The Cutting Season (24 page)

Jason had
stayed
.

He learned to read here, on the plantation, taught by a colored woman named Nadine, inside the walls of the old schoolhouse. And for the first time in his life, he earned a monthly wage. He lived and worked at Belle Vie until, as was noted in Tynan’s diary-like notations, he went missing in the Year of Our Lord 1872. Of his best employee, Tynan wrote plainly that Jason had simply walked off the job one day.

Caren closed the drawer on the file cabinet.

She tried to hear her mother’s voice, the stories she used to tell.

She stood among a virtual mountain of documents, the official history of Belle Vie, and tried to remember the parts that
weren’t
written down, the pieces that had been passed on, in stories and songs, for generations. She tried hard to put herself back at her mother’s feet, nights Helen used to braid her hair, nights they slept back-to-back on a shared bed, nights Caren should have paid more attention. She would never get them back now and could recall few of the details, only the memory of her touch, the smell of olive oil on her hands, which she rubbed onto her raw knuckles after work in the kitchen. She could only recall the soft whispers in her ear, nights her mother tried to tell her, over and over, that Jason’s life mattered, that his story was in their blood.

19

E
ric was not in the parlor when she emerged. Upstairs, Morgan was on the computer in the sitting room. Caren didn’t know what, if anything, she’d heard of her parents’ fight, and she told her to go to bed. In her own room, she smoothed the bedsheets because she couldn’t bear to see them so tangled, the way she and Eric had left them only a few hours ago. He was outside right now, talking to Lela on the phone.

Alone, she lay on top of the covers.

He was right, she knew.

Clancy
was
going to sell Belle Vie, and she would have to find another place to live. It was only a matter of time. She rolled over onto her side, staring at the wall, when the phone beside her bed rang, startling her. She glanced at the bedside clock. It was late, well after eleven o’clock. She couldn’t imagine who would be calling at this hour. She sat up, reaching for the cordless on the nightstand. But by the time she answered, whoever was on the other end of the line had hung up. She scrolled through the caller ID screen on the telephone . . . feeling a sharp jolt when she saw the last call received. It was a phone number she recognized immediately: her own.

Someone had just called her from her own cell phone.

She remembered losing it last night, when she’d been startled by the presence of Lee Owens on the plantation after dark, and she had a fleeting thought that he, the reporter, had gotten his hands on it somehow. When the phone rang again, as it did just a few seconds later, she actually said his name out loud. There was no response, no words of any kind, only a slow, steady breath, the sure presence of another person.

And then . . . the line went dead.

Maybe, she thought, someone had found her phone on the grounds and was trying to return it to her . . . though something about this seemed highly unlikely.

She hung up the phone and stepped into the hall. The door to Morgan’s bedroom was closed. Caren stood and listened, making sure she was asleep. Then she went straight to the computer in the sitting room and turned it on. In minutes, she found a customer-service number for her wireless provider. At this hour, the girl on duty was not able to give her any information about where the last call came from. She was, however, willing to sell an add-on to Caren’s service account, a navigator that would track the location of her phone or any of the family members on her account. The girl probably took Caren for a nervous parent, making a desperate call to a cell phone company after eleven o’clock at night, hoping to discover the whereabouts of her kid. She probably made a lot of sales ’round about midnight. “It’s easy,” she said repeatedly. She could set it up right now, right over the phone, for $9.99 a month.

“Okay,” Caren said.

And just like that she was hooked up.

There was a special link, the salesgirl said, that would show the exact location on a detailed map, as long as the cell phone was in use. Caren hung up and made her first test. She dialed her cell number, holding her breath through three rings, exhaling when someone finally picked up the line. She heard music, voices in the background. “This is Caren Gray,” she said, waiting. But whoever it was on the other end hung up.

Caren stared at her computer screen.

In less than ninety seconds she had it.

There was a flashing blue light blinking back at her, telling her the call was coming from a spot just off State Highway 1, between here and Donaldsonville, not even fifteen minutes away. It was quiet in the house. By the time she made it downstairs, Eric was lying on the couch, eyes closed. He was off the phone now, but she could tell he wasn’t asleep. He was just refusing to speak to her. So be it, she thought. She went for her coat and car keys. “Stay here with Morgan,” she said. Eric turned his head to look at her. What he saw must have caused concern. She had just slid the .32 into the pocket of her coat.

“Where are you going?” he said, sitting up.

“I lost my cell phone,” was all she said, before walking out the door.

