Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (38 page)

“Have they, now?” Shaw moved to fold his hands over his chest, but let them slip back to his sides. Sunk in dark circles, his gray eyes had a speculative light.

“The boat coming across from the sugar-mill with food and drinking-water is three or four feet below the eaves now,” Rose continued, going to the open dormer. “There's also a sort of raft in operation. But I wouldn't advise trying to go down into the house before it's fully light tomorrow. Floods like this flush snakes out of their holes. There was a three-foot water-moccasin on the steps about an hour ago when I looked.”

Shaw looked interested. “Still there?”

“Would you like me to check?”

“Iff'n you would, Miss. An' ask Cut-Nose in here for a word with me, if you would... I recollect as you speak Italian?”

Rose nodded.

“An' the Avocet ladies don't? Nor English? They wouldn't speak English around me, but then they wouldn't speak much of anythin' around me....”

Rose shook her head. January had already guessed this: tart-tongued though Rose might be, she would never exercise her bitterness in a language that its targets might understand. “Laurene told me her mother had to communicate with Burke through M'sieu Rabot. Would you like me to speak to M'sieu Chighizoia in Italian?” Behind the spectacle-lenses her eyes twinkled, as if she guessed what Shaw was up to.

“Iff'n you would. Maestro,” he said, as Rose departed through the curtain again, “thank you. You didn't have to do what you did.”

“There's been many times,” said January quietly, “that you didn't have to do what you did.”

“An' bein' that you saved my life-an' a lot of others besides,” Shaw went on, “we'll sort of pass over what you was doin' Johnny-on-the-Spot at Avocet when things sort of blew up there.”

“I appreciate it,” said January gravely. Then, “You know I had nothing to do with what happened.”

“Oh, I figured that Jacinthe didn't seem to know you, anyways. But iff'n you would, I do have another favor to ask.” Between fatigue, shock, and loss of blood, his voice was barely more than a scrape; January had to kneel close beside him, for at the other end of the attic Madame Vivienne was loudly complaining about the food.

“Fact is, Maestro, I ain't forgot why I was lurkin' around Avocet to begin with when the shootin' started,” breathed Shaw. “In the household rag-bag I found the took-apart pieces of a woman's dress: the skirt, the back of the bodice waist, an' the left sleeve, all in good condition, not much worn. The front of the waist an' the right sleeve was missin'-the parts of the garment that'd catch the blood, if a woman were to stab a man up close to her. Now, it was M'am Vivienne's dress, right enough, but a dress can be wore by more than one woman, specially if she ain't particular about the fit because it's dark. So it may be, Maestro, that I'll be needin' some help tonight, 'long about the time everyone's snorin'.”

By the time full darkness fell, the water level around the house had sunk almost to that of the house floor itself. The quarter moon's thin light barely filtered through the attic dormers as January carried Shaw to the ladder, bore a nearly-covered dark-lantern down the trap to the floor below to check for snakes, then re-ascended, silent as a cat, to carry the policeman down.

“You're a fool for doing this,” January whispered, as he guided his friend's feet to the rungs and maneuvered Shaw's good arm around his shoulders. Before full darkness fell he'd cut the rifle-ball out of Shaw's side, bound a dressing as tightly over the wound as he could, and had told him to rest. He went on, more loudly and in French instead of the English in which he usually spoke to Shaw, “Whoever did the murder, what does it matter now?”

In the same tongue Shaw replied, “It matters to me. You fetch the boat, an' leave the rest to me.”

For all Shaw's rangy height, he was thin, and in his years working in the clinic at the Hotel Dieu, January had learned the knack of carrying bodies, though he'd never had the occasion to carry a man of his own height down a ladder in near-pitch darkness before. Moreover, the dead have few opinions about their own comfort. Try as he would to be gentle, twice January had to shift his grip around Shaw's ribs and wrung strangled oaths of pain from the Kentuckian's throat. Shaw was barely conscious by the time they reached the bottom of the ladder. January's injured arm ached damnably in its sling, and he felt sick and dizzy as he lowered the policeman at last to the butler's pantry floor.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“I'll live.” Shaw's voice struggled to remain steady. “Lord, that hurt. Just get me out to the gallery, an' get the boat.” January could hear the thready gasp of his breath in the dark. “An' hurry.”

