The Cutting Season (30 page)

“What choice I got?”

“Go back in front of that judge and
don’t
lie.” She knew from experience that he could get a hearing to change his plea. But he needed a lawyer who was on his side.

“Aw, I’m fucked anyway,” Donovan said. “I put myself on the grounds the night of the murder, admitted I’d stolen a key to the property. A jury might make a lot worse of that than whatever this lawyer, Wilson somebody, can work out with the DA.”

“Where was the knife, Donovan?”

“They saying they found it in my car.”

“Well, then somebody must have put it there.”

“You don’t fucking think I know that!” he said, slamming his fist on the table so hard that it shook and skidded an inch across the floor. Caren waited for the door to fly open, for the deputy to come in charging. Donovan held his breath, waiting, too. But no one came. A silence settled between them. It felt as thick as the door that closed them in this room. Donovan broke through it first. “I never saw that woman in my life and what difference does it make?” He gestured to the jail clothes and the locked room with an armed guard on the other side. What did the truth have to do with any of this? He was in jail anyway. Caren stared at him for a long time. Outside, she heard car engines, trucks passing on the road. All of it seemed very far away.

“Those tapes are evidence,” she said. “They’re proof somebody else was out there that night. You saw it, and I saw it. The headlights out by the field. It’s right there on the DVD. If you tell me where the originals are, if the tapes have some kind of time stamp on them, a date, something, then that information goes to trial with you.”

“You think they give a shit?”

He looked at her, a sad, crooked smile on his face. “Come on, Miss C,” he said. “You think I didn’t even try? It was a truck, I said. I
told
them. It was parked out there by the fields. But it don’t look like that’s going to change a damn thing, does it?”

She asked him to tell her exactly what he’d seen, the make and model. Donovan waved her off, mumbling, “Naw, man, I didn’t see what it was.”

He couldn’t be sure of the color, or any details.

It was just another dead end.

“Two and a half,” he said again. “I’d rather take the deal than gamble on a life sentence at trial.” He stole a sideways glance at her. “I suppose you think that makes me some kind of a punk,” he said, and Caren finally understood that it mattered to him, that it had, all along, mattered what she thought of him. He actually looked up to her. “Don’t do this, Donovan,” she said. She was out-and-out pleading now. He didn’t respond, choosing now, of all times, to remain silent. When he finally spoke again, his voice was soft and dry. He ducked his head and asked her, “So you watched it?” he said, referring to the movie, the history project that meant so much to him. “Yes, Donovan, I watched it,” she said, telling him finally, “I think you should finish it.”

25

I
t was late by the time they left the station. So, together, Eric and Caren drove to Laurel Springs to pick up their daughter from school, arriving a few minutes before the final bell. Eric parked the rental car a few yards down the road from Morgan’s school, beside a newly planted Japanese maple, held in place by rope and wood stakes in the bark-covered ground. The rain had stopped, and Eric shut the car engine and rolled down the windows while they waited. The air was warm and smelled of wet grass. Through her sideview mirror, Caren could see the redbrick schoolhouse behind them, the state flag flying atop the Stars and Stripes.

“Hunt Abrams met with Raymond Clancy this week.”

“Who?”

“He’s the project manager for Groveland.”

“The cane farm?”

She nodded, adding, “He drives a truck.”

Black, she remembered.

“What was he doing with Clancy?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But all of a sudden Raymond gets a lawyer for Donovan, and he’s ready to take a plea deal? Just days after I see Abrams go behind closed doors with Clancy?” She shook her head. “It stinks, the whole thing. This is Raymond trying to protect his deal. The sooner this murder investigation goes away, the better it is for both of them, Clancy and Groveland.”

Eric made a face. “What’s at risk for the company?”

“Inés Avalo had some kind of altercation with Abrams, not even a week before she died. She found something, Eric, something out in the fields,” she said, turning to look at him across the upholstered front seat. “She found a bone,” Caren said. “Human remains.”

“Jesus.”

“Apparently she told Abrams about it, and it caused some tension between them. There was talk about going to authorities, but, according to Owens, Abrams wanted her to shut up about it.”

“Owens?”

“The reporter,” she said.

Eric turned away from her then, looking out the window.

She couldn’t read his expression.

“Abrams is a bad seed, and apparently Inés Avalo isn’t the first one of his workers to never make it home. There was a worker who died in California, and there was another woman down in Florida, a girl he supposedly beat pretty badly,” she said. “Owens thinks there’s a connection, between what Inés found and her murder, something to do with the question of who might be buried out in the fields. He asked me if any other cane workers had gone missing since Groveland took over the farm.”

Eric shook his head, visibly disturbed.

He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.

“So, what? You think he killed this Inés woman to cover for something else?”

