The Cutting Season (35 page)

Caren hopped off the edge of the stage. “What do you mean he cut Bobby out?”

“Years ago,” Lorraine said.

“So Bobby’s not going to make any money off this Groveland deal?”

“I don’t see how.”

And all this time Caren had thought that Bobby’s sudden reappearance in the parish these past few weeks was about the younger Clancy keeping an eye on his assets, and his brother’s handling of the family business. He had said as much, hadn’t he?

“That boy don’t have a pot to piss in,” Lorraine said. “Leland don’t like him at the house, and Raymond won’t have him. It’s something how money changes folks. Raymond, all these years, has gone cold as ice, looking down on his own kin. But Bobby ain’t all bad. Some folks just need the love and patience of a real family, need an anchor in this world. He misses that, is what I think. To Bobby, this place is still home.”

They were the same words Raymond had spoken just after the murder.

She remembered the night of the Schuyler event, how Bobby had made himself at home in the dining hall, nipping at the food and lamenting at the presence of strangers in his father’s house. She wondered if Bobby still had a key. “He hasn’t been coming around here, has he?” she asked the room. She remembered, too, the night Morgan swore she heard someone outside her bedroom window, someone Caren was no longer sure was Lee Owens. “Have any of you guys seen him coming around Belle Vie?”

Lorraine raised an eyebrow . . . then shook her head.

“I never met the dude,” Cornelius said.

“Me neither,” Nikki added.

There were more head-shakes around the room.

Luis cleared his throat, suddenly stepping forward. “He’s been here,” he said, hands tucked in his pockets and looking sheepish, worried maybe that he should have said something about it earlier.

“You saw him?”

“I caught him in the shed, yes, ma’am. He was taking one of our shovels.”

A shovel?

Yes, ma’am, Luis said.

Caren grew quiet then, very still and quiet.

But her mind was already racing, all the way out the front door, flying all the way across the plantation grounds to the cane fields and the open land by the farm road. Into her mind popped the image of the pocked land, the holes in the ground where someone went digging for bone. What in the world did any of this have to do with Bobby? “Do you know where he lives, Lorraine? You know where I can find him?”

Lorraine nodded.

“I know where he stay, baby.”

29

A
ll this time and Bobby Clancy had been living just up the river road, not even a mile from Belle Vie’s gates, in a run-down fishing lodge that had its back to the water, set back from the river’s levee by a hundred yards or so of sand and weeds. There was a propane tank along the west side of the one-story, clapboard house, a few of its graying shingles rotting at the edges, and down in the dirt, an orange extension cord was snaking from the edge of the yard all the way to the front door of the house, where Caren was standing now. She thought she heard some movement inside, and so she went to knock on the door a second time. The shovel, the one Luis said Bobby had stolen from Belle Vie, was resting right there against the railing of the front porch.

A minute or so passed, and still no one came to the door.

Caren thought about a back door, one that faced the river, and wondered if Bobby was coming out that way. She felt the porch’s wooden planks creak beneath the weight of her boots, as she started down the steps. The house was a true river hut, with no foundation and all four corners hopped up on blocks of cement. She could see tiny blades of grass blowing beneath the house, as the wind picked up and a huge chunk of blue sky closed over.

She smelled rain coming.

The air had turned gray and dark, and Caren was careful to watch her step on the unpaved ground, stepping over tools strewn in the dirt, along with empty beer cans and miniature bottles of bourbon, the kind you could still buy at the T&H in town for a dollar or two a pop. She walked all the way around to the back of the house . . . before stopping dead in her tracks. For parked in the yard, at an angle which had made it invisible from the street, was a red pickup truck. It was rusted along the sides and had a familiar dent in the front grill. The headlights were square . . . just like the ones in Donovan’s video, shining from the cane fields on the night Inés Avalo was murdered.

Caren slapped a hand over her mouth, afraid she might actually scream out loud. Slowly, she backed away from the sight of the red truck and all that its presence
here
implied. There would be time to sort it out, but right now she felt an almost primal urge to get out of there as fast as she could.

She spun on her heels, turning toward her car.

And that’s how she bumped right into Bobby Clancy.

He smelled of pine and beer, and he was sweaty for some reason, the dampness of his cotton T-shirt showing off a ridge of muscles across his torso. He’d grown sloppy over the years, but he was still strong. Capable of God knows what, she thought.

Bobby looked at her and smiled.

“Well,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Caren stammered that she was just leaving.

She tried to step around him, but Bobby blocked her, reaching for her hand, and then her shoulder, digging his fingers in, so that she could move neither left nor right.

