The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  This went on for weeks.

  But then came the rains and everything was shut down. Donovan said they’d pick up again when the weather got better, which it didn’t for the longest time.

  “Wednesday night, though,” Morgan said. “It was supposed to be clear.”

  She had never been “on set,” had never left her mother’s house without asking. She looked at Caren as she said this, wanting her to know that this was a onetime indiscretion. Caren found herself nodding along encouragingly. “I just wanted to be part of something,” Morgan said, speaking of Belle Vie’s staff. She just wanted to feel like she was part of this group, she said. “I’m not like you, Mom,” she said. “I don’t like being out here all by myself. I don’t want to be alone.”

  Eric looked at Caren but was kind enough not to comment.

  “Go on, ’Cakes,” she said.

  Wednesday night it was all set, Morgan said.

  Everybody was supposed to be there. It was going to be her big chance.

  “Nikki and Bo, Shauna and Cornelius and Shep and Eddie . . . and Donovan. It was supposed to be everybody out that night. Donovan was all excited. They were going to shoot the big scene where the sheriff makes an arrest for the killing of that man, the one who went missing.” Caren stopped her here. An arrest, she thought. She didn’t remember seeing that in Donovan’s script.

  “You mean Jason?” she said.

  Morgan nodded.

  Eric, who was not following even ten percent of this, looked sideways at Caren.

  She looked at her daughter and nodded. “Go on.”

  Morgan, who had finally stopped crying, wiped her cheeks with the seat of her palm. Her mouth had gone dry, and her lips were chapped. “I just wanted to hang out with Donovan. I just wanted to be friends with all of them. But he didn’t want me there.”

  “Where?” Caren asked.

  “The Manette house.”

  She knew they were planning to shoot there. So she waited until her mother fell asleep, then she took the flashlight from the top drawer of the antique writing table and walked across the plantation.

  Donovan, it turned out, was the only one there.

  “No one else showed,” she said. “He had the camera, the lights, and all that. But no one else was there. He tried calling a few people, but he couldn’t get anyone on the phone. He was real mad. He said it was just because of a little rain. That’s why no one had showed up. He called them a bunch of pussies.” She looked at her parents, waiting for some reaction to the word.

  “And then what happened?” Eric said.

  “Donovan told me I had to leave, that he would get in a shitload of trouble,” she said, coloring the telling, emboldened by her success with the earlier vulgarity. “If anyone found out that he let me stay out there like that, he would get fired, he said, or worse. It was almost midnight by then, and he told me to go home.”

  “But you didn’t,” Caren said.

  Morgan shook her head. “No.”

  She hid behind one of the magnolias, she said, the one that sat between the two cottages on the back side of the Manette house. Caren nodded; she knew the color and personality of nearly every tree and shrub on the property. “Donovan said he was going to wait around for them a little while longer,” Morgan said. “He was going to shoot some background stuff in front of Manette, on the path, like pictures of the house and stuff, and I thought I could just wait, too. I thought when everyone got there, he might change his mind . . . or he’d be so busy he wouldn’t even notice I was there.”

  Eric’s cell phone rang.

  Morgan was the only one who didn’t jump.

  Her father reached into his pants pocket. He glanced at the phone number. Caren wondered if it was Lela, if he’d told her what had happened between them this afternoon. He silenced the ringer without answering, without saying a single word.

  “I think I must have fallen asleep,” Morgan said. “The rain started. It was just a few drops at first. I felt it on my face, and it woke me up. It was quiet, real quiet. And I kind of, for a second, forgot where I was. I didn’t see Donovan. I didn’t see anybody.”

  Caren remembered that it was shortly after midnight, twelve-twenty in the morning according to the sign-in sheet, when Donovan checked in the camera equipment on campus, all the way in Donaldsonville. He was already gone by then, she realized, and Morgan woke up out there on the grounds after midnight, totally alone.

  “I heard something,” she said.

  “Heard something, like what?”

  “I heard somebody scream.”

  “Jesus, Morgan,” Eric muttered. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  He sounded exasperated with her, even disappointed, as if he’d forgotten she was only nine years old. Morgan shrugged, only this time the gesture seemed small and sad. “I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.” Even at her age she seemed to grasp the supreme irony of this statement, what with Donovan sitting in a jail cell right now. “You have to help him, Mom,” she said. “He didn’t do this.”

  “Where was the knife, Morgan?” Caren asked, pressing her. She needed her to finish what she’d started.

  Morgan paused, swallowing hard before continuing.

  “The scream came from down by the quarters,” she said. “Manette house was empty, and I thought for a second that maybe Donovan had moved everything down there. Maybe they were filming something down there. It was getting cold, but it was only drizzling at first, and I thought I might still get to see them doing the movie. I could get a blanket for Shauna or help Eddie with his lines. I thought they might let me help.” She pulled away from her parents, bringing her knees into her chest and scooting her body to the center of the bed, so that she seemed alone on her own island.

  “I got all the way to the dirt road,” she said.

  “In the quarters?”

  Morgan nodded.

  “Where is this?” Eric asked.

  “The slave cabins,” Caren explained.

