as Caren could tell, spent most of her money on a leased Lexus LS, black with tinted windows. She was a cute girl, young and stylish, managing, even, to pull off the antebellum look, the apron and floor-length rags that made up her slave costume. Both women were in the kitchen by the main house when Caren came in, just minutes before the final walk-through. They were crowded at Lorraine’s card table, eating an early dinner along with three of the cater-waiters who were on duty tonight, one of whom was talking on his cell phone. The air in the kitchen was clouded with the smoke of fried bacon and the sizzle of sautéing greens. Caren’s eyes watered, and her stomach turned over with hunger. Pearl was standing on her crate at the stove, hovering over a big, dented drum of a pot, stirring creamed potatoes. Lorraine was leaning against the open back doorway, sharing a smoke with Danny Olmsted.

  “How are we doing in here, Lorraine?” Caren asked, feeling encouraged by the bustle of culinary activity in the kitchen. “The
client’s going to be here soon. I assume we’re pretty close?” Lorraine didn’t address her directly. Instead, she blew out a long, coiling stream of cigarette smoke and glanced at her assistant. “Pearl?”

  Pearl squinted through the steam. “Yeah, all right,” she muttered.

  “Great,” Caren said, her manner full of forced cheer for the troops.

  In truth, the sheer effort required to remain upright at the end of this long day was making her sweat. She felt a cold line of it running down the center of her back.

  At the rear door, Lorraine blew cigarette smoke through her lips, waving the air in front of her face. She offered a drag to Danny, but he turned it down, biting at the white meat of his thumb. He was still in his trench coat, even though the air in the kitchen was warm and sticky. He’d had his eyes on Caren since she walked in.

  “So what’d the cops say?” he asked.

  “They’ll be back tomorrow,” she said, not wanting to get into any of it right now, not with the hired waitstaff present.

  “And there’s been no word from Donovan?”

  “No.”

  The room was exquisitely, almost achingly, quiet, with only the sound of the gas range, the hum and hiss of heat coming from the stove. The staff was tight-lipped, just as they’d been this morning in the schoolhouse. Caren looked back and forth between Danny and Lorraine, Dell and Shauna and Pearl, all of them quiet as church mice.

  “Look, if you guys know where he is, you should tell me now,” she said. “Trust me, the longer he waits to talk to the cops, the more trouble he’s making for himself.”

  Danny cleared his throat.

  “He’s not returning any of our calls,” he said.

  Shauna nodded in agreement, brushing her long, black hair off her shoulders. She, like the others, seemed concerned, but none of them as much as Danny. He looked downright disturbed, his pallor that of skim milk, and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stop gnawing at the flesh around his fingernails, tearing at himself like a dog working a bone.

  “The detectives just want to talk to him,” Caren said, trying to sound reassuring.

  Lorraine tossed her smoke through the back doorway. “Talk to him about what?” she said. “Donovan ain’t have nothing to do with them Mexicans back there.”

  “Oh, hush, Lorraine,” Dell said, fanning herself with a paper plate. She lifted and pushed the folds of her prairie skirt up above her knees, courting a breeze down there. One of the waiters, a white kid in his twenties wearing suspenders and black dress pants, his shirt still undone, looked back and forth between Dell and Lorraine.

  “Hey, what are you guys talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Shauna mumbled. She and Dell seemed to regard this as a family matter and not a subject for open discussion, and Caren felt an unexpected surge of affection for both of them. Shauna stood and dumped her leftovers in a gray trash bin. Caren reminded her and Dell that she would need them in position by five. She told both women to keep an eye on each other tonight, no wandering around the grounds. “Not tonight,” she said firmly. After dark, she wanted everyone to stay in pairs.

  She started for the door and then stopped.

  She turned back to Danny and asked about his key.

  “The police detectives have informed me that all but essential personnel need to turn over their keys.” It was a lie, of course, and she didn’t know why she said it.

  Danny stared at her for a moment, then looked at Lorraine, who raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He patted the front of his trench coat, felt inside its pockets and the pockets of his trousers, coming up with nothing. “Sorry,” he said. “I must not have it on me.” And that’s how they left it. She turned and walked out of the kitchen.

  The walk-through went off without incident. Lorraine was on her best behavior in the kitchen, “yes, ma’am”ing Ms. Quinlan to death, but also letting her have a taste of her mushroom soup and plying her with an early glass of homemade rum, made from molasses and caramel. Caren knew the drink’s power, its buttered sweetness, the way it made your tongue go numb. It was her mother’s signature drink, a cocktail and tonic all in one. Caren was allowed exactly one swallow on cold mornings, mornings her mother would sit with the heat on in the car while she finished getting dressed for school, so Caren’s toes wouldn’t go cold. Helen would smoke cigarette after cigarette, waiting, blowing smoke through windows cracked open a fraction of an inch, and sometimes she would grow sleepy and let Caren drive, all the way into town, even though she was only fifteen. “Oh, ’Cakes,” her mother would say. “You got my life in your little hands either way, behind that wheel or not.” Something Caren never fully understood until she’d given birth, until her mother was already gone, and she had a girl of her own.

