The casket was closed for the service. Morgan, who had never been to a funeral or a wake or memorial service of any kind—had never even known a person who had died—was plainly fascinated by the spectacle of the thing. The prayer candles and the spray of gladiolus and white carnations, and the short, black priest in his dress robe, a formal stole of red and gold draped about his shoulders and hanging near to his ankles. She sat on the edge of the pew, leaning forward, her elbows propped on the back of the bench in front of them, as if they were at a ball game or the theater, and twice Caren had to ask her to please sit up, to show Inés that least little bit of respect. Eric was appropriately solemn, but distant. He didn’t know the woman, of course; he was sitting in this tiny, dimly lit church for Caren. From Father Akerele’s opening prayer to his reading from the Book of Wisdom—the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them—to the congregation’s whispered Amen, Caren was on the verge of tears.
Everyone was invited to speak.
Friends and loved ones.
The first to the lectern was Ginny, the church secretary, with her ruby-red curls and her graceful pear shape poured into a black pantsuit, a small pink flower in the lapel. She was holding a tiny, square piece of paper, her hands shaking slightly. The church was not full. But a good number of people had gathered to honor Inés, more than Caren would have expected for a woman born and raised over a thousand miles away. There were the church ladies, of course, and also the Groveland workers, and a few field hands from other farms. One man was biting at his nails. Another, nearly as dark as Caren, had his head down in prayer. She remembered him from the candlelight vigil, when he’d leaned against the white fence in the fields, hardly able to tear himself away from the site, the shallow grave, the space that could not be filled. It was Inés’s love, Gustavo.
There were others, too.
Lorraine had come to honor a woman she didn’t even know, simply because she had walked among them, no matter how invisible. Dell and Pearl and Ennis Mabry had also come. ’Cause that’s just what black folks do. Southerners, too. These were cultural artifacts that, God willing, would go untouched by time. Raymond Clancy was here. Caren had seem him in a back pew on her way in, seated next to, of all people, his brother, Bobby, who looked distinctly uncomfortable in a suit. Whether by coercion or his own free will, he had come to play his part: son of Leland James Clancy, a man beloved in this parish, who would have demanded his sons put aside their petty disagreements and show respect for the fallen, an innocent woman who’d been killed on the very land the Clancys had lived on and loved for nearly two hundred years. Caren caught Bobby’s eye. He nodded at her, then turned his attention to the altar.
“Inés was warm and quick to smile,” Ginny said.
At the pulpit, Father Akerele listened with his eyes closed, nodding.
“And she believed deeply in God.”
Amen, someone called.
In the center pew, Caren felt a sudden motion on her left side. She turned to see Lee Owens sliding into the open spot next to her. “Guess who’s here?” he whispered, leaning in so closely that she could smell his aftershave, a musky scent, like the dried leaves of bay laurel. He nodded over her shoulder, and when she turned she was surprised to see yet another familiar face in the back of the church. In the very back row, on the far-right-hand side, Hunt Abrams was sitting alone, arms folded across his wide chest. He was wearing the same black Groveland windbreaker, hadn’t even bothered to change out of his jeans. “Paying his respects, I see,” Owens said. He raised an eyebrow at the audacity of it, the sick act of a killer showing up at his victim’s funeral. Caren felt Eric watching her, taking note of this whispered exchange between her and the reporter. But when she glanced over to meet his eye, he had already turned and was now staring straight ahead. He was holding their daughter’s hand.
At the lectern, Ginny made the sign of the cross.
Then, in halting, high school Spanish, she said, “Descanse en paz.”
Rest in peace, Inés.
As Ginny started down the short flight of steps at the edge of the altar, Akerele held out a hand to escort her. Caren glanced again over her shoulder. Hunt Abrams was looking right at them, at Caren and Eric and Morgan—at her nine-year-old daughter, the girl who had first stumbled upon the bloody knife. We should go, she thought. We should get her out of here right now. Only she couldn’t think of an easy exit out of the small church that wouldn’t take her daughter within inches of Abrams’s grasp.
There was a sudden rustling, a sober murmur in the crowd.
One man was walking to the lectern alone.
