The Cutting Season (7 page)

“She was a good woman, your mother,” Lang said. “Loyal.”

Caren nodded vaguely.

“Thirty-two years at Belle Vie,” he said, whistling at the breadth of it. “And Leland Clancy never had any trouble with her,” he said, glancing at Detective Bertrand, who was following this bit of the conversation with a kind of detached appreciation for his partner’s style and approach. “How long ago did she die again?” Lang said.

“I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with your investigation?”

“She must have missed you something awful when you went off,” the detective said. “Dillard, then two years at the law school at Tulane. You spent time out there working in a legal clinic, isn’t that right?” So Donovan’s wasn’t the only background they’d looked into, she thought. “Kind of strange, you not mentioning that fact.”

“You asked me if I was a lawyer, and I answered the question correctly.”

“Didn’t mention your mother working here neither.”

“Didn’t think it was relevant.”

“ ‘Relevant,’ ” Lang said, playing the word back to her. He glanced down at the tips of his black dress shoes, which were marred now with damp grass and dirt. He was still fiddling with the coins in his pocket. “Well, Tulane,” he said. “I sure hope you weren’t gone so long as to forget where you came from, what this land means for the Clancys, who’ve been very good to people like your mother, Ms. Gray, people like you. We’re hoping we can count on you to do the right thing here. Point of fact is, somebody killed that girl out here. Now, my gut on this deal is that we’re talking about somebody local, someone who knows the landscape out here, and who might well come back. We need all the cooperation we can get, and that includes getting a hold of Donovan.”

“Dumped her here, you mean,” Caren said, correcting him.

Detective Bertrand shook his head. “We considered that, ma’am.”

“But thing is,” Lang said, “you already told us the gates were locked last night.”

“That’s right.”

“Every entrance, everything was locked, you said.”

“Yes.”

“Which means, ma’am,” Lang went on, laying out the facts as gently as possible, sensing he had not been as forthcoming as he should have been, like a doctor speaking of surgeries and pills and next steps, without ever mentioning the word
cancer
. The danger they were potentially in was a lot closer than she thought. “It means I don’t think we’re talking about someone getting inside these gates with a body, but someone who was trying to get
out
with it. That fence out there is, what, five feet?”

“It’s four feet, ten inches,” she said flatly. She’d once had it measured for a bride who wanted a line of Douglas firs to greet her guests for a Christmas wedding.

“And that gal out there was well over five feet tall and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds. Even a particularly strong man would have had a hard time lifting that amount of dead weight over a vertical fence, without leverage of any kind. My guess is somebody killed that girl here, on the property, and then tried to move her out. And we believe,” he said, glancing at Bertrand, “it was the fence that stopped them.”

“Mom,” Morgan said, “can I walk over to the kitchen now?”

“No, you stay right there.”

Morgan slumped in her seat, rolling her eyes.

Caren turned back to Detective Lang, feeling a flush of heat all of a sudden.

“It’s more likely than not, ma’am, that we’re talking about a murder that happened here last night, on the grounds of Belle Vie, while you and your daughter were sleeping . . . so I would think you’d want to help us solve this in any way you can.”

“I’ll try,” she said.

The words were a mere exhale, taking with them the last of Caren’s strength. She felt fear, of course. But also a choking dread, creeping up like floodwater, rising from her navel to her neck before she had a chance to take a second breath.

She knew the trouble that was coming, for all of them.

She would try to find Donovan, she said.

“ ’Preciate that, ma’am,” Detective Bertrand said.

“And we’ll keep Deputy Harris on duty, at least through the night.”

“The kid in uniform?”

Lang buttoned his suit jacket, even though the air in the schoolhouse had grown thick and hot, and Caren was by now sweating openly. “You couldn’t be in better hands,” he said. “And anyway, we’ll be back first thing in the morning with the search warrant.” He let those last words float in the air, hanging like smoke between them.

