By Monday morning, Bobby Clancy was out of surgery and resting as well as could be expected at the St. Elizabeth Hospital across the river in Gonzales, no more than a few miles from the sheriff’s station at the Ascension Parish courthouse, where he would be housed once he was able to be moved and thereby officially charged with the murder of Inés Avalo—the same courthouse where Donovan Isaacs’s hearing to change his plea had been hastily scrapped from Judge Jonetta Pauls’s morning docket. All charges, Caren heard, had been dropped.
She was already miles and miles away by then, downriver at the New Orleans International Airport in Kenner, bidding a bittersweet good-bye.
She was not allowed past the checkpoint, and so the setting was awkward. Out on the curb by the skycaps, she kissed her daughter one more time.
Morgan was surprisingly calm, cheerful even. She’d never been on an airplane before, never been to Washington. Eric had mentioned, twice already, a possible trip to the White House. He was trying to put her at ease; they both were. Caren had promised to call every night. It was coming, she knew. She’d made a point to warn Eric, last night and then again this morning as they’d loaded up the cars. It might be a day or two or even a few weeks from now, she told him, but the events of yesterday, the rain and the blood and the guns . . . she will wake up one night screaming. Or she might say nothing at all, Eric, and you’ll have to watch for those moments most of all, when she simply stares out a window or stops eating in the middle of a meal.
Just be there, she told him.
“And what about you?” he’d asked, his left arm still bandaged.
Nothing had been decided, not yet.
There was the Whitman wedding, work she’d promised the staff.
There was a whole house to pack and a history to put away.
Beyond that, she wasn’t willing to say for sure, one way or another.
“Mom,” Morgan said, turning to run back to her mother just as the sliding glass doors to the terminal opened and Eric stepped inside with their bags. Caren knelt down on one knee and caught Morgan as she threw herself into her mother’s arms. I know, ’Cakes. I feel the same way. Morgan was the first to pull back, digging her fingers into Caren’s shoulders and staring into her eyes as if she felt she needed to buoy her mother up or convince her of her own strength. It reminded Caren of the whispers of encouragement she used to give Morgan when she was first learning to walk on her own. “I won’t let them touch my hair,” Morgan said. “Or pick out my clothes.”
And by them, Caren knew she meant her.
They were having a discussion about loyalty, without ever mentioning Lela’s name. Caren didn’t know whether she should feel proud or tremendously sad that her daughter believed that this would make it easier on her, that Morgan felt she had to protect her mother. “No, ’Cakes,” she said. “That’s your dad, and she’s going to be your stepmother, your family.” The mother of your brother or sister, she thought.
Caren smiled, touching the curls around Morgan’s round face.
“And I’m okay with that, ’Cakes.”
Morgan grinned, showing the gap in her front teeth. Bobby was right. She did look just like Helen Gray. “Tell Donovan I love him,” she said. And with that, she turned and ran, her backpack thumping against her bottom, as she caught up to her father, who’d been watching and waiting from the glassed-in vestibule of the American Airlines terminal. “Good luck next month,” Caren told him, meaning his coming nuptials, his start at something new. Eric gave her a small wave. Morgan, God bless her big, magnificent, forgiving heart, never looked back.
Later, at the sheriff’s station, Caren gave Detectives Lang and Bertrand her second of two interviews, the other having taken place last night, on the grounds of Belle Vie, her clothes still wet and muddy from the afternoon storm. Today, she signed an affidavit, detailing the last twenty-four hours and beyond: the early suspicions of someone other than Donovan being responsible for the murder, the discovery of his film script and DVDs and her missing cell phone, the discussions with Lee Owens of the Times-Picayune and the information from Father Akerele and Ginny at the church, the stories of Inés being followed by none other than Bobby Clancy, Caren now knew. And this she tied to the bone that Inés had found in the fields. There was an official file for him now, for Jason. Forensic anthropologists at LSU were contacted, and Caren had offered her own blood for a DNA sample, or whatever else this century had to offer in the way of science, to determine who was buried out in the cane fields.
