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actors,” she said. “He didn’t come to work today.”
    “You have a phone number for him?”
    She nodded. “In my office.”
    “We’ll need that, too.”
    “Fine,” she said, glancing at her watch. They were probably just entering the Civil War at the schoolhouse, a few minutes away from the sudden death of Monsieur Duquesne and the eve of Reconstruction and Belle Vie’s near demise. Which meant the show was almost done, and she would have to improvise some other time-filler. Maybe giveaways at the gift shop. Or Pearl could scoop out ice cream for the kids.
    “What about the cane fields, ma’am?” Lang said. “That’s the Groveland Corporation out there?” He nodded toward the machines and the rows of sugarcane.
    “Yes, they’ve held the lease for the past year.”
    “Your staff have any dealings with their people, or vice versa?”
    “Their workers aren’t allowed on the grounds of Belle Vie,” she said. “Raymond Clancy has always been very clear about that.”
    “Sure, I understand, ma’am,” Lang said, closing his notepad for the first time. “But I guess I’m just wondering in any case if there’s ever been any contact between your people and the workers over there, any conflicts that you know of?”
    “Most of the workers out there don’t speak English, Detective.”
    “I know it,” Lang said, nodding. “And that might be precisely a source of conflict,” he said, adding, “for some .” He paused, waiting on her reaction; the gesture was presented as an act of courtesy, an invitation to unload in safe company any pent-up feelings about the parish’s immigrant population, which swelled every planting season, like the Mississippi after a storm, seeping into a historically tight-knit community. Every year, the feelings of resentment, among locals—blacks in particular, many four and five generations deep—only strengthened, often souring into vocal posturing about “these new people coming here, making themselves at home.”
    Most black folks with roots in Louisiana could trace their people back before the war, when slaves had built the state’s sugar industry with their bare hands. And they all had a good yarn about a great-great-uncle or a distant cousin or somebody who fought with the Union, or a great-great-great-grandfather who served as one of the first blacks in Congress during Reconstruction. There were bits and pieces left behind, letters and faded newspaper accounts, but for the most part this was a history that existed on the wind, in stories passed down through the years. Caren had these stories in her family, too, tales her mother had heard growing up, from elders who were told the very same stories when they were kids. Caren’s mother was born and raised in Ascension Parish, and she was always clear that the Grays were sugar people, that she and Caren came from a line of men who lived and died by what they could produce with their hands. Her granddaddy cut cane, and his daddy before him, all in the fields behind Belle Vie. Her mother loved the whole of this land, and she wanted Caren to love it, too, to know where she came from. She had a piece of history for every corner of the parish, pulling bedtime stories out of the dirt Caren played in, the details changing a little with each telling. She peopled their lives with the hazy stories of men and women Caren would never know, in place of where a father might have been, a sibling or two.
    Caren stopped listening after a while.
    These days you could often hear whispers in town, rumblings about things not being the way they used to be, talk about the lack of good-paying jobs for black folks. One AM radio host even went so far as to publicly blame the Groveland Corporation for high unemployment among the locals, for knowingly hiring illegals and flooding the parish with cheap labor. “Hell, you can’t even get a job bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly anymore without knowing how to speak Spanish,” he’d