The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “It’s a potential match for the wounds on her neck, yes, ma’am,” he said. “Would have been nice to have had this information in hand when we were here yesterday morning. Thought you said you did a full inspection of the property.”

  “I brought it to your attention as soon as I noticed it.”

  Then she told him, “That’s new, too.”

  She was pointing to something else odd.

  On top of the wooden table, there were globs of milky white candle wax and the burnt wicks of cheap votives. It was yet another thing she’d missed when she’d been too spooked to stick around yesterday morning, too scared to stay in the cabin alone.

  Lang noted this, too.

  The cop with the camera took a few shots.

  And then Lang glanced around the small cabin one more time, his eyes sweeping nearly every corner. He seemed puzzled. There was no blood in here, no sign of a struggle, and he was no closer to understanding where Inés Avalo was killed.

  He clicked his pen closed, tucked his pad in his suit jacket.

  He was heading to the station, he said. His officers would be on- site for at least another hour or so, combing the grounds, the open fields. Caren knew the limits of the warrant, which was signed late last night by a parish judge. She’d read it carefully this morning. The uniformed officers had arrived first. They’d gone through the schoolhouse and the employees’ greenroom. She’d led them to the main house and the guest cottages and the groundskeeper’s shed. The gift shop and the library were off limits, at least according to this warrant. They were the two buildings farthest from the grave site. She’d made that point several times during her interviews. She knew the detectives were free to return to the judge at any time, as the case progressed. The more information they gathered, the wider their scope of authority, their power to open any door. Lang was on his way to the station now, where Donovan had been taken in a cop car.

  You ain’t have to call the police, he’d said.

  Caren was still bothered by it, those strange parting words.

  9

  Staff meetings were held twice weekly, on Wednesdays and Fridays, always promptly after the 9:15 show—and the one scheduled for this morning had been on the books long before the presence of law enforcement on the property. They met in the old schoolhouse usually, but some days they would gather on the south lawn, the wide swath of shaded grass between the schoolhouse and the parking lot, if the weather held. By midmorning, it looked like rain again. The sky had clouded over, and so after the morning’s performance, Caren brought everyone together right there in the old schoolhouse, in front of the stage. Lorraine and Pearl, Val Marchand and Kimberly Reece and the other Belle Vie Players. Shep and Ennis Mabry, Dell and Shauna. And Nikki Hubbard and Bo Johnston, who were sitting next to each other in the first row of folding chairs. Eddie Knoxville was holding a plastic Saints cup, his cheeks flushed a drinker’s pink. He had his black riding boots propped on the edge of the stage, where Cornelius McCrary was sitting, his Air Jordans dangling. Luis, now the sole member of the maintenance crew, was standing solemnly near the back wall. Danny Olmsted was here, too, though he had no real reason to be. She could have made an issue of it. But Danny, for better or worse, was a part of this family, too, and she wanted to hear what he had to say. Lorraine had her arms folded across her bosom, waiting. Pearl was sucking on the stone of a peach. The only people missing were Gerald, whom she’d already given the morning off, after he’d stood watch through the night, and the high school girls who worked part-time in the gift shop. And Donovan, of course.

  She wanted to start there.

  “Any of you talk to Donovan?”

  Bo Johnston, who’d been cast as the overseer for his height and the strength implied by the broad span of his shoulders, raised a hand. “I saw his car in the parking lot this morning.” Nikki, sitting close beside him, nodded. “Me, too,” she hummed.

  There were a few curious looks around the room.

  “So where in the hell is he?” Cornelius said.

  He had an afro pick sticking out of his uncombed hair, and he was wearing too much cologne, something Caren had previously made a note of in his personnel file.

  “He’s with police detectives,” she said.

  “Oh, good lord,” Ennis said. He shook his head gravely, twisting the brim of his felt hat in his hands.

  Lorraine sucked her teeth in disgust. “I told you,” she said to the rest of them. “Didn’t I tell you?” She pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and set it between her lips, even though she knew good and well she wasn’t allowed to smoke in here.

