The Cutting Season (33 page)

She felt a line of sweat down the center of her back.

There was no ventilation except for the screen door, and every step Owens took, the whole camper swayed and tilted to one side. Stop, she whispered. Just stop. She wanted him to stop moving, to turn around and drive them out of here. “Give me the keys,” she said. She couldn’t put words to it or easily explain it, but she felt, in that tiny camper, the same frank stillness, the breathtaking absence of anything resembling human life, that she felt in Jason’s Cabin. Owens was oblivious. He was bending down to look through a pile of magazines and papers inside an old shoe box. Caren told him she felt she couldn’t breathe. He looked at her, hearing for the first time the distress in her voice. But before he could get to his feet, there was a loud thump along the side of the camper, as if someone had taken a bat to the outside walls; it was forceful enough that the whole structure swayed from side to side.

“What the hell was that?” Owens said, reaching for something to hold on to. Caren turned and looked out the screen door, to the dirt road.

The radio, she realized.

She didn’t hear it anymore.

Nor the television in the neighboring trailer.

It was as if she and Owens were the only two people left out here—them and who or whatever was on the other side of the camper’s wall.

She heard a soft patter coming through the wall. Footsteps.

Owens must have heard it, too.

He pointed to the screen door and mouthed the word
Go
. They both turned and ran. Outside, the man with the knife was gone, and his friend on the hood of the Le Mans. The toddler and his blue-and-white football helmet were also gone. Everybody, it seemed, had suddenly hidden behind closed doors. Had they seen something, she wondered. Had something out on this dirt road spooked them good?

Owens told her to keep running.

She was comforted by the sound of his footsteps behind her.

The Saturn was where they’d left it, waiting along the side of the road. Owens clawed at the keys in his hand, trying to find the right one. He opened the doors, and they both slumped inside. When he finally got the car started, slamming it into reverse and backing down the dirt road, Caren stared down the length of the alley and the broken-down trailers. She didn’t see a single soul, but she no longer took that as a sign that she was safe. Someone had been following her, she now understood. The same man in the red truck who had tailed Inés Avalo in the days before her throat was cut.

27

H
e drove her home, as promised, pulling into the parking lot, which was empty except for Eric’s rented sedan parked near the main gate. Owens slid in beside it, leaving his engine running, twinned headlights shining on the gate’s padlock. Caren undid her seat belt, staring ahead. She hadn’t thought through this part, the walk in the dark from the gate to the library, until this moment. She could see the deserted security kiosk from here. Gerald wasn’t on duty today, and the golf cart was not parked at its station—which meant Eric, who took a set of Caren’s keys, probably used it to ferry himself and Morgan across the plantation. Belle Vie, this time of night, absent a wedding or other such catered affair, was black and still, and she could hardly see past the reach of the car’s headlights. The gate was locked. But it had been locked the night Inés was murdered, too. And faced now with the prospect of crossing the grounds alone, Caren was almost paralyzed with fear. She hesitated . . . before finally opening the car door. The overhead light popped on, splitting the dark in two, his side of the car and hers.

Owens reached across the distance, touching her arm.

“Hey,” he said. “You want me to walk you?”

She zipped up her jacket. “You’d never find your way back, not this late.”

“I could stay.”

She couldn’t imagine what Eric would make of that.

“I’ll be okay,” she said.

She asked if she could use his cell phone.

“Sure,” he said, reaching for the phone, which was sitting in the cup holder between them. Caren dialed over to the library, waiting through four rings. When Eric’s voice finally came on the line, she felt Owens watching her. She told Eric to be on the lookout, to do something drastic if she was not on the front steps of the library in the next ten minutes. She let out a low chuckle, awkward and self-conscious, trying to keep her voice light and casual . . . which Eric saw right through. “You okay?” he said.

She told him she was fine.

When she hung up, Owens asked, “That your husband?”