T
here are some places in rural Louisiana that are untouched, that have remained unchanged for the past sixty-some-odd years, only that somewhere along the way someone thought to add a satellite dish and wi-fi. Rainey’s was just such a place. It was a proper icehouse, a one-room building, long and lean, made of corrugated tin and painted wood slats, with a front porch that went all the way up to the edge of the highway. Caren had been inside only once, sent in to buy her mother a pack of cigarettes, exactly $1.75 in her hand; she’d been told to come straight back out, no dawdling. It was a farmers’ place mostly, though on game nights—LSU in the fall, Grambling and Southern, and the Dallas Mavs in spring—the place cast a wider net, attracting an array of folks from the river belt. Tonight, the parking lot was sparse. Caren drove past it twice, jackknifing the road to double back, making sure she had the right place. There wasn’t a building for half a mile in either direction. The phone call, she thought, had to have come from Rainey’s. She pulled into the gravel lot and parked.

Stepping out, she had a clear view across the land, the cars and empty beer bottles . . . and a red pickup truck. It was rusted on its sides, and had a dent across the front grill. It was in every way identical to the one that had tailed her on the highway.

“You following me, ma’am?”

Caren spun on her heels, reaching for the .32 in her pocket.

She came within a few fatal seconds of shooting . . . Lee Owens.

When she saw his face, she quickly slipped the gun back into her pocket. He was in the same ball cap and khakis, had likely not been home to change in at least a day, still pecking away at his story, his investigation into Hunt Abrams and the murder of the cane worker. “What are you doing out here?” he said. He was grinning, excited to see her. Caren glanced back at the rusted red truck. She had no clue as to the driver’s identity, or if he and the cell-phone caller were one and the same. “Come on,” Owens said. “Let me buy you a drink.” He was already starting for the steps of the front porch, but Caren got cold feet, pulling away from him and the front door of Rainey’s, her boot heels digging in the gravel. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

Owens turned. “Ma’am?”

“You didn’t call me, by any chance, did you?”

He smiled, plainly amused by the idea and treating it as if she had actually made him an invitation. “And when would this have been?” he said with a smirk.

“Last night, you didn’t find my cell phone?”

“You mean while I was being held at gunpoint? Did I find your
cell
phone
?” He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, too. “No, ma’am, I did not find your cellular telephone.” He started again for the slatted porch. She could hear the music inside, horns and guitar, the canned sound of blues from a jukebox, Johnnie Taylor, she thought, or maybe it was Bobby “Blue” Bland. She could smell beer and smoked meat. Owens stopped in the gravel, his sneakers shuffling up a curl of dust. “You coming?”

“What are you still doing out here, this far from New Orleans?”

“I got something out of that priest,” he said.

He walked back toward her, coming so close she could see straight into his pale-green eyes, could see two days of stubble down his chin. “Apparently, Inés Avalo had some kind of an altercation with Abrams in the fields, about a week before she was killed. Akerele said she’d found something out there, something that shook her good.”

“What?”

“A bone.”

“A bone?”

Owens gave her a grim nod. “She found a human bone.”

I
nside, they got a table.

Per local custom, there were two metal drums filled with ice by the doors, each one loaded with about ten different kinds of canned beer. Owens reached in and grabbed two Buds, waving his purchase at the girl behind the bar, who nodded and went back to texting on her cell phone. Caren took the corner seat at their table, scanning the faces in the bar. It was dark in here, the whole place cast in a blue haze, the only light coming from a television screen and the neon beer signs around the room. There were two
Playboy
bunnies painted on the back wall, and across from the bar was a display of monthly calendars going all the way back to 1989, dotted with a few
RE-ELECT JUDGE ELMER B. HIMES
flyers that had long ago been forgotten. There were maybe a half dozen men in Rainey’s tonight, mostly drinking alone, two white and the rest black, plus two women in their fifties, who were drinking beer out of lipstick-ringed plastic cups, their feathered bangs pressed close together in heated conference. They were either in love with the same man, or each other. She didn’t recognize a soul in here. Was it really possible that one of them had made that call from her cell phone? She found herself staring at the short hallway that led to the bathrooms. She remembered, too, that Rainey’s had a back porch, out by the propane tank. She thought to get up and take a look when Owens dropped into the seat across from her.

He had the two beers and a bag of chips to share.

Caren didn’t touch any of it.

“You were right about Clancy,” he said first off. “The Groveland deal, all of it.”

