The Cutting Season (36 page)

Caren glanced out the window, thinking of the quarters and the patch of land back behind the cabins where Jason had built a small hut, no bigger than a horse’s stable but big enough to suit the dimensions required by federal law. She had the map of the plantation out on her desk, stamped by the federal government in 1872. She now realized that her great-great-great-grandfather must have made a claim on this very land just before he died . . . and just before William Tynan took possession for himself. Caren remembered her mother’s last words to her: Leland Clancy knew he hadn’t come by this land honestly. And she guessed that Clancy’s two sons knew it, too. They knew what William Tynan, their ancestor, had done to get his hands on Belle Vie, that the sheriff’s accusations of murder back in 1872 weren’t that far-fetched. It made her think twice about the bone Inés had found, and the possible identity of the body buried in the fields. “What about state and federal records? Were you able to check there?” she said.

“I cross-checked what I could from here in the office, but my understanding is that some of those records have been lost over time. Before computers, things got moved around, papers disappeared.”

Then, mulling it over, he said, “Bobby Clancy . . . are you sure?”

Outside, lightning shot through the sky, brightening the southern end of the plantation. And in the flash of electric light, Caren caught a frightening sight. Eric’s rental car was in the parking lot . . . but so was Bobby’s red truck. “I have to go,” she said, slamming down the phone. Thunder followed the strike of lightning, as loud as a cannon shot. Caren ran out of the main house, searching for her family. On the other side of Lorraine’s kitchen, the vegetable garden came into view. The dirt was turned over, roots coming up out of the ground.

Caren saw tire tracks in the mud.

She grabbed the two-way from her jacket pocket, calling over to security again.

Gerald, when she reached him, sounded breathless and confused. The white golf cart was missing, he said. He’d driven to the gift shop to use the facilities and when he stepped out again the cart was gone.

“What’s going on, Miss C?”

“Call the cops,” she said. “Get somebody out here
now
.”

She clicked off the line and followed the twin tracks in the mud.

She passed the garden and the stone kitchen and the two guest cottages, searching every corner of the plantation, running all the way. She ran through the slave village, coming up to the white five-foot-high fence, and that’s where she saw them. On the other side sat the golf cart, idling near the cane fields. Eric was in the driver’s seat, the lenses of his glasses so dotted with rainwater that Caren could hardly see his eyes. Morgan was shivering, crouched in beside him. Eric had an arm around her, not letting go for a second. And behind them both, in the backseat, Bobby was holding the .32 to the back of Eric’s head.

When she saw her mother, Morgan tried to stand. “Morgan!” Eric shouted.

Caren told her not to move.

I’m coming
, she thought.

Don’t move.

She ran for the fence. The bars were slippery and wet, and she had no idea how she made it over in one piece. She did manage to cut her palm in the process. And when she landed in the cane fields, her ankle bent at a sharp angle, a pain that shot up through the base of her skull. She limped toward them, but stopped short when Bobby slid from the backseat. He had the pistol in one hand and the shotgun in the other, the long nose of it carving a trail in the dirt. His gait was loping and unsteady, and he was tilting off to one side. “I told you not to do anything stupid.” He’s drunk, Caren thought. The .32, still pointed at Eric’s head, was wavering slightly in Bobby’s hand. All around them, the tall sweet grass was swaying this way and that in the wind. “I’m not going down for this. Not for nothing,” he said. He was shaking his head, back and forth, the motion achingly precise, as if he were gunning some internal engine, revving himself up . . . for what, Caren didn’t know. “I’m not going down for this alone.”

There was a faint movement behind him.

Eric had climbed from behind the wheel of the golf cart. To Morgan, he held up a single finger, indicating that she was to remain silent and perfectly still, no matter what was about to happen. Then he looked at Caren. He nodded his head toward the shotgun, sending her a silent message with that small gesture. He was going to grab the larger gun, catching Bobby unawares.

But when Eric reached for it, the shotgun didn’t easily come out of Bobby’s hand. Bobby turned and swatted hard with the smaller gun, landing a sharp blow across Eric’s brow. Eric reeled backward, and Morgan screamed. Bleeding from the hit, Eric then charged Bobby at the waist, knocking them both into the dirt and mud. Bobby fell on top of the shotgun, belching out a low moan when the nose of the gun dug into his back. Eric reached for the pistol, and a second later Caren heard a shot ring out. Morgan jumped out of the golf cart. Caren screamed for her to stay where she was. They both watched as Eric rolled over in silence, landing face down in the dirt. Within seconds Bobby was standing over Caren.

