Free The Cutting Season by Attica Locke Page B

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 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