The Cutting Season (32 page)

“I don’t know, ’Cakes.”

Morgan nodded sagely, a kid getting an early, unwelcome lesson in the breadth of life’s vast unfairness. She took a sideways glance, a second look at Owens. “Don’t keep her too late,” she called to him, before skipping off to catch up to her dad. Owens was highly amused. “What a great kid,” he said, as Caren stood there, watching her go.

T
hey sat in his car, in the dark, only the blue light of his laptop computer between them. Owens hit rewind and they watched it again, the last scene on the second disc. Caren could smell the soapy pomade in his hair, the hint of mint on his breath. He was chewing his fingernails, utterly perplexed. “I don’t understand,” he said, staring at the headlights on the screen. “Why would he take a deal?”

“The whole thing started as a misunderstanding,” she explained. Outside, the rain was misting, swirling about, like tiny seeds in the wind. “Donovan, the kid with a criminal record, admits to being at the scene of the crime the night she was killed, not knowing what he was getting himself into, and then the cops just kind of zeroed in on him and never looked back. And now they’re saying they have the murder weapon.”

“The knife?”

Caren nodded. “But his car sat in our parking lot for at least a day. It sat out there completely unsupervised for a whole night. Anyone could have put it there.”

Owens was still staring at the computer screen, at the shot of the truck’s white headlights, the visual fact of someone parked just over the fence in the cane fields.

“Abrams sleeps in his trailer, by the way, so he can be first in the fields at sunrise,” he said. “That’s not even five hundred yards from the grave site.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. The nails were bitten to the quick, gnawed and pink. Caren noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “There’s almost no excuse for him not being a person of interest in this, especially in light of his past behavior,” he said. “I tried to offer an affidavit, to tell Lang what I know, the research the paper has on file for the man right now, but they don’t want to hear it. For them, this whole thing is solved.”

She caught a note of something between heartache and rage behind his pale green eyes. She wondered what all this meant for him, why, beyond his job, his reporter’s eye for a lie, he was so beset by this particular story, why he cared so much.

“Clancy got Donovan a lawyer,” she told him.

“
Raymond
Clancy?”

She nodded, adding this to the growing list of his shady behavior of late. He wanted this deal with Groveland to go through, and Abrams getting arrested for murder, or even being under suspicion, would surely pour cold water on the plantation’s sale, as well as the launch of Clancy’s political career. Getting Donovan a lawyer was a sleight of hand, a trick, a cover . . . but for what exactly, she wondered.

Once more, she tried to walk through Owens’s take on the case. “So Inés finds a bone out in the fields, a body part buried in the Groveland farm, and less than a week later she’s dead,” she said.

“Very rarely does one come across an honest-to-God coincidence in my line of work,” he said. “If it smells rotten, it’s usually ’cause it is.”

“You think Abrams told Clancy what was buried out in those fields?”

“It
is
his land. Clancy’s, that is.”

Caren wondered how deep this cover-up went.

Outside, the wind lifted, swirling and shaking rain from the tree leaves overhead, drops as soft as water on wet cotton, a faint thumping on the roof of the car. Caren shivered. Owens, without comment, rolled up his car window, sealing the air between them. The church lights were still on, but the place was otherwise deserted, the bottle tree twinkling in the rain, doing its colorful best to protect the chapel and its last guest. Caren thought of her all alone in there.

“Inés was sleeping in the quarters,” she said. “She spent the last nights of her life sleeping inside a slave cabin.” Akerele and Ginny were right. She must have been terrified, Caren said.

She turned to look at Owens.

He was already turning his key in the ignition.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

T
hey drove south on East Bayou Road, past the town center and heading into the ragged outskirts of the parish. About a mile past the high school, she asked him where they were going. Owens was hunched over the steering wheel, staring studiously at the unbroken lines on the asphalt ahead. And then, with no warning, he yanked the wheel hard to the left, the sudden move pushing Caren against the side of the door.

They had turned onto a short, red-dirt road, no more than an alley cut through a block of weeds. It was lined on both sides with trailer homes, double-wides and singles propped up on blocks and parked haphazardly on messy, trash-strewn plots of gravel and grass. Nearby sat a grove of rusted cars, made over for lawn furniture. A ’76 Le Mans sat under a colorful blanket, its dirty fringe dappled with dried leaves and empty soda cans left on its hood. The place was a makeshift subdivision of some kind, a virtual tent city. “What is this?” she said, staring ahead.

“That one was hers.”

He was pointing to a small camper, the kind of thing a suburban family might hitch to the back of a station wagon, a thing to sleep in for a night or two, not a life. But this, apparently, had been Inés’s home. She had taken the care and time to clip the weeds out front, had doctored a large hole in the structure with an artful weave of black and gray duct tape, and had arranged a pile of broken concrete and rocks to hold up the camper’s front end. It was not so far a leap from here to the quarters, Caren thought. She heard the punch and twang of
tejano
music. There was a television playing in a nearby trailer. A roll of canned applause blew across the night air. The terrain was rough, rocking the small sedan back and forth as Owens inched them forward. Rainwater swirled in open pockets in the middle of the road. Caren begged Owens to turn back before they got stuck out here in the mud.

Instead, he parked the car in a patch of weeds by the side of the road.

The sky was dark, a deep, midnight blue. Owens shut the car engine, undoing his seat belt and reaching for the door handle. “What are you doing?” Caren said.

“When we spoke, Akerele told me there were no other acts of violence that the church was aware of, or disturbances of any kind, and certainly no workers who went missing.” Caren nodded. Akerele had reported the same to her. “But he also said those workers are like family,” he said, cracking open the car door. “Maybe Gustavo, the guy she was living with, knows more than the rest of them are saying.” He stepped out of the car, and Caren, not sure she could stand being left alone in this car, on the side of a dark road, got out and followed him. The heels of her boots sank in the mud as she struggled to catch up to him. Together, they walked in a line down the center of the dirt road.

