The Cutting Season (21 page)

Caren remembered the name Gustavo.

He was at the candlelight vigil, leaned against the fence, weeping.

Owens wrote the priest’s words on his notepad, writing in the margins every detail he could gather about Akerele himself. “You’re from Africa, Father?”

“Nigeria, son.”

“You mentioned wage disputes and the like,” Owens said. “Did Inés Avalo ever have any problems out on the farm, any troubles with the manager out there?”

Up to this point, Akerele had not looked directly at Caren.

But he knew she was there, of course, and he declined to say more in her presence. Remembering his manners, he finally turned to address her. He nodded his head and said, “Good morning,” his accent like seashells on a string, sharp and melodic. “If you would like to pay your respects, there will be a memorial service here in the sanctuary this coming week. We welcome all who wish to honor her.” He smiled warmly at her, and she felt strangely embarrassed. She was telling a lie, wasn’t she? She didn’t know Inés, she wanted to say. But even that no longer felt like the truth.

“She’ll be buried here in town?” Owens asked.

“That has yet to be determined, I’m afraid,” the priest said, his expression growing long. “We are still trying to locate her family in San Julián. We know she sent money home, at least once a month. She had two children, you should know.”

The money order, Caren remembered.

The pink ribbon and the hairbrush and the white teddy bear with the red bow.

She’d been standing in that small grocery store, arguing with the cashier just to get these gifts, large and small, home to her kids . . . only to walk away empty-handed.

“We can’t find a proper phone number for her family. I have sent two telegrams to the parish church nearest her village. But as of yet there’s been no word, no way of knowing if her family there understands she’s gone.”

“That’s in Mexico?” Owens said, still writing.

“El Salvador.”

“Quite a long way from home.”

Akerele nodded solemnly.

“Her husband was injured on a job some time ago, badly enough apparently that he can no longer work. And so I suppose she did what she felt she had to. She left her kids, a boy and a girl, the youngest not even two years old, with her mother’s people and came north for work.” He looked at Owens and Caren, as if they’d loved her, too, as if the three of them shared that much. “It was only meant as a temporary stay, to send money home, to get out of a hole. She was supposed to be going home.”

He sighed.

“I have given myself until Monday,” he said. “If I cannot find a relative, someone to claim the body, we will make a final home for her here. She will not be alone. She will have a proper resting place.”

He neatened the sheaf of papers in his hands.

Then he looked at Owens. “Shall we, then?” he said. “We can speak more in my office.” As they turned to leave, Akerele again smiled at Caren. “Good day, ma’am.” Owens followed the priest to his office, leaving the two women alone in the church sanctuary. Caren stood eventually, walking the length of the center aisle to stand at the edge of the pine casket. From her jacket pocket, she pulled out the tiny, star-shaped earring, a thing she had no business holding on to. It would only cause her trouble every minute she kept it in her possession, the effects of a dead woman, a murder victim. She leaned forward and tucked the earring into the folds of satin.

She stood there for a long time, gazing at Inés Avalo, at the heart-shaped face and the half-moons of her sleeping eyes, the clasped hands still marked by work in the fields. Somewhere, Caren thought, there are two children, a boy and a girl, who nightly dream of that face, two kids who have no idea their mother is never coming home.

W
hen Caren walked through the front door of the library, Eric was alone in the house. He had his back to the door, and he was on the phone.

She took off her jacket, left her keys on the antique writing table, and waited. “I don’t know,” Eric was saying into his cell phone. “I’ll see what’s available tomorrow.” He turned, noticing Caren for the first time. “I’ll call you as soon as I know when I’m coming home.” He paused there, his voice growing soft. “You, too, honey.”

He ended the call, shoving the cell phone into his pocket.

He turned to Caren and said, “I missed my flight.”

She was already walking toward him, her arms hanging helpless at her sides. She walked right up to him, standing so close that their torsos were almost touching. “What are you doing?” he said, sounding at first confused and then alarmed, as if he were retreating from an electric charge. She wanted him to touch her, for someone to please hold her. But she knew it was not her place to ask, not anymore. She simply stood there, pressing herself closer to him, until she could feel the heat coming through his clothes, until she could feel the outline of his body against hers. “Don’t do this,” he said. She wasn’t playing fair, she knew. But she couldn’t stop herself either. She laid her head on his chest, hearing his voice above her, whispering a plea. “Don’t do this to me.”