The cops were getting no help from Raymond Clancy on the matter. He’d been stalling about giving his own police interview. Too busy, Caren guessed, dealing with the press, giving multiple television interviews about his unstable brother and the tragedy of the circumstances, a man come unhinged, a man he hardly knew anymore. By the morning’s news cycle, he had completely disowned his only brother, and people were already praising him for his frank candor and levelheadedness in the face of a crisis. He was an absolute natural on-screen.
On her way out of the station, Caren spied Owens in the parking lot. He was in the driver’s seat of his Saturn, parked next to her Volvo.
He climbed out of his car as she approached and leaned his right hip against the front end of his vehicle. He was back in uniform, his khaki pants and a thin T-shirt, even though it was barely fifty degrees outside, and on his head was a faded ball cap, the words BANKS STREET BAR & GRILL stitched in white, yet another blues club in his beloved New Orleans. She wondered what it would have been like to know him when she lived in the city, if she’d stumbled upon him some night at Sweet Lorraine’s or the Old Opera House, or if he’d ever had a drink at the Grand Luxe Hotel after work. She liked him, that was easy enough to admit. When he took off his hat in her presence, running his fingers through the snaking curls, she felt an unexpected swell.
He smiled, tapping his cap against his thigh. “So . . . where you laying your head tonight, miss?”
“Belle Vie, for now,” she said. “I’ve got some things I need to wrap up.”
“Any chance we’ll get you back?”
The we being his city, she knew. “I don’t know.”
“It’s not like it was,” he said.
“Is that good or bad?”
Owens smiled, kicking his foot against the car’s front tire. There was no easy way to answer that. His tone grew serious, wistful even. “The story’s dead,” he said. “And Clancy’s coming out of this deal looking like a star.” He shook his head at the exquisite irony of it. “The crime beat will have a go at the killing and Bobby Clancy, but without a murder angle tied to the Groveland deal, and no charges against Hunt Abrams, the paper’s a lot less interested in how the company treats its workers. They’re going to run a piece about the company’s expansion, what it’ll do for the state’s economy and the future of the sugar business in Louisiana. But most of that research is coming out of the AP’s bureau in New Orleans. It won’t have a thing to do with me.”
“I’ve got a story for you.”
He gave her a curious look, tilting his chin to one side. “Yeah?”
“Just give me some time to get it all straight, Owens.”
“Call me Lee.”
He slid his cap back on his head and nodded toward the doors of the courthouse. “My turn now,” he said, indicating the police interview that awaited him.
He was stalling, though, lingering in her presence.
“Listen,” he said finally. “If you do come back to New Orleans, I mean, if you come back for good, would you let me buy you a drink sometime, Miss Gray?”
“I would insist on it.”
He was charmed, for sure. And wise enough to go out on a high.
He tipped the bill of his cap, and walked into the parish courthouse.
Two days before the Whitman wedding, Caren led a guided tour for the Groveland brass. The company sent a team of five from the corporate headquarters in Porterville, California, to survey the site, two women and three men, the youngest and tallest of whom—an African-American gentleman with close-cropped hair and smooth, unlined skin—appeared to be the one in charge. They arrived with their own name tags, laminated cards clipped to their matching oxford shirts, the sunny Groveland logo stitched over their right breasts. The black guy was: KEN WIGGAMS, PRESIDENT, SOUTHEAST REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT. The other four were titleless names: Susan, Kathy, Edward, and Jim. Caren greeted them in the plantation’s parking lot. There was no rain that day, not a cloud for miles, and so the plan was to tour the grounds on foot. She started at the rose garden, remembering as she went Luis’s steady hand, the care he’d shown all these years. The main house was open, the view through the foyer and the dining hall going all the way to the front lawn on the other side, the alley of oaks and the verdant levee in the distance, a roll of grass bright and green in the sun. She showed them the upstairs bedrooms, where the Duquesnes and then the Clancys once slept. And she took them through the kitchen, introduced them to Pearl and Lorraine, who offered a tray of sweet tea infused with orange and honey. Lorraine winked at Caren as the tour group left, stepping around her garden. Down the lane, the windows of the cottages, Manette and Le Roy, were all open, their white, gauzy curtains lifted and then rested in the late morning breeze. She explained that the cottages were once used by guests visiting Belle Vie, but the overseer, a man named Tynan, had made his home in the garçonnière, what was now the plantation’s library.
