The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  The priest looked down at the tips of his shoes, which were not expensive dress shoes, she saw, but black sneakers. Then he patted Caren’s arm and said, “Follow me.”

  Behind the velvet curtain there were two rooms, divided by a thin, cloth-covered partition that did not reach the height of the ceiling. On one side, Megan or Mary was sitting on the floor, reading a social studies textbook. Beside her were boxes of copier paper and colorful church programs folded and stacked in neat piles. The girl looked up as Akerele escorted Caren past, but she didn’t say anything and quickly went back to her schoolwork. On the other side of the partition sat Ginny. She was the woman from the candlelight vigil, the one who had pleaded with Deputy Harris to do something about Hunt Abrams. Today, she was dressed in khaki slacks and a burgundy blazer, large curls framing her face. Her lips were pink and her eyes a pale blue. There were square, black reading glasses tucked into the front of her shirt. She looked up from behind her desk, which was covered in notepaper and letter stock and cans of Diet Coke. Father Akerele began introductions, realizing only as he turned to Caren that he didn’t, in fact, know her name.

  “Caren Gray,” she said.

  Ginny stood, smoothing her blazer.

  The tiny room, no more than ten or twelve square feet, smelled of her perfume, Shalimar, and incense, small, black cones of which lay in open boxes on top of a filing cabinet behind her desk. Ginny took Caren’s hand in her own, which was plump and baby-soft. “You’re out on the plantation, right?” she said, as friendly as could be. “I finally took my daughter last spring. I’ve lived in Ascension Parish my whole life and had never been to Belle Vie, if you can believe.” Caren remarked darkly that she felt as if she’d never left, stealing a look at Akerele as she explained that her family, in one form or another, had worked the land for generations. “It’s beautiful country out there, just outrageously beautiful,” Ginny said. “You should be really proud.”

  Across the room, Akerele pressed his lips together, keeping his feelings about the plantation to himself. He said, “Ms. Gray had some questions about Inés.”

  “Oh, honey,” Ginny said. “Did you know her, too?”

  She was still holding Caren’s hand.

  “Ms. Gray works with the Isaacs boy.”

  “Oh.” Ginny let Caren’s hand slide from hers. She scrunched the pad of flesh between her eyebrows and wrinkled her nose. She looked back and forth between Akerele and Caren, her priest and a virtual stranger. She seemed not to understand the turn this meeting had taken. “Well,” Akerele said eventually. “It appears that Mr. Owens is not the only one who thinks the detectives do not have their man.”

  “Hmph,” Ginny said, folding her arms across her chest, pushing the blazer’s shoulder pads up toward her ears. Her painted mouth was pulled into a tight line.

  She leaned in and whispered, “I never liked Hunt Abrams either.”

  Akerele shot Caren a look.

  To Ginny, he said, “Ms. Gray expressed curiosity about the fact that Inés had come by the church on the day she died.”

  “Did Detectives Lang and Bertrand ask you about that?”

  “Only inasmuch as they were trying to establish a timeline. I told them exactly what I told you, Father. She was here on Wednesday afternoon, for about an hour, leaving around six o’clock. But they didn’t get into it much more beyond that.”

  “And do you know where she went after she left?”

  “Home, I assumed.”

  Caren nodded, but she didn’t think this was true.

  She asked why Inés had come to the church that day.

  “She was hunting about a place to stay.”

  “Inés . . . was homeless?”

  “Oh, no, she stayed out in town with her boyfriend.”

  “Gustavo?”

  Ginny nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Was there some kind of problem, between the two of them?”

  “No, ma’am, that wasn’t it at all,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “She and Gustavo were a real pair. It was real for them. I wanted her to stay with him. He was good to her, you know, real kind. And any dollar she spent on renting a room somewhere else was money she couldn’t send to her kids. Lord knows she was trying to get back to them. I mean, it’s hell being away from your kids, you know. I told her to save her money, but she was serious about finding some other kind of living arrangement.” She turned around to fish for something among the mess of papers and files and tattered periodicals on a table pressed against the wall behind her. “She wanted some place cheap and clean and close to work, she said. We went through some listings, friends of the church, you know. I really tried to find her something.”