It was Gustavo, wearing a pressed shirt, black and red, his nerves plainly showing. Even from a distance, Caren could see his lips quivering, and there were dots of sweat across the leathered skin of his forehead. “Lo siento,” he said, trying to gather himself. He kept looking in the direction of the back of the room, where Abrams was sitting. Then he crossed himself and began again. He didn’t cry, and he didn’t say his name. There was just this, this one declaration, a mere whisper into the microphone.
“Yo la amaba.”
I loved her, he said.
He knew he shouldn’t say that, not here.
He knew they weren’t married.
And long ago they had made a pact not to speak of their families, the ones back home. “De este lado,” he said. “Fuimos solo nosotros. Y era amor.” On this side, he said, it was only us, and it was love. He knew there was a husband. There were kids. And he could speak to her love for her children, whom she hadn’t seen in almost three years.
She sent money home each month, and she prayed.
She prayed for those kids.
She worked every day for them, even looking for day work when the rain pushed them out of the fields—cleaning houses or washing dishes at the VA center in Darrow or doing cleanup at construction sites, hauling trash, some of which she would lug home, to a small camper they shared. Books or used clothes or the base of a porcelain lamp or a piece of an old bed frame. She found a use for everything.
Here Gustavo smiled.
Inés was headstrong, he said, and sometimes stubborn. At this, one of the other field-workers smiled in kind. Sí, he called out, sharing this particular memory.
Gustavo glanced down at the casket, covered in flowers.
She didn’t like it here, he said. She was trying to get enough money to leave, to go back home, or at least get as far as Texas. She thought, if nothing else, she could make more money picking grapefruit along the Valley. Gustavo lowered his head.
I wish she had gone, he said.
She should have gone home.
Por eso cantamos para Inés, he said.
So we sing for Inés.
We sing her soul home.
By now Caren was crying openly. Through the sting of her tears, she watched as Gustavo walked back to his seat, while some of the churchwomen stood to face the congregation, positioning themselves below the altar. Ginny was standing in front. In chorus, they began a hymn: “What Wondrous Love Is This.” Owens, sitting next to Caren, mumbled the words in a soft tenor, speaking more than singing, and she was surprised that he knew each verse by heart. This close up, she could see his hair had been slicked back and combed. Out of his usual khakis and ball cap and into slim black pants, he’d clearly gotten dressed up for this, for Inés. And when Father Akerele asked the congregants to please join hands, it felt oddly comforting to hold his, Eric on one side and Lee Owens on the other.
Outside, she asked him to wait for her.
But somehow as they filed out of St. Joseph’s with the rest of the congregation, Owens got ahead of them. Eric was close by Caren’s side, ushering her along, but also keeping her and Morgan well within his sights. She could feel his presence behind her as they made it down the church steps. “Let’s go,” he said, holding tightly to Morgan’s hand. She was still in her school uniform, her bare legs open to the night air.
Abrams was long gone, his black truck nowhere in sight.
Lorraine and Pearl, Ennis and Dell had already left in Lorraine’s Pontiac.
Bobby Clancy was still lingering on the dewy lawn, beneath the low branches of the black pecan tree. He smiled when he saw Caren. He ambled over, both hands balled inside his pants pockets. Beneath his dark suit, Caren noticed a pair of camel-colored boots. “Hey,” he said. And Caren said, “Hey,” back, introducing him to Eric and her daughter, Morgan. He nodded warmly at the girl, folding his tall height in half by bending at the waist, so he could shake her hand like a gentleman. “Lord, if she don’t favor Helen,” he said, glancing back at Caren. “And as pretty as her mama, too.”
Caren caught the faintest smile on her daughter’s lips.
“You don’t remember me, huh?” he said to Morgan.
Caren thought he was drunk, or at least halfway there. Bobby had never actually met her daughter, not even as a baby. “Bobby and I grew up together,” she told Eric.
Bobby smiled sloppily, swaying a little on the heels of his boots, and again Caren wondered how much he’d been drinking. “Wouldn’t know it now, but we was real close,” he said. “And I was way too shy to tell her I had something of a boyhood crush on her.”
Eric looked from Bobby to Caren, who felt her cheeks flush.