5

S
he told her daughter none of this, of course, as they started for home, veering together off the main path and walking through grass shaded by a grove of willow oaks. The branches were lifted, once and then again, by a stiff late-afternoon breeze. It woke the leaves, stirring them to conversation, the wind like a whisper over their heads.

It would be dark soon.

She’d ask Gerald to stay, put him on post right outside their front door.

Detective Lang had made it plain. There was a killer on the loose.

Morgan was a few feet ahead of Caren. She was humming a song her mother didn’t recognize, her overstuffed backpack hanging by a strap in her right hand, swinging and knocking against the backs of her bare knees. “I’m hungry,” she said when they were past the rose garden and the library was in sight. Their apartment was on the second floor of the building, which was made of painted brick and stone. It was without columns or a balcony, but in every other way resembled the main house, only in miniature. The black shutters on the top corner window opened to Caren’s bedroom.

The house had been Tynan’s once, the plantation’s overseer.

The man was seen as a hero around here, cited in all the literature of Belle Vie and in the coffee-table books sold in the gift shop, and featured heavily in the staged play
The Olden Days of Belle Vie
. The original owners had fled during the war, and Tynan was eventually hired by the United States government to manage the cane farm. Grant’s administration had seized Confederate land all across the South, Belle Vie included, for the purpose of establishing schools and a cash-based labor system for ex-slaves—but also keeping some of the sugar profits for itself. Tynan did well by the feds, and it was therefore a surprise to no one when the government deeded him the title to the land. In this parish, Tynan was regarded as an industrious planter who, by the good Southern values of hard work and discipline, had wrested back the land from a greedy federal government and made it something good again. He lived in this very building until the day he died, turning over the main house to his youngest daughter as a wedding gift on the eve of her marriage to a man by the name of James Clancy. The newly married Clancys had been the first occupants in the big house in nearly a decade.

“I’ll bring you a plate from the kitchen,” Caren said, as they approached the front door, which was always unlocked during business hours. There was no separate entrance for the upstairs living quarters, but up until now safety hadn’t been much of an issue. Tourists never made it back this far, only Danny and his laptop. She had a sudden vexing thought about his gate key, his freedom to come and go as he pleased.

“You have homework?” she asked her daughter.

“I already did it.” Caren glanced at her daughter’s backpack, aware that it was likely filled with library books and magazines instead of textbooks, plus the cookies she saved from her lunch tray at school. Morgan was a straight-A student and therefore allowed a lot of leeway on the subject of academics. Still, Caren always swore she would never raise a child who lies.

“All of it?” she said.

“Yep.”

Morgan pushed in the front door with her elbow.

Caren slid out of her muddy ropers before crossing the threshold.

Inside, the front parlor was dark, waning sunlight casting dusty gray shadows about the room. She turned on a floor lamp, then crossed to each of the room’s front windows, closing the velvet drapes. “I want you to stay inside tonight, Morgan.”

She was rifling through the drawers of an antique writing table.

She seemed to remember there being a spare key inside. “Letty’s not here, and there’s an event in the main house, and I want to know exactly where you are.”

The key, she realized, wasn’t there.

“Can I watch TV?” Morgan said.

There were two doors off the main parlor, on opposite sides of the room. To the right was the doorway that led to Belle Vie’s Hall of Records, a room the size of a walk-in closet, lined with storage cabinets and bookshelves. To the left was a closed door leading to the first floor of their apartment. There was a small kitchenette when you first walked in, next to a narrow, poorly carpeted stairway that led to four rooms upstairs: a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a small living area. It was not wired for cable and the “TV” was really a desktop computer on which Morgan downloaded programs she heard girls talking about at school. She was not allowed a Facebook page, and there was a parent-protection lock on the computer, a program that had taken Caren all of one afternoon and into the next to install on her own. She was a single mother out here, leaning on Letty and any other help she could get to raise her girl as best she could. “ ’Cakes,” she said. “I want you to tell me if you hear about things going on around here. Bo and Nikki Hubbard, they’re not supposed to be going into the cottages, no matter what they were in there doing.” She stopped there rather than get into any specifics about what all she thought they were doing. “If you hear of somebody breaking the rules, I want you to tell your mother about it, okay?”