January cracked the slide on the lantern a trifle more, shone the light around the dining-room. Furniture, books, candle-stubs, and bibelots strewed the slimed floor. A silver needle-case gleamed in the middle of the room; a snake slipped around a woman's shoe and fled. Curtains bloated with wet and dark with mud draggled from their rods. Newspapers clung like lichen to everything in sight, washed from some giant cache where they must have been accumulating for decades. January had taken the precaution of wrapping his legs from boot-top to groin in strips of leather cut from a trunk-covering, yet he stepped carefully when he gathered Shaw up in his arms again and carried him out to the gallery. There were more snakes out there. He only hoped their friend the alligator wasn't lurking somewhere.

The raft Virgil had used to tow supplies from the sugar-house still lay tied to one of the porch colonnettes; January hauled it in on its rope and looked around for an other piece of flotsam to use as a pole. “I don't like to leave you here like this, sir,” he announced, more loudly perhaps than the silence would bear and still in French. He knelt next to Shaw. “There's no telling how many of Mulm's cutthroats survived.”

“. . . take that chance. Need... to get men quick. Just get the boat.”

January straightened up, and stood for a moment looking down at the prostrate form in the dark of the gallery.

“Hurry,” whispered Shaw again, his eyes sliding shut. He started to gesture with his good hand, but it dropped back to his chest.

January turned, straddled the raft-which was only a section of planking-and cast off, paddling toward the sugar-house, invisible beyond the dark trees. He glanced back once, to see the tiny glimmer of the covered lantern and the dim shape of Shaw lying motionless near the door of the butler's pantry. Though Shaw had coached him mostly on what he must say in order to be clearly overheard, he had meant it when he said he thought the man a fool.

Or else, he thought, a more dedicated servant of justice than himself.

Ahead of him the floodwaters were a sheet of silver patched with the dense black of trees. The ruins of the kitchen, stable, laundry, and workshops formed a sort of blighted archipelago against the quicksilver gleam. Not a roof remained of the slave cabins, and most of these humble dwellings had vanished. January guessed-and later confirmed-that the quarters upriver for miles were so ruined. A number of plantation houses had lost their roofs as well, and orchards, crops, barns.

The moment he passed the corner of the house, instead of continuing on toward the sugar-mill he paddled around the corner, tied the raft to the rail again, and climbed back onto the gallery.

Nothing struck at him as he eased his way into the inky house. He could not have said which made him more uneasy, paddling through the floodwaters with his legs dangling, or tiptoeing through the snake-infested house. He stepped carefully, not only because of snakes but because he had no idea where furniture had washed up, and he moved with breathless silence.

Somewhere above him, he heard the stealthy creak of a foot on the attic floor above.

Shaw was right, he thought.

He timed his next footfalls carefully, matching creak for creak when he could. Advancing across the lightless parlor with his plank-paddle stretched out before him like a blind man's cane. Listening.
Seeing in his mind the man still lying by the lantern in the blackness of the gallery, too weak with blood-loss and battering, almost, to move.

The shutters had all been opened downstairs, that the house might more quickly air and dry. At least, in the aftermath of the storm, there were no mosquitoes, though they'd be back soon enough and worse than ever.

Another creak, tiny in the immense silence.
There was another ladder and trapdoor in Duquille's office, but that, he knew, would not be used.

Twenty years. The thought of the planter and his sons made him shiver, though the night was thickly hot. Twenty years.

And in those twenty years, Joffrey Duquille and his slaves had settled into an agreement. You care for me and my sons, and you can live as you please. Sugar was a cash crop, enough to buy tobacco and coffee for everyone on the place. Enough to replace tools and kitchen pots, to buy bright-colored loincloths, beads for the women, new shirts for the shabby, desperate old man and his sons. To buy books-hundreds of them seemed to have washed out of the library, plus those that had been salvaged into the attic above the infected garçonniere wing.

You care for me and my sons, and no one will be sold from here. No one will come to break up your families and your village and your lives.

We don't have strangers here at St. Roche.

