The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  Again, Caren made no promises.

  She had no contact information for Hunt Abrams, no cell phone or direct line, only a regional office number for the Groveland Corporation that was actually answered by a secretary at their headquarters in California. Getting in touch with the man meant a long walk into the fields. Abrams had certainly never expressed an inclination toward cooperation or neighborly consideration when it came to the aesthetic needs of Belle Vie’s well-heeled clients. But she at least had to say she tried.

  The back five hundred acres of the Clancy family property, and the whole of Groveland’s cane farm, formed an L-shape around the south and west sides of the plantation, around the fence that secured Belle Vie. She drove her car along the farm road, toward the southernmost corner of the farm, where she knew there lay a short, dirt road that led into the fields. She would have to walk the rest of the way to Hunt’s trailer on foot. She parked her Volvo and stepped out of the car, halting before a curious sight: there, along the side of the farm road, was a series of jagged holes in the ground where the earth had been pulled out in wide chunks, the ground hacked away by a shovel. There were a few wood posts strewn in the dirt, as if at one time a fence were being built here. It was an unsightly mess, a project abandoned and forgotten.

  Abrams’s trailer was a double-wide, stone gray and completely unadorned. It sat sandwiched between two uncut fields. The sign outside read: GROVELAND FARMS. Caren knocked on the door’s metal frame and waited, listening to the mechanical cutters in the distance, the gassy chug-chug of their engines. She knocked a second time, this time pulling back the screen door. When her knuckles hit the surface of the plywood door, it popped from its frame and swung open. The trailer was unlocked.

  “Hello?”

  She stepped inside the stuffy room.

  At first glance she spotted a television, but no computer. On the floor were a pillow and a sleeping bag, but no filing cabinets or fax machine, nothing that said this was a place of business. There was a coffeemaker atop a spare, uncluttered desk, and a cash box with a heavy, metal padlock. The trailer looked more like the hideaway of some illegal, cash operation rather than an outpost of a national corporation. Apart from a few cardboard boxes stacked with production reports, graphs, and charts, and a wall calendar, there was no evidence of anything that resembled a working office—no payroll cards or time sheets that Caren could see, no proof on paper that Groveland’s workers even existed. In fact, she had to search for a pad and a pen just to leave Abrams a note, asking him to please contact her regarding the Whitman wedding. She was bent over and poking around, looking, when a line of clouds rolled past the trailer’s one skylight, brightening the room. Something on the floor caught a wink of the sun’s light. It was wedged between the flat carpet and the leg of Abrams’s desk, a tiny thing, casting a glitter of light. Curious, Caren reached down to pick it up, not realizing until she had it in the palm of her hand exactly what it was she’d found: a single, star-shaped earring.

  The trailer’s door swung open.

  She heard it slam against the metal frame.

  She turned and saw Hunt Abrams, the top of his head almost touching the low ceiling, all six feet of him nearly hunched over in the trailer. He was wearing jeans and a black windbreaker and eyeing her with a bemused smirk. “You just stopping by to say hi?” he said. She was still holding the earring in her hand, the post cutting into the center of her palm. There was no getting rid of it now, not without Abrams knowing what she’d found in here, or making it seem like she’d come to his trailer specifically to snoop around.

  On instinct, she hid her hand in her jacket pocket, realizing, almost immediately, the mistake she’d just made. She never should have touched the thing, never should have picked it up. It was in her possession now, and not his, and there would be no way now of proving it had ever been inside this trailer or anywhere near Hunt Abrams. Would Lang and Abrams even believe her if she told them where she’d found the dead woman’s earring, now covered in Caren’s sweat and fear?

  “Might I ask what in hell you think you’re doing in here?”

  He took a step toward her. She felt the long shadow of his height creep across her chest, then up the sides of her neck, slowly enveloping her whole body. She mumbled something about the Whitman wedding, the client’s concerns about production in the fields. She was already starting toward the door. Abrams reached out a hand to stop her. He grabbed her arm roughly. “The Whitman wedding, huh?” he said. He didn’t believe a word of it. She mumbled something like, “Yes, sir,” before pushing past him and out of the trailer, flying through the fields of cane.