“Uh-huh,” Morgan said, in a way that suggested she had no intention of ever doing any such thing. She had no playmates out here, no kids her own age; all the students from her grade school lived miles away, in Laurel Springs. Instead of friends, Morgan had the staff: a cook, two gardeners, and a cast of slaves. And she spent nearly every moment out of her mother’s sight in their company, preferred it most days.

Caren walked into the kitchen.

She didn’t find the spare key in any of the drawers in there either.

But by then her mind was made up. “I’m going to lock that door, Morgan.”

In the parlor, Morgan was leaning her rump against one of the leather armchairs, fingering a line of brass tacks on the chair’s left arm and following her mother’s movements with her eyes. “I’ll have my cell phone with me,” Caren said, picking up her daughter’s backpack from the floor and setting it on the chair. “You can call me if you need anything, and I’ll have Gerald stay with you until I come back.”

She unhooked her key ring from the belt loop on her jeans.

The library’s key was sandwiched between the one for her aging Volvo and the small, round-tipped brass key that used to open the front door of their place in Lakeview, one half of a Victorian duplex, a building that didn’t even exist anymore. Four years had passed, and she still couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. There were twenty or so work keys on her ring: the short brass one for the main house; the color-coded keys to the cottages, Manette and Le Roy; plus the dull silver one that opened the groundskeeper’s shed. She paused over this one . . . the key to Luis’s shed. Inside, she knew, there was a cabinet that housed a 12-gauge shotgun and a .32-caliber six-shooter, a weapon small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of her hand. They’d only ever been used for killing snakes or wood rats in Lorraine’s vegetable garden—shotgun or pistol, depending on Luis’s mood, or the size of the creature in his sights. Caren was the only one with a key to the cabinet—the shortest on her key ring, the one with the tiny diamond-shaped head. This was the first time, in all the years she’d worked here, that she’d thought to go into that cabinet on her own, without a word to anyone else. It was the first time at Belle Vie she’d felt the need to have a gun on hand.

She turned toward her daughter. “Why don’t you come with me tonight?” she said, already running the calculations in her head, how she could do her job and watch her daughter at the same time. Surely, the night’s hosts wouldn’t mind a nine-year-old girl tucked in some quiet corner of the ballroom, a book in her lap. Morgan lifted her legs off the ground, letting her soft, pudgy body fall into the center of the armchair. She sank down into the cracked leather, pulling her scuffed knees under her chin. She looked distracted, worried about something. “Why isn’t Donovan here?” she said.

“I don’t know, ’Cakes.”

Then she repeated her earlier idea. “Why don’t you stay with me in the main house tonight? Or you could sit and watch Lorraine in the kitchen,” she said.

But Morgan was surprisingly uninterested.

She shook her head. “I’m tired, Mom.”

Caren kissed the top of her daughter’s hair, which smelled of wet grass and thick, late-day clouds, the salted sweat of recess. She couldn’t believe that come December Morgan would be ten years old. She could still remember whole afternoons when Morgan wouldn’t leave her mother’s lap. She kissed her again, inhaling everything. It was Morgan who pulled away first. She yawned, sinking further into the leather chair, laying her head across the armrest. “I’ll have Gerald stay tonight,” Caren said. “And I’ll be back to take a shower and bring you some dinner.” Morgan nodded. It was a quarter to four when Caren closed the door, her only child on the other side.