  “We try to offer what services we can,” Akerele reiterated.

  “Here,” Ginny said, holding out a stapled stack of apartment listings and room rentals. It was three pages, typed. Caren flipped through it, the words blurring from one line to the next. Then she looked up, searching Ginny’s face, then Akerele’s. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why was she so determined to move?”

  At this, Ginny pinched her lips together. It was a hesitation.

  Akerele gave her a small nod. “It’s okay.”

  “She thought someone was following her,” Ginny said, finally spilling it. On the farm road, in town, even out near the trailer park where she lived, she felt she was being watched. “I told those two police detectives. She was scared to death.”

  Akerele added, “It had been going on for a week or so before she died.”

  “Around the time she discovered the bone,” Caren said.

  She looked at Akerele, wondering if he sensed a connection, too.

  He made a face, considering anew this sequence of events.

  “I told the sheriff’s men to look into it,” Ginny said. “But they said they had nothing to go on since Inés had never filed a police report or anything, which I had begged her to do. But she wasn’t having it. Said she was cursed, had been ever since that bone came up out of the ground. She didn’t want to get thrown in jail for not having any papers, not when she was so close to getting out of here. A few more weeks and she probably could’ve made up the money they’d lost during the rains.” Ginny let out a long sigh. “I wish to God she’d left when she had the chance.”

  Caren felt a wave of nausea.

  It was the incense and the drugstore perfume, making her stomach turn. And this: she now thought she knew why Inés was on the plantation after dark. “And you never found her a place, did you?”

  Ginny shook her head. “A few days before she died, she just stopped asking, and I stopped looking. And, unfortunately, honey, that’s right where we left it.”

  Some place cheap and clean and close to work.

  Inés had been looking for a place to stay.

  By the time Caren pulled back into the parking lot of Belle Vie, dark clouds had started a march overhead. Like chunks of ash after a steady burn, they crowded out any hint of light or color on the other side, the sun or blue sky. The wind had picked up, too, whipping cane leaves in the distance, the sound like the percussive whoosh of seeds inside a baby’s shaker. There was a storm coming, for sure, rolling up the Mississippi from the Gulf, gaining strength, bringing thunder and lightning, too. The air was sharp with it, the acrid smell of electricity lying in wait for a single, lone spark. Caren was determined to make it to the slave quarters before the storm hit, borrowing the golf cart from security and speeding to the west. Gerald was not on duty today, not on a Sunday. Except for weddings or private parties, the staff was not asked to work on the Sabbath. Caren was out this far on the property line alone. The plantation was a chorus of whispered voices. The wind in the tree leaves, the wind in her hair, and the long, green fingers of weeping willows dusting the grassy groves. Overhead, the shrieking whistles of mourning warblers could be heard as the birds fled the low branch
es of a nearby oak, flying out ahead of the rain. The machines had stopped in the cane fields, and the pastoral music of Belle Vie was all Caren heard as she approached the quarters.

  She parked the golf cart as she always did, at the head of the dirt path, uttering a prayer the second her feet touched the ground. Only today, when she made the offering, she was thinking not only of her ancestors . . . but also Inés. It wasn’t Catholic, her prayer, but a hymn her mother used to sing, the lyrics to a Mahalia Jackson song, about somebody dying for your sins.

  She wanted some place cheap and clean and close to work, Ginny said.

  And just across the fence from the fields sat these six cabins, where sugarcane workers, enslaved and free, once lived and loved and raised families for generations, cabins that Inés had likely laid eyes on every day she worked at the Groveland farm. Six surprisingly well-kept cabins, their history foreign to someone like her. Each and every one of them sitting empty through the night. The last one on the left not even a hundred yards from the fields.

  Jason’s Cabin, Caren remembered.

  There had been blood inside the gate, Morgan said.

  And a knife just a few feet from the cabin door.

  And inside, Caren had found candles, lots of them, votives burned to stubs.

