Free The Cutting Season by Attica Locke Page A

was still fiddling with the coins in his pocket. “Well, Tulane,” he said. “I sure hope you weren’t gone so long as to forget where you came from, what this land means for the Clancys, who’ve been very good to people like your mother, Ms. Gray, people like you. We’re hoping we can count on you to do the right thing here. Point of fact is, somebody killed that girl out here. Now, my gut on this deal is that we’re talking about somebody local, someone who knows the landscape out here, and who might well come back. We need all the cooperation we can get, and that includes getting a hold of Donovan.”
    “Dumped her here, you mean,” Caren said, correcting him.
    Detective Bertrand shook his head. “We considered that, ma’am.”
    “But thing is,” Lang said, “you already told us the gates were locked last night.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Every entrance, everything was locked, you said.”
    “Yes.”
    “Which means, ma’am,” Lang went on, laying out the facts as gently as possible, sensing he had not been as forthcoming as he should have been, like a doctor speaking of surgeries and pills and next steps, without ever mentioning the word cancer . The danger they were potentially in was a lot closer than she thought. “It means I don’t think we’re talking about someone getting inside these gates with a body, but someone who was trying to get out with it. That fence out there is, what, five feet?”
    “It’s four feet, ten inches,” she said flatly. She’d once had it measured for a bride who wanted a line of Douglas firs to greet her guests for a Christmas wedding.
    “And that gal out there was well over five feet tall and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds. Even a particularly strong man would have had a hard time lifting that amount of dead weight over a vertical fence, without leverage of any kind. My guess is somebody killed that girl here, on the property, and then tried to move her out. And we believe,” he said, glancing at Bertrand, “it was the fence that stopped them.”
    “Mom,” Morgan said, “can I walk over to the kitchen now?”
    “No, you stay right there.”
    Morgan slumped in her seat, rolling her eyes.
    Caren turned back to Detective Lang, feeling a flush of heat all of a sudden.
    “It’s more likely than not, ma’am, that we’re talking about a murder that happened here last night, on the grounds of Belle Vie, while you and your daughter were sleeping . . . so I would think you’d want to help us solve this in any way you can.”
    “I’ll try,” she said.
    The words were a mere exhale, taking with them the last of Caren’s strength. She felt fear, of course. But also a choking dread, creeping up like floodwater, rising from her navel to her neck before she had a chance to take a second breath.
    She knew the trouble that was coming, for all of them.
    She would try to find Donovan, she said.
    “ ’Preciate that, ma’am,” Detective Bertrand said.
    “And we’ll keep Deputy Harris on duty, at least through the night.”
    “The kid in uniform?”
    Lang buttoned his suit jacket, even though the air in the schoolhouse had grown thick and hot, and Caren was by now sweating openly. “You couldn’t be in better hands,” he said. “And anyway, we’ll be back first thing in the morning with the search warrant.” He let those last words float in the air, hanging like smoke between them.

5
    S he told her daughter none of this, of course, as they started for home, veering together off the main path and walking through grass shaded by a grove of willow oaks. The branches were lifted, once and then again, by a stiff late-afternoon breeze. It woke the leaves, stirring them to conversation, the wind like a whisper over their heads.
    It would be dark soon.
    She’d ask Gerald to stay, put him on post right outside their front door.
    Detective Lang had made it plain. There was a killer on the loose.
    Morgan was a few feet ahead of Caren. She was humming a