The Cutting Season (28 page)

The light outside the casement window changed color and direction, rolling dark shadows in waves across the flat carpet.

Danny lit his cigarette, blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

“I mean, the guy was run out of office.”

“The sheriff?”

“Ran himself out of office, really, by pushing for an indictment.”

“He knew what had happened to Jason?”

“Well, that depends on who you ask,” he said. “I mean, it sure looks like he was on to something, like the story is going to go one way, but then it all turns out to be some messy business over a broken heart.” He rolled his eyes, shaking his head at the operatic turn of events, as if the history had failed him personally in some way. “It turns out Jason was smack in the middle of a love triangle of some kind. His wife, Eleanor—”

“And the schoolteacher,” Caren said, finishing the thought.

Danny nodded. “Not exactly my field of study,” he said.

He glanced down at his laptop, responding to some prompt on the screen. “The general consensus in the parish had Jason running off with one or the other,” he said. “Or that maybe one of the women got jealous and did him in.”

“But Sweats didn’t believe it.”

Danny shook his head, puffing on the end of his cigarette. “And made a fool of himself in the process . . . left himself open to accusations he didn’t know what he was doing, that he was unfit to serve in the office of sheriff,” he said, exhaling.

“The thing is, Jason’s body was never found. There wasn’t any proof that a crime had even been committed. And certainly no clear motive to support the sheriff’s theory of the crime, which put the murder weapon in someone else’s hand, someone other than the two women Jason was involved with. The sheriff swore that Jason had been killed with his own cane knife, one loaned to him in the fields by his employer. He was insistent. Stubborn, some said. He actually wanted to put Tynan on trial for murder.”

Caren felt her stomach drop.

She wasn’t immediately sure she’d heard the name right.

“William Tynan?” she said, and Danny nodded.

“Raymond Clancy’s great-great-grandfather?”

“Yes.”

23

R
aymond had lied to her, she thought.

By the time she made it back to Belle Vie, made it all the way back inside the cramped Hall of Records, she had a sickening suspicion that he’d lied to her when he said he didn’t know anything about an investigation into Jason’s disappearance. The room was exactly as she’d left it. The papers were still there, laid out on the low wood table in the center of the room, right where she’d left them. Slave records and bills of sale, farm receipts and the creased, worn photos of harvests past, the blank faces of sharecroppers and field-workers. And as Caren searched the file drawers, the many folders and leather binders in the room, she was again struck by the feeling that papers were missing—not just land records and such, but also pages and pages of William Tynan’s diary. Only now Caren suspected this was evidence of more than just sloppy record-keeping. It suddenly seemed to her that someone had been in here, removing, page by page, pieces of Belle Vie’s history, excising the parts he didn’t like—like the fact that Raymond Clancy’s great-great-grandfather was a suspect in the death of one of Caren’s ancestors. The thought was dizzying. What else, she thought, could Raymond be lying about?

Slowly, meticulously, she put the papers back. One by one, she refiled the documents and historical records, leaving them just the way she’d found them.

E
ric was in the parlor when she walked in.

He was sitting on the leather divan, and he was holding Morgan’s school records. He wanted her to know he was serious. He was taking their daughter away from here. He’d changed his clothes, out of the wrinkled suit and into khakis and a deep-blue T-shirt, both crisp and unlined and likely purchased in town. He was resting his elbows on his knees, leaning his weight forward. “Caren,” he said softly. “Look, about yesterday, what happened between us . . .” The words registered somewhere in Caren’s brain. It was an opening, she knew, if she wanted to take it. But now she was the one who couldn’t talk about this. She was still reeling from the news of Clancy’s possible cover-up.

There was a knock on the library’s front door.

It was tentative at first, then loud and growing more frantic.

Eric stood, but it was Caren who opened the front door. Pearl was standing on the other side, panting and out of breath. She’d run all the way from the kitchen with an urgent message from Miss Lorraine. There was some movement down at the courthouse. They were putting Donovan in front of a judge.

Caren turned to Eric.

“They’re arraigning him,” she said.

Eric nodded and grabbed his car keys.

T
he judge was a black woman, fair-skinned and heavyset, with a ring of pearls choked around her neck. Her traveling nameplate read
JONETTA PAULS
. She was a circuit court judge, one they’d brought in just for this, the formal reading of charges against Donovan James Isaacs. Eric and Caren were sitting in the front row. Lorraine had come on her own, taking a seat behind them. The room was small, like a miniaturized version of a courtroom scene on television. The wood was fake paneling, and the banker’s lamps on the desks didn’t work. They were all drowning instead under the sharp white of fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Caren looked around the courtroom. Betty wasn’t here, she noticed, a fact that spelled trouble. She couldn’t think of any good reason that would keep Betty Collier from her grandson.

