The Cutting Season (6 page)

“You promised,” is all she said.

Caren glanced at her daughter’s face in the rearview mirror.

Morgan was still carrying some of her baby fat, which softened what would otherwise be duplicates of Caren’s own sharp features, the L-shaped jawline and cheeks like two wide conch shells beneath the skin, the heart-shaped hairline passed down from
her
mother. It used to embarrass Caren, how much they looked alike, as if she’d huddled alone in a dark room and sculpted the child from her own flesh. It seemed greedy, like she was taking more than her fair share. These days, Caren wore her hair long, tightly pulled and pomaded into a cottony ponytail or a single chignon-like braid on event nights. Morgan, on the other hand, had demanded to wear her hair short for as long as Caren could remember, even attempting to cut it herself when she was only four years old. Even then she seemed to sense that where a line couldn’t be drawn between them, only heartache and trouble would follow. In that way, she was a lot smarter than her mother, Caren thought. Now, at nearly ten, Morgan wore her curls in a short, floppy ’fro, pushed back by a headband—but she’d also been trying a myriad of different styles, pin curls one week, a flatiron the next, long afternoons spent in front of the bathroom mirror. Caren loved her desperately. To date, theirs was the most enduring relationship of her life, and one she was determined not to fuck up. This job, this life way the hell out in the country, it was all for Morgan, she told herself daily.

Morgan saw it differently.

She was presently in the early stages of a growing resentment about their living arrangements, especially the distance from her father. She would sometimes go days without talking, often alarming her teachers and the few school friends she’d made. The school’s staff sent home notes, worried over her shy and withdrawn nature. But Caren knew better. Morgan could be quite charming when she wanted to be, winsome even, when she wanted someone’s attention. At Belle Vie, that usually meant Lorraine, but especially Donovan. She had probably seen
The Olden Days of Belle Vie
at least fifty times, and Donovan’s part she could recite by heart, from start to weepy finish. Caren had long suspected that Morgan was developing something of a schoolgirl crush on Donovan—harmless but for the fact that it further signaled the limits of her maternal influence. She had dreams in those days of following her daughter through an endless series of rooms, round and round short corridors, walking in a tight, coiling circle.

“ ’Cakes,” she said.

They were almost to Modeste, and she was running out of time.

“I need to talk to you about something, okay? Something important.”

Morgan was busy tracing her finger along the rear window’s glass. She didn’t even look at her mother. “There’s been an incident at Belle Vie,” Caren said, because she couldn’t immediately think of another way to put it. “Someone’s been hurt badly.”

In the rearview mirror, she caught her daughter’s eye.

“What happened?”

“Somebody died.”

In the backseat, Morgan was silent a moment. “Oh,” she said finally.

“There’ll be police officers there when we get home,” Caren said, making an effort to keep her tone even and flat. She didn’t want to scare her, but she needed her daughter to understand how serious this was. “They’re going to want to talk to you.”

In the mirror, their eyes met again.

“I want you to know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I know.”

“I mean, no one thinks you did anything wrong. They’re talking to everyone at Belle Vie, and because you live there, they want to talk to you, too. It’s going to help them understand what happened. And I’ll be with you the whole time.”

“Who died?”

“It’s no one you know. Everyone at Belle Vie is fine.”

Morgan didn’t say anything. She twirled her index finger on the smudged glass, moss-covered cedars along the highway casting shape-shifting shadows across her face, like dark clouds passing over, then breaking wide again. “I have to prep for an event tonight,” Caren said. “But after that we can talk about your plane ticket, okay?”

“My dad said he would pay for it.”

“I know. We’ll talk about it tonight.”

A car shot around them on the two-lane road, passing at eighty miles an hour, at least. It raced ahead of them, growing smaller in the distance. Caren couldn’t read the license plate number, determine the make or model. But it was a red pickup truck, she was sure.

4

I
n the time it took her to drive to Laurel Springs and back, the detectives had turned the old schoolhouse into a base of operations. They were each on their cell phones when she and Morgan entered, Morgan with her backpack in her hands, pressed against her chest. Some of the chairs had been rearranged, and Lorraine had sent over coffee on a room-service tray meant for the guest cottages. Caren put an arm around her daughter and waited for one of the detectives to notice them. The bigger cop, Detective Jimmy Bertrand, was off the phone first. He told them to have a seat. Caren reached for Morgan’s hand, holding tightly as Morgan pressed herself into Caren’s side. They chose two seats near the raised platform where the play was performed. By then, Detective Lang was off his phone as well. He joined them near the stage. He smiled at Morgan and asked if she’d like something to drink, water or juice, though Caren wasn’t sure just where he thought that was going to come from. There were no vending machines at Belle Vie, and it was a ten-minute walk to Lorraine’s kitchen. Morgan shook her head; Caren could feel a damp heat radiating from her small, round body. Lang opened a clean page in his notebook, then looked again at Morgan. “So,” he said, starting with the barest of facts. “Morgan Gray?”

“It’s Ellis,” she said, correcting him. “Morgan Ellis.”

Lang looked briefly at Caren, but she offered no clarification on this point.