“I don’t know what to think, Eric.”

“Who’s the lawyer for the kid?”

“Someone from his firm,” she said. “Raymond set it up.”

“
Clancy’s
firm?”

“Yes.”

“Caren . . . Clancy, Strong, Burnham & Botts is a corporate firm, specializing in real estate and banking. We used to send business to them when I was at Klein & Roe. I don’t think they have a single criminal defense attorney in the whole building. It’s not what they do.” He undid his seat belt, shifting several times behind the steering wheel.

Something here was very wrong.

And it went beyond the cops’ slapdash investigation.

“The Avalo woman, she worked for Abrams?” he said, repeating the facts in evidence, turning the information this way and that. Caren nodded and said she was a field hand hired on for planting. She went on to explain the basic arc of a year growing cane, what she’d learned from a near lifetime at Belle Vie. “Planting’s in late summer,” she said. “The cutting season, the harvest, is late fall, and goes until the first frost. It’s been that way for hundreds of years.” Since her own ancestors cut cane in the fields, she said. “But everyone’s behind this year because of the rain, which kept the migrant workers around a lot longer than they would have been during any other season.” It’s the rain, too, she said, that likely brought the bone up from out of the ground, pushing it out, like a depraved and dirty birth.

Across Main Street, two crossing guards in bright yellow vests were taking up positions on the circle drive in front of the elementary school, where cars and minivans were starting to line up. “So that’s it, huh?” Caren said. “They found the knife, and that’s their whole case?”

“That’s all they need,” Eric said. He was still tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, the sound as precise as a metronome, or the tick of a clock. It made Caren’s heart beat faster, made her anxious and unsettled. “He
did
admit to being at the scene.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“You can’t dismiss it, Caren. If this was your case, if we were back in school together, you’d have to find a way to address it for a jury. And, again, they have the knife. If it has some physical evidence on it, something tying it to—”

“No.” She shook her head, adamant. “There’s almost no physical evidence in their entire case. The rain washed over everything Wednesday night. Lang admitted from the start that it was one of the biggest problems with their investigation.”

“They found the knife in his car. That’s kind of hard to get around.”

“Someone planted that, Eric, come on.” The car sat in the parking lot for days, she reminded him. “Anyone could have had access to it. Lang was out there. And Abrams is just over the fence.”

“That reporter was on the plantation, too.”

Eric turned and looked at her straight on. “You never asked yourself what the hell he was doing wandering around the grounds in the middle of the night?”

“I certainly don’t think he was tampering with a murder investigation.”

She didn’t add to this the fact that she liked Owens.

She trusted him.

Eric stared at her across the front seat, his expression grave. “Listen to me, Caren, don’t fuck with that guy Lang, okay?” he said. “For whatever reason, the guy’s got it in for you.”

“What was that stuff about plane tickets?” she said. “How did he know about that?”

“You checked about flights for Morgan, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “Saturday morning. I called the airline from my office.”

“You don’t think your phones are tapped, do you?”

“On what basis would they have to get a court order to monitor the phone lines?”

“They wouldn’t need a court order if Raymond Clancy gave them permission. It’s his place. You’re his employee. You said you made the call from your work phone,” he said. Caren’s mind went back to the day the body was found. If Eric was right, and it was even possible that Lang and Bertrand were monitoring her phone line, then it was likewise possible that they’d heard her on the phone with Eric, discussing the blood on Morgan’s shirt. They may have actually known about it for days.

She felt herself start to panic.

“But why would Clancy do that?”

“You know any reason he has to want to keep tabs on you?” he said. “I mean, I know your families go way, way back, for generations. I can’t imagine what that’s like. Whatever it is with you and the Clancys . . . it seems complicated, to say the least.”

“Raymond’s the one I don’t trust.”

“The feeling’s mutual, apparently.”

He turned and glanced again out the window. “It certainly seems like he wants to keep you where he can see you, so to speak, to know what you’re up to.”

“I can’t understand why.”

“He’s threatened by you, maybe,” Eric said. “You’re smart, and that guy’s paper thin. He knows you see right through him.” Then Eric shrugged, his voice growing pensive and soft. “Or, hell, maybe every time he looks at you, he sees your mother’s face and her mother’s face before that, your grandfather, and all the people who fed him and cut the very cane that made his life possible. Makes him squirrelly maybe.”

Caren undid her seat belt, shifting her weight in her seat.

She opened the collar of her jacket, letting out a rising heat trapped inside.

“I think Jason was murdered,” she blurted out.

“Who?”

“My great-great-great-grandfather.”

There was a sheriff, she said, a black sheriff, newly elected after the war, during the heyday of Reconstruction, when slaves were suddenly free to work
and
vote. “The sheriff,” she said, “he had a suspect.”

