Free The Cutting Season by Attica Locke Page B

song her mother didn’t recognize, her overstuffed backpack hanging by a strap in her right hand, swinging and knocking against the backs of her bare knees. “I’m hungry,” she said when they were past the rose garden and the library was in sight. Their apartment was on the second floor of the building, which was made of painted brick and stone. It was without columns or a balcony, but in every other way resembled the main house, only in miniature. The black shutters on the top corner window opened to Caren’s bedroom.
    The house had been Tynan’s once, the plantation’s overseer.
    The man was seen as a hero around here, cited in all the literature of Belle Vie and in the coffee-table books sold in the gift shop, and featured heavily in the staged play The Olden Days of Belle Vie . The original owners had fled during the war, and Tynan was eventually hired by the United States government to manage the cane farm. Grant’s administration had seized Confederate land all across the South, Belle Vie included, for the purpose of establishing schools and a cash-based labor system for ex-slaves—but also keeping some of the sugar profits for itself. Tynan did well by the feds, and it was therefore a surprise to no one when the government deeded him the title to the land. In this parish, Tynan was regarded as an industrious planter who, by the good Southern values of hard work and discipline, had wrested back the land from a greedy federal government and made it something good again. He lived in this very building until the day he died, turning over the main house to his youngest daughter as a wedding gift on the eve of her marriage to a man by the name of James Clancy. The newly married Clancys had been the first occupants in the big house in nearly a decade.
    “I’ll bring you a plate from the kitchen,” Caren said, as they approached the front door, which was always unlocked during business hours. There was no separate entrance for the upstairs living quarters, but up until now safety hadn’t been much of an issue. Tourists never made it back this far, only Danny and his laptop. She had a sudden vexing thought about his gate key, his freedom to come and go as he pleased.
    “You have homework?” she asked her daughter.
    “I already did it.” Caren glanced at her daughter’s backpack, aware that it was likely filled with library books and magazines instead of textbooks, plus the cookies she saved from her lunch tray at school. Morgan was a straight-A student and therefore allowed a lot of leeway on the subject of academics. Still, Caren always swore she would never raise a child who lies.
    “All of it?” she said.
    “Yep.”
    Morgan pushed in the front door with her elbow.
    Caren slid out of her muddy ropers before crossing the threshold.
    Inside, the front parlor was dark, waning sunlight casting dusty gray shadows about the room. She turned on a floor lamp, then crossed to each of the room’s front windows, closing the velvet drapes. “I want you to stay inside tonight, Morgan.”
    She was rifling through the drawers of an antique writing table.
    She seemed to remember there being a spare key inside. “Letty’s not here, and there’s an event in the main house, and I want to know exactly where you are.”
    The key, she realized, wasn’t there.
    “Can I watch TV?” Morgan said.
    There were two doors off the main parlor, on opposite sides of the room. To the right was the doorway that led to Belle Vie’s Hall of Records, a room the size of a walk-in closet, lined with storage cabinets and bookshelves. To the left was a closed door leading to the first floor of their apartment. There was a small kitchenette when you first walked in, next to a narrow, poorly carpeted stairway that led to four rooms upstairs: a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a small living area. It was not wired for cable and the “TV” was really a desktop computer on which Morgan downloaded programs she heard girls talking about at school.