  Eric made a face but said nothing.

  “There was light at the end.”

  “Light?” Caren said, confused.

  “In one of the cabins.”

  Caren shook her head, thinking this couldn’t be. Past the guest cottages, there was no electricity on the grounds. Sure, it was possible that Donovan had a small generator or a battery pack for his portable lights and equipment, but Donovan, Caren knew, was already either back on campus by then or on his way, and Morgan was out on the grounds, alone with Inés and her killer. It physically hurt her to listen to her daughter recount her slow march down the dirt road, through the shadows in the quarters, all the way to the last cabin on the left, Jason’s Cabin. Morgan had still been expecting to find the whole crew out there, she said, Donovan and the cast.

  She walked toward the light. It was dim and yellow, not like the sharp white light of the flashlight in her hand, but something soft and flickering. She got all the way to the gate, but then something made her stop. “I got kind of a funny feeling all of a sudden,” she said. “There was no one out there.” Not Donovan or Shauna, Nikki or Shep. There wasn’t a single cast member in sight. Which made no sense to Morgan; she couldn’t understand where the light was coming from. She thought of the plantation ghost stories and got very, very scared. It was when she turned to leave that her flashlight caught the shape of something on the ground, resting just inside the low-lying fence, the gate to which was wide open and swinging in the wind. “I just wanted to see what it was,” she said.

  “You touched it?” Eric asked.

  “It was warm . . . and wet.”

  She pointed the flashlight on the ground and saw blood.

  “I ran,” Morgan said, sounding relieved to have this confession behind her. “I ran all the way home.” She looked up at them. Eric was standing, hands on his hips.

 
“Show me,” he said.

  It was after dark when the three of them started for the quarters, Caren chauffeuring from behind the wheel of the golf cart. She stopped at the top of the dirt road, as she always did, idling the cart while Eric, who had never laid eyes on the slave cabins, was staring straight ahead. He’d never seen anything like it, and Caren found herself wanting to reach for his hand, because no person should experience this moment alone, this face-to-face meeting with one’s own history, the family you never knew you had. The cottages were aligned in two rows, three on each side of the dirt road. Their spindly columns were like tired arms at the end of a long day’s work, nearly crushed beneath the weight of what they were being asked to hold up. The plank porches sagged in places; each cabin, silhouetted by the newly set sun, was no more than a few feet wide, smaller than some of the SUVs riding on American highways.

  Caren could hear Eric’s breathing.

  He was so quiet for so long that Morgan, sitting between them, whispered, “Daddy,” while nudging him in his side. He turned, looking first at Caren, and then his daughter. Then, facing the quarters, he put both hands on the cart’s dashboard, as if he were literally bracing himself for what lay ahead. Finally, he stepped out. Caren shut the engine, and the two of them followed their daughter’s small footprints in the dirt.

  In front of Jason’s Cabin, Morgan stopped.

  She turned, looking over her shoulder at her mother and father, and, without saying a word, pointed to a spot just inside the gate: It was right here. Caren walked ahead of Eric, who was studying the face of each cabin he passed, the hollow windows like eyes behind which lay a glimpse of the soul of slave life; and they, in turn, seemed to be watching him, too, this black man in wool gabardine and dress shoes, a five-hundred-dollar watch on his wrist. The tiny square yard in front of the last cabin on the left was filled with dirt and patches of grass, all of which had been washed over by days of rain. Standing at the threshold of the gate’s small wooden door, Caren saw no trace of blood. She pulled the black Maglite from the back pocket of her jeans and shone a thin stream of light on the spot where Morgan said she saw the bloody knife. She knew the cops hadn’t found the murder weapon, which meant whoever left it there must have returned at some point to remove it, the same way they tried to steal off the property with Inés’s limp body. Stopped by the fence, Lang had said. Eric was behind her. He nodded toward the cabin. “Is it okay if I go in?”

  Caren opened the gate for him.

  Morgan clung to her mother’s side as she followed them into the cabin. Soon the three of them were crowded inside, a family barely contained by these four walls. It was hard to imagine Jason raising his own family here. Eric, who was nearly six feet tall, hunched over as he studied the artifacts in the cabin: the gathering of rusted pots and pans around a fire pit dug into the ground; the patchwork quilt and straw pallet on the dirt floor; and the unfinished table, which Eric stared at for quite some time. Morgan said, “I want to go back.” Caren nodded, but she didn’t move. Like Eric, she was looking for something, though what, exactly, she couldn’t say. A clue, maybe, as to what went on in this one-room shack. “I’m serious, Mom,” Morgan said. “I don’t like it in here.” Caren felt it, too, the air so still it cut, the feeling that you could never get enough breath, no matter how hard you tried. She’d avoided this cabin before. It had, even before Inés’s murder, made her feel unimaginably sad. She was just about to leave when Eric pointed to something on the tabletop. She moved closer and saw those same drops of candle wax, milky white and fresh enough to peel with ease when Caren scratched at the wax with her thumbnail. She remembered Morgan’s description of a flickering light coming from the cabin and had a terrifying thought that the killer could have still been inside the cabin that night, while her daughter was only a few feet away at the gate. Eric must have been thinking the same thing. His face was blanched with a look of horror. He shook his head slowly. This is not good, Caren.