Would they have made that bargain, January wondered, had Duquille not offered sanctuary and care to the headman's infected sister? If he'd simply tried to pass her along as she'd been passed along to him? Dealers dyed the hair of older slaves all the time in order to claim them young and fit. Dealers had also been known to plug the anuses of those suffering from dysentery or enteritis, to get them off their hands, not caring what the consequences would be.

As Mulm had not cared.

What some nameless dealer had done to Duquille and his sons made Mulm look like a boy pilfering apples in the market.

Twenty years.

And in all that time, the treasure that Hesione LeGros had stolen from her lover-who had stolen it from Lafitte-had lain... somewhere.

January slipped through the archway between parlor and dining-room. The faintest stain of light outlined the doors onto the gallery. In the silence he heard the ladder creak again, just the tiniest bit.

Then a shadow passed across the door.

For a moment January couldn't tell whether the woman who stood in the doorway of the butler's pantry, looking down at Shaw, was Annette or Vivienne Avocet. Both women were much of a size, and in the frail thread of the lantern-light it was nearly impossible to distinguish individual features. Both had changed from their soaked clothing into garments once worn by Felice Duquille, out of fashion and laid up in trunks long before the disease took hold.

Only when she stepped forward did the light catch for an instant on her blond hair, and on the blade of the knife she held in her hand.

She struck fast. She had a pillow in her other hand and this she slapped down over Shaw's face, muffling any cry he might have made. When he caught her wrist in his good hand, fighting the descending blade, she rammed her knee with all her strength into the bandages that covered his broken ribs. Then January was on her, dragging her back, and she kicked and fought and, when she saw he was a black man, began shrieking, first “Murder!” then “Rape!”

“What, you gonna rape somebody here, eh?” Cut-Nose Chighizola appeared out of the dining-room also. January had to marvel at the man's silence, for though he knew the pirate had to be somewhere in the house, watching all that transpired, he had heard not a sound from him in the darkness.

Annette Avocet stared at him, panting, her square, homely features a mask of rage. Shaw pushed the pillow from his face and asked, “Now, was it Ben who was gonna murder me, Miss?”

She looked wildly around, from one man to the other, recognizing January at last. Within the house, feet scrambled and creaked on the stairs, and voices called out “Annette?”

“Mademoiselle Avocet... ?”

“What's going on?”

“You care to say what's goin' on, Miss?” Shaw tried to prop himself up a little and held out his hand for the paperknife Annette Avocet had dropped. January knew it-he'd borrowed it to get the bullet out of Shaw's ribs. He recalled suddenly what Shaw had said about the wound that had killed Guifford Avocet being too small for a regular dagger, specifically the one that his brother habitually carried.

This weapon was thin-bladed but very sharp, and long enough to have been lethal. Shaw's chest was slashed as if with a razor above the heart. “Miss Chloe,” he said when the other women appeared, blinking and confused, in the doorway, “would you be so good as to look in Miss Avocet's dress pockets an' tell me what's there-? That should be it.” Chloe was unwrapping a little wallet of oiled silk, containing several letters: these she unfolded and held close to the light.

Two of them were from a M'sieu Marius Motier-“That's M'sieu Guifford and Uncle Bertrand's uncle in Marseilles,” said the girl Laurene in a tone of surprise. Vivienne had retreated into the butler's pantry, where she was having hysterics in Melisse's arms. “Quite a wealthy gentleman, Uncle Bertrand always said...”

The third was from a Cousin Catherine Motier. Dated the second of July, it informed Annette Avocet that Uncle Marius had died a few days before Guifford's marriage and had left quite a large sum of money and the controlling interest in his shipping firm jointly to herself and her two brothers.

“Maestro,” said Shaw as Rose bent over him to stanch the bleeding wound in his chest, “Mr. Chighizola, I'll be askin' you two to come to court an' tell the jury about what you seen.”

“According to Cut-Nose”-Rose balanced herself with her snake-stick on a tufted green flottant and stepped gingerly over the rill that surrounded it-“one had to be careful about burying treasure. Any place where there's ground high enough to get a hole dug, that isn't likely to get drowned when the river shifts course, is going to be a long way from whatever boat you brought the treasure on in the first place.”