She felt embarrassed, but also slightly angry with Bobby for finally saying it out loud, and here of all places. She felt she would have rather gone the rest of her life pretending not to know what she always had, that Bobby liked her and that he felt hemmed in by the proscriptions of his birth and name, the rules that he imagined kept them apart. Bobby basically said as much now, adding, “Yeah, well, times were different back then,” while fiddling with something in his pants pocket. Through the fabric, Caren thought she spotted the outline of a flask. She wanted to change the subject.
“So I guess you know about the sale, then?”
Bobby looked back toward Lessard Street, where Raymond was sitting in the driver’s seat of a late-model Cadillac, watching this little reunion between his kid brother and Caren. He tapped on the horn, letting Bobby know his ride was leaving.
Bobby turned back to Caren. “I’ll talk to you about it later.”
Then, he pulled out a silver flask and took an open swig in front of everyone, before tramping across the grass toward the passenger seat of his brother’s Cadillac.
By now the crowd outside St. Joseph’s had thinned. There were still a few lights on inside the church, but Ginny had already pulled closed the gate to the church’s parking lot, which was now vacant. There was a rustle of tree branches overhead and a cool wind swaying the leaves. It was cold out here, and getting colder. The field-workers, everybody, was gone . . . except Lee Owens, who was waiting for her.
“I hear they charged the Isaacs kid,” he said.
“Caren,” Eric said, putting a hand on her elbow.
He was through with it, she knew, all of it. The plantation and the cane fields and the sloppy murder investigation. The rain and the muggy mess of Louisiana.
“Can you give me a minute?”
Eric looked at her, then at Owens. “We’ll wait by the car,” he said, tugging at Morgan’s hand. Caren watched as he led her toward the rental car across the street.
“I have something,” she said, turning to Owens. She still had the DVDs in her pocket—the headlights caught on tape. She pulled out the plastic case, the clear cover catching the light of the street lamp. The whole effect threw a yellow glow over the bottom half of Owens’s face. Who knew what could happen, Caren thought, if a newspaper took seriously what the cops wouldn’t?
Screw Lang, she thought.
Eric called out her name again. “It’s late,” he said.
“I could drive you later,” Owens said. “I mean, if he needs to get her home.”
When Caren presented this idea a few moments later, and out of Owens’s earshot, Eric lost the last of his patience. “What are you doing, Caren, you don’t even know this guy.” He had his fingers dug into Morgan’s shoulders, keeping her close. Morgan was leaning her head against her father’s torso. She was shivering.
“Take her home, Eric. I’ll be fine.”
He looked from her to Owens, then back to her again, rolling his eyes. “Caren and her many suitors,” he muttered.
Now she thought he was just being mean.
“It’s not a date, Eric,” she said. “He’s a reporter.”
Eric let out a wearied sigh.
He stared at her for a long time, the amber street light softening his features. He was worried about her, that’s all. “Just be careful, Caren.”
Morgan was still standing between them, unsure in which direction she was meant to go, if she should stay with her mother or go with Eric. “Go with your dad,” Caren insisted. “I’ll be fine, ’Cakes.” Morgan’s eyes narrowed to slits. She looked past her mother, sneaking a peek at Owens. “Is Donovan going to be okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know, ’Cakes.”
Morgan nodded sagely, a kid getting an early, unwelcome lesson in the breadth of life’s vast unfairness. She took a sideways glance, a second look at Owens. “Don’t keep her too late,” she called to him, before skipping off to catch up to her dad. Owens was highly amused. “What a great kid,” he said, as Caren stood there, watching her go.
They sat in his car, in the dark, only the blue light of his laptop computer between them. Owens hit rewind and they watched it again, the last scene on the second disc. Caren could smell the soapy pomade in his hair, the hint of mint on his breath. He was chewing his fingernails, utterly perplexed. “I don’t understand,” he said, staring at the headlights on the screen. “Why would he take a deal?”
“The whole thing started as a misunderstanding,” she explained. Outside, the rain was misting, swirling about, like tiny seeds in the wind. “Donovan, the kid with a criminal record, admits to being at the scene of the crime the night she was killed, not knowing what he was getting himself into, and then the cops just kind of zeroed in on him and never looked back. And now they’re saying they have the murder weapon.”