  “Tell them what, Lorraine?” Caren said.

  “I told you they were going to try to put this on one of us,” Lorraine said, preaching to her own choir. Pearl nodded. “Yep, that’s just what you said.” She pulled the peach pit from her mouth and stowed it in her apron pocket, saving it for later.

  “No one here is a suspect,” Caren said, though she wasn’t sure she believed that. She was present during Donovan’s police interview, and they were sure treating him like a suspect. “But just so I’m clear,” she said, “none of you have talked to him?”

  There were head-shakes among the staff.

  “Huh-uh,” Cornelius said.

  Danny Olmsted cleared his throat. “I left three messages.”

  Shauna said she’d left messages as well. “I told him something was up, but he never called me back.” Between shows, she’d slid on a pair of black jeans under her slave costume to keep warm. On her feet were sheepskin-lined boots, a pair of pink Uggs.

  “Me neither,” Cornelius added. “Not a text, not a word from the dude.”

  “Since when?”

  “Saturday.”

  He looked around at the others, pushing for consensus.

  Shauna nodded. Dell, too.

  Danny Olmsted was the only one not looking Caren in the eye.

  “Saturday?” she repeated.

  Cornelius said, “Yeah.” Nikki said she’d last seen him leaving work.

  So, apparently, not a single one of them had had any contact with Donovan for days, and certainly not since that woman was killed. It was the very thing that had been bothering Caren since he’d been in her office this morning. The more she thought about it, the more the whole interview seemed peculiar to her, starting with Donovan’s demeanor. He frankly didn’t appear to be taking it all that seriously, displaying little solemnity or alarm over the policemen’s questions. He hadn’t been on the grounds the morning the body was discovered and no one had spoken to him. It was at least plausible, she thought, that Donovan didn’t even know a crime had occurred.

  “Does Donovan know what happened?”

  “You mean the dead girl?” Val said.

  “I sure hope he don’t know nothing about it,” Ennis said.

  “Aw, hell, Ennis,” Lorraine said. “You know Donovan better than that.”

  Eddie Knoxville, sipping whatever concoction he had hidden in his black-and-gold Saints mug, shrugged; he wasn’t so sure. Kimberly Reece was clutching a cup of coffee she’d somehow talked Lorraine into hand-delivering. She was as indulged and pampered as the character she played, Manette, the planter’s daughter. “I always kind of liked Donovan,” she said, sounding as if she might never see him again, as if Donovan’s presumed involvement were already a done deal. Behind her, Dell rolled her eyes.

  “Look,” Caren said, because she didn’t think it would do any good to scare them, “the detectives just want to talk to him. They just have a few questions, that’s all.”

  “Questions about the murder?” Danny asked.

  Caren stared at him for a moment. “Well, what else would they be asking about?” He opened his mouth to say something, then clamped it shut. She thought again of Donovan’s parting words in her office. You ain’t have to call the police. If Donovan didn’t kn
ow about the murder, the body of Inés Avalo on the grounds, then what did he mean by that? What other reason would she have had to call the cops?

  “Danny?” she said, waiting on an answer.

  Cornelius was eyeballing Danny, hard.

  Lorraine was shaking her head at him, slowly, back and forth.

  Caren guessed something was up. She had long known there were things they didn’t tell her, as a rule. She’d known that since she started here. They didn’t consider her one of them. Apart from Lorraine, Ennis, and Luis, they didn’t know her personal history, her upbringing as the daughter of the plantation’s cook. To them, she was management, with a capital M, the eyes and ears of Raymond Clancy. It drew a line between them, like the fence between Belle Vie and those workers in the fields. She worked in the big house now, an ascension of class and station that alienated her from everyone around her, people she worked with every day, even people like Lorraine, whom she’d grown up with, people who were, for all intents and purposes, family. They didn’t trust her, any more than Donovan had in her office. They didn’t believe her when she said, “If you know something about Donovan, something to do with this investigation, I promise it’ll be better for you, and for him, if you speak up now.”