“I’m not going down for this one,” he said, pointing the pistol at her face, his finger on the trigger, the knuckle scraped raw. “You not gon’ breath a word of it, hear?”

Bobby
.

She whispered his name.

“It’s me, Helen’s girl,” she said. “It’s Caren.” Bobby stumbled on unsteady feet, blinking back against the sound of her voice and whatever memories it invoked. In his hand, the gun wavered slightly.

Behind him, Eric sat up.

Bobby turned toward the sound, which is how he never saw where the final shot came from. Even Caren had no idea that Hunt Abrams had followed the sounds of their shouts in the fields. Without saying a word, Abrams aimed his shotgun, the very one he carried in his truck, and unleashed the force of it. Caren watched in disbelief as the blast shredded Bobby’s left shoulder. He dropped the pistol and fell backward, as stiff and straight as a stalk of cane. The sound he made, his voice box choked with shock and searing pain, cut through the air.

Abrams jogged across the field, kneeling at Bobby’s side. When he got a good look at his handiwork, saw up close what he’d done, he cursed himself. “Aw, goddamnit,” he muttered. He sank down into the wet earth and lowered his head, his shotgun still warm at his side.

Eric’s right arm was bleeding.

He was shaking everywhere, teeth chattering from the pain.

“Morgan opened the door,” he said to Caren, trying to explain, trying to understand himself what had just happened. “She let him in and . . .” His voice trailed to nothing, lost in the rain and wind. He winced and looked down at his arm. “How bad is it?” It was ugly, but manageable, she hoped. It looked like no more than a flesh wound.

A few feet away, Morgan, by a miracle, was unhurt.

“Get her out of here,” Caren said.

Eric made his way to their daughter, and Morgan threw her arms around her father.

“Go!” Caren said.

Eric hesitated, looking back at her.

He didn’t want to leave her out here.

“I’m okay,” she said, and she was.

She watched and waited as he ushered Morgan into the golf cart, then climbed behind the wheel. He put the cart into gear and spun it in the direction of the river road, kicking up a spray of mud as he sped away. Hunt Abrams was still seated beside Bobby’s injured body, his own one-man vigil. Caren limped toward him, her ankle still throbbing. She knelt beside him and rested a hand on Abrams’s shoulder. He looked up at her, but had nothing to say. She leaned her weight against him as she bent over Bobby Clancy, patting his damp body, until she found her cell phone in his jeans pocket. In the afternoon rain, she called 911, asking for an ambulance, and then she called the Sheriff’s Department.

Lang was already on his way, they told her.

They would need a second team, too, she said, investigators and crime-scene techs with shovels and whatever else was needed for an excavation, to get Jason out of these fields.

30

B
y Monday morning, Bobby Clancy was out of surgery and resting as well as could be expected at the St. Elizabeth Hospital across the river in Gonzales, no more than a few miles from the sheriff’s station at the Ascension Parish courthouse, where he would be housed once he was able to be moved and thereby officially charged with the murder of Inés Avalo—the same courthouse where Donovan Isaacs’s hearing to change his plea had been hastily scrapped from Judge Jonetta Pauls’s morning docket. All charges, Caren heard, had been dropped.

She was already miles and miles away by then, downriver at the New Orleans International Airport in Kenner, bidding a bittersweet good-bye.

She was not allowed past the checkpoint, and so the setting was awkward. Out on the curb by the skycaps, she kissed her daughter one more time.

Morgan was surprisingly calm, cheerful even. She’d never been on an airplane before, never been to Washington. Eric had mentioned, twice already, a possible trip to the White House. He was trying to put her at ease; they both were. Caren had promised to call every night. It was coming, she knew. She’d made a point to warn Eric, last night and then again this morning as they’d loaded up the cars. It might be a day or two or even a few weeks from now, she told him, but the events of yesterday, the rain and the blood and the guns . . . she will wake up one night screaming. Or she might say nothing at all, Eric, and you’ll have to watch for those moments most of all, when she simply stares out a window or stops eating in the middle of a meal.

Just be there, she told him.

“And what about you?” he’d asked, his left arm still bandaged.

Nothing had been decided, not yet.

There was the Whitman wedding, work she’d promised the staff.

There was a whole house to pack and a history to put away.

Beyond that, she wasn’t willing to say for sure, one way or another.

“Mom,” Morgan said, turning to run back to her mother just as the sliding glass doors to the terminal opened and Eric stepped inside with their bags. Caren knelt down on one knee and caught Morgan as she threw herself into her mother’s arms.
I know, ’Cakes. I feel the same way.
Morgan was the first to pull back, digging her fingers into Caren’s shoulders and staring into her eyes as if she felt she needed to buoy her mother up or convince her of her own strength. It reminded Caren of the whispers of encouragement she used to give Morgan when she was first learning to walk on her own. “I won’t let them touch my hair,” Morgan said. “Or pick out my clothes.”

And by
them
, Caren knew she meant
her
.

They were having a discussion about loyalty, without ever mentioning Lela’s name. Caren didn’t know whether she should feel proud or tremendously sad that her daughter believed that this would make it easier on her, that Morgan felt she had to protect her mother. “No, ’Cakes,” she said. “That’s your dad, and she’s going to be your stepmother, your family.” The mother of your brother or sister, she thought.

Caren smiled, touching the curls around Morgan’s round face.

“And I’m okay with that, ’Cakes.”

Morgan grinned, showing the gap in her front teeth. Bobby was right. She did look just like Helen Gray. “Tell Donovan I love him,” she said. And with that, she turned and ran, her backpack thumping against her bottom, as she caught up to her father, who’d been watching and waiting from the glassed-in vestibule of the American Airlines terminal. “Good luck next month,” Caren told him, meaning his coming nuptials, his start at something new. Eric gave her a small wave. Morgan, God bless her big, magnificent, forgiving heart, never looked back.

L
ater, at the sheriff’s station, Caren gave Detectives Lang and Bertrand her second of two interviews, the other having taken place last night, on the grounds of Belle Vie, her clothes still wet and muddy from the afternoon storm. Today, she signed an affidavit, detailing the last twenty-four hours and beyond: the early suspicions of someone other than Donovan being responsible for the murder, the discovery of his film script and DVDs and her missing cell phone, the discussions with Lee Owens of the
Times-Picayune
and the information from Father Akerele and Ginny at the church, the stories of Inés being followed by none other than Bobby Clancy, Caren now knew. And this she tied to the bone that Inés had found in the fields. There was an official file for him now, for Jason. Forensic anthropologists at LSU were contacted, and Caren had offered her own blood for a DNA sample, or whatever else this century had to offer in the way of science, to determine who was buried out in the cane fields.

The cops were getting no help from Raymond Clancy on the matter. He’d been stalling about giving his own police interview. Too busy, Caren guessed, dealing with the press, giving multiple television interviews about his unstable brother and the tragedy of the circumstances, a man come unhinged, a man he hardly knew anymore. By the morning’s news cycle, he had completely disowned his only brother, and people were already praising him for his frank candor and levelheadedness in the face of a crisis. He was an absolute natural on-screen.

On her way out of the station, Caren spied Owens in the parking lot. He was in the driver’s seat of his Saturn, parked next to her Volvo.

He climbed out of his car as she approached and leaned his right hip against the front end of his vehicle. He was back in uniform, his khaki pants and a thin T-shirt, even though it was barely fifty degrees outside, and on his head was a faded ball cap, the words
BANKS STREET BAR & GRILL
stitched in white, yet another blues club in his beloved New Orleans. She wondered what it would have been like to know him when she lived in the city, if she’d stumbled upon him some night at Sweet Lorraine’s or the Old Opera House, or if he’d ever had a drink at the Grand Luxe Hotel after work. She liked him, that was easy enough to admit. When he took off his hat in her presence, running his fingers through the snaking curls, she felt an unexpected swell.

He smiled, tapping his cap against his thigh. “So . . . where you laying your head tonight, miss?”

“Belle Vie, for now,” she said. “I’ve got some things I need to wrap up.”

“Any chance we’ll get you back?”

The
we
being his city, she knew. “I don’t know.”

“It’s not like it was,” he said.

“Is that good or bad?”

Owens smiled, kicking his foot against the car’s front tire. There was no easy way to answer that. His tone grew serious, wistful even. “The story’s dead,” he said. “And Clancy’s coming out of this deal looking like a star.” He shook his head at the exquisite irony of it. “The crime beat will have a go at the killing and Bobby Clancy, but without a murder angle tied to the Groveland deal, and no charges against Hunt Abrams, the paper’s a lot less interested in how the company treats its workers. They’re going to run a piece about the company’s expansion, what it’ll do for the state’s economy and the future of the sugar business in Louisiana. But most of that research is coming out of the AP’s bureau in New Orleans. It won’t have a thing to do with me.”

“I’ve got a story for you.”

He gave her a curious look, tilting his chin to one side. “Yeah?”

“Just give me some time to get it all straight, Owens.”

“Call me Lee.”

He slid his cap back on his head and nodded toward the doors of the courthouse. “My turn now,” he said, indicating the police interview that awaited him.

He was stalling, though, lingering in her presence.

