The Cutting Season (5 page)

“No,” she said.

“Okay, then.”

Behind him, the moonwalkers had formed a tight semicircle around the grave.

Dr. Allard was standing now, nodding his head. “Let’s turn her.”

Detective Lang shot a look to his partner. “Jimmy,” he said.

The two men inched nearer to the grave site, just as the crime-scene techs set gloved hands under the dirt-covered corpse. On a three-count, they lifted the body.

A swarm of blowflies shot two feet into the air.

Caren actually staggered back.

In the rapidly warming air, the scent of death had blossomed. It was worse than spoiled milk or rotting meat or piles of dead fish lying out in the sun . . . though some inventive combination of the three may have come close to matching the putrid smell.

The crime-scene techs turned the body, laying it gingerly on flat grass.

There, on her back, she stared up at them.

Her skin and hair were dappled with dirt, and there was dried blood staining the front of her rose-pink T-shirt. Her arms were pressed against her chest, and her mouth was open, as if a final scream were lodged in her throat, trapped somewhere in the butterflied flesh around her bloody neck, where the woman had been nearly cut in two.

Caren’s knees gave out.

She turned from the sight, stumbling slightly, trying to get away.

“You okay, ma’am?” Lang said.

The voice seemed very far away, like a whisper at the bottom of an oil drum, hollow and useless. She bent over, put her hands on her thighs to steady herself, to catch her breath. When she finally raised her head again, the first thing her eyes landed on was the quarters and Jason’s Cabin, the last one on the left. She felt a stone-sized pain in her chest. It was the same heaviness, the same dread, she’d felt this morning when she’d no sooner stepped into that very cabin than she’d had to stop and walk out.

“Ms. Gray?”

“Just give me a minute.”

“Ma’am, we’re going to get the investigative team in and out of here and get this whole thing cleaned up as soon as possible, I promise. Now, if you wouldn’t mind gathering the staff, we can start those interviews right away.” She nodded and said, “Sure,” and then she started for the old schoolhouse, anything to get far away from here.

“And we’ll need to speak to your daughter, of course.”

Caren stopped cold. “She’s only nine years old.”

Ten actually, come December.

It was a number frequently on Caren’s mind these days.

“We need to talk to her, too, ma’am,” Lang said.

“I’ll think about it.” That was all she would give him.

“You’re welcome to be present during the interview.”

“I’m aware of that,” she said. “I’m also aware of my right to refuse.”

Lang shot her a funny look, as if the clouds in the sky had made a sudden unexpected shift, showing her up in some new light that did not in any way flatter. “You’re not a lawyer, by any chance?” He gave her a wry smile, enjoying the sheer improbability of it, the idea of Caren, in her ropers and faded jeans, a doctor of law.

“No,” she said plainly. “I’m not a lawyer.”

He glanced at the
TULANE SCHOOL OF LAW
ball cap still on her head, but offered no further comment.

Behind them, one of the moonwalkers unzipped a rubber body bag. Overhead, a lone black buzzard circled the whole scene.

“I understand your concern here, ma’am,” Lang said. “But we need to talk to everyone.” She nodded, but didn’t feel any better about it. She hadn’t yet given thought to how she might explain to her daughter what had happened here today, the fact of a woman murdered, found dead in the dirt, right where they live. She had up until this point felt one of the gifts of coming home, coming back to Belle Vie, was the sense of safety she felt here, deep in the countryside, fifteen miles from the nearest town. Instead of Caren worrying, as she might have if they’d stayed in New Orleans, about her daughter getting lost on city streets or hunted by predators or shot, for that matter, Morgan, most afternoons, rode her bike down the plantation’s main lane, as she herself had once done; and even on nights when Letty wasn’t working, Caren only ever required that her daughter be home by sundown. Inside these gates, Morgan had always been free.

3

S
he ended up giving Letty the day off anyway, eventually arranging with the two police detectives for Letty to be interviewed as soon as she was back on plantation grounds, so she could be done with it and get home to her kids. After her own second, more extensive, interview with the two cops, Caren left Belle Vie at two o’clock, starting the thirty-minute drive north toward the capital to pick up Morgan.

There was a red car behind her on the highway.

It was a pickup truck with a dented grill and ten years of gathering rust.

She didn’t make much of it at the time.

She was busy thinking of just what she was going to tell her little girl.

Morgan’s school was brand-new, in the planned, gated community of Laurel Springs, just south of Baton Rouge. Raymond Clancy, whose practice was in the state’s capital, had pulled a few strings to get Morgan placed at the school, one of the few conditions Caren had pressed upon him before taking the job. Clancy’s own kids were at the Laurel Springs Middle School across the street. The town’s three schools shared the same campus, and their pooled resources included an aquatic center, a state-of-the-art computer science center, and a library run by graduate students from the Library and Information Sciences Department at LSU. It was a school that would have cost her at least ten thousand dollars a year if they were still living in New Orleans. Instead, she’d managed to sock away nearly twice that for each year she’d been living rent-free at Belle Vie. She had no mortgage, no possessions that couldn’t be packed up in a single afternoon, and her car was eleven years old and paid off. Morgan, when the time came, could pay for any college she wanted to go to, preferably one far away from here.

