The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “Inés Avalo had some kind of altercation with Abrams, not even a week before she died. She found something, Eric, something out in the fields,” she said, turning to look at him across the upholstered front seat. “She found a bone,” Caren said. “Human remains.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Apparently she told Abrams about it, and it caused some tension between them. There was talk about going to authorities, but, according to Owens, Abrams wanted her to shut up about it.”

  “Owens?”

  “The reporter,” she said.

  Eric turned away from her then, looking out the window.

  She couldn’t read his expression.

  “Abrams is a bad seed, and apparently Inés Avalo isn’t the first one of his workers to never make it home. There was a worker who died in California, and there was another woman down in Florida, a girl he supposedly beat pretty badly,” she said. “Owens thinks there’s a connection, between what Inés found and her murder, something to do with the question of who might be buried out in the fields. He asked me if any other cane workers had gone missing since Groveland took over the farm.”

  Eric shook his head, visibly disturbed.

  He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.

  “So, what? You think he killed this Inés woman to cover for something else?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Eric.”

  “Who’s the lawyer for the kid?”

  “Someone from his firm,” she said. “Raymond set it up.”

  “Clancy’s firm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Caren . . . Clancy, Strong, Burnham & Botts is a corporate firm, specializing in real estate and banking. We used to send business to them when I was at Klein & Roe. I don’t think they have a single criminal defense attorney in the whole building. It’s not what they do.” He undid his seat belt, shifting several times behind the steering wheel.

  Something here was very wrong.

  And it went beyond the cops’ slapdash investigation.

  “The Avalo woman, she worked for Abrams?” he said, repeating the facts in evidence, turning the information this way and that. Caren nodded and said she was a field hand hired on for planting. She went on to explain the basic arc of a year growing cane, what she’d learned from a near lifetime at Belle Vie. “Planting’s in late summer,” she said. “The cutting season, the harvest, is late fall, and goes until the first frost. It’s been that way for hundreds of years.” Since her own ancestors cut cane in the fields, she said. “But everyone’s behind this year because of the rain, which kept the migrant workers around a lot longer than they would have been during any other season.” It’s the rain, too, she said, that likely brought the bone up from out of the ground, pushing it out, like a depraved and dirty birth.

  Across Main Street, two crossing guards in bright yellow vests were taking up positions on the circle drive in front of the elementary school, where cars and minivans were starting to line up. “So that’s it, huh?” Caren said. “They found the knife, and that’s their whole case?”

  “That’s all they need,” Eric said. He was still tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, the sound as precise as a metronome, or the tick of a clock. It made Caren’s heart beat faster, made her anxious and unsettled. “He did admit to being at the scene.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You can’t dismiss it, Caren. If this was your case, if we were back in school together, you’d have to find a way to address it for a jury. And, again, they have the knife. If it has some physical evidence on it, something tying it to—”

  “No.” She shook her head, adamant. “There’s almost no physical evidence in their entire case. The rain washed over everything Wednesday night. Lang admitted from the start that it was one of the biggest problems with their investigation.”

  “They found the knife in his car. That’s kind of hard to get around.”

  “Someone planted that, Eric, come on.” The car sat in the parking lot for days, she reminded him. “Anyone could have had access to it. Lang was out there. And Abrams is just over the fence.”

  “That reporter was on the plantation, too.”

  Eric turned and looked at her straight on. “You never asked yourself what the hell he was doing wandering around the grounds in the middle of the night?”

  “I certainly don’t think he was tampering with a murder investigation.”

  She didn’t add to this the fact that she liked Owens.

  She trusted him.

  Eric stared at her across the front seat, his expression grave. “Listen to me, Caren, don’t fuck with that guy Lang, okay?” he said. “For whatever reason, the guy’s got it in for you.”

  “What was that stuff about plane tickets?” she said. “How did he know about that?”

  “You checked about flights for Morgan, didn’t you?”

  She nodded. “Saturday morning. I called the airline from my office.”

  “You don’t think your phones are tapped, do you?”

  “On what basis would they have to get a court order to monitor the phone lines?”

  “They wouldn’t need a court order if Raymond Clancy gave them permission. It’s his place. You’re his employee. You said you made the call from your work phone,” he said. Caren’s mind went back to the day the body was found. If Eric was right, and it was even possible that Lang and Bertrand were monitoring her phone line, then it was likewise possible that they’d heard her on the phone with Eric, discussing the blood on Morgan’s shirt. They may have actually known about it for days.

  She felt herself start to panic.

  “But why would Clancy do that?”

  “You know any reason he has to want to keep tabs on you?” he said. “I mean, I know your families go way, way back, for generations. I can’t imagine what that’s like. Whatever it is with you and the Clancys . . . it seems complicated, to say the least.”

  “Raymond’s the one I don’t trust.”

  “The feeling’s mutual, apparently.”

  He turned and glanced again out the window. “It certainly seems like he wants to keep you where he can see you, so to speak, to know what you’re up to.”

  “I can’t understand why.”