She turned and looked Eric in the eye. “It was Clancy’s people, his ancestor. And I get the sense Raymond’s tried to keep that part quiet for years.”

Eric shook his head at the whole mess of it, how deep the history went.

Then he turned and looked at Caren across the stillness between them. “Just be careful, Caren,” he said. “If Raymond
is
working with the cops, I mean, if he let them put a bug on your phone line, if he’s somehow helping them build a case against you, you’re going to be in a world of trouble. If the DA ever put you on the stand in front of a grand jury, you’d have one of two choices, Caren, either lie about destroying evidence . . . or tell the truth and go to jail.”

He was right, of course.

She knew she was walking a fine line.

“And I don’t think I could take that,” he said softly.

Caren heard the school bell ring. Within seconds, a steady stream of plaid and navy was pouring out of the redbrick building. She told Eric he would need to pull around to the circle drive where Morgan usually waited. He started the car but didn’t actually put it in gear. He glanced in his sideview mirror at the schoolkids, their backpacks and lunch pails in tow. Soon Morgan would be in the car, and this moment, just the two of them, would have passed. “Caren,” he said. He was resting an elbow on the window’s frame, his left hand on the steering wheel, as he stared through the windshield. She could see the faintest sheen of sweat above his brow. He seemed shy and slow to gather his words. His discomfort was apparent, almost painful to witness. They were no longer talking about Clancy or Abrams or Inés Avalo, she knew. Finally, Eric sighed. It was a whisper of self-reproach, but also a kind of peace. “I’m not sorry for what happened between us the other day,” he said. “If I’m being honest with myself.” He tried to smile, but lost the gesture about halfway through. Caren knew better than to say anything. She was careful not to draw any open conclusions from his statement. She knew she couldn’t afford to want this man, not again, and yet the wanting seemed to be happening all on its own and without her say-so, ever since he showed up at Belle Vie. She wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to do 2005 over again, if there could ever be such a thing as a second chance.

What a fool I was
, she thought.

She was on the verge of telling him so when he turned and looked at her again.

“I love her, Caren,” he said quietly, stealing the moment right out from under her. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she thought it would to hear it said out loud.

Behind them, a white Laurel Springs security jeep rolled to a stop.

In her sideview mirror she saw a security guard exiting the car.

Eric had both his hands on the steering wheel now. His grip was so tight that Caren could see the veins in his arms rising up like swollen rivers. He was like a man holding on to a small stick in a strong current, resisting an unspoken pull. There was something he’d wanted to say to her since he came back to Louisiana, since he walked into her home. “But you, Caren . . .” he whispered. A knock on the driver’s-side door stopped him in midbreath. The security guard leaned in to tell them that there was no parking on any street in Laurel Springs—a bike- and pedestrian-friendly community, as the pitch went—and that they would need to take whatever it was they were doing in the car someplace else. “We’re just here to pick up our daughter, man,” Eric said.

The guard tapped the roof of the car and then pointed back toward the circle drive and the school complex down the road.

As the guard departed, Eric rolled up his window.

Putting the car in drive, he headed for the nearest break in the median, making an awkward U-turn as he turned the car toward Laurel Springs Elementary School. They pulled into the circle drive behind a Chevy Tahoe with a purple-and-gold LSU Tigers bumper sticker across the back window. Eric inched the car forward, taking extra care in the swarm of schoolkids weaving in and out of the cars in the driveway. Caren stole a glance at him behind the wheel. The tension was still there. She could see it in his jawline, in the knot above his brow. She wanted to pick up where they’d left off.

“Eric,” she said.

“There she is,” he said, pointing ahead.

Through the windshield, Caren spotted the short, round shape of her nine-year-old. Morgan was holding her backpack at her side. Under her right arm were sheets of colored construction paper, red and gold, the foundation of some art or social studies project, Caren thought. At the sight of her, the tortoiseshell headband and the school dress, the backpack and all that, Eric smiled, tickled by this moving image, what had before existed for him only in photographs, his growing girl in the fifth grade. It occurred to Caren how few times he’d been able to do this, to drive his daughter to and from school—a duty so commonplace it was one of the first she’d turned over to Letty when she’d hired her. Driving Morgan to Laurel Springs had been an easier task for her to relinquish than dressing her daughter each morning or making her food or washing and conditioning her hair once a week, combing it out while Morgan sat on the floor reading books. These tactile moments had meant so much more to Caren that it was a long time before she could see Letty’s hands in her daughter’s hair without feeling actual envy. For months she thought of firing Letty on a daily basis. A woman who had only ever tried to offer a hand, to help Caren raise this girl way the hell out in the country.