The Cutting Season (4 page)

She hated this part of the job.

She wanted to lie down somewhere and start this day all over again—Donovan on time, and no body in the ground, and none of this news about Miguel’s status.

The slim detective was walking toward her. “Caren Gray?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Sergeant said you’re the one who made the call?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Nestor Lang, ma’am.” He held out his right hand.

“You can call me Caren.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He turned and surveyed the scene with a small sigh.

“Well,” he said. “Tell me what you know.”

“Miguel,” she said, nodding to where he was standing with the other cop. “He alerted Luis, who alerted me, and then I called the station. I don’t really know any more than that.” Detective Lang nodded, reaching for his cell phone at his waist. He checked a text message, then nodded to the kid in uniform. “Go on and escort Dr. Allard back this way,” he said, “and let him know the crew from CID is already here.”

“Yes, sir,” the deputy said. He jogged across the grass toward the parking lot, keeping a taming hand on the loose waistband of his pants as he ran. Lang slid his cell phone back inside the leather case on his belt. From his jacket pocket he pulled out a small pad, identical to the one his partner was using to take notes. He clicked the top of an ink pen and said, “So who all has access to the property, ma’am?”

“The staff, during the day.”

“Can I get a list?”

“Yes.”

“And the property’s locked at night?”

“Unless we have an event, yes.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” he said. “Y’all put on parties out here.”

She didn’t believe that
y’all
for a second. It was a folksy air, put on in an effort to disarm her, she thought, to make her feel at home with him. He was watching her closely, studying her face, the way she had both hands shoved down deep in the pockets of her jeans, making clear by his expression that he hadn’t yet decided on which side of his internal ledger she belonged, openly compliant . . . or trouble. He threw a glance over his shoulder, nodding toward the main house and the quarters. “Strange place to throw a party,” he said, testing her reaction, trying to get a feel for what kind of an employee she was, perhaps one who might go off-script outside her boss’s earshot.

“Well . . . we host weddings, too.”

This made him smile.

He thought she was being clever.

“The event fees help cover the cost of maintaining the property,” she said matter-of-factly. “The Clancys feel it’s the best way they can preserve the space for history.”

“Was there something going on here last night?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “The last was a luncheon yesterday.”

The Baton Rouge Ladies’ Lunch Bunch, she said.

“And who all has keys to the property?”

She ran through the list aloud. “Gerald, our security guard, is on nights when we have an event. He has keys for the main gate and most of the buildings. Lorraine, the cook, she comes in early sometimes. She has a key. And Danny has one, too.”

“Danny?”

“He’s a graduate student, a professor, I guess. He has a key to the main gate and access to the library. He kind of comes and goes as he pleases. He doesn’t work for me,” she said, making that distinction clear. Lang was writing all this down.

“Is he here now?”

“He was earlier, yes.”

“Good,” he said, writing this, too.

“And of course the Clancys have keys,” she said.

“The owners.”

Caren nodded. “Leland and his two sons, Raymond and Bobby. Leland is nearly bedridden these days, and Bobby rarely comes around. Raymond is the one who runs the plantation’s LLC. But he hardly ever comes out here either,” she said.

Lang pointed toward the main house.

“We came in that way,” he said. “That’s not the main entrance?”

“No, the main gate is actually around back, by the parking lot.”

It was a common mistake, she explained. The front of the big house—which faced the water and was visible from the “river road,” a paved street that shadowed the Mississippi like a plain and faithful twin—hadn’t been used as the plantation’s main entrance for more than a hundred years, back when the river was the primary mode of travel into or out of Belle Vie. These days, nearly everyone entered through the back gate.

“And that’s the only way in or out? I mean, besides the house?”

“Yes.”

“And they would have both been locked last night, the gate and the house?” he said, glancing at his notes. “The last event was midday, a luncheon, you said.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Everything was locked last night.”

Lang nodded, jotting this down. “I didn’t see any cameras out here.” He nodded in the direction of the main house, the cottages, and the manicured grounds.

“There are actually two security cameras,” she told him. “They’re both fixed to the main house. But they were both inoperative when I took the job, and Raymond Clancy has repeatedly declined to repair them.” Lang glanced again at the grounds, the multimillion-dollar view, making a humming sound at the back of his throat. “I’ve seen people put floodlights and spy cams on a mobile home,” he said.

She shrugged. “We haven’t had any problems out here.”

“Sure, I understand.”

A few feet away, his partner was still talking to Luis and Miguel. Miguel was staring at the ground, and Luis had his ball cap pressed to his chest, shaking his head.

Caren felt bad for both of them.

“And who all was on the grounds last night, ma’am?”

“I was the only one here,” she said. “I live on the property.”

“Alone?”

“It’s me and my daughter.”

The detective nodded, writing.

The deputy in uniform was just now returning with a white-haired man whom Caren took for the coroner, Dr. Frank Allard. She voted for him in last year’s election, even though she’d never seen the man in person. He’d actually run uncontested, but it was 2008, and she’d felt weird about leaving any of the spaces blank. She didn’t want to lose her say on a technicality. She’d gone over that ballot three or four times, standing alone in the booth, tracing a finger under the first line, the word
President
. She wondered what her mother would have made of that, if she’d lived to see it.

Dr. Allard was wearing tan ropers and slacks, and he carried a leather satchel in his right hand. He nodded to the moonwalkers in white before bending deeply at the waist, peering down at the body, its nose down in the dirt.

“How long have you lived here?” Lang asked.

