by Attica Locke
He signaled a waiter for more wine.
Then, turning to Caren, he smiled.
He eyed the getup: the dress and the French braid in her hair.
“I’d better be careful,” he said. “You may start to get the wrong idea here, me coming around again.”
She smiled, despite herself. He still had a sense of humor.
“What are you doing here, Bobby?”
“Checking up on the family business, that’s all,” he said. “Seeing what my brother’s up to.” He looked around the ballroom, the chandeliers and the starched tablecloths, staring at the dozens of strangers standing in what used to be his living room.
“What’s this, a five-, ten-thousand-dollar deal?” he said.
“Something like that.”
Across the room, Ms. Quinlan was staring at them, her lips pursed.
Caren sent a waiter to see about a fresh drink for her.
“I liked it better the way it was, the way it used to be,” Bobby said. “Just family, you know. Daddy and Ray, me and Mother. And all the old-time folks on the place, your mama and her kin, the cutters in the field.” He popped another bun in his mouth, a roll baked around a hash of zucchini and potato, smoked sausage and chives, something Lorraine had thrown together at the last minute. Bobby swallowed it whole, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I liked your mama’s cooking better, too.” He craned his neck, looking around, still hunting for that second or third glass of wine.
Caren wondered if he knew about the murder.
This was the most she’d seen Bobby since she’d returned four years ago, and she suspected something had to be behind his sudden appearance on plantation grounds. Raymond had sworn her to secrecy, made her promise he would be the one to break the news to Bobby. Twenty, thirty years ago, that wouldn’t have counted for much. But these days Raymond was her boss, and the truth was, she and Bobby weren’t friends anymore, not really, not for a long, long time. He had followed in the family’s footsteps to Ole Miss, picking up, along the way, Raymond’s ideas about how Clancy men ought to behave, including not spending so much time with the help; Raymond had teased him mercilessly about his particular fondness for Caren. She was only thirteen years old when Bobby went off to college. He stopped hanging out with her after that. No more dropping by the kitchen for teacakes and milk, tugging on the curls in her hair; no more racing her up the trunks of trees, or through the grove of willow oaks; and no more ghost stories in the quarters. Caren kidded herself as long as she could that it was the age difference between them that had suddenly come to significance. And when she couldn’t kid herself any longer, she simply accepted the truth as she knew it. She was the daughter of a plantation cook, the descendant of slaves. Bobby had been born in the big house. He played his role, and she played hers, biding her time until she could get out of there, away from Belle Vie. Still, it had stayed with her a long time, the lines that were drawn, reminding her of where she came from.
Older now, she didn’t hold it against him.
People grow apart, move on.
Of the brothers, she probably still liked Bobby best. But his nostalgia for the old days was of a color she could not match. “Raymond know you’re here?” she said.
Bobby skipped over the question.
“There’s a cop out there, you know, sniffing around.”
“Deputy Harris.”
Caren had forgotten about the young cop and his planned night watch, and now had a panicked thought that Lang had put him on duty as a ruse, a way to keep a watch on the plantation, but also a watch on her. It was an irrational worry, a fear that Lang somehow already knew what she knew, that he could see what she had seen: the blood on her daughter’s shirt.
Bobby leaned in, hovering over her. “I heard you were the one who found her.”
“Raymond told you.”
Again, Bobby didn’t react to his brother’s name.
“A fucking shame,” is all he said, reaching for the nearest cocktail tray, settling for a pale glass of champagne and downing most of it in one gulp. “I could have told him that company out there wasn’t going to bring nothing but trouble.”
Caren wasn’t sure what Groveland had to do with it.
“The cops seem to be looking closer to home,” she said.
“Hmph,” Bobby muttered.
She didn’t know if it was the liquor or the bewitching hour, the faded sunlight through the leaded-glass windows, but she couldn’t miss the grayish crescents beneath his eyes, the washed-out color in his cheeks, and the bleakness of his expression. There was deep sadness there, but also anger. “It’s the money, is what it is,” he said. “Every goddamn thing with Raymond is money. You watch yourself with him, Caren.” He reached for her arm, all six feet, two inches of him blocking nearly all the available light, throwing her into shadow, standing so close she could count the hairs on his chin.
“Be careful, is all I’m saying,” he said.
Caren felt light-headed, overheated, and overwhelmed.
She wanted to get upstairs to her office, alone.
She grabbed a drink from a passing tray and said, “It was good to see you, Bobby. But I left some work on my desk. You can stay if you want to, but I know they’d rather you didn’t,” she said, motioning toward Ms. Quinlan across the room.
Let her deal with him, Caren thought.
She turned and walked out before the first course was served.
Upstairs, she closed the office door behind her. Hot and slightly rattled, she cracked open her office window, propping a parish phone directory under the painted wood frame to hold it open. She sucked down the warm red wine, and then stood over her desk, watching her trembling fingers as they dialed Eric’s home phone number.
Lela answered.
Caren knew that decorum called for her to pause here, to ask Lela how she was doing, to ask after her family or inquire about her work, and ordinarily her own ego wouldn’t allow for any less. She had never met the woman and had always known Eric to show good judgment; it would be tacky, frankly, to be anything less than cordial. But she also thought she had earned the right, in an emergency, to skip all social graces.