  Back in her office, she set the star-shaped earring on her desk.

  It was identical to the one in the picture of Inés Avalo.

  She found it odd that the cops had come through Belle Vie with a search warrant, but had apparently never thought to take a close look at the trailer of the dead woman’s employer. At her desk, she Googled the words “Groveland and California.” Then “Groveland and Florida.” Then “Abrams and Groveland and Florida.” She thought about what Lee Owens, the Times-Picayune reporter, had said last night, about Abrams having a bad way with his workers. Sitting stiffly, she watched the search results fill her computer screen. They were generic news articles about the company, its business dealings, and she skimmed through these rather quickly, not sure what exactly she was looking for. It wasn’t until the second page of search results that she thought she’d stumbled on something worthwhile, a story in the Jacksonville newspaper about a woman who’d been hurt on the job, in a citrus grove near Lake City—and the fact that there had been whispers of a DA’s investigation. The tagline told the basic story:

  LAKE CITY, FL—HUNT ABRAMS, A PROJECT MANAGER FOR THE GROVELAND CORPORATION, MET WITH LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT TODAY, TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BEATING OF ONE OF THE COMPANY’S WORKERS IN THE FIELD . . .

  Caren clicked on the link to the article. She wasn’t through the first paragraph when her desk phone rang. She ignored it at first, but it kept ringing, on and on.

  “Yes,” she said, picking up.

  It was Betty Collier, Donovan’s grandmother.

  Right off she said she’d been calling Caren’s cell phone nonstop for the past twenty minutes. The woman was beside herself with panic. But Caren no longer had her cell phone. After the strange run-in with Lee Owens last night she never found it, even after searching the whole northeast side of the property. “What’s going on?” she said.

  “I didn’t know nobody else to call or I wouldn’t bother you with it, God knows I wouldn’t, but we got to get somebody down there right now, a lawyer or somebody who can straighten this mess out.”

  “Donovan?” Caren said, catching on. “Did something happen with Donovan?”

  “Lord, if they ain’t gone and arrested him.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve got him down in lockup right now.” She was crying by this point, her voice cracked and strained. “Help me, Lord, please,” she said, calling on a power much higher than Caren. “Can you please help me get my boy out of jail?”

  Caren called Eric because, besides Raymond Clancy, he was the only lawyer she had immediate access to. He answered his cell phone, somewhere between Belle Vie and Baton Rouge. He agreed to turn around and drop Morgan with Letty. He would meet Caren in the parking lot of the sheriff’s station. “They probably won’t let you see him, but if you do get in, tell him not to say anything until I get there.” Eric had never met Donovan, and Caren couldn’t help thinking that Donovan, were he to meet Eric under different circumstances, probably wouldn’t like him very much, what with Eric’s tailored clothes and his Tulane degree and the fact that he wasn’t a Saints fan. The two men didn’t know each other, and it was clear that Eric was doing this only as a favor to her. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said. When she saw him later in the parking lot of the East Courthouse
in Gonzales, his suit softly wrinkled, she was struck by how immeasurably kind he could be. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said.

  He pulled his necktie from his pocket, sliding the ready loop over his head. “I’m just going to talk to him, get some information from the detectives,” he said, adjusting the knot at his throat, above which dark hairs were coming in on his chin. He hadn’t bothered to shave this morning, hadn’t thought the day would lead to this. “I don’t pay bar dues to the state anymore. I’m not licensed to practice here. But, hell, maybe they won’t ask. Later, I’ll make some calls, try to find him a real lawyer. If this is a murder rap, he’s going to need a criminal lawyer, Caren, not someone like me.”

  He started for the doors to the station.

  Then, he stopped suddenly. “You’re sure about this kid?”

  “Yes,” she said, even though she wasn’t.