This interview was merely an act of courtesy, a show of good faith.

Lang looked at Morgan again and smiled. “I’m Detective Nestor Lang, Morgan, and this is my partner, Detective Bertrand.” Morgan looked back and forth between the two men. Bertrand was on his feet, a hand on his waist. Caren could see a patch of sweat growing in the pits of his dress shirt while he sucked down a cup of black coffee. Detective Lang had meanwhile pulled a chair in front of Morgan. “We just want to ask you a few questions,” he said to her. “This shouldn’t take too long at all.”

“Okay.”

“What grade are you in, Morgan?”

“Fifth.”

“So that makes you, what, about ten?”

“Nine.”

“That’s right, your mom said that.”

He wrote this down, too.

“And you live here with your mother?”

Morgan nodded.

“Well, I assume she’s told you . . . there’s been an ‘incident’ here.”

“Someone died.”

“That’s right,” Lang said. “Someone did something very bad, Morgan, and my partner and I are here to find out what happened.”

“And put someone in jail.”

Lang looked over in Caren’s direction. “She’s sharp, this one.”

Caren glanced at her watch. She would need them to move this along if she was going to be ready for a walk-through with Schuyler’s assistant at four. The waitstaff, hired out from a catering company in Baton Rouge, was due to arrive any minute now.

Detective Bertrand stepped away to take a phone call.

“Okay, Morgan,” Lang said, continuing. “Can you tell me if, in the last couple of days, you’ve seen any strangers around the plantation?”

“There are strangers here every day,” she said. “It’s basically a museum.”

Lang smiled, more tightly this time, his expression pinched by the reminder, from a preteen girl, no less, of the challenges inherent in this case. “Maybe a better way to put it is to ask whether or not you’ve seen or heard anything out of the ordinary in the past few days.” He was, without even realizing it, clicking the top of his ink pen up and down, up and down. The rhythm was catching. It set Caren’s nerves on edge.

“Like, out of the ordinary . . . how?”

“Well, you tell me. What comes to mind?”

At first, Morgan hesitated, stealing a look at her mother. Then, she tested the room, starting with something small. “Well,” she said, “Pearl found a stray cat in the parking lot, and she’s been feeding it leftovers from the kitchen, and when Lorraine found out she got really mad ’cause she said it was just throwing good food away.”

“Okay, Morgan,” Lang said patiently. “What else?”

“Nikki and Bo Johnston were kissing in the Manette house.”

Caren turned to her daughter. “Who told you that?”

Morgan seemed to relish this telling of plantation gossip.

“Oh, and Donovan quit school,” she said.

A few feet away, Bertrand nodded to get his partner’s attention.

“Nes,” he said, waving his cell phone in the air for emphasis. “We’ve got a preliminary from Dr. Allard, and that gal from the state lab is on her way down.”

“Hold on a sec,” Lang said.

To Morgan, he asked, “Where did you hear that? About Donovan?”

This was news to Caren as well. “Morgan?”

Morgan looked from her mother to the two police detectives.

They were all staring at her, waiting. It was clear that something, though Morgan seemed uncertain as to what, hinged on her answer. For the first time, she looked nervous about the police interview, the big men in suits, and the questions.

“Is he in trouble?”

“No,” Caren said before Lang had a chance to. She wanted her daughter to tell the truth.

Lang nodded. “It’s okay, Morgan,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”

“Danny told Eddie Knoxville.”

“When?” Caren asked.

“Yesterday. They were smoking cigarettes behind the kitchen.”

“Okay,” Lang said, making a note on the nearly empty top sheet of his pad, listing one of the few details he’d gathered from this interview. “Now, your mom tells us your bedroom is above the library. I need to know if you heard anything last night, some sound or something out of the ordinary that might have woken you up.”

“You mean like the wind shaking, spooky stuff like that?”

“She’s heard ghost stories,” Caren volunteered.

“Something particular to last night, Morgan,” Lang said. “Did you hear anything last night?”

“Just the rain.”

“
Before
the rainstorm, Morgan,” Lang said, wanting to clarify. “Sometime between midnight and two in the morning . . .” It was their best guess as to a timeline, Caren knew, of when the woman was killed. They’d asked her the same question during her second interview late this morning. They’d gone over this point several times, Lang circling around it, like a seagull hunting for something in the sand. Morgan was in bed by nine, she’d said. Caren had checked her e-mail and was asleep herself by ten-thirty.

“Did you hear anything about that time last night?”

Morgan shrugged. “Like what?”

“Strange voices, arguing, something like that?”

“Huh-uh.”

“What about screams?”

Morgan shook her head.

Lang closed his notepad. “Okay, then.”

From the seat of a nearby folding chair, which was serving as a makeshift desk, he lifted a thin sheet of sketch paper. On one side was a pencil drawing, the smudged lines of which suggested an image made in haste. The mouth was closed, and the eyes had been brightened by the artist’s rendering . . . but it was her all right, the woman from the grave. Her eyes were small, set close to the bridge of a thin, pointed nose, and there were soft, feathered lines around her eyes. There was a single star-shaped earring in her left earlobe. She was young, much younger than Caren, in her twenties maybe.