“Stay,” he said. “Let me at least make you a cup of coffee.”

She saw a flash of lightning reflected in his blue eyes.

And then a crack of thunder, as loud as a gunshot.

The storm was creeping closer.

Caren looked across the yard at her car, seemingly beyond her reach, as she nearly withered beneath Bobby’s grasp. She looked toward the clapboard house.

A phone, she thought.

Inside, there might be a phone.

And so she let him lead the way.

T
he place was surprisingly roomy, mostly because Bobby didn’t hardly have furniture of any kind. As far as she could tell, he slept on a pallet of blankets in the center of the lodge’s main room. Bobby had by now led her into the kitchen, where he’d sat her at a chair against the wall, in such a way that put him between her and the front door. He was standing over a small two-range stove, fiddling with the knobs and a small book of matches. From Rainey’s, Caren noticed, the icehouse, where she’d gone the night she went looking for her cell phone. Bobby, getting a fire going on the stove, looked up at her and smiled. “Or I could make us some tea, if you like that better.” Caren shook her head. She felt a strange calmness come over her. This was Bobby, after all. She had known him her whole life. Sitting here in his warm kitchen, at a table topped with a sunny tablecloth and toast crumbs, a few loose insides of local newspapers, she felt a surge of hope that she was wrong about him, about all of this. “It was good seeing you last night,” he said. “It’s always good seeing you, Caren.”

She smiled stiffly.

“That’s a sweet girl you got, too,” he said, standing over running water at the sink, swishing it around an empty coffee mug. “She’s, what, in the fifth grade or something?” At the mention of her daughter, Caren felt something acid in her stomach. Bobby had his back to her, and she could see he was wearing blue Wranglers, just like the description of the man the school’s secretary said had been looking for Morgan.

“Good guess.”

Too good, she thought.

She swallowed hard, then said softly, “Do you think I could use your telephone?”

Bobby, who was setting a percolator on the stove, looked up at Caren and said nothing for a few seconds. But she did notice that his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. Outside, she heard another roll of thunder, this one more like a roar, a scream.

Bobby gave her a queer smile.

“Sure.”

From a chipped corner of his kitchen counter he grabbed a dirty cordless phone and handed it to her, meeting her eye for a half second before releasing it to her grasp. He never made his way back to the stovetop, instead hovering over the edge of the table as she dialed the ten digits that made up her cell phone number. Bobby was looking right at her as the line connected and she heard a ringing in her ear. Beyond the kitchen table, the whole of the house was dead silent, and Caren felt a moment of breathtaking relief. Maybe there was some other explanation for all of this. It was a small hope that she clung to . . . up until the moment she heard a faint buzzing in the front pocket of Bobby’s Wranglers. Their eyes met over the table. She hung up the line, and a second later, the buzzing in Bobby’s pants pocket stopped.

He was still hovering over her.

Caren could see that he had started to sweat again. There were shallow pools of moisture in the deep hollows beneath his tired, bloodshot eyes. She still had the cordless in her hand. She managed to dial a 9, and then the first 1, before Bobby said, “Don’t do anything stupid, Caren.” He reached down and grabbed the phone out of her hand.

Caren felt a whisper in her throat. “What did you do, Bobby?”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Caren,” he said, stepping back, as he tucked the cordless into the back pocket of his jeans. “I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

“Jesus, what did you do?”

Bobby wouldn’t look her in the eye.

“Did you kill that girl?”

“She was on my land,
mine
,” he said sharply. “Not Groveland’s.”

The pools of water beneath his eyes broke free, running in two lines down his face, and Caren realized that Bobby was actually crying. He was nearly shaking with rage. His life had come down to this fishing lodge, this one room by the river, where he lived alone. “That’s my family’s place,” he said. “And it ain’t right what Ray’s doing.”

“What did you
do
?”

He shrugged coldly, as if saying the words out loud didn’t matter much. His back was to her, kind of, and she couldn’t tell if he was hiding shame or the ugliness of his rage. “My brother told me to keep an eye on her. She had found something in the fields that worried him, something Abrams told him about, and he didn’t want it getting out. He told me to watch her.” Then, he added bitterly, “That’s Ray. Don’t want a goddamn thing to do with me till he wants something dirty done.”

“So you
killed
her?”

“I was just keeping an eye on her, just making sure she kept her mouth shut, that nobody said nothing else about bones in the fields, not before Ray’s big sale. But then she came at me with a knife . . . On my own goddamned property, she’s threatening
me
. So I reached out, and I don’t know, I grabbed the knife and I just swung. I guess I must have cut her good.”