  Could Inés, she asked herself as she approached the cabin’s low-lying gate, could she have stolen onto the grounds of Belle Vie, like Owens did the night he and Caren met, and waited until sundown to sleep here, in this little slave cabin, where Jason had once lived, the place from which Caren’s whole family had sprung? Were they so different really, Jason and Inés, two cane workers separated by time and not much else?

  As Caren stepped into the tiny yard where summer cabbage once grew, peppers and okra, where chickens pecked feed in the dirt, she thought how desperate Inés must have been to choose this, a home literally behind bars, behind gates locked each night.

  She must have thought she’d be safe here.

  But someone had found her anyway.

  Inside, it took a while for Caren’s eyes to adjust to the low light and the swirl of black dust kicked up by wind blowing through the open door. She tried to picture Inés here, the way she had many times tried to picture her own ancestors living within these four walls—with the candles and the tattered quilt and the straw pallet on the floor, the antique tools and, of course, the night she died, the cane knife still hanging in its usual place on the wall.

  Beyond the cabin walls, Caren heard the first crack of thunder.

  She felt the ground move beneath her, the earth shaking from the force of it.

  It made her heart stop.

  Is that it? she wondered.

  Is that how it went?

  Inés was out here all alone and something, someone, startled her?

  Frightened, did she grab for the first thing at hand, the knife on the wall? And the killer took it away from her? It gave Caren the idea that the killer had entered the grounds without a weapon, that he maybe hadn’t intended to kill her at all, but some struggle had nevertheless ensued . . . and something went horribly wrong. The police had found no blood, no real forensic evidence inside the doors of any building on the entire plantation. Caren thought the confrontation, the moment her throat was slit, had to have happened outside the cabin, out by the fence, where Morgan saw blood. She turned, walking the last steps she imagined Inés took, from the center of the cabin to the front door, Caren’s right hand clenched around an imaginary weapon, the antique cane knife. She inched slowly toward the cabin door. But when she tried to imagine the last person Inés saw that night, the whole scene playing in her head simply faded to black.

  She had no idea who had been stalking this woman, or why.

  Outside, she felt the first drops of rain, cold water stinging her skin.

  As she reached out to open the gate, it swung out on its own, clanging against the fence in the sweeping, blustery wind. The rain was coming down harder now, the clouds blacker than they were only minutes before. She turned to the dirt road and ran.

  21

  When she walked into her office the following morning, Hunt Abrams was standing over her desk, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, casually studying the papers sitting out in the open on her desk. He didn’t start at her presence, didn’t inch away from her things. He was wearing a cotton button-down beneath his Groveland windbreaker. His hair was greased at the sides, and he smiled slyly in her direction.

  “We meet again,” he said.

  They were alone in here, and the feeling Caren had, creeping from her navel and spreading hot across her chest, was fear. She had a sudden disturbing thought about those holes in the ground out by the fields, the story of Abrams’s fight with Inés over what she had found. She swallowed hard. “Can I help you with something?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  In deference to decorum, he smiled politely, but his eyes didn’t move, and the effect was cool and masklike and wholly insincere. Abrams, it was clear, didn’t give a shit about being discovered like this, in her office. He wanted her to know that he, too, was free to come and go as he pleased; two could play the snooping game. He pivoted on the heels of his leather boots, casually perusing the antique furniture in the office, the floral wallpaper, and the stacks of books on the shelves, which included everything from yellowing agronomy texts to bound commemorative copies of The Olden Days of Belle Vie, and photo albums documenting every debutante ball and wedding and catered event held in the ballroom since 1972. Abrams took in the scene as he might an exhibit at a small roadside museum full of curios and knickknacks, all of it quaint but of no real consequence. She didn’t like his hands on everything, or the knowledge that he might claim all this one day soon. “The first tour starts at nine-fifteen,” she said, the words coming out thin and strained. “You’re certainly welcome to purchase a ticket. But otherwise I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  Abrams smiled, but didn’t move.