“The knife?”
Caren nodded. “But his car sat in our parking lot for at least a day. It sat out there completely unsupervised for a whole night. Anyone could have put it there.”
Owens was still staring at the computer screen, at the shot of the truck’s white headlights, the visual fact of someone parked just over the fence in the cane fields.
“Abrams sleeps in his trailer, by the way, so he can be first in the fields at sunrise,” he said. “That’s not even five hundred yards from the grave site.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. The nails were bitten to the quick, gnawed and pink. Caren noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “There’s almost no excuse for him not being a person of interest in this, especially in light of his past behavior,” he said. “I tried to offer an affidavit, to tell Lang what I know, the research the paper has on file for the man right now, but they don’t want to hear it. For them, this whole thing is solved.”
She caught a note of something between heartache and rage behind his pale green eyes. She wondered what all this meant for him, why, beyond his job, his reporter’s eye for a lie, he was so beset by this particular story, why he cared so much.
“Clancy got Donovan a lawyer,” she told him.
“Raymond Clancy?”
She nodded, adding this to the growing list of his shady behavior of late. He wanted this deal with Groveland to go through, and Abrams getting arrested for murder, or even being under suspicion, would surely pour cold water on the plantation’s sale, as well as the launch of Clancy’s political career. Getting Donovan a lawyer was a sleight of hand, a trick, a cover . . . but for what exactly, she wondered.
Once more, she tried to walk through Owens’s take on the case. “So Inés finds a bone out in the fields, a body part buried in the Groveland farm, and less than a week later she’s dead,” she said.
“Very rarely does one come across an honest-to-God coincidence in my line of work,” he said. “If it smells rotten, it’s usually ’cause it is.”
“You think Abrams told Clancy what was buried out in those fields?”
“It is his land. Clancy’s, that is.”
Caren wondered how deep this cover-up went.
Outside, the wind lifted, swirling and shaking rain from the tree leaves overhead, drops as soft as water on wet cotton, a faint thumping on the roof of the car. Caren shivered. Owens, without comment, rolled up his car window, sealing the air between them. The church lights were still on, but the place was otherwise deserted, the bottle tree twinkling in the rain, doing its colorful best to protect the chapel and its last guest. Caren thought of her all alone in there.
“Inés was sleeping in the quarters,” she said. “She spent the last nights of her life sleeping inside a slave cabin.” Akerele and Ginny were right. She must have been terrified, Caren said.
She turned to look at Owens.
He was already turning his key in the ignition.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
They drove south on East Bayou Road, past the town center and heading into the ragged outskirts of the parish. About a mile past the high school, she asked him where they were going. Owens was hunched over the steering wheel, staring studiously at the unbroken lines on the asphalt ahead. And then, with no warning, he yanked the wheel hard to the left, the sudden move pushing Caren against the side of the door.
They had turned onto a short, red-dirt road, no more than an alley cut through a block of weeds. It was lined on both sides with trailer homes, double-wides and singles propped up on blocks and parked haphazardly on messy, trash-strewn plots of gravel and grass. Nearby sat a grove of rusted cars, made over for lawn furniture. A ’76 Le Mans sat under a colorful blanket, its dirty fringe dappled with dried leaves and empty soda cans left on its hood. The place was a makeshift subdivision of some kind, a virtual tent city. “What is this?” she said, staring ahead.
“That one was hers.”
He was pointing to a small camper, the kind of thing a suburban family might hitch to the back of a station wagon, a thing to sleep in for a night or two, not a life. But this, apparently, had been Inés’s home. She had taken the care and time to clip the weeds out front, had doctored a large hole in the structure with an artful weave of black and gray duct tape, and had arranged a pile of broken concrete and rocks to hold up the camper’s front end. It was not so far a leap from here to the quarters, Caren thought. She heard the punch and twang of tejano music. There was a television playing in a nearby trailer. A roll of canned applause blew across the night air. The terrain was rough, rocking the small sedan back and forth as Owens inched them forward. Rainwater swirled in open pockets in the middle of the road. Caren begged Owens to turn back before they got stuck out here in the mud.
