by Attica Locke
The digital operator put the call at 4:07 this morning.
She still couldn’t make out half of what he was saying, only that he sounded drunk or high, or else half asleep. The words “Can’t make it back out there, man” were nearly rolled into one. The rest of the message was unintelligible, even after playing it twice. She turned off the voice mail, staring at her cell phone.
Can’t make it back out there, man.
Can’t make it back out there.
They were his own words, spoken as if he’d just pulled a double shift. Only Donovan hadn’t been on the schedule yesterday, and hadn’t shown up the day before. His last day of work had actually been Saturday, when the cast had done three performances back-to-back. So why would he be calling her at four o’clock this morning, sounding completely disoriented, saying he couldn’t make it back to Belle Vie?
Caren hesitated, then she dialed over to his grandmother’s house, using her desk phone. She waited through six rings before finally leaving a message on the machine about a scheduling issue that might affect Donovan’s hours and pay. She ended by asking him to call her back right away, before setting the phone back in its cradle. She swiveled in her desk chair and stared out the office window at the Groveland fields in the distance and the nearly five-foot-high fence that separated her people from theirs.
It was four-thirty by now.
She still had to shower and get dressed.
But she was slow to move from her desk. She was bone tired, for sure, but it was more than that. She couldn’t stop thinking of the slim band of gold on Miguel’s left hand and the young woman she imagined waiting for him at home, with a warm pot of food cooking on the stove. At her desk, Caren set her head in her hands and cried.
The sun was down by the time she stepped out of the shower.
Wrapped in a towel, she moved in darkness through the second floor of her apartment, careful not to wake Morgan. She’d been asleep in her bedroom when Caren came home, tangled in the sheets on her twin bed, still in her school uniform. Caren hadn’t been able to wake her and so let her be, leaving her dinner on the kitchen stove and instructing Gerald to make a quick sweep of the property and return in fifteen minutes.
In her bedroom Caren braided her hair by lamplight into a single, thick strand, pinning it at the nape of her neck. She slipped into a bra and panties, but couldn’t find the black crepe wool dress she’d planned on wearing, which she’d laid out carefully on the rocking chair beside her bed early this morning. She thought Letty might have moved it, thinking it had already been worn or that it belonged in a different place. Her first day on the job, Letty had rearranged all of Caren’s kitchen cabinets without asking, and she regularly reorganized the books on her shelves. It had been Letty’s idea to move the home computer out of Caren’s bedroom. She had three bright, healthy kids and a husband who adored her and was therefore immune to any suggestions from Caren about how a household should be run. Caren was in no position to complain.
She checked Morgan’s room first, picking through her dresser drawers, finding, among other things, a pearl necklace and a pair of her gold earrings, both taken from Caren’s jewelry box without permission. She made a point to leave them on top of the dresser, so Morgan would know she’d been in here, so she would know that Caren knew what she had done. She picked through a few more drawers but didn’t find the black dress. In her slip, she started for the laundry closet downstairs in the kitchen.
The dress was not in the pile of clothes on top of the washer and dryer. She made a careful double-check, plucking the articles one by one, like pulling petals from a wilting flower, and dropping them on the floor. They were Morgan’s school things mostly: plaid dresses and white oxford shirts and navy gym short with red piping. There were inside-out socks; a shell-pink camisole; and a worn gray T-shirt from Kingston Mines that her dad had sent her when he still lived in Chicago, just after he and Caren split. The elastic on the neck band was sagging and there was a dime-sized tear under the left arm. Morgan had slept in the shirt for years, treasuring it above all other gifts her dad had sent her over the years: books and toys and, one particularly generous Christmas, a brand-new guitar (the lessons, twice a week after school for six months, Caren paid for herself).
The black dress, however, was still missing.