In the quarters, she kept an eye on Ken Wiggams.
The ladies, Susan and Kathy, and even the older gentleman, Edward, a white man in his late fifties, were all taken with the scene, reading each placard carefully and going in and out of the cabins, including the last one on the left, Jason’s old home. The women asked questions, about the quilts and the field tools and the stove dug into the ground. Edward took a picture of the cabin with his cell phone.
Ken Wiggams, the black guy, was the only one who didn’t venture into the slave village, never setting foot on the dirt path. He stood apart from the others, his hands shoved in the pockets of his black slacks, his mouth pinched into a bitter, grudging expression, and it occurred to Caren that she should have found a way to bring this man out here alone, away from his white colleagues, that her last-ditch effort to save the plantation might have gone better if she hadn’t put him in the difficult position of necessarily viewing himself as two men at once: a president and a descendant of slaves. He turned at one point and asked her directly, “How much more of this is there?”
The last stop on the tour was a visit to the old schoolhouse.
There was no staged performance today, but the members of the Groveland delegation were invited to watch a different production in progress, the shooting of one of the final scenes of Donovan’s screenplay. Caren advised caution as they stepped over a tangled river of wires and cords, connecting lights and sound equipment. The schoolhouse had been made over to look like a court of law, the place where Tynan finally went on trial for the presumed stabbing death of Jason.
The sheriff was on the stand.
It was Donovan, of course, in boots and a badge.
Danny Olmsted, newly added to the cast, played the part of the prosecutor, wearing as his costume the same black trench coat he always did, this time over a frilly white shirt and a poorly knotted ascot. He clasped his hands behind his back, speaking in a manner that was one part Perry Mason, one part George Washington.
The scene of an ancient murder trial played before them.
“What is this?” one of the Groveland employees asked.
“Belle Vie,” Caren said.
This is what you bought.
Later that day, she said good-bye to her mother, clearing the land and brushing dirt and leaves off the headstones of her family, working in a straight line, all the way back to Eleanor and the empty space beside her that belonged to Jason. It would have been something to know them, she thought, whispering their names. And then, lastly, she told her mother it was long past time for her to go. It was time for her to move on.
That night was one of her last at Belle Vie.
Alone, she ate half a frozen pizza, washed down with warm red wine. She sat in front of her laptop at the kitchen table, looking at law schools in the D.C. area. Just looking, she told herself.
Later, she surveyed what was left of her packing.
As the sun set, she started off with her Maglite and ring of keys, checking and double-checking the front and back gates, riding along in the white golf cart underneath the canopy of magnolia trees. Around the back side of the main house, she stopped cold when she saw a light on inside the building. Caren was supposedly the only one out here. She slammed on the brakes. Looking in through the first-floor windows, she felt in her jacket pocket for the .32 pistol. She was in the habit now of keeping it close by.
She left the engine idling and entered the house through the back door, pausing in the darkened foyer. She held the gun by her side as she walked beneath the winding staircase toward the dining hall, the door to which was cracked open. On the other side, she saw a flicker of light. She crept across the parquet floor, trying to center most of the weight in her hips so her feet fell lightly, making little sound. It was only as she got closer to the door that she heard heavy breathing, like a rattling whisper. Raising the pistol, she pushed open the carved wood door. Inside the dining hall she found Raymond sitting alone, reclining by lamplight. He was stone drunk and sleeping across the wide bottoms of two of Belle Vie’s best dining chairs, within arm’s reach of a bottle of Cuvée, which was open and stood half-finished on the floor next to him. Caren felt for a light switch on the wall, brightening the crystal chandeliers overhead.