  He was right.

  This was not good at all.

  She made an instinctive turn toward her daughter . . . but Morgan was gone. Caren called her name calmly at first. But she heard no response . . . and her panic started to spread. She ran for the door. “Morgan!” she yelled. It was Eric who stopped her, grabbing her from behind and practically lifting her off the ground. He pulled the whole weight of her toward the front window, so that she could see Morgan was standing outside by the fence, waiting. This wasn’t all Caren could see. What was also clear from this vantage point, this gaze through the cabin’s front window, was the realization that if the killer was still inside the shack when Morgan stumbled upon the bloody knife, then he very likely got a good look at her nine-year-old daughter.

  18

  Caren wanted to go to the cops.

  Eric reminded her that she’d destroyed DNA evidence, a felony.

  Because neither one of them believed Morgan was upstairs actually sleeping, they were having this argument in the one room where she couldn’t hear them, behind the closed door of Belle Vie’s Hall of Records. It was a dark, windowless room the size of a walk-in closet. The floor was bare, and the walls were crowded, floor to ceiling, with half a dozen printer’s cabinets, their slim drawers holding every piece of paper and every photograph that had managed to survive a civil war; the open contempt of Yankee soldiers, yeoman squatters and vagabonds; five different legal owners, three with the last name Clancy; and, for a brief time following the war, the United States Government—not to mention the coffee-stained hands of Danny Olmsted. There was a single sixty-watt bulb overhead, leaving the room dark and womblike. Standing at his full height, Eric’s head almost touched the dropped ceiling, which was made of a cheap plastic that did not in any way match the colonial look of the rest of the building.

  Caren had already peeled off several layers of clothing and was standing in a white undershirt and her grass-stained jeans. And still she was sweating. “Why can’t we just tell Detective Lang what she told us without mentioning anything about the shirt?” she asked. She was testing the theory. She and Eric had been running through the merits of one strategy over another, the way they used to do when they were back in school together, working cases. Eric had his arms tightly crossed. He was shaking his head back and forth. “We tell them where she saw the knife,” Caren said, trying to convince herself of her own line of reasoning. “We tell them she was scared and that’s why she didn’t tell them—or us—before. She’s just a kid. They’ll understand.”

  “It’s a slippery slope, lying to a cop.”

  “How is it different from what you’re proposing?”

  “Not telling is not lying. It’s withholding, and I for one can live with that.”

  “We can’t hide this, Eric. Donovan is in jail. Jail. How exactly are you going to explain to your daughter that she should keep her mouth shut while someone, whom she idolizes, by the way, sits in jail for something he didn’t do? What kind of message is that?” she asked, wondering just how deeply D.C. had changed him. “We can’t do that to her, not over something like this. She has information that—”

  “I don’t care! I don’t want my kid witness to a fucking murder!”

  “She already is a witness, Eric.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  “Better that we take control of the situation now.”

  “There’s nothing she told us tonight that helps their case. She didn’t see anybody. She can’t give eyewitness testimony. And nothing she says puts them any closer to knowing where that knife is. My guess is that thing is long gone by now, sunk in the river somewhere. There’s no reason to involve Morgan in any of it.” He looked at her, the overhead light making deep creases of the lines around his eyes. “You think they’ll protect her, but they won’t. They don’t give a shit. I don’t want it known publicly that my daughter is a witness in a murder investigation. So far, we’re the only three people who know she was out there
that night, and that’s enough.”

  “Four people, Eric. It’s us, and whoever was in that cabin.”

  “You don’t know that for sure, Caren. We don’t know that anyone saw her at all. Which is why we don’t need to go around advertising what she saw. We certainly don’t have to put her name out there as a potential witness.” He was so agitated he could hardly look at Caren, even though they were standing mere inches apart. She said his name with quiet care, reaching for his hand, which he, surprisingly, let rest in hers. The touch was real, sealing a connection that time and space had not undone. She wanted him to understand that she was scared, too. Her way was a risk, she knew that, but one that might ultimately protect their daughter. “If we just talk to the Sheriff’s Department,” she said, “we’ll have a better chance of keeping her safe.”

  “Don’t you dare, Caren,” Eric said, seeming momentarily terrified that she might actually do it, that she might go behind his back even. “These backwater cops down here are just making this shit up as they go along, putting together a homicide case with spit and string. They put that kid in lockup based on total bullshit. You’re not careful, Caren, and you’re going to be looking at a charge yourself, for sitting on information in the middle of their investigation. Don’t think they won’t come after you.”

  “You sound like Lang.”

  “He threaten you?”

  She hadn’t told him that part yet.

  Eric shook his head. “There is no way I’m trusting them with my kid.”

  Then, quite matter-of-factly, he said, “I’m taking her back with me.”

  “What?”

  “She can’t stay here, Caren.”

  She stared at him for a long time, trying to gauge how serious he was. “I trusted you,” he said softly. He was rocking back and forth, chewing on his bottom lip, staring down at her. “You said it was safe down here, you said she’d be in a good school—”