In the distance, she heard a whisper of Spanish, the low hum of talk radio. A few feet away, two men were smoking cigarettes and sitting on top of the Le Mans, a Styrofoam cooler at their feet and a pile of ice and a fishing line dumped in the grass. One of the men was gutting a flathead catfish. The blade of his knife shone beneath a flashlight that was rigged to the roof of the car. The other man was drinking beer out of a can. He squinted in the advancing darkness, trying to make them out, two figures on the road. The one with the knife hopped off the hood of the car, walking toward them, the blade pointed down. There was blood dripping off the tip. Owens froze, staring at the knife. Caren stepped forward and told the man, “
No queremos problemas
,” making use of the Spanish she’d learned on her first part-time job in New Orleans, waiting tables at a steak house. The man’s posture softened somewhat. He gave her a curt but not unfriendly nod, before returning to his fish, looking up every now and then to stare at Owens. The man he was with threw his head back, draining his beer and staring at the night’s stars. Across the road, a toddler was witnessing this whole scene. He was wearing a football helmet and a diaper, watching them from the doorway of a nearby trailer, the grill of his Cowboys helmet pressed against the mesh of the screen door. Behind him, Caren heard the faint sounds of a television game show playing low.

Finally, they made it to Inés’s camper.

The front door was a thin black screen, framed in a cheap aluminum that rattled in its hinge when Owens knocked. Together, they waited to hear movement, some sign of life inside the camper. The man with the knife was watching them. In the other direction, down the main road, Owens’s car was a silhouette in the distance. For a brief second, she thought she saw something, or
someone
, moving beside the car. Weeds, she told herself. Please, God, let it be the weeds.

“
No hay nadie allí
.”

Caren swung around.

It was the man with the knife. There’s no one there, he was saying.

He tossed the filleted fish onto the pile of ice chips, then reached into the cooler for another, running the flat blade along the skin. “
La señora está muerta
,” he said. “
Y su novio, se ha ido. Se fue
.” The woman, he said, was dead, and her man was gone.

“What’s that?” Owens said. “What’s he saying?”

Caren shushed him.

“
Cuando?
” she asked the man.

“
Esta noche
.” Then, he shrugged. “
Agarró una maleta y se fue
.”

Gustavo’s gone, she said to Owens.

He took a bag and fled.

“Ask him if he knew them.”

“
Usted los conocía?
” she asked.

The man with the knife stared for a long time, looking between Caren and Owens, this white boy. Maybe it was the language, the ease with which he and Caren had fallen into conversation in his mother tongue, but he seemed to get no charge from her presence. She was a woman,
y una morena
at that, and he regarded her as more a curiosity than a threat. No, he said, going back to his knife and his fish.

Owens nudged her to keep it going.

Caren asked the man if he knew the Groveland farm.

“
Sí
,” he said. “
Pero nunco he ido
.”

He’s never been there, he said.

He was not a man for the fields. “
Me gusta el agua
.”

He slapped a fish on ice and reached for another.

Owens seemed lost without a working language. He was leaning on Caren, literally, pulling at her elbow and holding on way too tightly. “The field-workers, do they live around here, too?” he asked Caren, nudging her to turn and ask the man with the knife. She felt his insistent breath in her ear. She told him to stop and let her talk.

“
Hay otros campesinos de la granja que viven aquí?
”

“
No, no
.” The man shook his head. “
Solo ellos
,” he said, pointing to the camper where Inés and Gustavo lived. They were the only Groveland workers here.

“
Está seguro?
”

“
Sí
,” he said. He was very sure. They didn’t get many strange faces around the campsite, he said, a strange smile on his face, looking at Caren and Owens, as if to prove his point. “
Claro, la policía llegó
.” The police, of course. They were here.

His buddy, who had so far let nothing past his lips save for cold beer, nudged the man with the knife. “
Y el gringo
,” he said, his speech so slurred that Caren didn’t catch it the first time. The man with the knife nodded. There was someone else who had come snooping around the campsite a few times, specifically looking for Inés.

“
Un gringo?
”

“
Sí
,” he said. The man was kind of dark, with black hair, and tall, very, very tall, the drunk man said, holding his hand a foot or so above the roof of the Le Mans. He had come around a few times the week before Inés died. “
En un troca rojá
,” he said.

“He was in a red truck?”

The man nodded.

She played his words back in her head: a man in a red truck stalking Inés . . . just like the man in the red truck Caren had seen in her rearview mirror more than once this past week. She heard Owens’s words again, his pronouncement that true coincidences are rare, and for the first time she had a fleeting doubt about Abrams being the killer. Was there someone else out there? A killer who had gotten to Inés Avalo and was now following Caren?

She told Owens she was ready to go.

She wanted to get the hell out of here.

But Owens didn’t see how he could get this close to Inés, to where she had once lived, and not go inside. “Just for a second,” he said, as he reached for the camper’s screen door.

Owens stepped in first, feeling along the buckled walls for a light switch. But there was no electricity in here, only an oversized mechanic’s flashlight hanging on a nail by the door. Caren flipped it on and saw that there was no running water, either. There were bedsheets on the floor and stacks of folded clothes, plus a crate of dented kitchen utensils, a plastic holly wreath, ceramic bowls, and a rolling suitcase. She found a use for everything, Caren remembered Akerele saying. Among her things were a red plastic cooler . . . and dozens of votive candles, just like the ones Caren had found inside Jason’s Cabin in the slave quarters.