Caren took two calls on the drive.

The first was from Raymond himself, the day’s news having finally made it to him through his secretary. “My God, Gray,” he said, calling her by her last name, an affectation he’d picked up years ago, when he’d first gone off to school (returning that first semester with all kinds of ideas about how a Clancy man ought to conduct himself). He was a lifelong member of Sigma Chi and seemed to think this manner of speaking was a winning way to show affection and intimacy, even where neither existed. Raymond and Caren were not particularly close, never had been. It was Bobby to whom she’d always been drawn, Bobby who let her tag along places, who never made her feel any different for being born a girl . . . and black. Raymond had mostly ignored her. Nearly fifty now, he was tall and good-looking, and pointedly sheepish about the good fortune he’d been born into, which some women mistook for charm. He was well-liked and well-regarded in his city, a successful civil litigator who represented everyone in the region from Shell Oil to CenturyTel. And every four years, like clockwork, he was courted heavily by the local business community about making a run for office, for his last name as much as anything. He’d turned out to be a decent-enough boss, hands-off and loyal—though she’d heard that heated words had been exchanged between Raymond and the last general manager, who’d been accused of pirating knickknacks off the property. Clancy had fired him on the spot. Just her luck, it was a week before Caren had called him up, out of the blue, asking about a place to stay, and a job, if he had it.

“So what are the cops saying?”

“Only that it was a woman who was killed,” she said. “She was dumped along the fence line, down by the cane fields.”

“She one of Hunt’s?”

“It looks that way, yes.”

“They know who did it?”

“Right now they’re just asking a lot of questions.”

“My God,” Raymond mumbled. “You talk to Schuyler yet?” Giles Schuyler was the host of tonight’s prepaid event and CEO of Merryvale Properties, the real estate development firm that designed the town of Laurel Springs. “Maybe we ought to think about canceling his deal tonight.”

“The detectives seemed to suggest that we would be able to conduct business as usual,” she said, knowing on some level, even then, that nothing about Belle Vie would ever be the same. “They’d already finished the staff interviews before I left.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” he said, though he sounded vaguely displeased.

“Let’s keep a lid on this as best we can, Gray,” he went on. “No reporters, hear?”

“Sure.”

“This is just awful. I mean, the timing couldn’t be any worse.”

There was a coolness in his voice that caught both of them by surprise. It was callous and unkind, and Clancy immediately fell silent. There was nothing but the sound of the highway humming along beneath her car. In the rearview mirror, she saw the red truck again, only this time the sight of it bothered her. She’d seen that truck before, hadn’t she? It had been passing by, riding slowly, back and forth, on the farm road, the one right outside the gates of Belle Vie—or it was certainly one that looked just like it. It was odd, noteworthy to say the least, to see the red truck now, trailing behind her on the highway, never more than a single car-length away. She couldn’t make out details about the driver, only that it was a man, a sun visor shielding the better part of his face.

Raymond cleared his throat then, searching out a more sober tone. “Listen, Gray,” he said. “I’d just as soon not have Daddy know a thing about this, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, though she thought that went without saying.

She hadn’t spoken to Leland Clancy in years, not since she was first hired for the job in 2005. Already well into retirement by then, he used to drive down from his house in Baker for lunch a few times a week. Lorraine would make him a hot plate—chicken and gravy or crawfish with red beans and rice or sometimes just pea soup and biscuits. And after, Leland would sit with a book under one of the old oak trees, his long legs stretched out toward the river. Or some days he would take a nap in the library. He was newly widowed then and alone a lot during the day, and he seemed to appreciate the company he found at Belle Vie, where someone was “always home,” as he put it. He took a particular liking to Morgan, plying her with peanut butter candies, which seemed to stream in an endless supply from the pockets of his patched cardigan sweaters, which he wore year-round, and sometimes he read storybooks to her in the rose garden. He asked after Helen from time to time, forgetting she was gone.

Caren liked Leland, always had.

It often pained her to ask him to please move from his post on the front lawn so they could set up chairs for an outdoor wedding reception or request that he not park in the spots reserved for school buses and chartered vans. He always did as he was told, thanking her for the job she was doing. But his demeanor struck her as lonely and displaced; he could spend whole afternoons wandering the grounds of his property, as if he were searching for something he’d lost. He’d inherited Belle Vie from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, a long line of ownership that went back to Clancy’s ancestor William P. Tynan, who acquired the land after the Civil War. Leland raised his own family there for a while, until his growing law practice in Baton Rouge required them to move. The family eventually settled into a four-bedroom split-level ranch just north of the capital, and Belle Vie became his wife’s pet project, in time lovingly restored to its original antebellum glory, and eventually becoming a state showpiece—a long way from the overgrown land, weather-beaten and forgotten, that had been Leland’s boyhood home. Though the Clancys were beloved in Ascension Parish for what they had done, making the land available to the public and preserving the history for posterity (not to mention the scholarships they had endowed, the money they poured into local, and mostly black, schools), he once confessed to Caren that he wished he’d never bothered with any of it, turning Belle Vie into an events venue and tourist stop. He was eighty now and in failing health, and once a month Lorraine carried a plate up to his house in Baker, as Caren’s mother had done, in the years when Lorraine was her number two.

