The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

A year earlier, she and Eric had worked their very first case together, a simple battery charge that Professor Kazari let them take a crack at, leaving them alone in his office. Eric took one look at the file photos—the victim a white woman who’d been jacked by a lead pipe, both her eyes swollen shut, and the defendant, smug and indifferent in his booking photo, his black hair braided on one side and flying loose on the other—and announced he was going into politics, public policy maybe. Criminal law just wasn’t his thing. He did his work, though, was too much of a gentleman to let it all fall on Caren. He transcribed police interviews, watched hours of security-camera footage from a liquor store on the corner of Lombard and St. Anthony. And he made sure all of their paperwork was filed on time. But it was Caren who spoke at the arraignment; she was the only one the defendant trusted; and she was the one who, during a long cross-examination at trial, put the victim at a bar in the French Quarter from the hours of two o’clock in the afternoon until midnight the day of her assault. She was quite drunk, Caren got on record, and unable to walk straight by the time she made it to the liquor store on Lombard, picking up a nightcap on her way home. Their client, the defendant, had offered her a hand when she’d stumbled off the curb, had even offered to call her a cab. But he was not the man who assaulted her, was in fact already a block away, on Sumpter, when the assault occurred. The woman had simply made a mistake. Caren liked the work, being inside a court of law. She liked the order of it, the hope implied, that we might get something right in this lifetime. At the defense table, Eric leaned in and whispered in her ear, “You just saved that kid’s life.”

  She hadn’t seen him in nearly a year, not since she’d left school.

  He stopped in the middle of the bar, saw her, and smiled.

  “Caren Gray,” he said. “I was wondering where the hell you went.”

  She smiled.

  It meant something that he’d thought of her, that he’d noticed she was gone. But she was not otherwise enthusiastic about the encounter, or the need to explain her life, her job in a hotel bar—not with two of her ex-classmates nudging each other, eyeing the cheap blazer she was wearing, the name tag on the lapel. She quickly sat them at her best table, the one across from the piano, with a view of the wharf. And she set them up with a bottle of Brunello, on her. Then she turned and walked through the kitchen to her small office and shut the door, hiding out until she thought they were gone.

  Eric found her anyway.

  About a quarter to closing, he knocked on her office door.

  He was in jeans and a thin, cotton sweater. He’d gone home and changed clothes, and then come all the way back, he said. He wanted a chance to see her one last time. Caren sat behind her desk, fiddling with a paper clip, bending and twisting the silver metal, turning it over and over in her palm. She didn’t want him to leave. She didn’t want him to leave her behind. But she couldn’t get the words out.

  “Hey,” he finally said. “You want to get out of here?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  It turned out they had the same taste in music and a low tolerance for the French Quarter. Eric found the tourists loud and tedious, and Caren was a single woman who’d learned to avoid it out of a concern for basic safety. That night, they went to a blues club in the Seventh Ward, a dive joint that let you bring your own liquor, charging $1.50 for a setup—a plastic cup of ice and 7-Up or Coca-Cola, whichever you wanted. They sat close to each other in the dark, smoky bar, Eric resting one knee between hers, so that their thighs were touching. He cracked roasted peanuts in his hands, carefully peeling the skins before offering some to her. They drank a lot, beer and whiskey, and talked for hours—about school, Eric’s family in Chicago, and what she wanted to do with herself, why she’d walked out on law school. Eric took her job at the bar as a lark, a break from the pressures of middle-class expectations, like the time he’d cut out of undergrad for a year to work at a fish cannery in Oregon, a summer job that he’d held on to for months, living out of a duffel bag. It was always understood that he would come back, that he would finish school. Eric’s family background was not unlike her father’s. He came from a long line of doctors, had two brothers who were professors, one at Loyola and the other at the University of Chicago. She didn’t point out their differences, didn’t tell him who she really was, a cook’s kid from rural Louisiana who was lucky to have made it this far. She didn’t tell him she’d run out of money, that even with student aid she couldn’t pay her tuition, couldn’t eat and pay rent at the same time. She couldn’t stay in school without a job—and a job, a real one, meant she couldn’t study, which meant she couldn’t keep up her grades, or her scholarship. It was an impossible dance, one she’d been tripping over for most of her time in law school, ever since she’d stopped taking money from her mother, ever since they’d had their big falling-out. She didn’t tell Eric any of this, the messy details.

