The Cutting Season (23 page)

He was right.

This was not good at all.

She made an instinctive turn toward her daughter . . . but Morgan was gone. Caren called her name calmly at first. But she heard no response . . . and her panic started to spread. She ran for the door. “Morgan!” she yelled. It was Eric who stopped her, grabbing her from behind and practically lifting her off the ground. He pulled the whole weight of her toward the front window, so that she could see Morgan was standing outside by the fence, waiting. This wasn’t all Caren could see. What was also clear from this vantage point, this gaze through the cabin’s front window, was the realization that if the killer was still inside the shack when Morgan stumbled upon the bloody knife, then he very likely got a good look at her nine-year-old daughter.

18

C
aren wanted to go to the cops.

Eric reminded her that she’d destroyed DNA evidence, a felony.

Because neither one of them believed Morgan was upstairs actually sleeping, they were having this argument in the one room where she couldn’t hear them, behind the closed door of Belle Vie’s Hall of Records. It was a dark, windowless room the size of a walk-in closet. The floor was bare, and the walls were crowded, floor to ceiling, with half a dozen printer’s cabinets, their slim drawers holding every piece of paper and every photograph that had managed to survive a civil war; the open contempt of Yankee soldiers, yeoman squatters and vagabonds; five different legal owners, three with the last name Clancy; and, for a brief time following the war, the United States Government—not to mention the coffee-stained hands of Danny Olmsted. There was a single sixty-watt bulb overhead, leaving the room dark and womblike. Standing at his full height, Eric’s head almost touched the dropped ceiling, which was made of a cheap plastic that did not in any way match the colonial look of the rest of the building.

Caren had already peeled off several layers of clothing and was standing in a white undershirt and her grass-stained jeans. And still she was sweating. “Why can’t we just tell Detective Lang what she told us without mentioning anything about the shirt?” she asked. She was testing the theory. She and Eric had been running through the merits of one strategy over another, the way they used to do when they were back in school together, working cases. Eric had his arms tightly crossed. He was shaking his head back and forth. “We tell them where she saw the knife,” Caren said, trying to convince herself of her own line of reasoning. “We tell them she was scared and that’s why she didn’t tell them—or us—before. She’s just a kid. They’ll understand.”

“It’s a slippery slope, lying to a cop.”

“How is it different from what you’re proposing?”

“Not telling is not
lying
. It’s withholding, and I for one can live with that.”

“We can’t hide this, Eric. Donovan is in jail.
Jail
. How exactly are you going to explain to your daughter that she should keep her mouth shut while someone, whom she
idolizes
, by the way, sits in jail for something he didn’t do? What kind of message is that?” she asked, wondering just how deeply D.C. had changed him. “We can’t do that to her, not over something like this. She has information that—”

“I don’t care! I don’t want my kid witness to a fucking murder!”

“She already
is
a witness, Eric.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Better that we take control of the situation now.”

“There’s nothing she told us tonight that helps their case. She didn’t
see
anybody. She can’t give eyewitness testimony. And nothing she says puts them any closer to knowing where that knife is. My guess is that thing is long gone by now, sunk in the river somewhere. There’s no reason to involve Morgan in any of it.” He looked at her, the overhead light making deep creases of the lines around his eyes. “You think they’ll protect her, but they won’t. They don’t give a shit. I don’t want it known publicly that my daughter is a witness in a murder investigation. So far, we’re the only three people who know she was out there that night, and that’s enough.”

“
Four
people, Eric. It’s us, and whoever was in that cabin.”

“You don’t know that for sure, Caren. We don’t know that anyone saw her at all. Which is why we don’t need to go around advertising what she saw. We certainly don’t have to put her name out there as a potential witness.” He was so agitated he could hardly look at Caren, even though they were standing mere inches apart. She said his name with quiet care, reaching for his hand, which he, surprisingly, let rest in hers. The touch was real, sealing a connection that time and space had not undone. She wanted him to understand that she was scared, too. Her way was a risk, she knew that, but one that might ultimately protect their daughter. “If we just
talk
to the Sheriff’s Department,” she said, “we’ll have a better chance of keeping her safe.”

