The Cutting Season Page 4

  “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 mot
her 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.

  “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

  She 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.