  Instead, she looked across the sticky vinyl tabletop and lied.

  “I guess it just wasn’t my thing,” she said about law school.

  Eric fell curiously silent, staring at her.

  Then he said dryly, “Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’d still very much like to have sex with you.” He was teasing her, of course, knocking his knee playfully against hers under the table, letting her know that he didn’t, in this moment, care a whit about law school, or anything outside of this room. She wasn’t laughing, though. Instead, she asked him what he was waiting for. And Eric leaned across the table and kissed her.

  They were at his apartment within the hour.

  It was a tiny flat near Tulane’s campus, just one room and a kitchen, a place much smaller than hers. Eric’s bed was the centerpiece of the room and the thing on both their minds. She undressed him first, her fingertips grazing his warm, dry skin. He moaned like a wounded man, a man coming undone. He put her on her back and held her hand all the way through to the end. She was dizzy after. Her skin was on fire, and on her bottom lip she tasted blood. Eric buried his head in her neck. The union needed no more preamble than this. They were Eric and Caren at once. He thought she was smart and capable, he said. He told her he loved her after only a few weeks of dating. She thought him unconscionably beautiful, a deeply moral man with a sense of humor. They got a place together, not far from school. Eric still had a few months before graduation. He studied at night while she read books—short stories mostly, or business texts, the kind people leave behind in hotel bars. Or she would help him with his class outlines, criminal law still a sticking point for him. He liked to lay his head across her lap while she read his messy handwriting, making notes of her own in the margins.

  It seemed to both of them that marriage was next. They talked about it quite a bit, in fact, often playfully disagreeing about the merits of a snowy Chicago wedding versus something reasonable, like New Orleans in the spring. She even met his family once, one cold winter when they went up to Chicago for his mother’s birthday. Caren’s mother, and the involvement of her parents in their lives, was never mentioned. There’d be time to explain, she thought. Neither one of them was in any particular rush. Eric had school, after all. And, anyway, Caren believed she had found, in Eric, her real family, and that nothing would ever change that. She was happy to wait.

  12

  Caren woke to the sound of crying in the fields.

  She pulled herself up out of bed, stumbling toward it.

  In the walking haze of her dream, they were right outside her front door, the swaying fields. She stepped barefoot into a jungle of sugarcane, the pointed tips of their leaves scratching the sides of her face. It was cold, the light pearl gray and brand-new. Daybreak meant work, and work meant faces in the fields, men handling cane. And somewhere in this maze, someone was hurt. There were moans, then a low whimper, coming from the south, maybe only a few feet in the distance, if only she knew which way to turn. The ground suddenly softened. Caren felt her toes sink in. She looked dow
n and saw blood, a stream of it that cut the earth and curved like a scythe to the right.

  She thought of Jason then, the blood and the mystery surrounding his disappearance. She worried what she would find here in the fields. She reached out and parted the cane . . . and then held her breath.

  It was Helen on the ground, her mother. She was holding the torn and bloody body of Inés Avalo, had laid the small woman gingerly across her lap. She was covered in it, whatever had happened to the dead woman. There was blood on her mother’s hands, on her clothes, down the front of her blue-and-white apron, and she was hollering for Caren to run back, to turn around and run and get somebody to help this girl. Caren heard the words, but she couldn’t move. She hadn’t seen her mother in years, and she was too scared to walk away, to miss her last chance. “I’m sorry,” she said to her mom, feeling sick with grief, hot, salty tears pooling in the back of her throat.