  Danny didn’t say anything more.

  Ennis and Lorraine exchanged looks, but they too were awfully quiet.

  Pearl let out a low, rolling whistle.

  “Fine, then,” Caren said.

  “Something wrong, Miss C?”

  She looked down at her clipboard, shuffling papers back and forth. She didn’t want them to know how it cut, the way it seemed they didn’t really see her. Besides her relationship with her daughter, Morgan, some days Caren felt totally alone out here.

  “We’ll run the eleven-o’clock show on schedule,” she said, sticking to her talking points, the meeting’s agenda. “Ennis, are you still okay taking over Donovan’s part?”

  Ennis stood, pressing his felt hat against his breastbone. In a god-awful dialect, something right out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he ducked his head and repeated a few lines of Donovan’s big speech near the end of the play. “Dem Yankee whites can’t make me leave dis here land. Dis here mah home. Freedom weren’t meant nothing without Belle Vie.”

  Eddie Knoxville cracked a smile.

  Nikki Hubbard snickered. She nudged Shep, sitting to her left, who, Caren realized, had been asleep this whole time. “That’s fine, Ennis,” she said. She glanced at her clipboard, scanning the week’s schedule. “Lorraine, I’ll need you to prepare a tasting menu tomorrow for the Whitman wedding. They want to finalize the food as soon as possible. And, Luis, they’ll probably want a look at the cottages, since I believe they’re planning to have the bridesmaids and the groomsmen dress and wait in there before the guests arrive for the ceremony.” She tried to catch his eye. “So if you could just take a second to look at the grounds out there and replace any wilted flowers and clip the hedges.” Luis nodded, still looking somber, and Caren felt another wave of guilt about firing Miguel. “Gracias,” she said, wishing at once she’d said it in English.

  “Okay, then,” she said to the others. “We’ll try to stay on schedule as best we can. Mr. Clancy was very clear that we should go about our business as usual.”

  “Hmph.”

  “You have something you want to say, Lorraine?”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “Well, of course, he’s upset that someone died,” Caren added charitably.

  “What about the sale?” Val asked.

  “What sale?”

  Val shot Lorraine a look.

  Eddie, too. “Go on,” he said. “Tell her.”

  “Tell me what?” Caren said, looking around the room.

  “So you ain’t heard, then?”

  “Heard what?”

  Lorraine smirked, drawing it out.

  Pearl shot up a hand. “Clancy’s going to sell the plantation.”

  Lorraine glared at her line cook, irritated at having been robbed of her chance to impart this big news, to Caren especially, who was frankly stunned by what she’d heard. She didn’t say anything right away. She couldn’t, really. She grew so still and quiet that she could count each breath in the back of her throat. When she finally spoke, her voice came out thin and dry. “Where did you hear this, Lorraine?”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Dell said.

  “Oh, it’s something going on, baby.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lorraine sighed, gracefully moving her heavy weight as she walked across the schoolhouse toward Caren, lowering her voice, selling the conspiratorial nature of what she was about to say. “I was out to Leland’s place this morning, up in Baker, and Raymond come by to see his daddy. He had papers on him, a lot of papers. And he wanted Leland to sign. Bobby also called over to the house, twice, only Raymond wouldn’t put him on the phone, hushing the day nurses and pushing them out of Mr. Leland’s room. I was in the kitchen mostly, but I swear I heard them talking about selling Belle Vie. Raymond was trying to get his daddy to agree to it.”

  “You know anything about this, Miss C?” Ennis said.

  Caren swallowed and said, “No, I haven’t heard anything like that.”

  She couldn’t imagine it was true. She could hardly imagine a world without Belle Vie, the way she’d always known it, with the Clancys and Luis and Lorraine, the kitchen where she’d spent her childhood. It had always been the same, even and especially in the year Caren had returned, waiting for her when she needed a place to stay and a way to start over. She thought of her mother, too. She couldn’t help it. The last time she’d seen Helen was here, at Belle Vie, an argument that began and ended in the stone kitchen.