“Don’t you dare, Caren,” Eric said, seeming momentarily terrified that she might actually do it, that she might go behind his back even. “These backwater cops down here are just making this shit up as they go along, putting together a homicide case with spit and string. They put that kid in lockup based on total bullshit. You’re not careful, Caren, and you’re going to be looking at a charge yourself, for sitting on information in the middle of their investigation. Don’t think they won’t come after you.”

“You sound like Lang.”

“He threaten you?”

She hadn’t told him that part yet.

Eric shook his head. “There is no way I’m trusting them with my kid.”

Then, quite matter-of-factly, he said, “I’m taking her back with me.”

“What?”

“She can’t stay here, Caren.”

She stared at him for a long time, trying to gauge how serious he was. “I trusted you,” he said softly. He was rocking back and forth, chewing on his bottom lip, staring down at her. “You said it was safe down here, you said she’d be in a good school—”

“She
is
in a good school.”

“You said she’d be happy.”

Caren fell quiet then, looking down at the tips of her boots.

Somewhere deep down she knew. Morgan wasn’t happy here.

She could finally admit it to herself. Caren was the one who’d grown comfortable, feeling safe in the familiar, letting one year turn to two, and then three, hardly noticing when four years of her life had passed, right here on this same old plantation. “You said this would be good for both of you, and I trusted you, Caren. I don’t understand how in the hell you let something like this happen.”

“Oh, fuck you, Eric. Really.”

“What the hell was she doing out in the middle of the night?”

“It’s eighteen fenced acres. It’s not like she was out at a nightclub.”

“Still,” he said. He was as angry as she’d ever seen him.

She sighed, feeling the weight of her own guilt, not just for this, but for all of it, every little thing that had led them here. “I’m raising her out here on my own, Eric.”

“That was your choice, Caren.” He wasn’t giving an inch. She looked away, fixing her gaze on a shelf at her side, because she was afraid that if she didn’t she might cry, and she didn’t want that. “I’m doing everything I can out here, Eric. I hired Letty, I’ve got the staff, but it’s not like I can watch her every minute of the day.”

“If this is something you can’t handle, Caren, raising our child, then I sure as shit wish you had said something sooner.”

Softly, he said, “I’m getting her out of here.”

“I can’t just up and leave my job, Eric.”

“This is not a job,” he said. “I don’t know what this place is, but it’s not a job.”

His tone was sharp and ugly, but not particularly unkind. If anything, she sensed in him a desire to rescue her along with Morgan, to tear them both away from the plantation. “You said Clancy is going to sell,” he said. “You were going to have to leave anyway.” He was still holding her hand. “You’re better than this place, Caren.”

She let go, pulling away to the farthest corner of the room.

She stared at the wall, the faded wallpaper in gray and blue, the lines of painted finches and jaybirds staring back. “I have a wedding here in a week. There are school tours scheduled every week for the next two months. I can’t just
leave
, Eric. I walk out, and the whole staff, they don’t get paid, not unless I process payroll. I owe them something more than that.”

“I’m willing to give you some time, but I’m not going to wait around forever. My daughter is not staying here, Caren.”

And then he turned and walked out.

A few seconds later, she heard him in the parlor, on his cell phone with Lela.

Caren felt trapped in this hot little room, unwilling or unable to run the emotional gauntlet that lay on the other side of the door.

I
t started as a way to kill time, picking through the plantation’s records while she waited for Eric to get off the phone. The opening of drawers, leafing through the aging, yellowed papers, was at first mindless. In all the years she’d worked at Belle Vie, she’d never once come into this room to read through these documents, to touch the real history of Belle Vie, to hold it in her hands. It was obvious to her now that she’d been avoiding this quiet confrontation for years. There were no brides in here, no catered affairs, no twinkling lights on the north lawn. There was no spectacle, no scenery sure to charm. There was just history, naked and plain. It was right here, on the papers all around her, in flat text that belied the complicated nature of the narrative, the story of one American plantation.