“Uh, no,” she said, handing back his cell phone. Maybe it was the way she said it, or the fact that Owens had observed her and Eric long enough to surmise a certain level of complication there, but he smiled in recognition. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got one of those, too.” He stared through the windshield, at the gates of Belle Vie, biting his thumbnail. “No kids, though,” he said. She heard a catch in his voice that she couldn’t quite place. It was gratitude, or else deep regret.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his Louisiana drawl curling the words.

“Why does any of this matter to you?” she said. She meant Groveland and Abrams and the death of a woman he didn’t even know.

“My granddaddy used to cut cane,” he told her.

“Mine, too,” she said. Her whole family, in fact, going back before the Civil War, all the way back to Jason. She liked the fact that Owens shared this with her. It made her feel better about leaving Donovan’s DVDs with him. In his hands, they would be delivered to his editor in the morning. That was their plan, the pact they’d made. She stepped out of the car, and through the rain-dappled windshield Owens gave her a thoughtful smile. “ ’Night, Miss Caren,” he said. He waited until she was all the way behind the locked gate before pulling out of the parking lot, taking the last bit of light with him.

F
rom the gate to the old schoolhouse was easy. She stayed on the main road as it veered a few yards to the west, before meeting up with the circle drive on the back side of the main house. She followed it to the rose garden, heading toward the library, which was situated at the northeast corner of the plantation. The rain had eased to nothing, but the ground was soaked through from days of this, back and forth, off and on, black clouds one minute, sunshine the next. She made sure to keep to the paved path. It was quiet out here, so much so that she thought she could hear the river in the distance, its push and pull, the swirling current and the chorus of night birds on its shores. Where there was moonlight, it cut through the tree branches overhead, casting sharp, short shadows that darted this way and that, right before her eyes. Still, this wasn’t so bad, she thought, shoving her cold hands into her pockets.

It was well past the garden when it first occurred to her that she wasn’t alone out there. The sound was faint at first, and she took it for wind in the trees, the whispers of haints on the plantation. Then the weight of the noise deepened into a low
pat-pat-pat
, the rhythm as even as a heartbeat. It sounded, without question, like the slap of feet on wet grass. Twice, she swung around and called Owens’s name, thinking, praying, really, that he had somehow followed her behind the gates of Belle Vie. She quickened her steps, breaking into a determined trot, then a sprint. She ran as fast as she could, darting off the main path and cutting across the east lawn. She could see the lamp in her bedroom window. She ran toward the light, dew seeping through the soles of her boots, cold creeping into her toes. She ran, calling Eric’s name.

The root of an aged oak tree laid a trap in the dark. She twisted her ankle on it, falling hard, nose-down in the wet grass. When she lifted her head, she was staring at a pair of men’s shoes, just inches from her face. She saw the gun next, black in his hand, as the other reached down and grabbed her by the collar of her jacket, yanking her to her knees. Caren started to cry, an ugly sound, wheezing and desperate. She could manage only a few words. “What are you
doing
?”

“Looking for you,” he said.

Eric laid the pistol at his feet, kneeling beside her in the grass. When he saw she was okay, he collapsed onto his backside, pulling his knees to his chest. He winced, laboring to catch his breath, leaning against the base of the oak tree. “You said to come get you if you didn’t show up. I waited and waited, and then you called again, and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what to think.”

She stared at him, the line of his profile in the dark.

“What do you mean I called again?”

“You called me,” he said, sounding overheated and agitated. “Not ten minutes after the call from the parking lot, you rang the house again. I picked up the line, but I couldn’t hear a thing, just someone there and not talking, and I guess I got scared.”

“I called you?”

“I thought you were in some kind of trouble out here.”

Caren felt the same panic she’d felt on the dirt road in the tent city, she and Owens running from someone or something she couldn’t see.

“The number,” she said. “That second call came from my cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Eric, that wasn’t me.”

