"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

sheep and pigs, picked clean by ants. These were mingled with wads and stains of chewed
tobacco of varying ages, though a considerably larger number of these-freshsplotched the dirt
floor around where the murderer had sat in the chair by the back wall.
"He searched the place," said January.
Olympe looked around at the jumbled bedding, the neglected dishes, the whiskey-bottles
gleaming in the weeds, and gave a mirthless chuckle. "Like you can tell?"
"Oh, yes," said January. "You can follow his tracks, for one thing. Look, he carried a candle, a
wax one, not the tallow one on the box there, so he must have looked around after she was dead.
Were the shutters open or closed when she was found?"
Olympe frowned, and glanced at the single window. "They was open when I got here." They
were open now, and between two cypresses another shack could be seen, a ramshackle cottage
pieced together from bits of old flatboats, with chickens scratching around its rear door. January
looked back at Hesione LeGros' body. At her dirty dress and dirtier gray hair, and the bare feet
whose toenails had grown out into curving horny claws. He recalled the parure of topazes she'd
worn with that gaudy redgold dress: that gorgeous necklace, earrings, bracelets the size of slave
manacles. The glint of the stiletto in her hand, and the smile on her lips. I'm gonna shoot that man
of mine for this....
The ground here was low, close by the cypress swamp that lay all along the back edge of town. In
the winter it would be freezing cold, and there was neither stove nor hearth. A ragged mosquito-
bar hung over the bed, torn and looped carelessly back. By the number of bites on Hesione's face
and neck it couldn't have done her much good. But then, she was probably drunk most nights, by
the time she slept.
He let his breath go in a sigh. He hadn't recognized her when he'd seen her on the levee,
inebriated and foulmouthed and already grown old. Hadn't connected her with that bright-eyed
girl in the defiantly gaudy dress.
Life battered the poor.
Olympe came back to his side. "What was he lookin' for? She didn't own but the clothes she
wore."
"Maybe some of her neighbors can tell us."
He started to cross toward the door, but his sister stepped in front of him: "You ain't just gonna
leave her lay?" The flies had settled again. The body, which he'd returned to its original position
face-down, looked as if it had been covered with a shroud of black lace, one that moved and
glittered in the morning light.
"Whoever the Guards send to look at the place, he'll want to see it as it was when she was found."
Even as the words came out of his mouth he felt like a simpleton, and Olympe's eyes jeered at
him, at his trust in the white man's laws. Two years his junior, she had known from earliest
childhood, perhaps even before he had, that their mother had no great regard for her slave
husband's African-featured children, lavishing her care instead on their lovely lacetrimmed half-
sister by St.-Denis Janvier. Now she didn't even speak, only looked at him with that combination
of incredulity and scorn.
"I'll go down to the Cabildo," he said, "and see they send someone."
"Oh, I'd go along to watch that, brother," retorted Olympe. "Only I got the ironin' yet to do this
morning." Still, she settled herself on the edge of the filthy bed to wait for him as he went out into
the yard.
Summers, New Orleans slowed, like a stagnant river sinking in the heat. Sugar harvested in
November, a desperate race against frost. In December, slaves dragged the long, coarse sacks
through the cotton-fields before the bitter-cold first light dawned and picked the sharp, dry boles
with chilblained fingers that bled. First frost brought the businessmen back to New Orleans from
their country places in Milneburgh or Mandeville by the lake, brought the steamboats downriver
in droves with the winter rise. Flatboats came in from Ohio and Kentucky, loaded with pumpkins