The Cutting Season (19 page)

“I’m your mother,” she said to her one day, a whisper in her ear as she slept.

I’m your family, she said.

They stayed a few more nights, just the two of them, until Caren was finally ready to go home, to the only one she had left
.
What they had, they packed into the car, heading out early, early in the morning, Caren with that box of her mother’s things riding shotgun beside her. Interstate 10 will take you all the way into New Orleans if you let it, but instead they cut south from Baton Rouge, heading for Ascension and Belle Vie. She had steeled herself for the reunion. She’d prepared herself to hate the place on sight, pointedly refusing to be courted by a pretty picture, or its pretense of antebellum grace. And she made herself a single promise: she would not forget her family’s generations of sweat here, and how trapped she’d felt by that very legacy, growing up in the shade of these trees. Her original contract was for one year. The job paid well and provided a roof over their heads. The plantation was furnished and populated, and she thought it might soften the losses they’d endured, for a while at least. The plan was to sit out for a few months, to stow away in a familiar place, until she could figure what she wanted to do next, what she wanted for her life and for her daughter. It was only supposed to be for one year. But the place got a hold of her, from that first day, the first hour even. And it surprised as much as it confused her to discover that she did not, after all these years, hate the plantation at all, that she
could
not hate what was now, and maybe always had been, her real home, the way she came into this world.

14

T
hings were tense between her and Eric the next morning, and he said very little as he waited for Morgan to get dressed, even eschewing Letty’s hot, honeyed milk and French toast. Letty didn’t seem to know what to make of them together, Caren and Eric. Each time she caught Caren’s eye across the kitchen, she smiled knowingly, until Caren could hardly stand it anymore, eventually forgoing the idea of a formal breakfast and instead grabbing an apple on her way to work. Eric waited until she was halfway to the door before mentioning his return flight to D.C. that afternoon.

“You’re leaving?”

Morgan had just come down the stairs. She was wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt and white socks. It was Saturday, and she didn’t have school, and she’d had it in her mind that she and her dad would be spending the whole day together. Her eyes were doleful and wide, and she let a small leather purse fall with a thud at her feet. She looked back and forth between her mom and her dad, waiting on some kind of an explanation. Letty was bent over the stove, the bangles on her wrist tolling lightly as she stirred a pot of grits. Caren knew she was listening to every word. She wanted to ask her to leave, but had never once in four years made a similar request and to do so now would only draw more attention to the situation, or signal that something was wrong.

Eric said to Morgan, “I have to get back to work, honey.”

Caren wondered if it was really Lela that Eric had to get back to.

“Did
she
ask you to leave?” Morgan said. She was looking at her mother.

“No, honey,” he said. “This isn’t about me and your mom.”

Which, even to Caren, sounded like a lie.

He glanced her way before standing and crossing to his daughter. He lifted her tiny purse from the foot of the stairs. “I have to get back to Washington, Morgan. I kind of took off without telling anybody, and I need to get back to my work. Your mom’s got everything under control here, and now that I know you’re okay, I need to go home.” Then he bent down, so they were somewhat eye-to-eye. “But, listen, if you need anything, anything at all, you know you can call me or Lela . . . anytime, okay?” Belatedly, he added, “We can still hang out this morning.”

“It’s not fair,” she said.

“I’m going to see you in a few weeks anyway.”

“Mom won’t let me go.”

“That’s not true,” he said, looking at Caren.

“I never said that, Morgan.”

“She hasn’t even bought my ticket yet.”

“I’ll take care of it today,” Caren said. “I should have done it a long time ago.” It was true. She had been stalling, and it wasn’t fair to either one of them. “You’re not going to miss your dad’s wedding.” That was all it took. Morgan broke out into a huge grin, showing the tiny gap between her two front teeth, looking, in the moment, just like Helen Gray, the grandmother she’d never laid eyes on. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, leaping across the room to throw her arms around Caren’s neck. She held her mother close and kissed her cheek, as sweetly as she did every year at Christmas when she discovered that, against all odds, she’d gotten exactly what she wanted. Letty likewise seemed pleased with the outcome. Caren caught her smiling to herself at the stove.