  Helen hushed her and told her to run back. “Hurry!”

  Caren shook her head. She wouldn’t leave her.

  “Mom,” she heard, in a voice that sounded small and not her own.

  She heard it again, more urgent this time. “Mom!”

  Caren woke in the dark to see someone standing over her. She didn’t know what time it was, only that it had to be past midnight. The room was cold and dark, the curtains drawn. Morgan was standing at the foot of the bed, arms stiff at her sides.

  “What is it, ’Cakes?”

  “I heard something.”

  Caren reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. “What?”

  Her head was foggy from the wine and she didn’t immediately understand what was happening. “I heard somebody walking outside my window,” Morgan said.

  Caren quickly threw off the covers.

  Morgan followed behind her as she walked across the hall to the other bedroom. She snapped open the curtains, her breath fogging the glass, and stared into the darkness. The library, by design, had a two-foot-wide path around its periphery, filled with the same fine gravel that lined the circle drive behind the main house. If someone or something was moving around out there, Morgan could have easily heard it from her bedroom window, which faced out toward the river. “Are you sure?” Caren said, thinking that maybe Morgan had been woken by the scuffle of a raccoon or a rat scooting around on the ground below. No, the girl said, this wasn’t an animal.

  “Someone was walking around outside.”

  Caren closed the curtains and said, “Come on.” Half-dressed, she started down the stairs, Morgan behind her.

  It was possible, she thought, that Eric had stepped outside for some reason and locked himself out. Or maybe he’d gotten turned around out there in the dark. But when she opened the door to the parlor, Eric was sleeping soundly on the couch, in a T-shirt and boxers, one naked leg slipping out from under the blankets. Caren peeked out of the library’s front windows. She saw the back tires of the golf cart, which she’d left parked just outside the door. But it was all she could make out in the dark. She walked to the kitchen next and grabbed the telephone. She called 911 first . . . but she knew that the response time in this unincorporated part of the parish could be as long as twenty minutes, maybe even half an hour. So she did the only other thing she could think of, pulling Nestor Lang’s business card from the antique desk by the front door.

  A service picked up.

  They wouldn’t give her the detective’s cell phone number, but the girl on the line promised a return call in ten to fifteen minutes. Caren hung up and then went to wake Eric, gently shaking his shoulders. His eyes, once open, were bloodshot. He felt along the couch’s backrest for his glasses. He sat up, looking from Caren to his daughter.

  “What’s going on?”

  Caren checked the lock on the front door, the bolts on all the windows downstairs, and then she closed the curtains. “Morgan heard something outside.”

  “I heard someone walking below my window.”

  “What?” Eric said, sliding on his glasses.

  He reached for his shirt, his pants slung on a chair. He pulled them on, hopping on one leg at a time, his whole body still sluggish and unsteady. He looked up at Caren, his eyes red and wild. The front of his torso rose and fell with each breath. He was still trying to take in what she’d said . . . to gauge the seriousness of the situation they were in.

  “Should I go out there?”

  “I’ve already called the police. There’s nothing to do now but wait.”

  The three of them took up positions on the leather couch, Morgan sandwiched between her parents, leaning most of her weight onto her dad, burying her face against his bare arms. On the other side, Caren held her hand. They sat in the dark and listened to the wind, listening for any sign of trouble. Gerald was not on duty. Lang and Bertrand had pulled their uniformed officer late that afternoon. They were miles from their nearest neighbor or even a working streetlight. If someone was out there, roaming the grounds as a killer had done, they were, the three of them, helpless.

  Caren thought about the guns in Luis’s shed.

  She should have taken them out of there a long time ago.