  Val leaned back, folding her long, manicured fingers around a bony knee. Like the delicate Madame Duquesne, the character she played, she had a kind of timeless beauty, pale skin and red lips, all of it well preserved. “Well, I’d sell it,” she said, waving away the disapproving looks popping up across the room. “This is riverfront property here, prime real estate, and worth a hell of a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, but what about us?”

  “I’ve been here going on eight years,” Ennis said. “What am I supposed to do if all this is just up and gone? I’m near sixty-four. I can’t make it on no Social Security.”

  “It’s a mistake,” Danny said, shaking his head.

  “Sure it’s a mistake,” Lorraine said.

  Nikki was running her fingers through a chunk of processed hair, holding it out in front of her eyes, checking for split ends. Her red-and-black Donaldsonville High School letterman’s jacket (CLASS OF ’06) was draped across her shoulders. She and Shauna, Bo, and Eddie Knoxville had, so far, remained pointedly silent on the topic.

  “I mean, if Raymond Clancy is serious about this, then he’s making a huge mistake,” Danny said. “This is a piece of history of major significance. It’s been preserved almost better than any like it in the state, or in the country for that matter.”

  “He can’t just close it down like a Holiday Inn, a rent-a-hall, or something,” Lorraine said.

  “It’s his property, he can do whatever he wants with it,” Dell said sourly.

  “Danny’s right, though,” Lorraine said. “This is history.”

  Here, Shauna spoke softly. “I never knew even half of this stuff before I started working here . . . the way the slaves worked the fields, cutting all that cane by hand. I never really seen it up close like this, not before I got a job here. The way they lived and stuff, people like us. I mean, black folks really did something here. There wouldn’t have been no sugar hardly anywhere if it weren’t for what we did out here.”

  “That’s why this don’t make any sense,” Ennis said. “It ain’t like the Clancys to just up and sell all of a sudden. They’ve always been good about keepi
ng all this open, keeping the history for the kids. You know, so people don’t ever forget.”

  “It ain’t like Leland Clancy,” Lorraine corrected. “But this is all Raymond, and that one don’t give a shit about nobody and nothing that don’t line his pants pockets.”

  “I know the university would love to get its hands on some of the research materials housed here,” Danny said, scratching at his chin. “It would be a real score.”

  “I bet it’s Merryvale Properties, Giles Schuyler’s group,” Val said, still playing the game of real estate speculator. A onetime agent herself, she got out of the business the previous year when the market imploded and several properties she was planning to flip were put in foreclosure by out-of-state banks. “He and Clancy are friends, you know. I bet he’s going to turn the whole thing over for development, another one of those high-end subdivisions.” She was already allowing herself to get excited about the idea.

  Bo Johnston shrugged. “That might not be so bad.”

  “That’s some good construction work,” Eddie Knoxville added, even though he was way too old, and too drunk, to do anybody any good on a construction site.

  “Aw, hell,” Cornelius said, scratching at his ’fro. “We ain’t getting no construction jobs in this parish. Ain’t no contractor gon’ pay us fifteen an hour if he can pay some Mexican nine, hell, eight an hour, you feel me? Shit, we’d be lucky to work security out there, lucky to get a gig mowing lawns or some shit. No offense, Luis.”

  Luis, in his grass-stained khakis, hooked his thumbs in his pockets.

  He hadn’t said a single word during the entire staff meeting.

  Caren looked over at Lorraine and told her there was no way Raymond Clancy would sell something that had been in his family for generations, going all the way back to the years after the Civil War, not without saying something to her about it. She found it unbelievable that Raymond would keep something like this from her, the general manager and the only person living on the place—to say nothing of her own personal history here. Members of her family had worked at Belle Vie, in one capacity or another, for as long as the Clancys had owned the plantation, longer even. She’d known Raymond her whole life. Her mother had cooked his every meal for most of his childhood.