T
he Belle Vie Players had left for the day, all but Shauna and Dell, who would each earn an hourly wage for staying on as “greeters” for the night and part of the set dressing—which, at $10.75 an hour for standing around in tattered calico and a head scarf, was not a bad way to make some extra cash. Dell Blanchett, in her late forties, had a second job at an outlet mall off I-10 and a mountain of debt from a second marriage. Shauna was in her twenties and, as far as Caren could tell, spent most of her money on a leased Lexus LS, black with tinted windows. She was a cute girl, young and stylish, managing, even, to pull off the antebellum look, the apron and floor-length rags that made up her slave costume. Both women were in the kitchen by the main house when Caren came in, just minutes before the final walk-through. They were crowded at Lorraine’s card table, eating an early dinner along with three of the cater-waiters who were on duty tonight, one of whom was talking on his cell phone. The air in the kitchen was clouded with the smoke of fried bacon and the sizzle of sautéing greens. Caren’s eyes watered, and her stomach turned over with hunger. Pearl was standing on her crate at the stove, hovering over a big, dented drum of a pot, stirring creamed potatoes. Lorraine was leaning against the open back doorway, sharing a smoke with Danny Olmsted.

“How are we doing in here, Lorraine?” Caren asked, feeling encouraged by the bustle of culinary activity in the kitchen. “The client’s going to be here soon. I assume we’re pretty close?” Lorraine didn’t address her directly. Instead, she blew out a long, coiling stream of cigarette smoke and glanced at her assistant. “Pearl?”

Pearl squinted through the steam. “Yeah, all right,” she muttered.

“Great,” Caren said, her manner full of forced cheer for the troops.

In truth, the sheer effort required to remain upright at the end of this long day was making her sweat. She felt a cold line of it running down the center of her back.

At the rear door, Lorraine blew cigarette smoke through her lips, waving the air in front of her face. She offered a drag to Danny, but he turned it down, biting at the white meat of his thumb. He was still in his trench coat, even though the air in the kitchen was warm and sticky. He’d had his eyes on Caren since she walked in.

“So what’d the cops say?” he asked.

“They’ll be back tomorrow,” she said, not wanting to get into any of it right now, not with the hired waitstaff present.

“And there’s been no word from Donovan?”

“No.”

The room was exquisitely, almost achingly, quiet, with only the sound of the gas range, the hum and hiss of heat coming from the stove. The staff was tight-lipped, just as they’d been this morning in the schoolhouse. Caren looked back and forth between Danny and Lorraine, Dell and Shauna and Pearl, all of them quiet as church mice.

“Look, if you guys know where he is, you should tell me now,” she said. “Trust me, the longer he waits to talk to the cops, the more trouble he’s making for himself.”

Danny cleared his throat.

“He’s not returning any of our calls,” he said.

Shauna nodded in agreement, brushing her long, black hair off her shoulders. She, like the others, seemed concerned, but none of them as much as Danny. He looked downright disturbed, his pallor that of skim milk, and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stop gnawing at the flesh around his fingernails, tearing at himself like a dog working a bone.

“The detectives just want to talk to him,” Caren said, trying to sound reassuring.

Lorraine tossed her smoke through the back doorway. “Talk to him about what?” she said. “Donovan ain’t have nothing to do with them Mexicans back there.”

“Oh, hush, Lorraine,” Dell said, fanning herself with a paper plate. She lifted and pushed the folds of her prairie skirt up above her knees, courting a breeze down there. One of the waiters, a white kid in his twenties wearing suspenders and black dress pants, his shirt still undone, looked back and forth between Dell and Lorraine.

“Hey, what are you guys talking about?”

“Nothing,” Shauna mumbled. She and Dell seemed to regard this as a family matter and not a subject for open discussion, and Caren felt an unexpected surge of affection for both of them. Shauna stood and dumped her leftovers in a gray trash bin. Caren reminded her and Dell that she would need them in position by five. She told both women to keep an eye on each other tonight, no wandering around the grounds. “Not tonight,” she said firmly. After dark, she wanted everyone to stay in pairs.