“You seen this woman before?”

“Huh-uh.”

Lang looked at Caren next. She shook her head. “No.”

“Okay, then.” He stood, still holding the picture.

Detective Bertrand was waiting just inside the doorway to the schoolhouse, texting on his cell phone. Lang held out his right hand to Morgan, who seemed unsure of what to make of the gesture from a grown man, a cop no less. She gingerly shook his hand, barely making contact. “You be sure to let your mom know if you think of anything else.” Then he nodded to Caren, motioning her into a private conference, out of her daughter’s earshot. She patted Morgan’s leg before standing to follow him, wanting her daughter to know that she did well. Caren was glad this part of it was over. She crossed the old schoolhouse, the heels of her boots sinking on the loose boards of the plank floor. The building had originally been used as a chapel: a house of worship for the master’s family and a temporary sanctum for any traveling preachers wandering through the parish. It earned its current name sometime after the Civil War when the Freedmen’s Bureau ran a school for ex-slaves, during the years when the federal government held brief ownership of the land. Colored schoolteachers, earnest, mostly unmarried women devoted to uplift and a life of learning, came south in droves. There was a pretty schoolteacher at Belle Vie in those days, a Miss Nadine something or other, as Caren’s mother had often told the tale. Next to the kitchen, Helen Gray loved the old schoolhouse best of all. Men had learned to read in this room. Men like Jason. Using their laps for a desktop, they practiced their letters, struggling with a whole new set of tools. Nadine taught them to make the marks that make the letters that make the words. It was a system, like the making of sugar from cane.

Lang stopped near the table that held the play’s programs. He put his hands on both hips and sighed heavily. “We need to get a hold of that young man.”

“Donovan?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve had no luck so far with the numbers you gave us.” There was a faint hint of accusation in his voice, as if he thought it was altogether possible that Caren was shielding the boy.

“Those are the only numbers I have, his cell phone and his grandmother.”

“Well, I imagine there are ways of getting him on the telephone,” Lang said, lowering his voice some. “Say, if you left a message for Mr. Isaacs about some trouble with his paycheck, I imagine he wouldn’t waste any time calling you back.”

“The state pays his checks, not us.”

It was a plain statement of fact, but Lang took it as an inclination toward noncooperation. “Well,” he said, “it was an idea.” He stared at her for a long while, trying to read something about her that wasn’t immediately clear to him. Caren could smell his musky cologne, mixed with the scent of stale coffee and hair grease. He was nearing sixty, she guessed, his skin a tawny Cajun hue that was hard to date.

“Let me ask you something, ma’am,” he said. “Did you happen to know of Mr. Isaacs’s legal troubles before you hired him?” He pinched his lips together, waiting on her answer. He appeared to be rolling something over in his pocket, coins maybe.

So that’s what this is, Caren thought.

Donovan’s criminal record.

She couldn’t help feeling that something had shifted in the cops’ investigation since she’d gone and returned to the plantation, that they were now circling around a specific, but as yet unstated theory. And Caren didn’t like it. No matter her personal feelings about Donovan, she didn’t think it was fair. Donovan was a lot of things, and law-abiding was not necessarily one of them. But murder was murder, a theft of a soul, requiring a depravity touched by something not of this world. Caren didn’t think Donovan had it in him. He was a simple kid, both feet planted in the material world.

“I knew about it, yes,” she said. “It was on his application.” Not that it would have disqualified him, she might have added, not at this end of the employment pool.

“Oh, he’s got a record all right,” Lang said, rolling and rolling those coins in his pants pocket, so that she thought she might go dizzy trying to follow the sound. “Some property crimes and misdemeanors,” he added. “But he also spent time in the parish jail down to Donaldsonville on battery charges last year.”

She knew all of this.

Lang lifted and replaced his slim necktie, smoothing it down along the center of his shirt. “Look, I’ll be honest here and say we’re up against it with this one. We’ve got a pretty good read on the time of death. It’s the
where
of this crime that’s causing us trouble. That rain came down hard last night, and as far as we can tell, washed out any trace of a workable crime scene. There’s no blood, no sign of a struggle, nowhere to start. That’s why the more information we can get from you folks about what you know or what you may have seen, the easier it’ll be for us to put this one down.” He smiled here, really selling it, his implied offer of something like a partnership, he and Caren playing for the same team. “If you could help us get a hold of Donovan—”

“Don’t push it, Nes,” his partner said.

Lang looked at Detective Bertrand, but said nothing.

Then he looked again at Caren.

“You’re Helen’s girl, right?”

He smiled, not waiting for an answer. “It took me a minute to put it together.”

Congratulations, she thought.

She did not want to talk about her mother, not like this, and not with him.

She glanced back at Morgan, who was folding the hem of her plaid skirt across the palm of her hand and kicking one of her sneakers against the edge of the stage. Caren felt tired all of a sudden, aware in every bone that her day had started at dawn. She saw that woman’s face again, those narrow, black eyes, that one, tiny star-shaped earring, the other lost along the way. She wanted to take her girl and go home.