“Listen,” he said finally. “If you do come back to New Orleans, I mean, if you come back for good, would you let me buy you a drink sometime, Miss Gray?”

“I would insist on it.”

He was charmed, for sure. And wise enough to go out on a high.

He tipped the bill of his cap, and walked into the parish courthouse.

T
wo days before the Whitman wedding, Caren led a guided tour for the Groveland brass. The company sent a team of five from the corporate headquarters in Porterville, California, to survey the site, two women and three men, the youngest and tallest of whom—an African-American gentleman with close-cropped hair and smooth, unlined skin—appeared to be the one in charge. They arrived with their own name tags, laminated cards clipped to their matching oxford shirts, the sunny Groveland logo stitched over their right breasts. The black guy was:
KEN WIGGAMS, PRESIDENT, SOUTHEAST REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
. The other four were titleless names: Susan, Kathy, Edward, and Jim. Caren greeted them in the plantation’s parking lot. There was no rain that day, not a cloud for miles, and so the plan was to tour the grounds on foot. She started at the rose garden, remembering as she went Luis’s steady hand, the care he’d shown all these years. The main house was open, the view through the foyer and the dining hall going all the way to the front lawn on the other side, the alley of oaks and the verdant levee in the distance, a roll of grass bright and green in the sun. She showed them the upstairs bedrooms, where the Duquesnes and then the Clancys once slept. And she took them through the kitchen, introduced them to Pearl and Lorraine, who offered a tray of sweet tea infused with orange and honey. Lorraine winked at Caren as the tour group left, stepping around her garden. Down the lane, the windows of the cottages, Manette and Le Roy, were all open, their white, gauzy curtains lifted and then rested in the late morning breeze. She explained that the cottages were once used by guests visiting Belle Vie, but the overseer, a man named Tynan, had made his home in the
garçonnière
, what was now the plantation’s library.

In the quarters, she kept an eye on Ken Wiggams.

The ladies, Susan and Kathy, and even the older gentleman, Edward, a white man in his late fifties, were all taken with the scene, reading each placard carefully and going in and out of the cabins, including the last one on the left, Jason’s old home. The women asked questions, about the quilts and the field tools and the stove dug into the ground. Edward took a picture of the cabin with his cell phone.

Ken Wiggams, the black guy, was the only one who didn’t venture into the slave village, never setting foot on the dirt path. He stood apart from the others, his hands shoved in the pockets of his black slacks, his mouth pinched into a bitter, grudging expression, and it occurred to Caren that she should have found a way to bring this man out here alone, away from his white colleagues, that her last-ditch effort to save the plantation might have gone better if she hadn’t put him in the difficult position of necessarily viewing himself as two men at once: a president and a descendant of slaves. He turned at one point and asked her directly, “How much more of this is there?”

The last stop on the tour was a visit to the old schoolhouse.

There was no staged performance today, but the members of the Groveland delegation were invited to watch a different production in progress, the shooting of one of the final scenes of Donovan’s screenplay. Caren advised caution as they stepped over a tangled river of wires and cords, connecting lights and sound equipment. The schoolhouse had been made over to look like a court of law, the place where Tynan finally went on trial for the presumed stabbing death of Jason.

The sheriff was on the stand.

It was Donovan, of course, in boots and a badge.

Danny Olmsted, newly added to the cast, played the part of the prosecutor, wearing as his costume the same black trench coat he always did, this time over a frilly white shirt and a poorly knotted ascot. He clasped his hands behind his back, speaking in a manner that was one part Perry Mason, one part George Washington.

The scene of an ancient murder trial played before them.

“What
is
this?” one of the Groveland employees asked.

“Belle Vie,” Caren said.

This
is what you bought.

L
ater that day, she said good-bye to her mother, clearing the land and brushing dirt and leaves off the headstones of her family, working in a straight line, all the way back to Eleanor and the empty space beside her that belonged to Jason. It would have been something to know them, she thought, whispering their names. And then, lastly, she told her mother it was long past time for her to go. It was time for her to move on.

That night was one of her last at Belle Vie.

Alone, she ate half a frozen pizza, washed down with warm red wine. She sat in front of her laptop at the kitchen table, looking at law schools in the D.C. area. Just looking, she told herself.

Later, she surveyed what was left of her packing.

As the sun set, she started off with her Maglite and ring of keys, checking and double-checking the front and back gates, riding along in the white golf cart underneath the canopy of magnolia trees. Around the back side of the main house, she stopped cold when she saw a light on inside the building. Caren was supposedly the only one out here. She slammed on the brakes. Looking in through the first-floor windows, she felt in her jacket pocket for the .32 pistol. She was in the habit now of keeping it close by.