Finally, she cried.

For Inés, those two kids.

For Belle Vie, slipping away.

And for her mother, already long gone.

And she cried for this man standing in front of her, yet another loss. He finally relented and put his arms around her, holding Caren up in all the ways she no longer could. She felt a warm kiss on her forehead, and when she looked up, their eyes met, and it was Eric, she would always remember, who put his lips on hers. His breath was sweet and hot, his hands rough across her skin. She cupped his face in her palms, kissing him tenderly. Eric pulled away first, staggering slightly, like a drunk on two legs for the first time in as many days. He lowered his eyes, shaking his head in self-reproach, or else surrender. Then he took her by the hand and led her through the parlor and the empty kitchen and up the narrow stairway to her bedroom.

PART II

The Olden Days of Belle Vie

16

E
ric got dressed first. He sat on the side of the bed, his back to her.

“Where’s Letty?” he said. “Morgan?”

“The store, maybe,” she said. “Plus, Letty said something about taking Morgan along to her son’s softball game, down in Vacherie.”

Eric stood, tucking his shirt into his pants. “I need to get some air.” He walked out of the room without looking back, leaving Caren alone on the bed, the bunched-up quilt snaked between her legs. She rolled over onto her back, one arm curved above her head. She could see part of the sky through the trees outside her window. The clouds had briefly cleared, and the shard of blue was as startling as sunlight pouring into a dark cave. She lay perfectly still for a few minutes, then slowly roused herself from bed, slid on her clothes, and headed downstairs to face him.

Outside, Eric was leaning against a small pin oak tree, smoking a cigarette. She walked within a few feet of him, slowing as she neared, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jeans. Her eyes were red and puffy, the skin on her cheeks rubbed raw from the stubble on Eric’s face. She had been turned completely inside out.

It was a while before either of them spoke.

“Eric,” she said.

He sucked on his cigarette, the filter pinched between two of his fingers, not exactly looking her in the eye. “Donovan
did
go to school Wednesday night, by the way,” he said, blowing smoke into the wind. “The night that girl was killed, he was there, long before the cops say the Avalo woman was killed.”

She let out a sigh. “Come on, Eric.”

But he just shook his head.

“I can’t, Caren,” he said, taking another drag. “I can’t talk about this right now, okay. I just can’t. You asked me to do you a favor and I did you a favor. The kid was on the college campus, just like he said. He needs a criminal defense attorney.”

He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. On one side, otherwise blank, he’d scribbled the names of several attorneys and their phone numbers, each with a 504 area code. On the other side of the paper was a messy table of handwritten names and dates and times in two columns, labeled “In” and “Out,” next to lists of words she didn’t, at first glance, understand. It appeared to be a sign-up sheet of some sort, with the heading: RIVER VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE AUDIO & VISUAL ARTS CENTER. “I copied this myself,” Eric said, tapping the paper with his index finger. “He checked in camera equipment to the school’s video lab a little before twelve-thirty in the morning. I talked to a girl who works at the lab who’s sure she was the one who signed in the equipment when Donovan returned it. She said he brought it all back himself.”

Caren grabbed the paper from Eric, studying it more closely.

Donovan’s was the second-to-last name in the far-left column.

According to this, at 12:22 a.m. he returned a Sony DSR DVCAM camcorder, an Audix miniature condenser microphone with a 50-inch boom arm and two sets of headphones, a Lowel two-light kit, four 25-foot extension cords . . . and a tripod.

Oh, God, she whispered.

She looked up at Eric, shaking her head in disbelief.

“What?” he said.

“He was here Wednesday night, that’s what you said before?”

“He said he was working on some kind of a school project,” Eric said. And then, clearing up an earlier misconception, he added, “It turns out he has not, in fact, quit school, but is on some kind of academic probation for carrying too light a load.”

“And he was
here
?”