Clancy stirred.
He opened his eyes and looked at Caren, grinning widely. “Gray.”
“What are you doing here, Raymond?”
He sat up, chuckling to himself at this situation, him drunk and laid out. When he sat up to his full height, his knees were nearly pressed to his chest in the short dining chair. “Sit down,” he said to her, as if she were just dropping by for a visit or an after-dinner spirit. He reached for the bottle of brandy, one she was sure he’d lifted from Lorraine’s kitchen. Pouring a small bit into a snifter, he then offered it to her. Caren refused. Raymond took his straight from the bottle.
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and sighed.
“They’re going to tear it down, Gray. I got the call a few hours ago.”
“What did you expect?”
Raymond shrugged, and Caren decided she hated him, for, as much as anything else, his smug indifference to all this. Sure, he was sad about losing this place, but sad for all the wrong reasons, a man in midlife coming to terms with the knowledge of what, given the chance, he’d trade for politics. There was nothing but self-pity in this room, and Caren wanted nothing to do with it. There was only one thing she wanted from him before she went.
“I want to see it,” she said. “I want to see the deed.”
Raymond paused, staring into his brandy.
He tapped a lean finger along the belly of the bottle.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gray.”
“Yes you do.”
Clancy took a long sip of brandy, not answering her, behaving for a moment as if she’d never said a word, as if she weren’t standing right in front of him. “Listen to me, Gray,” he said finally, his voice as hard and cold as a shard of ice. “Listen good . . . my brother is not a well man, hasn’t been for years. I don’t know what in God’s name got into him, why he went crazy on that girl like that. But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You knew the story of what happened to Jason, and you lied when you said you’d never heard that your own relative had been the suspected killer. You were the one who took the records out of the archives, trying to erase the true chain of ownership. And when Abrams reported to you—still the stated owner of this land—what Inés had found in the fields, you had a hunch what it was, that the bone belonged to Jason, and you wanted to erase that, too. You had your brother dig up the fields out there, looking for the rest of his remains. And you put Bobby on Inés’s trail,” she said acidly, the words burning on her tongue. “And look what happened.”
“He was just supposed to watch that girl, make sure she didn’t go blabbing to anyone else,” Raymond said. “But I swear, Gray, I think my brother saw an opportunity to tank all I had coming to me, and he was willing to take a life to do it.” He lifted the bottle. “I swear he did it to spite me, leaving her in the dirt like that.”
“I just need to see it,” Caren said. “I just need to see the piece of paper that said this place would have been Jason’s if Tynan hadn’t killed him. I just need to see it.”
Raymond didn’t say anything.
He was staring into the dregs of his bottle, the whites of his eyes dull and gray.
“This was never just about Groveland, was it?” she said. “The sale?”
Raymond’s voice, when he finally spoke, was hushed and wistful.
“People are funny about this place, Gray,” he said. “I’ve met whites who love it, blacks who can’t stand it, and the other way around, and not a damn thing in between. Everybody’s got their own idea of what Belle Vie ought to be, who it really belongs to.”
“It belonged to Jason,” Caren said. “This was all his.”
“You’ll never prove that, Gray.”
“And there was no way in hell you could run for office in a state with a population this colored, no way to run on your daddy’s good name, and then have the whole world find out your family stole this land from a black man.”
Raymond leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair.
He made a move, as if to take hold of her arm, but she still had the revolver in her right hand.
At the sight of it, he backed off, stammering his words. “I didn’t steal shit, Gray,” he said. “That was Tynan. That don’t have a thing to do with me. I didn’t steal a goddamned thing. And hell if I’m going to be held responsible for what some crooked white man, family or no family, did two hundred years ago. It ain’t fair to me. It ain’t fair to anybody. And I don’t want it on my back anymore. I wish to God Daddy’d never fooled with any of it, never put it on his kids, passing this shit down, on and on. I don’t want it. People been after me for years to sell this land, and I put it off, but I’m finally ready to be done with it.” He then turned and fixed a stare out the windows. “Groveland is a good deal, good for the state,” he said. “People want history, they can read books.”