“Is Eric home?” she said.
There was a pause on the other end. She could hear the hum of Mr. Schuyler’s amplified voice from the PA system downstairs, coming up through the floorboards.
On the phone, she heard her name.
“Caren?”
“Yes.”
There was another pause, and then Lela’s voice, cooler than before. “He’s here.”
Caren heard a dull thump, and then silence, Lela setting down the phone.
When Eric picked up the line, almost a minute later, he seemed in a good humor, almost cheerful and happy to hear from her. “Hey,” he said. Then, picking up on some ongoing conversation, the last e-mail or a voice message she didn’t remember, he said, “You know, I think it’s best, Caren, if you just let us go ahead and buy the plane ticket. American has a direct from New Orleans to D.C. right now for less than four hundred.”
She hadn’t seen Eric in almost a year.
His last visit, sometime in the spring, he and Lela had picked up Morgan while Caren was in Baton Rouge meeting with a vendor. Morgan had stayed in a hotel with them in New Orleans through the weekend and was dropped off in Laurel Springs that Monday morning in time for school. Lela had never been to New Orleans, and Morgan came home with three disposable cameras’ worth of pictures. It had made Caren sad to think of her daughter as a tourist in the city in which she was born. And though she promised more than once to sit down with Morgan and look through the photos, she never got around to it. Eric’s fiancée, therefore, remained a mystery to her. She had, embarrassing as it was to admit, initially pictured her as something of a rival: tall, with bigger breasts maybe, and a law degree. For weeks, she even wondered if
Lela was white. It was Morgan who put that idea to rest, reporting, unsolicited, that Lela was brown, of average height, with a “very pretty smile.” “She kind of looks like you, Mom,” she said. Eric, on the other hand, was always the same in Caren’s mind: tall and lean, with close-cropped, tightly coiled hair and round, rimless glasses. They talked on the phone at least once a month, e-mailed more often, mostly about Morgan’s schooling, but she had not stood with him, face-to-face, in quite a long time. “I think Morgan is starting to worry you’re changing your mind about her coming up here,” he said.
“I’m not calling about the trip, Eric.”
“Oh,” he said, briefly clearing his throat. She wondered if Lela was listening.
“We have a problem, Eric.”
“What’s going on?”
“There’s been an ‘incident’ here,” she said, regretting the weak choice of words almost as soon as they were said. She didn’t want to soft-pedal, or be in any way misleading. She wanted him to have all the facts. “The police were here this morning.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice sharp and alert. He sounded genuinely concerned, and for a brief moment she felt a warm lump in the back of her throat.
“Yes.”
“Is Morgan?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“They found a body, here at Belle Vie. It was way out on the edge of the property line, by the fence and the cane fields out back. She was half-buried in dirt.”
“Someone died.”
“Someone was killed.”
“Out there?” he said, in some disbelief. “Who?”
Caren pushed the woman’s face out of her mind.
“I don’t know. It looks like it was a woman from the fields.”
“Oh, man,” Eric said, taking a slow, leveling breath. “Does Morgan know?”
She was getting to that.
“They’ve talked to the whole staff, trying to find out if anyone saw or heard anything. I don’t even know how someone got on the property, the woman . . . or whoever it was that did this to her.” She looked out the window where the world of Belle Vie had gone black. She could hardly see more than a few feet beyond her office window, a fact that had never bothered her before. But suddenly she was aware of feeling afraid and alone living out here. “I don’t know, Eric, the whole thing is creepy.”
“Is the plantation looking to protect itself from liability?” he said, completely misunderstanding her reason for calling. “I’m sure Clancy’s firm can handle it, but I still know some folks at DeLouche & Pitt in the city. Bob Klein is still convinced I’m coming back to work any day now.” There was a faint chuckle in his throat that faded almost instantly, as he realized, too late, that he’d stumbled into tender territory. They were both silent for a moment. Caren said, “The detectives also spoke to Morgan.”
“Why?”
“She lives here, and they wanted to know what, if anything, she knew about it.”
“She’s just a kid.”
“I was with her the whole time,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, the facts laid bare. “They asked her if she had seen or heard anything strange on the property in the last few days. I was right next to her when she told the cops no.”
“She must have been terrified.”
“She was lying.”
“What?”
“I found blood on one of her shirts, Eric.”
He was quiet, his breathing momentarily halted.
“I don’t understand.”
“In the laundry, on the right-hand sleeve of one of her shirts, I found blood.”
“So you think she killed someone?” he said, sounding amused and also vaguely relieved. The idea was so preposterous that it seemed to lighten things on his end. Caren said, “No, I don’t think she killed someone,” adding, “She’s left-handed.”
The silence returned.
“Jesus, Caren,” he mumbled.
Then, more sternly, he said, “You’re not serious, are you?”
“How did she get blood on her shirt, Eric?”