Caren had made the trip with her mom only once before, when she was barely a teenager. Twelve years old, she’d ridden in the front seat of her mother’s white Pontiac, finally working up the nerve to ask her mother something painfully delicate. She knew Helen didn’t like her spending so much time with Bobby Clancy, didn’t like the way he sometimes looked at her, lingering sideways glances that hadn’t escaped Raymond’s attention either, even though she and Bobby were both just kids, more brother and sister than anything. And once that last thought took hold, Caren locked on to it and wouldn’t let it go. It was an answer, maybe, an explanation for the life that kept them both pinned in place, tethered to a plantation. Caren told herself she could accept it, her mother’s job, her devotion to Belle Vie, if she could just make sense of it. And that day, on the car ride, she asked her mother, point-blank, if Leland James Clancy was her father. Helen laughed out loud, the muscles in her neck rolling like waves, up and down. “Oh, ’Cakes,” she said. And then just as suddenly she fell into a cold, stony silence. She barely spoke to Caren for three days after that, pulling into herself. Caren had felt shamed by the incident, but also confused.

She hadn’t seen Leland in a long time.

Raymond was the one who signed her checks.

“Daddy ought not have any unnecessary stress, and that’s straight from the doctor’s mouth,” he said. “This kind of thing would just mess with his head.”

“Sure, Raymond.”

“Bobby neither, hear?” Clancy said, and Caren found it amusing that Raymond, all these years later, still imagined she and Bobby had some special connection, when the two of them had seen each other only once in four years, a brief encounter in town that had been awkward and somewhat strained. “Let’s keep him out of this, too. There’s a whole lot in this world my brother doesn’t hardly understand, and he’s liable to take something like this personal, somebody leaving that gal out there like that. He still calls the plantation home.” Caren nodded, though she suspected Raymond was working himself up for nothing. Until very recently, Bobby had stayed out of Ascension Parish, even skipping out on a seventy-sixth birthday party Lorraine had arranged for his father. “You let me break the news to him,” Raymond said.

“Sure.”

She glanced again at her rearview mirror.

The red pickup truck was gone.

A few minutes later, she got a second call on her cell phone, just as she was exiting State Highway 1 for the decorative gates of the town of Laurel Springs. It was Mr. Schuyler’s assistant, Patricia Quinlan, informing Caren that she would be arriving at least one hour before the guests, to make sure there were no more surprises.

“Have they removed—”

“The coroner took the body late this morning, yes,” Caren said.

On the other end of the phone, Ms. Quinlan sighed heavily. “Well, Mr. Schuyler would greatly prefer if the news of this morning’s incident did not reach our guests.”

“Understood.”

“Good, then,” Ms. Quinlan said. “I’ll see you at four.”

T
he kids were already pouring out of the elementary school when Caren pulled into the circle drive in front, into the crush of SUVs and minivans. The three schools, for grades pre-K through twelve, were a mile past the Unitarian church. The campus spanned both sides of Main Street, with a raised walkway bridging the elementary school to the other buildings, all of which were done up in a vaguely neocolonial style, with lots of red brick and black shutters and eaves trimmed in white. The girls wore smock dresses of navy and green plaid. The boys were instructed to wear khaki pants. Otherwise, their tops were to be all white, polos or cotton button-downs only.

Morgan was one of twenty black students in the lower school, which made her easy enough to spot in the crowd. She was sitting cross-legged on top of her backpack, set a few feet back from the curb, and she was reading a library book. She looked up once, scanning the line of cars in the circle drive, only to go right back to reading her book. She was, Caren knew, expecting Letty’s van. Caren honked her horn, even though that was generally frowned upon by the school’s staff. Morgan looked up again. She saw Caren this time, and smiled widely. She started to gather her things. By the time Caren reached the end of the curved driveway, Morgan was already waiting at the curb, her navy backpack over her shoulder. “Where’s Letty?” she asked.

“Artie’s sick.”

Morgan’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, an almost comic expression of skepticism on a nine-year-old. “She didn’t say anything to me about it.” She was standing at the open passenger window. She still hadn’t made a move to get into the car. Behind them, the line of waiting cars had grown even longer. “Just get in, Morgan, and we’ll talk about it, okay?” Caren said. This only served to confirm her daughter’s suspicion that something else was behind her unscheduled appearance at the school. Up ahead, the traffic guard was looking in their direction, waving the Volvo forward.

“Get in, Morgan.”

“Did you get my ticket?” Morgan said, changing the subject.

Caren didn’t want to have this conversation right now.

“Get in the car,” she said.

Morgan pouted openly. She climbed into the backseat, tossing her backpack across the floor, and didn’t speak again until they were ten miles outside of Laurel Springs. She kept her eyes glued to the passing landscape, lined with bookstores and gun shops and roadside stands selling oysters on ice, which eventually gave way to naked Louisiana swampland, as they rode shotgun alongside the river. Morgan put a finger on the cool glass of her window, lifting it every few seconds to see the patch of heat and sweat left behind, then pressing down again.