“Where’s the deed, Raymond?”
“It’s gone.”
The admission wasn’t mean-spirited. It was the truth.
She would never see it, not in this lifetime.
“I can still make 2010 work,” he said, speaking of his place in the political landscape. “That’s a whole year away.” He sank into a chair with the bottle of brandy. “People have short memories.”
“I remember.”
Clancy looked up at her, rolling his shoulders, trying to compose himself. “So I suppose this means you’re going to try to block the Groveland deal, lay some claim to the land,” he said. “I suppose you’re going to pick through dusty records in your family’s name, try to find any old thing that says Belle Vie belonged to you all along.”
Caren shook her head.
“I don’t want it,” she said firmly. “Any more than you do.”
She repeated the words she’d said over her mother’s grave, that it was time for her to leave it behind.
“Where you headed, then?”
“D.C.,” she said, finally saying it out loud. “I’m moving to D.C.”
“Washington, huh?” he said, making a face, as if he didn’t realize they let anybody in the place without an elected seat in government. “You got family there?”
“Something like that.”
She left him alone, in the big house, driving herself home in the company of the plantation’s aged oaks and weeping willows, each branch and leaf dusted with silvery moonlight.
They went all out for the Whitman deal.
Peonies out of season, in shades of plum and rose, with a supporting cast of hothouse orchids, shipped all the way from Memphis; tables set with silver and china trimmed in gold; and a dusky pink carpet sprinkled with white petals, leading from the rose garden to the main house. Lorraine, as instructed, spared nothing for the food: chilled oysters with a mignonette sauce awaited guests on the front porch as soon as the last vows were said; along with a rare Viognier, enough for each guest to have two and three glasses before dinner, served with both Roquefort and Comté cheeses and complemented with a cherry jam dotted with cane crystals. And that was all just to start.
In the dining hall, while Shannon Whitman, resplendent in winter white, beads, and silk, cried through four rounds of drunken wedding toasts, the guests were treated to red cabbage sautéed in cider vinegar; andouille sausage over coarse grits and butter; pork roast in apples and wine; and a whole roasted chicken for each and every table. It was a feast the likes of which Belle Vie hadn’t seen in more than a hundred years. Caren watched it all from the back of the hall, overseeing every last detail.
Later, long after the sun went down and the guests had gone, she helped Lorraine and Pearl wheel a cart full of leftovers—buttercream cake and wine and cheese and champagne—down to the quarters, where the staff had gathered. In the end, they’d all begged off the overtime and the prospect of dressing up as slaves and slave masters for a paying audience one last time. They’d spent the evening filming instead, way down by the quarters and out of sight of the goings-on in the big house.
The scene was Jason’s funeral.
The stage was still set.
Twinkling lights were strung from the wood gates, and bunches of pansies and daffodils in mismatched glass jars lined the dirt road, where the ex-slaves had gathered to say good-bye. It was kind of pretty actually, out here under the stars on a clear, black night. Sometime after midnight, Cornelius hooked his iPod to a boom box and plugged that into Donovan’s generator. It started to feel like a party instead of a funeral—a proper send-off with food and drink and good music, blues and some zydeco, and when it got really late, Earth, Wind & Fire. They danced, some of them; they sat and talked and laughed. Shauna, Nikki, Dell, and Bo Johnston. Luis and Shep and Kimberly, Val and Eddie Knoxville. Cornelius and Pearl and Ennis Mabry and Lorraine and Danny Olmsted . . . and Donovan, of course. Some of these people Caren knew she would never see again, a shame, really. Lorraine was drinking beer from a can, and when she finished, she stood and said it was time to head back, to pick up where the catering crew had left off—bussing dishes and breaking down tables, cleaning the kitchen and any left-behinds in the dining hall. But as Lorraine started to her feet, Caren asked her to please sit down. “Leave it, Lorraine,” she said, her tongue light with champagne, her mood brighter than it had been in weeks, years even. Leave it just as it is.