It was only when Caren bent down to scoop the dirty clothes from the floor that she noticed the stain on one of Morgan’s school shirts. It was on the right wrist and quite large, stretching from the very edge of the sleeve to a spot above the cuff line, spread over several inches. The pattern of the stain was immediately familiar to her, a reminder of a time when Morgan was much younger, when she used to come home with the tips of her sleeves dipped in paint and ketchup or crusted with dried mud—a crude report of her day, the things she’d gotten her hands into. Standing alone in her kitchen, Caren stared at the cuff of Morgan’s white shirt. The cottony material was stained a dark copper-brown and stiff to the touch, and it looked frighteningly like dried blood.
6
Upstairs, she settled on a gray pencil skirt and a cashmere sweater.
She dressed in silence and then walked across the hall to her daugther’s bedroom. Morgan had rolled onto her stomach, her breath a soprano whistle. Caren turned on the lamp by the bed. She pulled the quilted comforter off her daughter’s legs and waited for her to stir. “Morgan,” she said, repeating the name twice when she didn’t move. Caren knelt beside the bed, placing a hand on the girl’s forehead. The skin was warm and plump, but not feverish, and Caren couldn’t understand why Morgan was sleeping so soundly, almost five hours before her bedtime. “Morgan,” she said, shaking her. When she finally opened her eyes, Caren was standing over her, holding the stained shirt. “Sit up,” she said. Morgan pushed herself onto her elbows, her body still sluggish with sleep. “I’m hungry,” she mumbled, rubbing her puffy eyes.
“What is this, Morgan?”
“What is what?”
“This.” Caren held the large stain beneath the lamp’s light. “Why is there blood on your shirt?” Morgan stared at the shirt for a long time, her expression as flat as pond water. She wrinkled her nose but didn’t say anything. Her hair was mashed on one side from where she’d been sleeping, and her school uniform was a mess of wrinkles. There was dried spit in the corners of her mouth. Caren sat down on the edge of the bed. Across the hall, she heard the crackle of her walkie-talkie, followed by Gerald, who was still out making his rounds. “First guests arriving, ma’am,” he said.
“What time is it?” Morgan said, in a voice that sounded small and sleepy. She scratched at a bug bite on her leg, then tugged on her cotton socks, each of which had slid past her heels. When she swung her legs off the bed, the soles of her feet didn’t even reach the worn, pea-colored carpet. Caren set the shirt on top of the rumpled sheets. Morgan glanced at the brown, half-moon-shaped stain, as if she were looking at a stone on the ground, a common enough sight and certainly no cause for concern.
Caren felt her veins pulse, a throbbing behind her ears.
“How did you get blood on your shirt, Morgan?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This . . . this stain on your shirt.”
Morgan shrugged. “I don’t know what that is.”
Caren reached for her arms and pulled at them, yanking at the skin, searching for a scratch or a scar or anything that might explain the amount of blood on her clothes.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No.”
“Did someone else hurt you?”
“You’re hurting me!”
She snatched her arms free, scooting as far away from her mother as she could, pressing her back against the bed’s painted headboard and knocking it gently against the rose wallpaper. Caren asked her again, “How did you get blood on your shirt?”
“Why are you yelling at me?”
“I am not yelling,” Caren said, even though she was. Her voice had taken on that thin, high-pitched quality it did when she got really scared. And there, in her daughter’s bedroom, the bloodstained shirt between them, Caren was quite possibly the most afraid she had ever been in her life. “Did someone hurt you, Morgan?”
“No.”
Which left open another possibility, the thing that frightened Caren the most.
She reminded herself to breathe.
“This afternoon,” she said, speaking carefully and deliberately, drawing a line of emphasis under each word, “when the police asked if you saw or heard anything last night, you were telling the truth, weren’t you, ’Cakes?”
Morgan mumbled something.
“Morgan?”