  “He’s threatened by you, maybe,” Eric said. “You’re smart, and that guy’s paper thin. He knows you see right through him.” Then Eric shrugged, his voice growing pensive and soft. “Or, hell, maybe every time he looks at you, he sees your mother’s face and her mother’s face before that, your grandfather, and all the people who fed him and cut the very cane that made his life possible. Makes him squirrelly maybe.”

  Caren undid her seat belt, shifting her weight in her seat.

  She opened the collar of her jacket, letting out a rising heat trapped inside.

  “I think Jason was murdered,” she blurted out.

  “Who?”

  “My great-great-great-grandfather.”

  There was a sheriff, she said, a black sheriff, newly elected after the war, during the heyday of Reconstruction, when slaves were suddenly free to work and vote. “The sheriff,” she said, “he had a suspect.”

  She turned and looked Eric in the eye. “It was Clancy’s people, his ancestor. And I get the sense Raymond’s tried to keep that part quiet for years.”

  Eric shook his head at the whole mess of it, how deep the history went.

  Then he turned and looked at Caren across the stillness between them. “Just be careful, Caren,” he said. “If Raymond is working with the cops, I mean, if he let them put a bug on your phone line, if he’s somehow helping them build a case against you, you’re going to be in a world of trouble. If the DA ever put you on the stand in front of a grand jury, you’d have one of two choices, Caren, either lie about destroying evidence . . . or tell the truth and go to jail.”
r />   He was right, of course.

  She knew she was walking a fine line.

  “And I don’t think I could take that,” he said softly.

  Caren heard the school bell ring. Within seconds, a steady stream of plaid and navy was pouring out of the redbrick building. She told Eric he would need to pull around to the circle drive where Morgan usually waited. He started the car but didn’t actually put it in gear. He glanced in his sideview mirror at the schoolkids, their backpacks and lunch pails in tow. Soon Morgan would be in the car, and this moment, just the two of them, would have passed. “Caren,” he said. He was resting an elbow on the window’s frame, his left hand on the steering wheel, as he stared through the windshield. She could see the faintest sheen of sweat above his brow. He seemed shy and slow to gather his words. His discomfort was apparent, almost painful to witness. They were no longer talking about Clancy or Abrams or Inés Avalo, she knew. Finally, Eric sighed. It was a whisper of self-reproach, but also a kind of peace. “I’m not sorry for what happened between us the other day,” he said. “If I’m being honest with myself.” He tried to smile, but lost the gesture about halfway through. Caren knew better than to say anything. She was careful not to draw any open conclusions from his statement. She knew she couldn’t afford to want this man, not again, and yet the wanting seemed to be happening all on its own and without her say-so, ever since he showed up at Belle Vie. She wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to do 2005 over again, if there could ever be such a thing as a second chance.

  What a fool I was, she thought.

  She was on the verge of telling him so when he turned and looked at her again.

  “I love her, Caren,” he said quietly, stealing the moment right out from under her. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she thought it would to hear it said out loud.

  Behind them, a white Laurel Springs security jeep rolled to a stop.

  In her sideview mirror she saw a security guard exiting the car.

  Eric had both his hands on the steering wheel now. His grip was so tight that Caren could see the veins in his arms rising up like swollen rivers. He was like a man holding on to a small stick in a strong current, resisting an unspoken pull. There was something he’d wanted to say to her since he came back to Louisiana, since he walked into her home. “But you, Caren . . .” he whispered. A knock on the driver’s-side door stopped him in midbreath. The security guard leaned in to tell them that there was no parking on any street in Laurel Springs—a bike- and pedestrian-friendly community, as the pitch went—and that they would need to take whatever it was they were doing in the car someplace else. “We’re just here to pick up our daughter, man,” Eric said.

  The guard tapped the roof of the car and then pointed back toward the circle drive and the school complex down the road.

  As the guard departed, Eric rolled up his window.

  Putting the car in drive, he headed for the nearest break in the median, making an awkward U-turn as he turned the car toward Laurel Springs Elementary School. They pulled into the circle drive behind a Chevy Tahoe with a purple-and-gold LSU Tigers bumper sticker across the back window. Eric inched the car forward, taking extra care in the swarm of schoolkids weaving in and out of the cars in the driveway. Caren stole a glance at him behind the wheel. The tension was still there. She could see it in his jawline, in the knot above his brow. She wanted to pick up where they’d left off.

  “Eric,” she said.

  “There she is,” he said, pointing ahead.

  Through the windshield, Caren spotted the short, round shape of her nine-year-old. Morgan was holding her backpack at her side. Under her right arm were sheets of colored construction paper, red and gold, the foundation of some art or social studies project, Caren thought. At the sight of her, the tortoiseshell headband and the school dress, the backpack and all that, Eric smiled, tickled by this moving image, what had before existed for him only in photographs, his growing girl in the fifth grade. It occurred to Caren how few times he’d been able to do this, to drive his daughter to and from school—a duty so commonplace it was one of the first she’d turned over to Letty when she’d hired her. Driving Morgan to Laurel Springs had been an easier task for her to relinquish than dressing her daughter each morning or making her food or washing and conditioning her hair once a week, combing it out while Morgan sat on the floor reading books. These tactile moments had meant so much more to Caren that it was a long time before she could see Letty’s hands in her daughter’s hair without feeling actual envy. For months she thought of firing Letty on a daily basis. A woman who had only ever tried to offer a hand, to help Caren raise this girl way the hell out in the country.