Eric nodded. “But he says he left a little before midnight,
before
the murder. He left Belle Vie and went straight to the River Valley campus in Donaldsonville. He didn’t mention it when the detectives first cornered him in your office because he thought he could talk his way around it. I told you, I don’t think he had any idea those were two homicide cops he was talking to. I don’t think he really thought it was a big deal, him being on the plantation after hours.”

“With
camera
equipment?” Caren said, repeating what she took to be the most revealing part of what Eric was saying. She had a pretty good idea this was another one of Donovan’s stunts. Only this time he’d gone too far, landing himself in real trouble.

“I can’t believe he did this,” she mumbled.

“Did what?”

It would have taken too much time to explain the origins of her growing suspicion, her guess as to why Donovan had snuck onto the plantation after hours, with camera equipment no less. She would have to go all the way back to the summer, when Donovan came into her office with a handwritten script and a story he was dying to tell about life at a place like Belle Vie. “The truth is going to come out,” he’d said.

Oh, Donovan
, she sighed.

She turned back to the library. Inside, she grabbed her key ring and jacket.

When she stepped outside again, Eric was on his second cigarette.

“Are you going to be here when I get back?” she said. Eric, who was standing on the grounds of an antebellum plantation wearing the same clothes as yesterday, clothes that were only minutes before crumpled on the floor beside her bed, looked dazed. “Where am
I
going?” he said, shrugging at the absurdity of it all.

Caren started for the main house alone.

Upstairs, she tore through the drawers in her office, the mess of papers and files on the painted settee near the door, even lifting phone books beside her desk; she was looking for a stack of yellow legal paper. She couldn’t remember if she’d kept the handwritten script or if Donovan had taken his copy back. This whole mess could be cleared up in an instant, she thought. The cops needed to know that Donovan had his own reasons for being on the grounds after hours on Wednesday night, and they didn’t have a thing to do with Inés Avalo. When she couldn’t find the script in her office, she left the main house and walked across the lawn, heading for the old schoolhouse.

They were all onstage for the eleven-o’clock show.

Which meant the greenroom was vacant.

She could hear their voices through the plaster wall as she snooped around the room—Bo Johnston and Eddie Knoxville, in character, were talking about the advance of Union troops on New Orleans. The place was littered with soda cans and used tissues and crumpled copies of the
Times-Picayune
, and somebody had left a half-eaten ham and onion sandwich in plastic wrap sitting out. Across the room, against the far-left wall, stood a column of twelve-by-twelve-inch-square lockers, none of which had ever been secured except the one belonging to Val Marchand, who brought her own padlock from home. Caren opened them one by one, picking through Dell’s
Essence
magazines and romance novels and an open pack of Virginia Slims, Bo Johnston’s tank tops and roll-on deodorant. Finally, she stumbled on Donovan’s personal locker. The cops had been in here yesterday, as part of their search. And this is what they left behind: a hairbrush; a couple of unmarked CDs; a pair of rubber, open-toed slippers; a tourist map of the plantation; and, at the very back of the locker, a stack of white paper, bound by brass brads, which the cops must have mistaken for a copy of the plantation’s official staged play. But Caren knew better. This script had Donovan’s name on the cover.

RAISING CANE: A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN, by Donovan James Isaacs.

And below that, the words:
Inspired by a True Story
.

It was a work in progress, maybe twenty or thirty pages long, with bits and pieces blacked out and handwritten notes scribbled in the margins. But the story was immediately familiar. The setting, as was noted in a surprisingly well-written opening, was 1872, three weeks after the election that put Ulysses S. Grant into his second term—the same election that, just a few years after Emancipation, put a black man in the highest law-enforcement office in the parish. There was, quite literally, a new sheriff in town, a man by the name of Aaron Nathan Sweats, a name Caren had seen once before, in the pages of Danny’s dissertation. Sweats was the lawman who had investigated Jason’s disappearance, who believed that he’d been the victim of foul play. Caren felt a tingle at the mention of the family name.
Jason
. A man missing one hundred and thirty-seven years, and yet here he was again, showing up in print right before Caren’s eyes. She flipped through the pages of the script, trying to understand how Donovan Isaacs, the same employee who’d once asked her if slaves could talk, had put a story like this one on paper. She would have put her next month’s salary on the fact that he’d had some help.

