The Cutting Season Read Online Free PDF

a sincere apology and promised a truncated tour of the property, one that would skirt, in a wide arc, anything unseemly. She personally escorted them to the old schoolhouse, where performances were held three days a week and all day on Saturdays. As the students shuffled into rows of plastic folding chairs, Caren ducked into the back room—a spacious closet behind the stage that acted as a greenroom for the cast. She told Ennis Mabry to feel free to draw out some of Donovan’s monologues, ad-libbing if need be, to fill time. Ennis stood, twisting a handkerchief in his arthritic hands. “Sorry, Miss C,” he said, before relaying the news that his nephew, the stand-in for the part of the plantation’s driver, had backed out of playing the part. “He don’t want nothing to do with no cops,” Ennis said.
    “Just do the best you can,” she said to the cast.
    The Belle Vie Players were unusually quiet this morning.
    They looked spooked.
    Cornelius McCrary, who was wearing a faded red-and-blue OBAMA ’08 T-shirt over the tattered muslin pants that were his official FIELD SLAVE #2 costume, was staring at the floor. Nikki Hubbard, the plantation’s SEAMSTRESS, was playing with the zipper of her letterman’s jacket. Dell and Shauna, MAMMY and YOUNG HOUSE SLAVE, respectively, were tying each other’s aprons in place. Bo Johnston, who had the very important task of filling the boots of TYNAN, the former overseer and distant forefather of the Clancy clan who took over the plantation after the war, was putting on his costume. He and Dell kept looking over at Eddie Knoxville.
    Caren couldn’t help feeling that something was going unsaid.
    She tried to put them at ease.
    “Okay,” she said, because she had some basic sense of how this would go. She’d been around the mechanics of a criminal investigation before. It wasn’t so long ago that she didn’t remember. “Here’s what will happen next. There’ll be homicide detectives here. They’re going to want to ask you some questions, each of you individually probably. It’s not something at all to be afraid of.” Here she tried to smile, and felt how incredibly tense she was, and afraid, all the while she was telling them to relax. “Just answer their questions simply and honestly,” she said. It’s what she used to tell her clients.
    The room was dead quiet.
    Val Marchand, or MADAME DUQUESNE, according to the playbill, was drinking a Pepsi, sitting next to Kimberly Reece and Terry “Shep” Shepard, who played the Duquesnes’ two grown children, MANETTE and LE ROY. Shep, a former high school football star, seemed anxious and fidgety, his left knee pumping up and down. Val rubbed a fleck of pink lipstick off her teeth. She wasn’t saying anything either. Eddie, who had played the part of MONSIEUR DUQUESNE ever since he retired from a water treatment plant in St. Charles Parish, was either elected or self-appointed as the one to speak. He took a wide step in Caren’s direction, standing close enough that she could smell the morning’s amaretto on his breath. His voice was flat and dry, just above a whisper. “Where is Donovan ?” he said. The others were all looking at her, too.
    The question about Donovan’s whereabouts did not seem casual, and she actually paused before answering. At her hip, Gerald’s voice cut through a wave of static. From his roaming post, he announced, “Policemen are here, ma’am.”
    She lifted the walkie-talkie from her waist, answering Gerald. “Okay.”
    To the cast, she said, “Just let me know when the show is done.”
    Not until she stepped outside did she realize her hands were shaking.
    She closed her eyes and saw the blood and the dirt again, the open grave and the curl of that woman’s back. She leaned her weight against the trunk of the nearest tree, pressing a hand against her navel, holding it in, willing herself not to throw up, just as she had in those first months of pregnancy, when she had refused to be brought