  It had been the same with Eric’s mother, hadn’t it?

  Wasn’t that at least part of her resistance to moving to Chicago, his hometown?

  It wasn’t just the lack of a marriage proposal, she could now admit. It was the threat of another woman, always had been. Not just in Eric’s life, but in Morgan’s. Hadn’t this, deep down, been her real fear of sending her only child to D.C.? That she would somehow lose to Lela twice? First Eric . . . and then Morgan, too?

  She had walked out on her own mother.

  And there was no promise that Morgan wouldn’t one day do the same, walk away from Caren and never look back. She could now see how carefully she had built their lives around this single fear, so afraid of losing her daughter that she’d shut out any competition or interference, packing the two of them behind glass—in a museum, Morgan liked to say—where they lived alone on the second floor of a borrowed house, miles from the nearest town. It would be the end of them, she knew, if she kept it up.

  She was going to lose Morgan this way.

  Just like she’d lost him.

  Morgan arrived at the car on her dad’s side. “I made my dress,” she said, slapping the yellow construction paper against the driver’s-side window. In marker and pencil, she had drawn a gown of purple and rose; it had a sweetheart neckline and long, ruffled layers going to the floor. She had not drawn herself into the design, but rather outfitted the dress on a long, lean figure in pointy high-heeled shoes. The image saddened Caren, the fact that Morgan wanted to look so unlike herself at her dad’s wedding. “I think I could make it,” she said, meaning the dress. Caren happened to know for a fact that Morgan had never even seen a sewing machine, but she was careful not to point out this detail. Morgan, who once taught herself to make soap, was not easily discouraged, and Caren didn’t want her to think she was blocking her carefully laid wedding plans. She knew what the day meant for her daughter, how excited she was.

  Eric unlocked the car’s back doors, and Morgan climbed in.

  Because she was hungry, they stopped at a roadside café on the way, a small hut off the highway that served crawfish boiled over an open flame, in big, black pots behind the restaurant. Caren ordered Texas toast and a beer. Eric and Morgan went all out: crawfish and boudin with pepper jelly, and corn fried with pasilla chiles and sweet butter. Eric ate with abandon, savoring the pork-skin crackle and ordering a beer for himself and a second for Caren. Morgan shared her crawfish plate with her dad, showing him how to suck meat from the head, because she, at nine, was better at it than he ever was. Caren sat across the damp picnic table, watching the two of them, listening as Morgan told her father that Ms. Rivera was not a bad homeroom teacher, but that she lacked creativity when it came to discipline, which made Eric laugh out loud, throwing his head back. More than once, he glanced across the table at Caren, holding her gaze, smiling, his face flushed with heat. She would have done almost anything to hold on to this moment for a little while longer. She took a pull on her beer. It was sharp and cold going down. “Morgan,” she said finally.

  Morgan looked across the table, salt and grease all along the sides of her mouth. Caren offered no preface, no buildup, only the truth she knew no easy way around. She was going to have to
let her go. “You’re going back to Washington with your dad.”

  Morgan looked back and forth between her parents. “Why?”

  It was not the reaction Caren was expecting.

  She stupidly thought Morgan would ask few questions, that the same girl who’d been bugging her about a plane ticket to D.C. for weeks now would simply throw her arms around Caren’s neck and whisper, “Thank you, Mom.”

  She was not in any way prepared for the wounded look on Morgan’s face.

  “But you said I didn’t do anything wrong,” her daughter whispered.

  “Oh, ’Cakes, I’m not sending you away. I would never send you away.”

  And to her surprise, Morgan started to cry.

  Caren stood and walked around to the other side of the picnic table. She straddled the wood bench and pulled Morgan against her, feeling the girl’s warm tears through her cotton shirt. She could smell the shea butter in her daughter’s hair. And it was all she could do to go forward with this plan. “The wedding is coming up soon anyway,” she said. “It’s just a few weeks away, and Daddy thought you might stay for Christmas this year.” She tapped Morgan’s shoulders until the girl looked up at her mother, until Caren could see her face. “There’s snow there,” she said.

  “Are you coming?”

  Caren shook her head. “Huh-uh.”

  Morgan looked at Eric. “Daddy?”

  She seemed, at this point, more confused than anything.

  “The plantation is closing, honey,” Eric said.

  “No, it’s not,” she said emphatically, turning to her mother.

  Caren had never talked over her daughter’s head or assumed there were things she wouldn’t understand, had always been bothered by people who underestimated kids’ native intelligence. But she also didn’t have the energy to explain it all—the spread of corporate farming and Belle Vie’s tenuous value at the dawn of the twenty-first century, or Raymond Clancy’s political ambitions. In that moment, only the little bit that pertained to them mattered. “It is, ’Cakes,” she said. “Belle Vie is closing.”

  “Because of Donovan?”