Free The Cutting Season by Attica Locke

schoolhouse, the heels of her boots sinking on the loose boards of the plank floor. The building had originally been used as a chapel: a house of worship for the master’s family and a temporary sanctum for any traveling preachers wandering through the parish. It earned its current name sometime after the Civil War when the Freedmen’s Bureau ran a school for ex-slaves, during the years when the federal government held brief ownership of the land. Colored schoolteachers, earnest, mostly unmarried women devoted to uplift and a life of learning, came south in droves. There was a pretty schoolteacher at Belle Vie in those days, a Miss Nadine something or other, as Caren’s mother had often told the tale. Next to the kitchen, Helen Gray loved the old schoolhouse best of all. Men had learned to read in this room. Men like Jason. Using their laps for a desktop, they practiced their letters, struggling with a whole new set of tools. Nadine taught them to make the marks that make the letters that make the words. It was a system, like the making of sugar from cane.
    Lang stopped near the table that held the play’s programs. He put his hands on both hips and sighed heavily. “We need to get a hold of that young man.”
    “Donovan?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve had no luck so far with the numbers you gave us.” There was a faint hint of accusation in his voice, as if he thought it was altogether possible that Caren was shielding the boy.
    “Those are the only numbers I have, his cell phone and his grandmother.”
    “Well, I imagine there are ways of getting him on the telephone,” Lang said, lowering his voice some. “Say, if you left a message for Mr. Isaacs about some trouble with his paycheck, I imagine he wouldn’t waste any time calling you back.”
    “The state pays his checks, not us.”
    It was a plain statement of fact, but Lang took it as an inclination toward noncooperation. “Well,” he said, “it was an idea.” He stared at her for a long while, trying to read something about her that wasn’t immediately clear to him. Caren could smell his musky cologne, mixed with the scent of stale coffee and hair grease. He was nearing sixty, she guessed, his skin a tawny Cajun hue that was hard to date.
    “Let me ask you something, ma’am,” he said. “Did you happen to know of Mr. Isaacs’s legal troubles before you hired him?” He pinched his lips together, waiting on her answer. He appeared to be rolling something over in his pocket, coins 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