Instead, he parked the car in a patch of weeds by the side of the road.
The sky was dark, a deep, midnight blue. Owens shut the car engine, undoing his seat belt and reaching for the door handle. “What are you doing?” Caren said.
“When we spoke, Akerele told me there were no other acts of violence that the church was aware of, or disturbances of any kind, and certainly no workers who went missing.” Caren nodded. Akerele had reported the same to her. “But he also said those workers are like family,” he said, cracking open the car door. “Maybe Gustavo, the guy she was living with, knows more than the rest of them are saying.” He stepped out of the car, and Caren, not sure she could stand being left alone in this car, on the side of a dark road, got out and followed him. The heels of her boots sank in the mud as she struggled to catch up to him. Together, they walked in a line down the center of the dirt road.
In the distance, she heard a whisper of Spanish, the low hum of talk radio. A few feet away, two men were smoking cigarettes and sitting on top of the Le Mans, a Styrofoam cooler at their feet and a pile of ice and a fishing line dumped in the grass. One of the men was gutting a flathead catfish. The blade of his knife shone beneath a flashlight that was rigged to the roof of the car. The other man was drinking beer out of a can. He squinted in the advancing darkness, trying to make them out, two figures on the road. The one with the knife hopped off the hood of the car, walking toward them, the blade pointed down. There was blood dripping off the tip. Owens froze, staring at the knife. Caren stepped forward and told the man, “No queremos problemas,” making use of the Spanish she’d learned on her first part-time job in New Orleans, waiting tables at a steak house. The man’s posture softened somewhat. He gave her a curt but not unfriendly nod, before returning to his fish, looking up every now and then to stare at Owens. The man he was with threw his head back, draining his beer and staring at the night’s stars. Across the road, a toddler was witnessing this whole scene. He was wearing a football helmet and a diaper, watching them from the doorway of a nearby trailer, the grill of his Cowboys helmet pressed against the mesh of the screen door. Behind him, Caren heard the faint sounds of a television game show playing low.
Finally, they made it to Inés’s camper.
The front door was a thin black screen, framed in a cheap aluminum that rattled in its hinge when Owens knocked. Together, they waited to hear movement, some sign of life inside the camper. The man with the knife was watching them. In the other direction, down the main road, Owens’s car was a silhouette in the distance. For a brief second, she thought she saw something, or someone, moving beside the car. Weeds, she told herself. Please, God, let it be the weeds.
“No hay nadie allí.”
Caren swung around.
It was the man with the knife. There’s no one there, he was saying.
He tossed the filleted fish onto the pile of ice chips, then reached into the cooler for another, running the flat blade along the skin. “La señora está muerta,” he said. “Y su novio, se ha ido. Se fue.” The woman, he said, was dead, and her man was gone.
“What’s that?” Owens said. “What’s he saying?”
Caren shushed him.
“Cuando?” she asked the man.
“Esta noche.” Then, he shrugged. “Agarró una maleta y se fue.”
Gustavo’s gone, she said to Owens.
He took a bag and fled.
“Ask him if he knew them.”
“Usted los conocía?” she asked.
The man with the knife stared for a long time, looking between Caren and Owens, this white boy. Maybe it was the language, the ease with which he and Caren had fallen into conversation in his mother tongue, but he seemed to get no charge from her presence. She was a woman, y una morena at that, and he regarded her as more a curiosity than a threat. No, he said, going back to his knife and his fish.
Owens nudged her to keep it going.
Caren asked the man if he knew the Groveland farm.
“Sí,” he said. “Pero nunco he ido.”
He’s never been there, he said.
He was not a man for the fields. “Me gusta el agua.”
He slapped a fish on ice and reached for another.
Owens seemed lost without a working language. He was leaning on Caren, literally, pulling at her elbow and holding on way too tightly. “The field-workers, do they live around here, too?” he asked Caren, nudging her to turn and ask the man with the knife. She felt his insistent breath in her ear. She told him to stop and let her talk.
“Hay otros campesinos de la granja que viven aquí?”