“Oh, Bobby . . .”

The sound caught in the back of her throat, hiding there.

“She ain’t have no business out there no way,” he said acidly.

“Did Raymond tell you to keep an eye on me, too?”

By now, Caren’s voice was shaking.

“I did that for nothing,” he said.

He squatted down, so they were eye-to-eye.

She thought he was going to put his hands on her.

She leapt out of the chair, upending the kitchen table as she got to her feet. The whole thing fell against Bobby, knocking him back, and Caren ran for the front door. It was still standing open, and she shot straight through and down the porch steps, running to the driver’s-side door of her Volvo. She heard footsteps behind her, but she never looked back. She spun around in the dirt yard and drove onto the river road, heading south toward the highway, toward the sheriff’s station. She got about two miles up Highway 1 before she remembered she had left Morgan at Belle Vie with her father. Eric had no idea what Caren now knew, that everything connected to the Clancys was tainted, that he and Morgan were sitting ducks out on the plantation. And without her cell phone she had no way of telling him.

She swung the car around and headed back to Belle Vie.

The library was in the northeast corner of the property, and from the direction she was traveling, it came into view first, even before the main house. Caren dumped her car along the fence and ran to the front gate. As she started up the alley of live oaks, the first drops started to fall. Caren took off running, cutting through the grass.

T
he front door was unlocked.

The lights were all on, but there was no sign of Morgan or Eric. Caren circled through every room in the building, from the front parlor to the kitchen, where there was a pot of cold coffee sitting on the stove. Upstairs, there was an open, half-filled Samsonite suitcase in the hallway between the two bedrooms, as if they’d started packing and then stopped suddenly, the task interrupted. “Morgan?” Caren called out, over and over. She called Eric’s name, too, as she ran back down the stairs. There was only one room left to check: the Hall of Records, holding Belle Vie’s history, its heart and soul. Caren ran through the parlor to the narrow storage room. “Eric?” she said, pushing into the room. The door, swollen from the rain, took a moment to pop free. Inside, the lone lightbulb was swinging on a string. Caren squinted against the low light, and it took her a moment to notice what was wrong. The guns were missing. The shotgun and the pistol, the pearl-handled .32. They were both gone.

Caren ran to the phone on the kitchen wall.

She dialed Eric’s cell phone. Twice, no one answered.

She turned and ran out the front door.

There was a show still going in the old schoolhouse, but no Eric. He and Morgan were not in the gift shop, either. She tried Gerald, but he was not responding to any of her calls over the two-way. She checked every room on the first floor of the main house, then upstairs, checking the old bedrooms and lastly her office. Her desk phone was ringing off the hook. Caren reached for it, screaming Eric’s name as she answered. There was silence on the line . . . then the voice of Lee Owens.

“Caren, are you okay?”

“Bobby Clancy,” she said. She was panting, out of breath. “It was him.”

“What?”

Owens seemed momentarily confused, as if he’d walked into a play well past intermission and had missed some crucial turn in the plot line.

“It was Clancy.”

“What about Abrams?”

Abrams had never had a real motive, she finally saw.

It was Bobby Clancy who had taken out his rage on Inés Avalo. Just as it was Bobby who had been digging in the fields where she found human remains—which had worried Raymond terribly when he found out about it, enough that he put his brother to the task of keeping an eye on her, and setting in motion the events that took her life.

“It was him,” she said. “It was Clancy.”

“Caren, does this have anything to do with that message you left this morning? The stuff you asked me to look up?”

She had almost forgotten.

“What did you find?”

“The Homestead Act,” he said excitedly. On the other end of the line, she heard him shuffling papers across his desk. “I didn’t actually find anything in the newspaper’s archives about the Belle Vie Plantation and land sales. I mean, nothing that caught my eye. Like you said, the government owned it for a time after the war, and then a William P. Tynan took possession after that, in 1872.” The same year that Jason went missing, Caren remembered. “But it is true,” Owens continued, “that the federal government was using the Homestead Act of 1862, something Lincoln had signed into law, to procure land grants for former slaves. It had originally been written as a law to help settle the West, but during Reconstruction, the feds had other ideas. Any free man could be granted a piece of unclaimed property, including former plantations, as long as he lived on the land and grew crops or built on the place, a structure of at least twelve by fourteen. Long as he could prove he’d made some kind of improvements to the land, any man stood a chance,” Owens said over the phone. “That was the idea, at least.”