She’d already decided she would answer only the literal questions put to her; it’s what she would have told her clients. No need then to bring up her childhood, Belle Vie as her playground, or her mother’s three decades of service to the Clancys.

She would not say her name out loud.

She hadn’t in years.

“Since 2005,” she said.

Four years, she thought, and I’m still here.

She turned away from Lang, glancing again at the coroner. He was lifting mud from the back side of the corpse, using a tool like a small paintbrush, working in tight, tiny circles. “And all of your staff is accounted for?” she heard the detective ask.

There was, of course, one person who was missing.

She actually hesitated before mentioning his name.

“Donovan Isaacs, one of our actors,” she said. “He didn’t come to work today.”

“You have a phone number for him?”

She nodded. “In my office.”

“We’ll need that, too.”

“Fine,” she said, glancing at her watch. They were probably just entering the Civil War at the schoolhouse, a few minutes away from the sudden death of Monsieur Duquesne and the eve of Reconstruction and Belle Vie’s near demise. Which meant the show was almost done, and she would have to improvise some other time-filler. Maybe giveaways at the gift shop. Or Pearl could scoop out ice cream for the kids.

“What about the cane fields, ma’am?” Lang said. “That’s the Groveland Corporation out there?” He nodded toward the machines and the rows of sugarcane.

“Yes, they’ve held the lease for the past year.”

“Your staff have any dealings with their people, or vice versa?”

“Their workers aren’t allowed on the grounds of Belle Vie,” she said. “Raymond Clancy has always been very clear about that.”

“Sure, I understand, ma’am,” Lang said, closing his notepad for the first time. “But I guess I’m just wondering in any case if there’s ever been any contact between your people and the workers over there, any
conflicts
that you know of?”

“Most of the workers out there don’t speak English, Detective.”

“I know it,” Lang said, nodding. “And that might be precisely a source of conflict,” he said, adding, “for
some
.” He paused, waiting on her reaction; the gesture was presented as an act of courtesy, an invitation to unload in safe company any pent-up feelings about the parish’s immigrant population, which swelled every planting season, like the Mississippi after a storm, seeping into a historically tight-knit community. Every year, the feelings of resentment, among locals—blacks in particular, many four and five generations deep—only strengthened, often souring into vocal posturing about “these new people coming here, making themselves at home.”

Most black folks with roots in Louisiana could trace their people back before the war, when slaves had built the state’s sugar industry with their bare hands. And they all had a good yarn about a great-great-uncle or a distant cousin or somebody who fought with the Union, or a great-great-great-grandfather who served as one of the first blacks in Congress during Reconstruction. There were bits and pieces left behind, letters and faded newspaper accounts, but for the most part this was a history that existed on the wind, in stories passed down through the years. Caren had these stories in her family, too, tales her mother had heard growing up, from elders who were told the very same stories when they were kids. Caren’s mother was born and raised in Ascension Parish, and she was always clear that the Grays were sugar people, that she and Caren came from a line of men who lived and died by what they could produce with their hands. Her granddaddy cut cane, and his daddy before him, all in the fields behind Belle Vie. Her mother loved the whole of this land, and she wanted Caren to love it, too, to know where she came from. She had a piece of history for every corner of the parish, pulling bedtime stories out of the dirt Caren played in, the details changing a little with each telling. She peopled their lives with the hazy stories of men and women Caren would never know, in place of where a father might have been, a sibling or two.

Caren stopped listening after a while.

These days you could often hear whispers in town, rumblings about things not being the way they used to be, talk about the lack of good-paying jobs for black folks. One AM radio host even went so far as to publicly blame the Groveland Corporation for high unemployment among the locals, for knowingly hiring illegals and flooding the parish with cheap labor. “Hell, you can’t even get a job bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly anymore without knowing how to speak Spanish,” he’d scoffed.

“Your staff have any problems with the field-workers over there?” Lang asked, more directly this time. Caren didn’t get it initially, what this question had to do with the matter at hand. She looked from the woman in the grave over to Hunt Abrams, who was watching them from his side of the fence. She got it then, what Lang was thinking. Or rather
who
. The body in the dirt, discovered just a few feet from the cane fields, had been its own first clue. The inquiries about the farm and the field-workers, Lang’s gentle but persistent pushing about the tensions over the fence, all of it added up to an early deduction as to the woman’s identity. She was a cane worker, Caren realized.

“The only man I personally know who ever had a problem with Groveland, or the farm, was Ed Renfrew,” she said.

“I know Ed.”

“His family farmed on the place for years.”

“And the company drove them out?”

“They beat him out for the bid. Raymond said it all came down to dollars and cents, said his hands were tied. Ed huffed quite a bit about it. I don’t think he ever had much respect for corporate farming, the kind of business they’re running over there.”

“Ed hired his people locally,” Lang said, more statement than question.

“That’s right.”

“Black people,” he said.

Caren frowned at the implication, where she thought he might be heading with this line of thought. “Some,” she said tersely. Whatever note the detective made of this he kept to himself, his notepad now tucked away in the front pocket of his jacket.

“Anybody else express any political views that caught your attention?”

She wasn’t sure Donovan’s slave rant in her office counted as true political discourse, and, besides him, she’d never spoken with the staff about any subject deeper than work schedules or parking passes—though she did remember Val Marchand saying once that she admired Sarah Palin and would vote for her again if she could. But Caren had never heard anyone at Belle Vie mention a word about the farmworkers.