“No, no.” The man shook his head. “Solo ellos,” he said, pointing to the camper where Inés and Gustavo lived. They were the only Groveland workers here.
“Está seguro?”
“Sí,” he said. He was very sure. They didn’t get many strange faces around the campsite, he said, a strange smile on his face, looking at Caren and Owens, as if to prove his point. “Claro, la policía llegó.” The police, of course. They were here.
His buddy, who had so far let nothing past his lips save for cold beer, nudged the man with the knife. “Y el gringo,” he said, his speech so slurred that Caren didn’t catch it the first time. The man with the knife nodded. There was someone else who had come snooping around the campsite a few times, specifically looking for Inés.
“Un gringo?”
“Sí,” he said. The man was kind of dark, with black hair, and tall, very, very tall, the drunk man said, holding his hand a foot or so above the roof of the Le Mans. He had come around a few times the week before Inés died. “En un troca rojá,” he said.
“He was in a red truck?”
The man nodded.
She played his words back in her head: a man in a red truck stalking Inés . . . just like the man in the red truck Caren had seen in her rearview mirror more than once this past week. She heard Owens’s words again, his pronouncement that true coincidences are rare, and for the first time she had a fleeting doubt about Abrams being the killer. Was there someone else out there? A killer who had gotten to Inés Avalo and was now following Caren?
She told Owens she was ready to go.
She wanted to get the hell out of here.
But Owens didn’t see how he could get this close to Inés, to where she had once lived, and not go inside. “Just for a second,” he said, as he reached for the camper’s screen door.
Owens stepped in first, feeling along the buckled walls for a light switch. But there was no electricity in here, only an oversized mechanic’s flashlight hanging on a nail by the door. Caren flipped it on and saw that there was no running water, either. There were bedsheets on the floor and stacks of folded clothes, plus a crate of dented kitchen utensils, a plastic holly wreath, ceramic bowls, and a rolling suitcase. She found a use for everything, Caren remembered Akerele saying. Among her things were a red plastic cooler . . . and dozens of votive candles, just like the ones Caren had found inside Jason’s Cabin in the slave quarters.
She felt a line of sweat down the center of her back.
There was no ventilation except for the screen door, and every step Owens took, the whole camper swayed and tilted to one side. Stop, she whispered. Just stop. She wanted him to stop moving, to turn around and drive them out of here. “Give me the keys,” she said. She couldn’t put words to it or easily explain it, but she felt, in that tiny camper, the same frank stillness, the breathtaking absence of anything resembling human life, that she felt in Jason’s Cabin. Owens was oblivious. He was bending down to look through a pile of magazines and papers inside an old shoe box. Caren told him she felt she couldn’t breathe. He looked at her, hearing for the first time the distress in her voice. But before he could get to his feet, there was a loud thump along the side of the camper, as if someone had taken a bat to the outside walls; it was forceful enough that the whole structure swayed from side to side.
“What the hell was that?” Owens said, reaching for something to hold on to. Caren turned and looked out the screen door, to the dirt road.
The radio, she realized.
She didn’t hear it anymore.
Nor the television in the neighboring trailer.
It was as if she and Owens were the only two people left out here—them and who or whatever was on the other side of the camper’s wall.
She heard a soft patter coming through the wall. Footsteps.
Owens must have heard it, too.
He pointed to the screen door and mouthed the word Go. They both turned and ran. Outside, the man with the knife was gone, and his friend on the hood of the Le Mans. The toddler and his blue-and-white football helmet were also gone. Everybody, it seemed, had suddenly hidden behind closed doors. Had they seen something, she wondered. Had something out on this dirt road spooked them good?
Owens told her to keep running.
She was comforted by the sound of his footsteps behind her.
The Saturn was where they’d left it, waiting along the side of the road. Owens clawed at the keys in his hand, trying to find the right one. He opened the doors, and they both slumped inside. When he finally got the car started, slamming it into reverse and backing down the dirt road, Caren stared down the length of the alley and the broken-down trailers. She didn’t see a single soul, but she no longer took that as a sign that she was safe. Someone had been following her, she now understood. The same man in the red truck who had tailed Inés Avalo in the days before her throat was cut.