“I said yes.” She rolled her eyes, this new thing she’d picked up at school that Caren couldn’t stand. She wanted to swat her little legs to get her attention, the way she might have when Morgan was just a tot and danger meant something as real and present as a lick of fire burning on the stove. But her daughter wasn’t a preschooler anymore. She couldn’t put her in a corner or physically wrest the truth out of her. At this stage, the two of them, mother and daughter, were left with the crudeness of language, the imprecision of words. “What is going on, Morgan?” she said. “Why do you have blood on your shirt?” Her voice was shrill. She was yelling again.
Across the hall, she heard Lorraine’s voice on the walkie-talkie. “Miss White Lady is looking for you, baby,” she said, speaking of Ms. Quinlan. “I do believe they are waiting for someone to call an official start to this thing.” The two-way sputtered in static, and then Lorraine was gone. It was after five, for sure. Caren was late and due in the main house. But she didn’t care. The world outside this room could wait.
She started again, slowly. “Morgan . . .”
And then suddenly her daughter had something to say, something by way of an explanation. “Maybe it’s not even my shirt,” she said, her tone hopeful, courteous even, as if she really was trying to help, to solve a mystery as benign as where her mother may have misplaced her car keys. But the more Morgan talked, and the harder she tried to sell it, the more Caren realized how much trouble they were in. “Sometimes our uniforms get mixed up in PE,” Morgan offered. “They’re all the same. And you said you would sew my name in the back but you never did, and so it probably just got all mixed up. I bet I just picked up the wrong shirt after gym class.”
“ ’Cakes,” Caren said, swallowing hard, “I need you to tell me the truth.”
“I am.”
Caren could hardly look at her. She lowered her eyes, her gaze falling on the stain, lying face up between them. She saw its twin in her mind. She saw the open grave and the dead woman and the shock of blood that soaked the front of her clothes.
“Did you leave the house last night, Morgan?”
“No.”
“Tell the truth, ’Cakes.”
Not that Caren would have any way of knowing.
For the cops, she’d already tried to recall anything odd about last night, and now tried again to divine her daughter’s movements after dark. Morgan, even at nine, still had bathroom issues at night, a partial explanation for why she refused even the few sleepover invitations she received. She used to come to Caren at night, cradling her wet sheets. But since the start of this school year, she often changed the bedding herself in the middle of the night, shamed even to tell her mother. And, anyway, Caren had had wine with dinner, a lot actually. She’d slept soundly and heard nothing at all.
Morgan had her back pressed against the headboard.
Again, she was mumbling something Caren could hardly hear.
“What is it, ’Cakes?”
What came out was barely a whisper. “You said I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Oh, Morgan,” Caren whispered.
She felt a brick-sized lump forming in her throat.
“I’m only going to ask you this one more time. How did you get blood on your shirt?” But when her daughter gave a small shrug and said, “I don’t know, Mom,” Caren simply accepted it. She knew it was all she was going to get. “Okay,” she said calmly. She pushed against the side of the twin bed, rising slowly to her feet. She picked up the soiled shirt. And because she had no better idea, she tucked it into the top drawer of Morgan’s wooden dresser. “Gerald will be here in a few minutes. You are not to leave this building under any circumstances, do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, then.”
She didn’t intend to stay long, just until the guests were seated and she’d shaken hands with Giles Schuyler, the chief executive of Merryvale Properties. He was not at all what she’d pictured. He resembled something of an aging football player, with broad shoulders that no suit could contain with any grace and jowls thick and going soft with age. On his right hand, he wore a small mountain of gold, in the form of an LSU class ring, the center stone cheap and dull. If you’d told her he’d just gotten off his shift at Sears selling Amana washer-dryers, she would have believed it. His appearance was that of a simple man, a local boy, not one you’d necessarily expect to be running a company that traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He was affable and warm, patting her on the back and offering to fetch her a flute of champagne, as if they were standing in his living room. He was completely at home, an aperitif in hand and his suit coat undone. Whatever, if anything, Ms. Quinlan had told him about the body out by the fence, he didn’t seem fazed in the least. Ms. Quinlan, on the other hand, hadn’t let a glass of butter-colored rum too far from her lips. She was glued to Schuyler’s side, taking one small sip after another and eyeing closely the goings-on in the room, tracking the invited guests.