It was Danny she wanted to talk to.

Caren hadn’t seen him all day, so she started the quarter-mile trek to the plantation’s kitchen, to pay a visit to the eyes and ears of Belle Vie.

Lorraine was drinking a beer when she walked in.

The kitchen was unusually cluttered. There were torn sheets of notebook paper everywhere. Lorraine pulled a pencil stub from the front pocket of her soiled apron. She was making notes. “I’m going to need to order at least twenty pounds of crab legs for the Whitman gal. You can charge ’em what you want for it, baby. I don’t care. I’ve got a theme in mind, and that girl is just going to have to trust me on this one.”

“Lorraine,” Caren said. “Have you seen Danny?”

“No, ma’am, baby.”

“Pearl?”

She looked over at Lorraine’s second-in-command, who had her size-five feet set atop an orange crate in the corner; she was eating sour cream straight from a plastic tub. Pearl shook her head no. Lorraine said, “I believe he stays in town on Saturdays, baby.” She was still scribbling her menu notes. “You not likely to see him today.”

Caren held up Donovan’s movie script. “Did you know about this?”

Lorraine screwed up her face at the sight, scrunching up the puffy flesh around her eyes. Pearl, seeing the script in Caren’s hand, froze, a cream-covered spoon a few inches from her mouth. She dropped the tub of sour cream, spilling it on the concrete floor, before scurrying out of the kitchen on her bare feet. Lorraine, watching her number two crumple in the presence of modest authority, rolled her eyes. She slid the pencil stub into her pocket and wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, for the record, baby,” she said to Caren, “I never approved of it. I knew it was going to lead to trouble, one way or another. But you can’t be after these people all the damn time,” she said, as if the very fact that Caren was coming to her for information was further proof that Lorraine was the one in charge here, the real lady of the house. “I firmly discouraged it,” she said. She gathered her menu notes, stacking them in a messy pile.

Caren stood before her, dumbstruck.

“Wait, who else knows about this?”

“Well,” Lorraine said with a sigh. “There’s his cast . . .”

“
His
cast?”

“The
cast
,” Lorraine said, as if this were obvious. “The Belle Vie Players.”

“They all know?”

Lorraine nodded, and said, “Yes, ma’am, baby.”

It was as if Lorraine had literally struck her in the face.

She hadn’t realized, until maybe that very moment, the depths to which she’d come to think of them as family over the years, not just
a
family, but
her
family. Lorraine and Pearl and Luis, Nikki and Dell and Shauna and Ennis, Cornelius and Bo Johnston and the whole cast . . . even Donovan. “Why didn’t you all say anything?” she said, raising her voice at Lorraine for the first time ever. She was angry, but also hurt. Why didn’t
any
of them say anything to her? “Why in the world wouldn’t you tell this to police?”

Lorraine gave a slight shrug, the gesture nearly lost in the rolls of fat on her neck and shoulders. Then, matter-of-factly, she said, “They didn’t ask.” She took her stack of handwritten notes to her “desk,” the card table on which sat her television set, today’s paper, and an open pack of menthol cigarettes. She shoved the loose papers into a grease-stained manila envelope. She didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the implications of the information she’d been withholding, the fact that Donovan had apparently been coming onto the grounds after hours for some time now and was here on the night a crime was committed, a murder. “I’m glad he done it, though, tell you the truth,” she said, meaning Donovan’s movie project. She reached into her apron pocket for a Zippo lighter, a gift, Caren remembered, from the entire staff. They’d had it engraved for her sixtieth birthday last spring. Lorraine lit a smoke, sucking hard before exhaling. “If Raymond’s gon’ let this place go, there ought to be some way to know it was ever here. It’s got to be some way to remember it.”

Caren glanced down at Donovan’s script.

Behind her, Pearl poked her head into the kitchen.

She disappeared just as suddenly when she realized Caren was still here.

“And just for the record,” Lorraine said, again insisting that she be seen as an innocent party in this, “I told Donovan to leave the little one out of it.”

Caren looked up suddenly.