Free The Cutting Season by Attica Locke

maybe.
    So that’s what this is, Caren thought.
    Donovan’s criminal record.
    She couldn’t help feeling that something had shifted in the cops’ investigation since she’d gone and returned to the plantation, that they were now circling around a specific, but as yet unstated theory. And Caren didn’t like it. No matter her personal feelings about Donovan, she didn’t think it was fair. Donovan was a lot of things, and law-abiding was not necessarily one of them. But murder was murder, a theft of a soul, requiring a depravity touched by something not of this world. Caren didn’t think Donovan had it in him. He was a simple kid, both feet planted in the material world.
    “I knew about it, yes,” she said. “It was on his application.” Not that it would have disqualified him, she might have added, not at this end of the employment pool.
    “Oh, he’s got a record all right,” Lang said, rolling and rolling those coins in his pants pocket, so that she thought she might go dizzy trying to follow the sound. “Some property crimes and misdemeanors,” he added. “But he also spent time in the parish jail down to Donaldsonville on battery charges last year.”
    She knew all of this.
    Lang lifted and replaced his slim necktie, smoothing it down along the center of his shirt. “Look, I’ll be honest here and say we’re up against it with this one. We’ve got a pretty good read on the time of death. It’s the where of this crime that’s causing us trouble. That rain came down hard last night, and as far as we can tell, washed out any trace of a workable crime scene. There’s no blood, no sign of a struggle, nowhere to start. That’s why the more information we can get from you folks about what you know or what you may have seen, the easier it’ll be for us to put this one down.” He smiled here, really selling it, his implied offer of something like a partnership, he and Caren playing for the same team. “If you could help us get a hold of Donovan—”
    “Don’t push it, Nes,” his partner said.
    Lang looked at Detective Bertrand, but said nothing.
    Then he looked again at Caren.
    “You’re Helen’s girl, right?”
    He smiled, not waiting for an answer. “It took me a minute to put it together.”
    Congratulations, she thought.
    She did not want to talk about her mother, not like this, and not with him.
    She glanced back at Morgan, who was folding the hem of her plaid skirt across the palm of her hand and kicking one of her sneakers against the edge of the stage. Caren felt tired all of a sudden, aware in every bone that her day had started at dawn. She saw that woman’s face again, those narrow, black eyes, that one, tiny star-shaped earring, the other lost along the way. She wanted to take her girl and go home.
    “She was a good woman, your mother,” Lang said. “Loyal.”
    Caren nodded vaguely.
    “Thirty-two years at Belle Vie,” he said, whistling at the breadth of it. “And Leland Clancy never had any trouble with her,” he said, glancing at Detective Bertrand, who was following this bit of the conversation with a kind of detached appreciation for his partner’s style and approach. “How long ago did she die again?” Lang said.
    “I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with your investigation?”
    “She must have missed you something awful when you went off,” the detective said. “Dillard, then two years at the law school at Tulane. You spent time out there working in a legal clinic, isn’t that right?” So Donovan’s wasn’t the only background they’d looked into, she thought. “Kind of strange, you not mentioning that fact.”
    “You asked me if I was a lawyer, and I answered the question correctly.”
    “Didn’t mention your mother working here neither.”
    “Didn’t think it was relevant.”
    “ ‘Relevant,’ ” Lang said, playing the word back to her. He glanced down at the tips of his black dress shoes, which were marred now with damp grass and dirt. He