  It was only a strong hunch she had that this case was going in a wrong direction. She waited in the parking lot while Eric went inside. She was not family or counsel and was therefore not allowed to see or speak to Donovan. Instead, she sat on the hood of her Volvo, resting her boots on the dented bumper. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Finally, she crossed to a pay phone outside the courthouse and called over to the kitchen at Belle Vie. The news about Donovan had spread, and Lorraine sounded alternately outraged and then helpless as she asked what they were doing with her Donnie. Caren related what little information she had, plus the fact that Eric was inside right now, talking to the cops. Lorraine seemed touched by Caren’s willingness to help Donovan, impressed that she’d known just who to call, telling her for the first time in four years, “I’m glad you come home, baby.”

  Standing outside the courthouse, Caren smiled to herself.

  “Thanks, Lorraine,” she said, touched.

  Lorraine promised to keep everyone there in line until she got back. This, too, made Caren smile. She hung up the line, then dropped a few more coins in the machine, checking in with Letty at the plantation’s library. Twice, she tried to get a hold of Betty Collier, but there was no answer at her house at all.

  Behind her, the doors to the courthouse opened.

  Eric came out, breathless and worked up.

  “They’re holding him on a trespassing charge.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s all bullshit,” he said, walking toward his rental car, a blush-colored sedan that didn’t suit him. “They don’t have enough to hold him on a murder charge. They’re just buying themselves some time. They’re not setting a bail hearing until they can get an arraignment judge to the courthouse and that could be as late as Monday.”

  Caren was walking a few steps behind him. “Trespassing?”

  Eric opened his driver’s-side door. “Donovan seems to be under the impression that you were the one who called the police on him.”

  “Me?”

  “He didn’t even know they were Homicide. Before I got here, he had already told them he was on the plantation after hours the night that girl was killed,” Eric said, shaking his head at Donovan’s colossal stupidity. “He told them he’d copied a key, told them he was on the plantation without permission, working on some school project.”

  “A school project?”

  “He was in there digging his own grave for hours,” he said, nodding toward the courthouse and the sheriff’s station inside. “He got scared and just started talking.”

  “Wait—Donovan said he was at Belle Vie on Wednesday night?”

  She had been emphatic, indignant even, when she assured Lang that Donovan was most certainly not on the grounds the night Inés Avalo was killed. Donovan sat right in her office and told Lang and Bertrand that he wasn’t anywhere near Belle Vie, and she had backed him up. It was one more thing likely to turn Lang against her.

  “He told the cops he was at school,” she said.

  “He swears he was at school . . . at least by the time they think that woman was killed. He admits to being on the plantation but says he left before midnight and went straight to River Valley Community College, and he says he can prove it. He is adamant that he’s never seen the Avalo woman in his life.”

  “I want to see the arrest report.”

  She wasn’t sure they could get away with a trespassing charge, not without the owners of the property making some assertion that Donovan had indeed entered without prior permission.

  “I don’t have it,” Eric said, arriving at his rental car.

  “You didn’t ask to see the cops’ report?”

  It came out rougher than she’d intended, as if she were challenging his skills, his knowledge of the very basics of criminal law. And it didn’t go over well with Eric. “Jesus, Caren, I wasn’t going to go in there asking for discovery items, and I’m not even the boy’s lawyer. I’m not licensed to practice here, and last I checked neither are you.” It was a warning to back off. Caren, stung, fell stone silent.

  Eric stuck his key in the ignition. “That kid is in a lot of fucking trouble.”

  He cranked the car’s engine.

  Across the parking lot, Caren heard another car engine start in chorus. She turned to see a late-’90s Saturn four-door, marine-blue and dented across the front end. Lee Owens was behind the wheel. The Times-Picayune reporter had been sitting in his car for the better part of half an hour, she realized, the whole time she’d been waiting in the parking lot. He was wearing the same rumpled clothes from last night, the same ball cap with the name of a jazz club stitched in gray. SWEET LORRAINE’S in New Orleans. He’d been watching the doors of the courthouse this whole time.

  Eric put his car in gear.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check at the school,” he said. “To see if he’s telling the truth about any of it. If I’m going to call in a favor for him, then I at least want to know what the hell I’m talking about.” He was about to close the driver’s-side door. “You coming?”