T
he tasting went off as planned at nine a.m., Lorraine having set an elegant table in the dining hall of the main house: china painted with gold and rose, silver flatware and taper candles and a shock of yellow chrysanthemums from the garden. And the food, of course, a five-course spread. The bride didn’t touch a thing, letting her mother act as her surrogate. Caren had seen this many times, women who ceased eating in the days and weeks leading up to the big day. They were invariably the ones fuming on their wedding day because the food, the first they’d tasted in weeks, probably, was not up to their exacting standards, brides who ended up spending part of their reception in the ladies’ room, crying. Miss Whitman’s mother was a good sport, enjoying the food and the bottomless flute of champagne. The daughter, Shannon, was tense and brittle and far too young to get married, Caren thought. She made her mother describe, in detail, each and every forkful and mentioned at least three times that she wanted her own baker in Alexandria to do the cake. “Not a problem, baby,” Lorraine said. She was wearing a white chef’s hat today and a matching smock, for the full-service effect. She made sure to keep the older woman’s throat wet, pouring the mother another glass of champagne. Mrs. Whitman giggled. Shannon, cranky and hungry, rolled her eyes.

On her laptop, Caren made a series of notes for their file.

Later, they took a ride across the plantation so she could show them every corner of the land. Shannon Whitman wanted the doors and windows to the cottages open for at least thirty-six hours before her wedding day to get rid of the “old people smell.” She also wanted to know what could be done about the bugs. Come sundown, they’d be nipping at everyone’s ears. Caren made no promises, but said she could have Luis fog the front lawn on the morning of. Mrs. Whitman, still nursing a glass of bubbly, nodded agreeably. Caren ferried the clients along the fence line, out by the cane fields, and Shannon Whitman screwed her perfectly made-up face at the sight of all those machines and Mexicans sweating in the fields. “They’re not going to be out there like that on my wedding day, are they?” Caren tried to explain that the cane farm operated separately from the plantation, and that she didn’t imagine any of Miss Whitman’s guests would venture this far out to the property line. But Shannon Whitman was unmoved. “Mama, can’t they do something about this?” she said.

Again, Caren made no promises.

She had no contact information for Hunt Abrams, no cell phone or direct line, only a regional office number for the Groveland Corporation that was actually answered by a secretary at their headquarters in California. Getting in touch with the man meant a long walk into the fields. Abrams had certainly never expressed an inclination toward cooperation or neighborly consideration when it came to the aesthetic needs of Belle Vie’s well-heeled clients. But she at least had to say she tried.

The back five hundred acres of the Clancy family property, and the whole of Groveland’s cane farm, formed an L-shape around the south and west sides of the plantation, around the fence that secured Belle Vie. She drove her car along the farm road, toward the southernmost corner of the farm, where she knew there lay a short, dirt road that led into the fields. She would have to walk the rest of the way to Hunt’s trailer on foot. She parked her Volvo and stepped out of the car, halting before a curious sight: there, along the side of the farm road, was a series of jagged holes in the ground where the earth had been pulled out in wide chunks, the ground hacked away by a shovel. There were a few wood posts strewn in the dirt, as if at one time a fence were being built here. It was an unsightly mess, a project abandoned and forgotten.

A
brams’s trailer was a double-wide, stone gray and completely unadorned. It sat sandwiched between two uncut fields. The sign outside read:
GROVELAND FARMS
. Caren knocked on the door’s metal frame and waited, listening to the mechanical cutters in the distance, the gassy
chug-chug
of their engines. She knocked a second time, this time pulling back the screen door. When her knuckles hit the surface of the plywood door, it popped from its frame and swung open. The trailer was unlocked.

“Hello?”

She stepped inside the stuffy room.

At first glance she spotted a television, but no computer. On the floor were a pillow and a sleeping bag, but no filing cabinets or fax machine, nothing that said this was a place of business. There was a coffeemaker atop a spare, uncluttered desk, and a cash box with a heavy, metal padlock. The trailer looked more like the hideaway of some illegal, cash operation rather than an outpost of a national corporation. Apart from a few cardboard boxes stacked with production reports, graphs, and charts, and a wall calendar, there was no evidence of anything that resembled a working office—no payroll cards or time sheets that Caren could see, no proof on paper that Groveland’s workers even existed. In fact, she had to search for a pad and a pen just to leave Abrams a note, asking him to please contact her regarding the Whitman wedding. She was bent over and poking around, looking, when a line of clouds rolled past the trailer’s one skylight, brightening the room. Something on the floor caught a wink of the sun’s light. It was wedged between the flat carpet and the leg of Abrams’s desk, a tiny thing, casting a glitter of light. Curious, Caren reached down to pick it up, not realizing until she had it in the palm of her hand exactly what it was she’d found: a single, star-shaped earring.

The trailer’s door swung open.