“Oh, Caren,” he said, his tone warm, almost playfully admonishing, treating this like the time Morgan was six months old and Caren was sure she’d stopped breathing until Eric put a mirror to her nose, or when she was convinced the women at the day care center were secretly feeding her newborn daughter bottles of whole milk.
“She probably just fell down and scraped herself at school or cut her hand or something,” he said.
“It was too much blood.”
The words painted a picture, one that gave him pause.
“And you asked her about it?”
“She’s lying.”
“How can you know that?”
“What do you want me to say, Eric? She’s my kid.”
Eric let out a short, bullish sigh.
She knew the sound. It meant he was thinking.
“Blood?”
“Yes.”
“All right, let me talk to her, then,” he said.
“She’s home right now.”
Before hanging up, she told him she’d be waiting for his return call.
Outside, the wind had picked up, snaking in ragged coils through the dark and shaking the trees against the window. The branches were like fingertips on the glass, tapping for her attention. She walked around her desk to the window. As she bent to remove the phone book on the ledge, she swore she heard voices, coming from the direction of the quarters. She swore she heard . . . singing. It was faint, and she thought she was imagining things, but when the wind picked up, it delivered the sound right to the window’s ledge. Caren took a step back, thinking that someone was out there.
When the phone rang, she actually jumped.
On the other end of the line, Eric repeated the same story Morgan had told her earlier, that the shirt was probably not even hers, the whole thing likely a mix-up at school, and Eric still didn’t think any of it added up to much; he still had a hard time believing it was blood on his daughter’s shirt, or that Morgan would lie. Caren bit her tongue rather than point out the ways she felt she knew her daughter better than he did. It seemed mean-spirited. It was never his idea for Morgan to stay in Louisiana.
She reminded him of the amount, the odd placement on the sleeve.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said, sounding suddenly very far away. For the first time, Caren wondered what he was doing when she called, if his dinner was getting cold, if Lela had been waiting this whole time, alone at the table.
“They’re getting a search warrant, Eric.”
“The cops?”
“They’ll be here in the morning,” she said.
Something shifted in Eric’s demeanor.
He was a trained lawyer after all, and Morgan’s father.
He was quiet a good, long while.
Then he said, “I honestly wouldn’t worry about it, Caren.”
“Okay,” she said, because she wasn’t going to worry about it.
She was going to get rid of it.
Her first thought was the river. But there was, of course, the issue of weight, of how to keep the thing from merely skimming the surface of the water and floating along in plain view. She could just imagine someone finding her daughter’s shirt tomorrow morning, tangled in a thick of weeds along the riverbank, having traveled barely a mile by sunrise. And anyway, the levees in this part of the parish were eight feet and a challenge to navigate even in broad daylight. Nor could she come up with a convincing enough story to tell Gerald that would explain her stepping out on an errand in the middle of the night, after she’d made a point to put him on post, right outside her front door. Besides, she knew from experience that literal disposal was often tricky. That’s where most people made their biggest mistakes. One
of the first cases she’d assisted on, a kid had tossed a knife in a Dumpster, mere feet from his apartment; it was city property by morning, as soon as the trash trucks rolled past. No, it made more sense to keep any evidence close, within the bounds of a carefully laid argument about Fourth Amendment rights against improper search and seizure. She didn’t know what was on the shirt or how it got there. But she knew Detective Lang would never lay eyes on it. Not until Caren had more information. The law, she knew, is a narrow little box, and it takes only a single misstep to find yourself on the outside of it.
It was after two in the morning when she came up with a plan.
Morgan asleep upstairs, Caren washed the shirt twice, both times using double the amount of bleach. She leaned against the stove, watching the swish and slosh of the machine, the violent jerk-and-pull of her daughter’s white shirt. The plate of food from Lorraine’s kitchen was still sitting untouched. Caren made a halfhearted attempt to eat. The fried ’gator was rubbery and cold and completely inedible. The greens were coated in white animal fat. The sight made her stomach lurch. She settled on a single lump of creamed potatoes, a small spoonful to dull the gnawing emptiness in her belly.
She swallowed, and she waited.
It was as calm as she’d felt all night.
The shirt, once out of the dryer, was startlingly white, everywhere except the spot on the right sleeve, where a ghost lingered. The color had faded to a muddy gray, but the half-moon shape was outlined clearly. Still, Caren felt relief. Who would make anything of this relatively small stain, the color and spirit drained to nothing, which, at this late hour, she was willing to concede might not have even been blood? Why would her daughter’s rose-colored bureau ever make it within the bounds of a police search warrant? Surely, if she folded the shirt tightly, sleeves tucked in, and placed it in the back of some rarely used drawer, no one would ever notice. Upstairs, in her daughter’s room, she watched Morgan sleep. It was almost ten hours she’d been out like this. Caren tried to wake her, gently shaking her shoulders. She heard her utter a sound, a faint hum that sounded a lot like Mom. But maybe it was only a wish, a whisper inside Caren’s own head. Morgan’s body remained motionless, save for the soft rise and fall of her breath. Caren pulled the sheets from the foot of the bed, covering Morgan’s bare legs. Finally, she tucked the laundered shirt into the top drawer of her bureau before crossing the hall to undress for bed.