  She tried to make it once, her mother’s homemade rum.

  It was during those months when they had stopped talking, when Caren was living in New Orleans—a disastrous event that ended in tears, Eric cleaning up the sticky mess while she sat on the kitchen floor. They were still in that ground-floor apartment in Carrollton back then, Eric and Caren, him out on the front porch most nights, studying and drinking cold beer while she made dinner. He was still in law school at Tulane, while she was bringing home pilfered produce and day-old bread from her shifts at the hotel, where she’d worked since dropping out of law school the year before. This was back when they were still thinking they’d get married someday.

  At the start of the official inspection, Caren escorted Ms. Quinlan to the main house, making sure to walk her around to the entrance by the rose garden instead of using an unadorned side door. Patricia Quinlan was a middle-aged woman with a secretary’s hips. Her hair was limp and her shoes were cheap, the fake leather peeling at the heel of her pumps. Caren pictured her at a desk all day, under fluorescent lights, vacation photos from Gulfport or Biloxi taped to the walls of her cubicle. She was, like so many others, charmed by the breadth and the beauty of Belle Vie, which photographed handsomely but showed its best face in person. Caren walked her across the circle drive, fine gravel crunching underfoot, where an antique carriage—all polished wood and maple-colored leather—was parked theatrically a few yards from the big house.

  Then . . . she swung open the doors to the house, stepping back to reveal a vista that extended from the parquet floors of the foyer to the curved staircase and all the way into the dining hall, where round-top tables draped in cream linens were set with silver and centerpieces of roses and freesia. Nights like this, in early fall or temperate spring, they often left the “back” door open, broadening the view to include the aged live oaks on the north lawn. Their thick, purposeful arms reached out, meeting over the length of a natural alley, carpeted by green grass and framing, at this hour, a sunset horizon over the Mississippi. Ms. Quinlan gasped, a small, sharp sound of astonishment. She touched her fingers to her plump, flushed cheeks. She was bowled over, and maybe just the teeniest bit drunk. “Well,” she said. “Mr. Schuyler will be very, very pleased.”

  Upstairs, Miguel was waiting in Caren’s office.

  She’d actually forgotten she’d called him to a meeting and had no idea how long he’d been sitting here. He was still in his work clothes, belted khakis and a T-shirt, both of which were stained with potting soil and grass and rings of sweat. He looked up when she entered the room, and, at first, his expression was hopeful. She had a fleeting thought to tell him, Never mind. Go home, and she’d see him tomorrow. But for all she knew the cops had already passed news of his immigration status to Raymond Clancy, and she’d lose her job for not taking action. She knew she didn’t have a choice.

  This is what her life had become.

  She was management now.

  Miguel was perched on the edge of his chair, clutching a worn ball cap, resting the sole of one work boot against the instep of the other, his hooded, hazel-colored eyes tracing her movements across the room. By the time Caren took
a seat at her desk, leaning forward just so, he seemed to understand where this was headed.

  “Lo siento,” she said.

  Miguel lowered his head, shaking it slowly in disbelief. He was rolling the bill of his cap between his rough and callused hands. “I like you, Miguel, I do,” she said. “And you’ve done very well here. Pero si estás aquí illegally . . . no hay nada que puedo hacer.”

  He held up a single finger, nicked and cut by garden tools. “Una semana más,” he said. Then, in near-perfect English, he pleaded with her, “One more week, miss.”

  “I can’t.”

  He was still holding his finger aloft. On his left ring finger she spotted a slim band of gold. It shone brilliantly against the dust and dirt of his fingers. Either she had never noticed it before or it was brand-new. Caren felt her throat close. She stared down at her desktop, the purchase orders and accounts receivable, the letters and numbers blurring as she felt her eyes mist over. He stared at her for what seemed an eternity, waiting for his fate to change. “I can’t,” she said. Finally, Miguel lowered his head, replacing the cap over his black, greasy hair. He stood and walked out of the room. She followed the sound of his boots all the way down the stairs until the sound was gone and she was alone. The radio was still playing from this morning, those empty moments before the frantic summons from Luis, when she was still working at her desk—and her biggest problem was Donovan Isaacs. She reached into her jeans pocket for her cell phone, logging into her voice mail to replay his last message.