She heard it slam against the metal frame.

She turned and saw Hunt Abrams, the top of his head almost touching the low ceiling, all six feet of him nearly hunched over in the trailer. He was wearing jeans and a black windbreaker and eyeing her with a bemused smirk. “You just stopping by to say hi?” he said. She was still holding the earring in her hand, the post cutting into the center of her palm. There was no getting rid of it now, not without Abrams knowing what she’d found in here, or making it seem like she’d come to his trailer specifically to snoop around.

On instinct, she hid her hand in her jacket pocket, realizing, almost immediately, the mistake she’d just made. She never should have touched the thing, never should have picked it up. It was in
her
possession now, and not his, and there would be no way now of proving it had ever been inside this trailer or anywhere near Hunt Abrams. Would Lang and Abrams even believe her if she told them where she’d found the dead woman’s earring, now covered in Caren’s sweat and fear?

“Might I ask what in hell you think you’re doing in here?”

He took a step toward her. She felt the long shadow of his height creep across her chest, then up the sides of her neck, slowly enveloping her whole body. She mumbled something about the Whitman wedding, the client’s concerns about production in the fields. She was already starting toward the door. Abrams reached out a hand to stop her. He grabbed her arm roughly. “The Whitman wedding, huh?” he said. He didn’t believe a word of it. She mumbled something like, “Yes, sir,” before pushing past him and out of the trailer, flying through the fields of cane.

B
ack in her office, she set the star-shaped earring on her desk.

It was identical to the one in the picture of Inés Avalo.

She found it odd that the cops had come through Belle Vie with a search warrant, but had apparently never thought to take a close look at the trailer of the dead woman’s employer. At her desk, she Googled the words “Groveland and California.” Then “Groveland and Florida.” Then “Abrams and Groveland and Florida.” She thought about what Lee Owens, the
Times-Picayune
reporter, had said last night, about Abrams having a bad way with his workers. Sitting stiffly, she watched the search results fill her computer screen. They were generic news articles about the company, its business dealings, and she skimmed through these rather quickly, not sure what exactly she was looking for. It wasn’t until the second page of search results that she thought she’d stumbled on something worthwhile, a story in the Jacksonville newspaper about a woman who’d been hurt on the job, in a citrus grove near Lake City—and the fact that there had been whispers of a DA’s investigation. The tagline told the basic story:

LAKE CITY,
FL
—HUNT
ABRAMS
, A PROJECT MANAGER FOR THE
GROVELAND
CORPORATION, MET WITH LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT TODAY, TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BEATING OF ONE OF THE COMPANY’S WORKERS IN THE FIELD . . .

Caren clicked on the link to the article. She wasn’t through the first paragraph when her desk phone rang. She ignored it at first, but it kept ringing, on and on.

“Yes,” she said, picking up.

It was Betty Collier, Donovan’s grandmother.

Right off she said she’d been calling Caren’s cell phone nonstop for the past twenty minutes. The woman was beside herself with panic. But Caren no longer had her cell phone. After the strange run-in with Lee Owens last night she never found it, even after searching the whole northeast side of the property. “What’s going on?” she said.

“I didn’t know nobody else to call or I wouldn’t bother you with it, God knows I wouldn’t, but we got to get somebody down there right now, a lawyer or somebody who can straighten this mess out.”

“Donovan?” Caren said, catching on. “Did something happen with Donovan?”

“Lord, if they ain’t gone and arrested him.”

“What?”

“They’ve got him down in lockup right now.” She was crying by this point, her voice cracked and strained. “Help me, Lord, please,” she said, calling on a power much higher than Caren. “Can you please help me get my boy out of jail?”

C
aren called Eric because, besides Raymond Clancy, he was the only lawyer she had immediate access to. He answered his cell phone, somewhere between Belle Vie and Baton Rouge. He agreed to turn around and drop Morgan with Letty. He would meet Caren in the parking lot of the sheriff’s station. “They probably won’t let you see him, but if you do get in, tell him not to say anything until I get there.” Eric had never met Donovan, and Caren couldn’t help thinking that Donovan, were he to meet Eric under different circumstances, probably wouldn’t like him very much, what with Eric’s tailored clothes and his Tulane degree and the fact that he wasn’t a Saints fan. The two men didn’t know each other, and it was clear that Eric was doing this only as a favor to her. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said. When she saw him later in the parking lot of the East Courthouse in Gonzales, his suit softly wrinkled, she was struck by how immeasurably kind he could be. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said.