A
ccording to the map on her computer screen, the call had bounced off a cell tower not even a half a mile away in the parish countryside, and the closest source location the phone company’s website could offer was an address on the river road, a street number that happened to correspond with the Belle Vie Plantation. Whoever made the call might well have been inside the locked gates right now. Eric blanched, backing away from the screen. Caren went for the home phone . . . and then stopped herself. A 911 call about a missing cell phone was almost certain to be ignored. Even to a dispatcher, she couldn’t say for sure that the eighteen acres had been breached, that there’d been a break-in at all. And she wasn’t going out there in the dead of night to check, not even to open and unlock the gates for Lang. Her only child asleep upstairs, she locked the front door, then double-checked it. She handed Eric the .32, taking the shotgun for herself. They would guard the homestead as best they could.

Eric was sitting on the leather sofa.

It’s then she saw his canvas overnight bag, zipped at his feet. There was a printed travel itinerary resting on top. She stared at the duffel bag, and then she looked up at him. “I didn’t know if I was supposed to buy two plane tickets or three,” he said.

“I still have to tell the staff, Eric. I owe them that much.”

He didn’t say anything right away, just stared down at his hands.

“And we still have the Whitman wedding next week. It’s work I promised them.”

“What about Morgan? You heard her today.”

“She’ll be with her father.”

“She wants you, too. She wants her mother, too.”

It seemed they were veering toward a larger discussion of what would happen
after
the Whitman wedding, after this place closed for good. “I don’t know yet, Eric.”

It was the best she could offer right then.

He told her he’d booked a flight for Monday morning, three seats.

“I guess I’m still hoping you’ll change your mind.”

He was waiting for her, she realized.

He had been for days.

She smiled.

“You hungry?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “No.”

“ ’Night, then, Eric.”

S
he didn’t realize he was behind her until she was all the way to the foot of the stairs, didn’t realize until that very moment that he’d been following her on her way up to her bedroom. “What are you doing?” she asked, and of course he had no answer, at least none he could put into words. And it frankly didn’t matter, anyway. She was perfectly willing to be pulled along by their history, whatever was left of it and still imposing its will on this little moment in time, the two of them on the stairs. She didn’t have the energy to fight it. He kissed her right there, her back against the wall, which was papered with linen and pink roses. She took his hand, leading the rest of the way.

They didn’t have sex.

She didn’t try, and he didn’t ask.

Instead, they lay side by side in the dark, staring at the ceiling.

He was so still and silent for so long that Caren started to think he’d drifted off. But when she turned her head, Eric was wide awake. He had one forearm behind him, tucked under his head like a slim pillow. She watched the rise and fall of his chest.

“I lied,” he said softly. “When I told you I didn’t think I would ever marry you, I was lying.” He gazed in her direction, but the look in his eyes was lost to the darkness. “I was just mad.”

“I know.”

It was her own little lie.

“I had a ring,” he said, lifting his eyes to the ceiling again.

This detail hurt more than the rest of it. Fleetingly, she thought to ask where it was. Not to wear it, but just to have it, as a remembrance, something to hold in her hand.

Eric reached across the bed to touch her arm.

“I love her, Caren,” he said. “I mean, this is real for me.”

“I know that, Eric.”

He fell silent for a moment, then whispered the rest.

“Lela’s pregnant.”

Of course she is.

Eric waited to hear something from her, and when he didn’t he let his hand fall from her arm. In the dark, he said, “I want my family together, Caren. I want that.”

They lay beside each other for a long time, each growing drowsy in the absence of knowing what more there was to say, the shotgun and the pistol across the foot of the bed. Eric fell asleep first, and then Caren, lulled by his heavy, somnolent breathing, waking only once to tell him, to say it out loud, “I’m sorry, Eric.”
More than you know.

She drifted off thinking about family, the little one that fit beneath this roof, but also the one beyond the library’s doors. Lorraine and Pearl and Ennis. Luis and Dell and Donovan, and all the Belle Vie Players. And she thought of the ones who were gone. Her mother and grandparents and great-grands, stretching all the way back to Jason. Which made her think of Inés, too. They were, each of them, connected across time, across the rolling land of a place called Belle Vie, each navigating a life shaped by the raw power of labor, but also love, their relationships built on river silt, thin and shape-shifting, their family lives a work of improvisational art, crafted from whatever was at hand, like the glistening bottles of Akerele’s bottle tree.