  She turned back to see Lee Owens leaving the parking lot. She saw the tail end of his blue Saturn pulling out onto Irma Avenue. “No,” she said to Eric, heading toward her Volvo. “I’ll meet you at Belle Vie later.” Eric nodded without asking any questions. She’d seen him this way before, calm and focused, intent on getting his mind around some complicated puzzle. He didn’t have all the wayward pieces at hand, but he seemed to grasp that something here was off. They pulled out of the parking lot at the same time, Eric turning left, and Caren heading to the right, pushing her eleven-year-old car up to fifty miles an hour, trying to catch up to Owens . . . just as the streetlight on Irma Avenue turned green. She followed him all the way out of the town of Gonzales. She wanted what Owens had, whatever secret knowledge about Hunt Abrams and Groveland’s many “problems” the reporter was holding in his possession.

  They crossed the Sunshine Bridge over the Mississippi, Highway 70, and drove straight into the town of Donaldsonville, Owens turning onto Albert Street, then again onto Lessard, just a few blocks from the town center. She lost sight of him along the way, when her car got caught behind a truck traveling with a haul from a nearby farm, its bounty hanging out on all sides. She could smell the cane, like cut grass and sweet milk, damp and terrestrial, the scent of southern Louisiana. The truck’s tailwind blew through the open windows of her car. When she finally managed to pull around, she didn’t see the reporter’s car anymore. But by then, she thought she knew where Lee Owens was headed. She gunned her engine, trying to catch up.

  15

  The Feast of St. Joseph Holy Trinity Church sat on the south side of Lessard Street. Caren remembered it from the photograph, the one Detectives Lang and Bertrand displayed in her office, the snapshot of Inés Avalo and the dark priest, she in a bright dress, those star-shaped earrings catching the sunlight. She was smiling then.

  The church was small and built of shale stone and painted wood. Its one front-faci
ng window was a high arch of colored glass set in beveled panels, displaying the image of a cross beneath a yellow sun. Caren sat quiet for a moment, staring at the color and light, the way the shifting clouds made play of the sacred scene. She didn’t see Owens’s car, not on the street or in the parking lot next to the church, which was paved with crushed oyster shells and outlined by a rusting chain-link fence, the gate of which was propped open with a loose brick. She’d lost him somewhere on the drive. He was nowhere in sight. But as she sat now, alone in her car, he almost felt like an afterthought. Strange as it seems, she felt as if the church itself had called her here.

  St. Joseph’s was not particularly pretty, but it was quaint and welcoming. The front lawn was dotted with wet, fallen leaves from a pecan tree overhead. The double doors were made of arched wood, with twin cast-iron knockers on either side. And just to the right, beside the church’s two front steps, sat a tiny, bare-limbed birch tree, its branches adorned with glass bottles of cobalt and sea green, red and ginger brown, all of them in the shape of old soda bottles. It was an unexpected sight, nestled here at the threshold of a Catholic church; it was the kind of thing you could still find in the back swamps, in the desolate, rural haunts of deep Louisiana, parts of which seemed untouched by time and the march of history. The origins of the bottle tree were African, Helen had once told her; it was a folk tradition brought to this country by slaves, who, working with whatever materials were at hand, devised a crude method of catching and trapping malevolent spirits, to prevent their passage through human doors. The colored glass chimed in the light afternoon wind, its empyreal music calling. Caren answered the sound by opening her car door.

  She crossed Lessard on foot, stepping into a cold wind that wrapped itself around her arms and legs. Her cheeks flushed, and she felt a dull ache in her chest the closer she got to the front steps. She hadn’t been inside a church since her father’s funeral—a cold February morning during Morgan’s second year. After the church ceremony, she and Eric had stood awkwardly in the family home, where she finally met her brother and sister, and six of their kids, one of whom looked remarkably like Caren. They’d left before the food was served, when it was clear that her presence was making everyone uncomfortable. She had tried, at least. She had tried to do right by at least one of her parents. Missing her mother’s funeral was something Caren never got over.