  He went back to poring over the items on the shelf, reaching up to take down a photograph, framed in silver and black, a picture of the Clancy boys, Bobby and Raymond, the two of them in their early twenties. The photo had been there for years, beside tins of aged molasses and two ceramic mugs from the gift shop, inside of which stood dozens of pencils and pens. The photograph showed the two young men, darkly handsome, and long and lean as twin stalks of cane. Bobby, the younger, had the same intense gaze she remembered from when they were kids, cocksure and strong, the look of a young man standing cliff-side, sure he can fly. Thirty years ago, it was Raymond whose entire countenance appeared disjointed and fragile in some way.

  How things have changed, Caren thought.

  Abrams stared at the photo for a few seconds, then left it on top of her desk. Behind them, there were heavy footsteps on the winding staircase. Caren turned to see Raymond Clancy ascending the top steps in a suit and tie, a plush wool coat buttoned at his trim waist. He nodded in her general direction on his way into the office, turning sideways to pass her in the doorway. To Hunt, he said, “Sorry, I’m late,” before removing his coat and tossing it onto a chair. He walked behind the desk, taking possession, and motioned for Hunt to have a seat. Only then did he turn and address Caren directly. “Have Lorraine send over a pot of coffee, would you, Gray?”

  Before she could utter a response, Abrams crossed to the office door and slowly closed it in Caren’s face, leaving her on the other side.

  She could hear their muffled voices, the hushed, somber tone.

  But she had no idea what they were discussing in private.

  Well, there was no way she was walking to the kitchen for Raymond. He should have known better than to ask. Instead, she stepped out onto the gallery to wait him out.

  The balcony’s lacquered floor was still wet with morning dew, and she could smell a loamy, damp wind coming off the Mississippi. In the
distance, there was the low, steady hum of Luis’s riding mower. And to the south, Caren had a clear view of the plantation’s parking lot. Eric’s rental car was gone. Letty’s van, too. Caren and Eric had yet to come up with a game plan; they weren’t even communicating, really, Eric exchanging no more than a few words with her this morning, telling her that he would drive Morgan to school. This left Letty with little to do, and Caren had happily given her the day off. The river breeze rolled over the treetops. A patch of blue sky closed over with clouds, and Caren felt a chill.

  Staring across the grounds of the parking lot, she noticed something else for the first time: Donovan’s car was missing. Detectives Lang and Bertrand must have come and grabbed that, too.

  “Gray,” she heard behind her.

  Raymond was calling her name.

  By the time she stepped off the gallery, Abrams was already making his exit, breezing down the winding staircase, leaving behind a scent of Brylcreem and damp leather. He was whistling, the notes blowing through the main house like a cold draft.

  “Shut the door, would you?” Raymond said, as she crossed the threshold into her office. He was standing behind her desk. He was on his feet and in his hands was the framed photograph of him and his brother, Bobby. Raymond seemed distracted, preoccupied with the image, staring at it as if it were a found artifact, something that might take years to dust off and make sense of. Then, for whatever reason, he set the frame on the desktop, face down. He put his hands on his hips, looking at Caren. He looked tired, but in a good mood. She could see a hint of glee in his eyes, and he did a poor job of masking it with a hangdog expression of contrition.

  “Well, I guess I can’t put any damn thing past Lorraine,” he started. “She was right, I might as well tell you. She was telling the truth about Belle Vie.” He waited for some reaction, but Caren said nothing, forcing him to spell it out, to say the words out loud, here in his father’s old house. “We’re selling it,” he announced.

  “When?”

  “I talked to Jack Beverly at the statehouse this morning,” he said. “We’ll bring our relationship with the Tourism Department to an official close by the end of this month. But I want to shut down all operations well before then. Groveland is taking over the whole place, and some of the corporate honchos from headquarters are coming out this way. They’re ready to draw up plans as soon as possible. We’re just waiting for this business with the girl to die down.” He motioned toward the desk, on top of which Caren noticed he’d laid open the insides of several newspapers. She recognized the Donaldsonville Chief and the daily papers out of Baton Rouge and Monroe, even the Dallas Morning News and the Gazette out of Texarkana. Each contained a small post about the death of a migrant worker, a temporary employee with Groveland. Inés remained an unnamed figure in each story; it was Groveland that had made the headlines.