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

"Hessy," answered Suzie. "Hessy LeGros-Hesione. An' she wasn't so bad, you know, 'cept when
she was real drunk. She tore up Richie here pretty bad last month when she got the horrors...."
She nodded to her young man, who did indeed have a healing cut on his right hand. "Who'd a'
done this?"
Who indeed?
"Could you good people leave us for a few minutes, Olympe and me?" He sat back on his heels
and straightened his back, looked around at the neighbors. "I want to take a better look at her, see
if the bastard did more than kill her."
There was a murmur and they backed away, so that Olympe could close the rickety doors.
Moving carefully-he could already see the dirt floor was scuffed all over with tracks around the
body-January turned up the tattered skirts. It was difficult to tell because of the fluids and matter
leaking out of the corpse, but he didn't think the woman had been raped, either before or after
death. Her bodice waist hadn't been torn open, only ripped on one shoulder, as if she'd thrashed
away from an attacker's grip.
Dribbles of tobacco-spittle, old and new, stained the front of her dress.
He got to his feet, and wiped his hands on a bandanna handkerchief from his pocket. "What do
you know about her?" he asked his sister. Voodoos could generally be counted on to know
whatever there was to be known.
Olympe shrugged. "That she was a drunkard; that she was poor; that she didn't deserve to live this
way. Or to die this way." In the morning heat, sweat already blotched his sister's faded calico
bodice. "She was a free woman. No family that I know of. She claimed she used to be Jean
Lafitte's mistress, but I don't think that was true."
"No," agreed January, suddenly realizing where he'd seen that neat little mole before. "But she
was mistress to one of his captains." And as he moved cautiously around the room examining the
criss-crossed tracks, and the contents of the room's single shelf, he recounted the events of
General Humbert's birthday dinner, twenty-three years ago. "Here's her visitor, look," he said,
crouching to show Olympe the print of a wide, square-toed boot. A notch had been scored in the
heel, as if the wearer had trodden on something sharp. The tracks led from the rear door-which
looked out into the woods-to the chair beside the bed, near a packing-box on which a burning
candle had been set. The candle stump remained, in a messy dribble of pale brown "winding-
sheets," themselves already sagging with the heat.
Scratches in the dirt floor marked where the chair had been knocked over and later set back on its
legs. Deep heel-gouges showed where the visitor had sprung, strode, struggled among the vaguer
scuffings of Hesione's bare feet, all covered and mucked over by the first great splash of blood. A
yellow-and-green tignon lay trampled there, too.
Blood and tracks crossed the floor to the body.
The man's tracks continued. Beside the bed, which was planks on a frame nailed to two walls and
a bedpost in the corner-the moss mattress was rucked a little, but hadn't been turned or had the
lumps shaken out of it in months and it crawled with bedbugs and fleas. Along the wall, where a
shelf held three dirty and louse-ridden tignons, an assortment of unwashed gourd dishes, four
braided-straw cats and horses, a lot of whiskey-bottles and a nearly-empty sack of coffee-beans.
Beans scattered the shelf and the table beneath it, which also bore a dirty cup and bowl, and a
basket of strawberries creeping with flies. A small handful of beans scattered the floor
immediately underneath. When January crouched beside them he observed that they were shiny,
without dust.
In the dirt of the floor beside the beans, two small round blobs of white candle-wax gleamed, also
dustless.
Under the table, under the bed, around the scraped slots near the table that marked the chair's
usual place and all throughout the weeds that poked in under the shed's walls, the unclean debris
of a hundred frugal meals decayed: bread-crumbs, fruit-cores and pips, the knuckle-bones of