Donovan looked awful.

He was handcuffed when they brought him in, two armed deputies at his sides, and he kept his head down, his chin pressed against his sternum. He didn’t look around the room much, didn’t make eye contact with Caren or anyone else, just stood there, shaking his head every time his lawyer whispered something in his ear. He was unshaven, his hair in knots, and Caren had the awful thought that they’d kept him in lockup for the past few days for the sole purpose of aging him, curing him like a cut of meat, making him look more like the thug they were here to charge. It was a reminder of the ways an arrest can often work backward, making a criminal of any life it touches. It pained her to see him this way.

Eric nudged her, asking why she hadn’t given Donovan or his grandmother the list of attorneys he’d suggested—and that was the first time Caren took a good, long look at Donovan’s lawyer. She had initially taken him for a court-appointed attorney, but now she wasn’t so sure. He was in his midfifties and nicely dressed, too nice, she thought, to be taking work from the parish. And he looked vaguely familiar to Caren, in a way she could not get her hands around. He seemed too tall, and too big in the way he carried himself, for this small, country courtroom. He kept a proprietary hand on Donovan’s shoulder through the whole thing. Where had she seen him before?

Up first, there was the reading of the charge.

The court clerk stood and officially named the matter: “The state of Louisiana versus Donovan James Isaacs, who, pursuant to Louisiana State Penal Code, Title 14, Section 30, is hereby charged with the crime of Homicide in the First Degree.”

“What?” Caren turned to Eric and whispered, “Wait, what happened to trespassing?”

Eric shook his head. “They must have gotten something else on him.”

“What is going on, Eric?”

She felt sick all of a sudden, a rush of blood heating her from the inside out. She unzipped her jacket, pulling it away from her damp skin.

At the bench, the judge asked, “How do you plead, son?”

His attorney squeezed his shoulder and tried to whisper something in his ear.

Donovan kept shaking his head. “I ain’t kill nobody, judge.”

Bail was denied, with little apparent argument from Donovan’s attorney. Caren didn’t think he’d have gotten bail anyway, but it bothered her the way the lawyer didn’t even try. What kind of defense attorney was this? She sat through the various housekeeping matters that followed—the official filing of papers, the comparing of calendars to set a trial date—all the while thinking of the mess this boy had gotten himself into, all over his plans to retake and retell a history with his movie project.

The thought nearly pushed her out of her chair.

That’s right.

Donovan had made a movie. He had rented
video
equipment
.

Just as the deputies started to escort him out, she stood up. He looked at Lorraine first, and then at Caren in the front row of the gallery. His eyes were puffy and red. Donovan, she realized, had been crying. “Miss C,” he said, calling to her. “Tell my grandmother I didn’t do this. Tell her I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

Caren was still standing. “Where are the tapes, Donovan?”

The
tapes
.

She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of them earlier.

They were a piece of evidence that had been at their fingertips this whole time.

“Donovan . . . where are the tapes?”

By now the two deputies were pulling him out of the courtroom. His lawyer had a hand on his back, nudging Donovan along. Caren called out again. He turned and looked once more over his shoulder. Their eyes met, and for a single second she thought he understood. “Go to my grandmama’s house,” he said, as the cops pulled him out of the courtroom toward a holding cell. “Tell her it wasn’t me.”

W
hen Caren arrived at her house an hour later, Betty Collier was in the front yard. She was wearing a housecoat and slippers, and she was, despite her eighty-two years, on her knees in the dirt, patting soil around a small bed of primrose and sweet alyssum, shaking her head to herself as she worked. She heard the rental car’s engine shudder to a stop and looked up immediately. But she was no more comforted by the sight of Caren than she was by the state of her garden. Caren told Eric to wait in the car while she got out on the passenger’s side. She could hear Betty all the way from the street. The elderly woman was muttering under her breath, turning the black dirt this way and that. “Just look at this,” she said. “Just look what they did to my yard. No home training, not a nary a one of ’em.” She was speaking of the policemen, she said. The ones who had tramped through her house that morning, she said, waving a search warrant; they’d been careless and heavy-handed, tossing her things and crushing her flower garden. “Just look at this mess.” Her voice rose into a high-pitched wail.