“I understand your little girl is at Laurel Springs Elementary.”
“Yes,” Caren said, glancing down at her watch, trying to think what time it was in D.C., how soon she could get to a phone. “We’ve been very happy there.”
“Well, that’s what we’re all about,” Schuyler said. “Building communities where families can thrive.” It was a line right out of his brochure. He took a sip of his drink, gesturing toward the gathered crowd. The guests in the dining room were in their midthirties and older, part of a generation late to home ownership, men and women whose first home might very well be their last. Each of them had been brought here, beneath the crystal chandeliers, as an invitation to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become founding investors in Louisiana’s next great upscale living community, Douxville Estates, for which residential plots were currently being sold. The houses in the brochure were an echo of the historical elegance of a place like Belle Vie, only with new plumbing, of course, and custom-made granite countertops. It was an offer to retire inside of a Margaret Mitchell novel, to a time of opulence and refinement where you could end each workday as your forefathers had, sitting out on the front porch with a drink, imagining land that stretched for acres and acres instead of stopping crudely at the end of a concrete driveway. Mr. Schuyler opened the evening by asking the guests to stand and toast their new neighbors, before reminding them, with a salesman’s flair, that time was running out. There were only a handful of plots left. “Act now,” he said.
“Who is that?”
Patricia Quinlan had slid beside Caren. She was nodding her head at someone across the room. Schuyler was just then getting into the meat of his presentation, the PowerPoint displays of floor plans and computer models and testimonials from residents of Merryvale’s other success stories: Oakwood Village in Dallas; Sweetwater Estates in coastal Virginia; and, of course, the town of Laurel Springs, right here in Louisiana. Caren wasn’t listening closely. She was still trying to find a way to steal upstairs to her office when Ms. Quinlan pointed to a man standing near the hors d’oeuvres table, picking at the displays of food without a napkin or a plate—and, what was likely worse in Ms. Qui
nlan’s eyes, he wasn’t wearing a name tag. “I don’t believe he’s one of our guests,” she said, glancing down at a tiny clipboard, small enough to fit inside her purse. “We don’t want to be letting just anybody in here,” she added.
“He’s not just anybody,” Caren said, feeling a flush.
Across the crowded dining hall, Bobby Clancy was stuffing his face.
He dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his fingertips and took a sip of whatever it was some waiter had put in his hand—in this case a ’96 Burgundy he guzzled unceremoniously—before setting down the empty glass and reaching for another from a passing tray. He was wearing black jeans, faded in places, and an olive-green T-shirt that hung loose on his frame. He was underweight, and his hair had thinned over the years. Drink and time had laid a road map to middle age in the lines of his pale face, but he was a Clancy and therefore slyly handsome still, with black hair and broad shoulders and eyes of a color both blue and gold. He seemed to be enjoying himself royally, dipping into the bounty at the buffet table, and his presence was thoroughly irksome to Ms. Quinlan, no matter his last name. “Why is he here?”
Caren offered to refill Ms. Quinlan’s glass. She would take care of this, she said.
She crossed the dining hall to greet Bobby, thinking how strangely out of place he looked in the chandeliered hall. In his faded street clothes, he looked for all the world like a man who didn’t belong here, a man who could hardly afford even the most basic of Schuyler’s starter homes, instead of a Clancy, a man whose family had owned Belle Vie for generations. Bobby, she remembered, used to play in this very room.
He was swallowing a buttered roll when she approached.
She set down Ms. Quinlan’s empty glass and handed him a clean saucer.
“Bobby Clancy,” she said. “What’s this? Two times in, what, less than a week?” They had seen each other in town just a few days earlier.
“I’m spoiling you, I know.”