  The wind brushed tree limbs against the side of the building. Morgan shivered. From outside, they heard a pft-pft-pft noise. It sounded like stones being thrown, like someone trying to break a window. Eric leaped out of his seat. Caren squeezed her daughter’s hand, praying that it was only the black walnut tree on the north side of the building, raining shells across the rooftop. Eric walked to the front window, pushed back the curtains, and stared at a wall of blackness on the other side. It was impossible to see more than a few feet past the front door. “What’s taking so long?” he said.

  The phone rang.

  It was Detective Lang.

  He was on his own, without his partner, he said, and he was waiting at the back gate . . . which meant someone had to go out there in the dark to let him in.

  “I’ll go,” Eric said.

  But they both knew he’d never find his way there and back, not in the dark.

  Caren was already grabbing for her jacket and keys.

  Morgan stood suddenly. “Mom?”

  She was shaking her head, not wanting her mother to go, twisting and twisting the hem of her nightgown in her small hands, looking back and forth between her dad and her mom. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Caren told her. “And your dad’s going to be right here.” She turned and started rummaging through the drawer of the antique writing table, feeling around pens and paper receipts and stray coins for the small Maglite she kept there. She flipped the switch on the desktop lamp, searching inside the drawer for the flashlight. She tried to think what Letty might have done with it.

  Morgan was watching her the whole time.

  Caren heard her whisper, “I know where it is.”

  She looked up as her daughter slipped through the open kitchen door. She heard her small footsteps on the stairs. A few moments later, Morgan returned, the flashlight in her hand. Apparently, it had been in her possession, for who knows how long.

  Eric said, “Are you sure about this, Caren?”

  She nodded. “Lang knows I’m coming, and I have my phone,” she said, patting her pocket. Outside, she slid into her boots. The golf cart was parked a few feet from the front door, the key still in the ignition, just as she’d left it hours earlier. Behind the wheel, she turned over the engine, looking ahead as two streams of light shot from the front grill. They revealed only the deserted main road and a swirl of gray fog.

  The cart sputtered into gear.

  She pressed her foot on the gas till she hit maximum speed.

  Then she took off for the parking lot, cutting across the grass lawn, thinking it would be faster than staying on the main road. The cart bumped against the uneven earth, its two headlamps dipping and rising, throwing unexpected shadows across the landscape.

&nb
sp; Lang was waiting by the main gate, standing in the parking lot.

  He was, even at this hour, in a suit, and Caren wondered if he’d dressed for this. He unholstered his pistol as she drove them back toward the library.

  The lights were all on, and Lang hopped out first. Caren went to unlock the front door for him . . . not fully realizing her mistake until it was too late. She’d just let a police officer investigating a homicide into her home without a search warrant. Her daughter’s soiled shirt was still hidden away upstairs, the bloodstain still outlined in gray. Before she could stop him, Eric led the cop straight to Morgan’s room.

  Upstairs, Lang parked himself within a few inches of the bureau where her daughter’s shirt lay. Morgan pointed to the window and tried to describe what she’d heard. “It was about half an hour ago, right?” Eric said, turning to Caren. She nodded, watching Lang. He was reading the room, collecting and indexing information: the call after midnight and the unexpected introduction of Morgan’s father. He took a sweeping look around, at the twin bed, the bureau, the books and clothes on the floor. Then he holstered his weapon and made a slow walk across the carpet to the bedroom’s one window. With a single finger, he parted the white curtains, glancing at the ground below. “She said it was coming from outside,” Caren said, clearing her throat. She wanted this man out of her daughter’s bedroom. “Maybe we should take a look out there.” Lang turned and looked at her, making some silent calculation. He looked back and forth between Caren and Eric. Then he looked at Morgan and smiled.

  “Let’s do that,” he said to Caren.

  Outside, Lang walked the grounds around the building, and she followed.

  There was nothing wrong, nothing out of the ordinary. There were no new footprints out here that she could see, save for her own. Lang looked up from the ground, in a straight line, to Morgan’s bedroom window. “Did you hear anything out here?” Caren shook her head no, and Lang offered to take another look inside.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said.