She picked through the pieces.

One of the printer’s cabinets—made of aged oak, the lacquer peeling in some corners—held farm records, arranged by decade, going forward into the 1930s. In each drawer, there were production records and bills of sale, registering the bounty of each year’s harvest. Some eight hundred hogsheads in the good years, the years before the war, and down to as few as fifty hogsheads during the worst of it, the 1864–’65 season, when local planters had it particularly bad, when the ones who didn’t abandon their land nearly starved to death. There were handwritten notes on loose sheets of coarse paper, marking, in great detail, the difficulties of finding hardy men and women to work the fields on the other side of Lincoln’s war, when Negro labor was no longer the law of the land. Belle Vie had nevertheless survived, thrived even, in the hands of William P. Tynan, the former overseer for the Duquesne family who took it over after the Civil War. He eventually passed it along to his daughter and her husband, James Clancy, and then on to three more generations of the Clancy family.

All of this was recorded and stored in an antique leather portfolio that told the story of the plantation’s chain of ownership, containing the various deeds to the property.

The organization was sloppy, which surprised Caren.

She noticed a serrated edge along the inside of the folder’s binding.

She ran her fingers down the center spine. A few small, jagged triangles, dry flecks of old paper, fluttered to the carpet below. It appeared that some of the papers had been torn straight from the binding. She had a brief suspicion about Danny. She didn’t put it past him to treat the plantation like his own private fire sale, lifting pieces from Belle Vie’s historical records, which he clearly coveted. A real score for the university, he’d said.

There were many other documents in this room: Maps detailing the plantation and its many ornate structures, plus government documents, including one signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, sanctioning the transfer of title and deeding the plantation to the Clancys’ ancestor, William Tynan, in the year 1872, eight years after the Union took possession of this stretch of Confederate land.

1872
, Caren thought.

The same year Aaron Nathan Sweats was elected sheriff.

The same year he investigated the mysterious disappearance of an ex-slave.

What, she wanted to know, had really happened to Jason?

She wondered if some clue lay here, in this very room.

She poked through the slave accounts next, the records of every man, woman, and child born, bought, or sold from the estate. They were in a cabinet marked
INVENTORY
, together with notes about farm equipment and supplies in the storehouse. There were pages and pages, listing every slave ever owned by Monsieur Duquesne before the war.

Margaret and Julianne, Charles and Henry, Mathilde and Sarah Anne. All listed as American-born Creoles, their values ranging from two hundred to one thousand dollars.

There were also a Doe and a Rosine, two house slaves.

And Paul, Leandre, and Emile, a cooper, a blacksmith, and a mason, respectively.

Under the long list of American-born Negroes, Caren ran her finger past the names Anthony and Augustine, past Delphine and Dolphus, all the way down to Jason, the only man so named. He was brought to the plantation in the year 1853, though no more information was given, nothing about who his parents were. He was granted permission to wed an Eleanor, another slave, in 1859, when she was seventeen years old. It had been an empty promise, though. Within months, Eleanor was sold to a trader from Georgia, just one year before the war. Jason was eighteen years old. Though he didn’t know it at the time, he was a man on the verge of freedom.

What was most striking to Caren, of all the things she read, was the fact that he stayed on the plantation, long after the war. Jason
stayed
, right here at Belle Vie, in the shadow of the big house, working the same land he’d farmed since he was a child, since the first day someone put a cane knife in his hand. He could have fled the parish, of course. He could have moved to New Orleans, or sought work up north. His life and his labor now belonged freely to him, and for a brief, bewitching moment, Caren tried to picture how her life might have been different if her distant ancestor had, back then, struck a path for something wholly new, a way of life that led all of them out of the fields. She felt a sudden and peculiar sensation, a longing that gnawed at her and made her head hurt; it was a feeling akin to trying to recall a dream when none of the details were in color.