The Cutting Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

had been unable to do, and he seemed to take her ease with the task as an affront, spitting in her general direction a reminder that no one was to leave the premises and ordering her to wait by the gate for homicide detectives.
    As the group began to disperse, Danny Olmsted could be seen coming over the short hill behind the quarters. Having heard the news by now, he was walking fast, almost jogging, toward them. His trench coat was open and flapping behind him, and both of his shoes were untied. Caren wondered if he’d slept in the library again last night instead of driving back to his office or apartment or wherever it was he went when he wasn’t here. He was an adjunct professor in the history department at LSU, working on what must surely be the world’s most long-anticipated dissertation. Years ago he’d cooked up some arrangement with Leland Clancy giving him use of the plantation’s library, eventually acquiring his own key—a show of scholarship Caren had long suspected was bullshit. She had come upon him catnapping in the library’s Hall of Records one too many times not to know better. The plantation kept him off campus for long stretches of unsupervised time, and it provided a rather effective romantic backdrop for the seduction of unsuspecting coeds. He’d let more than a few of them paw through Belle Vie’s historical documents on file.
    He arrived breathless at the mouth of the grave, ignoring the young deputy, who was telling him to stand back. Danny, who was tall and thin, and sloe-eyed behind his smudged glasses, put his hands on his hips and bent at the waist, peering down at the muddy corpse. “Jesus,” he whispered, his mouth hanging slack in a way that made him look drunk or stupid, as if he couldn’t make sense of what it was he was seeing.
    “Y’all need to get on away from here,” the deputy said, hiking his pants up, the weight of his parish-issued sidearm pulling at his britches. Danny took a step backward, turning clumsily on his heels, coming, for a brief moment, to stand face-to-face with Caren. His was flushed, and a faint sheen of perspiration across his upper lip caught sunlight against his pale skin. He mumbled unintelligibly, then stumbled back the way he came, cutting through the quarters, which she’d asked him many times not to do.
    The young deputy, still tugging at his waistband, turned to Caren next.
    “You, too, ma’am,” he said. “I need to keep this area clear.”
    T he bus from St. Ignatius Middle School was already in the parking lot. They were the only ones Caren couldn’t get on the phone.
    Ernest N. Morial Elementary had, luckily, gotten her message before its fifth-graders left school grounds in Orleans Parish. The school’s vice principal thanked her for the update and promptly agreed that today might not be the best day for a tour of the plantation, what with police detectives en route, as well as the coroner.
    A Ms. Patricia Quinlan—administrative assistant to Giles Schuyler, CEO of Merryvale Properties, Inc., the host of this evening’s dinner reception—said she would have to get back to Caren once she knew more about how Mr. Schuyler wanted to proceed. The woman sounded nervous, but also faintly annoyed, as if the discovery of a dead body on the property was something Caren should have been able to anticipate.
    But no one in the main office at St. Ignatius could get the students’ chaperones or the bus driver on their cell phones, which left Caren standing in the parking lot, trying to explain a set of most unusual circumstances to two sixth-grade history teachers, one of whom was wearing a black sweatshirt with the stateofLouisiana painted in gold glitter. Behind them, the kids were all out of their bus seats, jumping across the aisle, their high-pitched squeals enough to melt metal. Neither teacher looked as yet prepared to endure another ninety-minute drive back to Metairie.
    Caren felt herself starting to sweat.
    She offered them coffee and