“Detectives Lang and Bertrand were here?”

Caren remembered Eric’s courtroom observation, that the detectives must have gotten something else on Donovan to change the charge from trespassing to murder.

“I don’t know who all it was,” Betty said.

She tried to stand tall a felled stalk of yellow primrose, but when she gave the plant the tiniest tug, the whole thing came up in her hand, roots and all. Betty lowered her head and started to cry. “I’m so mad I could spit,” she said, her dark eyes piercing from beneath the many folds of her copper-colored skin. “I’d swat his little behind if I could.”

It was hard to know who had hurt her worse: the cops or her grandson, whom she seemed to blame for getting himself into this mess in the first place, and dragging her one good home into it. Caren knelt down beside her and put a gentle hand on her elbow, helping the older woman to her feet. Betty felt for Caren’s free hand and, finding it, squeezed so tightly it made Caren wince. Betty was holding on for dear life, it seemed. Together, the two went inside. In the kitchen, Betty cleaned herself up at the porcelain sink, drying her hands on a faded yellow washcloth hanging from the handle of an old gas stove. Then she reached across the kitchen counter for an open bottle of Maker’s Mark. “For my nerves,” she said. She poured two fingers into a chipped coffee mug and sipped slowly. Twice Caren asked her why she hadn’t come to court this afternoon, but Betty never answered her. She set the mug on the tiled countertop and reached into the front pocket of her housecoat for a handkerchief. She blew her nose and then pulled from the same pocket a two-page, folded document that bore a stamp from the parish courthouse. “Here,” she said. “They came with this.”

The warrant was signed by the same
JUDGE JONETTA PAULS
and, below that,
DETECTIVE NESTOR LANG
. Caren read the list of items authorized for removal by law enforcement from 168 Crescent Place, Donaldsonville, LA 70346. The very first thing on the list was a knife, of at least eight inches in length, with a wooden handle—
KNOWN COLLOQUIALLY AS A “CANE KNIFE.”
The warrant went on to list almost any and every article of clothing that might belong to a man Donovan’s age, noting that detectives were limited to collecting bloody clothing or shoes or items soiled with dirt and grass. There was nothing in print about videotapes or even copies of Donovan’s unfinished script, the school project, he’d told the cops, that had brought him to Belle Vie after hours. Either the detectives didn’t believe him, or they’d missed the significance of his admission.

But Caren knew what
tapes
meant.

At the counter, Betty finished the glass of bourbon.

Caren asked her if she happened to see what the officers took.

Betty shook her head. “All this mess, and they walked out of here with nothing,” she said. “Not a damn thing.” Caren turned and looked around the inside of the one-story house, which was made up of just a few small rooms. The living room and kitchen were divided by an oval table with a crocheted tablecloth laid gingerly on top. The television was a big black box, as old and bulky as a steamer trunk, and in front of it sat a daybed, painted a glossy white and adorned with a mound of throw pillows, some cross-stitched by hand. Betty must sleep here, Caren thought. The back bedroom was for her grandson, the only privacy in the house reserved for him. Through an open door, she could see the disarray left by the officers’ search. The mattress had been upended from its bed frame, and there were men’s clothes and shoes strewn about the floor, plus magazines and books open everywhere. A basketball had rolled into the hallway. “What about tapes?” Caren said. “Did you see the officers carry away any videotapes?” Donovan had told her to get to his grandmother’s house.
Tell her I didn’t do it
, he’d said. And when she’d asked about the tapes in open court, he mentioned Betty again. Caren felt sure the tapes were somewhere inside this house.

Betty shook her head, her rheumy eyes gazing off in the distance, across the poorly lit room, fixed on some far-off thought. Caren wasn’t sure she was still listening.

“Mrs. Collier,” she said gently. “Why weren’t you in court today?”

Betty let out a teary sigh, shrugging her bony shoulders. “I’ve had him since he was eight. I did the best I could with him. His daddy was trouble, too, in and out of jail.” She dropped her hands into the pockets of her housecoat, the posture of a woman resigned to her fate. “I’m eighty-two years old, and I’m tired,” she said, as if Donovan’s story were already written in stone, had been since the day he was born. “I did the best I could,” she said, wiping tears that had settled in the deep creases beneath her eyes. There was dirt under her fingernails. She smelled of Dove soap and whiskey. Caren didn’t want her to give up on Donovan. Betty was the only blood family Donovan had.

“That lawyer should have let you know about the court proceedings,” she said. “He should have demanded you be there today as a show of support.”