He popped open the bag of chips, shoving a handful into his mouth. “I talked to one of the political reporters at the paper, and from what they fished out and what you told me, we’re able to put together an angle on Clancy’s plans. It’s smart, actually, what he’s doing. Selling the plantation to Groveland gives the company a foothold in the state’s sugar business, and that launches Clancy’s platform. ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ or something like that. He gets to position himself as the man with answers, a plan to broaden the state’s economy and take the pressure off the gas outfits on the coast. And Groveland ain’t stupid. Their executives are already pouring donations into a political action committee run by a crony of Larry Becht’s. And where do you think that money’s going to end up?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “In thirty-second spots running every fifteen minutes all over the state. Your boy Clancy is not playing around about this Senate run. He’s got the seed money, the platform, and a family history that plays well across color lines.”

She knew all this last night.

“What about the girl?”

Owens nodded, getting to that, washing down salt and oil with his beer. “Which makes this whole thing a much bigger story. The paper’s planning a feature to run in the front section. It’s big-league stuff now. I mean, we’re talking about a U.S. Senate seat. We might even beat his announcement. This business with the girl, a Groveland worker killed, it could really mess up Clancy’s deal and derail his political plans.”

“What did Akerele say?”

“Oh, God,” Owens said, taking another swig. “That girl was terrified of him.”

“Of Abrams?”

He nodded. “Apparently they got into it about a week or so back.”

“She found something, you said.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Abrams had a small crew digging a fence out there. Inés, her beau, and another man, and lo and behold she pulls a bone up out of the dirt.”

“A human bone?”

“That’s what Akerele said,” Owens added, and Caren felt a strange chill. She wiped at the cold sweat across her forehead. “He didn’t see it, of course, but Inés was supposedly pretty spooked. She’s real Catholic, you know, from the old country and all that, and she did
not
like the idea of digging around a bunch of bones or disturbing a final resting place. To hear Akerele tell it, it was long, maybe a femur bone, and too big to belong to an animal. No telling how long it’s been there or where it came from. It’s the rain that brought it up, probably. I understand y’all had it coming down hard in the parish . . . plus all that digging in the field.”

“And she told Abrams about it?”

“Later she did,” Owens said. “First she tried to put it back, bury it under dirt, you know, make it proper. At first she was too scared to say anything to anybody about it. But it weighed on her, I guess, and she brought the news to her priest, and he’s the one said she ought to tell her employer.” He nodded toward her unopened can of beer. “You gonna drink that?” Caren shook her head. He reached for it, but didn’t open it right away. “Father Akerele suggested it could be something serious, part of a crime scene or whatnot, and he said if she was too afraid to tell the police herself, then it was her employer’s responsibility, at the very least, to alert the Sheriff’s Department as to what she’d found.”

“She must have been scared out of her mind,” Caren mumbled, picturing this woman far from home, far from her kids, and stumbling onto something so vile.

“Oh, yes, ma’am.”

He cracked the second beer open, emptying the can in two swallows.

“So she tells Abrams all right,” he said, burping softly. “And he nods and says, ‘Yeah, okay,’ but then she waits a day or two and nothing happens. Abrams halts work on the fence but never says another word about the bone.” Owens set the empty can on the table. “And who knows if there’s more where that came from, if there’s a body buried out in the fields.”

“And the cops never came?”

“The cops never came.”

Across the room, in the bubblegum-pink display of the jukebox, the record changed, one 45 lifted and set aside, and another laid down in its place. It was Irma Thomas, local queen of soul, singing “Soul of a Man.” Owens leaned both elbows across the plastic tablecloth, checkered in blue and white. “She waited and waited for something to happen,” he said. “And all the while she’s losing sleep over taking a shovel to somebody’s grave. So finally she got up the nerve to confront Abrams about it, saying something about getting the police involved.” The door to the icehouse opened and closed again, and Caren looked up, studying the face of a white man in his late forties, his hair cropped and gelled, new sneakers on his feet. He hardly glanced in her direction. Caren, out of nowhere, asked to use Owens’s phone. He slid it across the table, and she picked it up and immediately dialed her cell. As she heard the rolling trills in her ear, she took a good survey of the slightly drunk patrons at Rainey’s, looking and listening. She heard no sharp sounds, saw no visible movement. No one reached into a back jeans pocket, or seemed in any way to react to the vibration of a cell phone anywhere on his or her person. What’s more, not a single person had come down the hallway from the bathroom, nor opened the door from the back patio. She was no closer to knowing who had her cell phone or who was driving that red truck parked outside. She handed the phone back to the reporter. Owens slid it into his pocket. He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop.