Read Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave for Free Online Page A

bed beneath a clean sheet obviously borrowed from somewhere else. Flies clung to the mosquito-bar, swarmed around the bloodied dress where it lay wrapped in a newspaper outside the shack's rear door. The storm-shadowed interior of the little building reeked of the kerosene and pepper that had been sprinkled all around her to keep the ants away. Through the dirty scrim of the netting January saw that she still lay in the position in which he'd seen her on the floor, one arm flung above her head and the other tucked beneath her breast. Someone had combed out her hair. When the rigor wore off, he knew, her neighbors would dress her in a nightgown, probably not her own, and collect what money they could among themselves so that she would not be buried in Potter's Field.
    Standing beside the bed-dripping on the scuffed and trampled floor, for the rain had caught him just the other side of the Swamp January could feel his sister's eyes on him, waiting for him to say something, so that she could lie and tell him the Coroner had come after all. Thunder boomed and the damp wind flowed through the shed, bellying the mosquito-bar. The cypresses and oaks outside made a rushing noise, like water through a millrace. Around the front door, Gali and Titine and their neighbors were drinking ginger-water and trading stories about the dead woman on the bed, the woman who'd glowed with topaz and flame-colored silk and that tower of black-and-golden plumes, who'd died so poor, she'd spent the last evening of her life scrounging leftover vegetables from the market-women ... and had insisted on dividing them with a neighbor who had a child.
    I'm gonna shoot that man of mine for this. . . .
    Twenty-three years, thought January, since she'd pressed beside him in the shelter of the piano, a stiletto in her hand and a smile on her lips. Twenty-three years during which he'd become a doctor, and played at the Paris Opera; in which he'd loved and married, studied and traveled.... “Michie Janvier?”
    He opened his eyes, looked down to see the woman Suzie beside him. Her faded dress was soaked from the rain, which was pouring hard now. She must have just come across from her house. In her hands was the apron Hesione had worn, tattered and filthy where it wasn't brown with blood. “I was takin' her clothes to the trash-heap,” she explained, “when I found this. It was in her pocket.”
    She held out her hand. In it were two cut pieces of a silver Spanish reale-bits, they were sometimes called, eighths of a reale sliced up to make change. Pieces of eight.
    With them was a whole silver double-reale, a doubloon.
    Enough for a poor woman to live on for months.

THREE
     
    “And did anyone ever come?” Rose Vitrac glanced back over her shoulder at January, who had loyally accompanied her into the kitchen of the St. Chinian town house on Rue Bourbon to make coffee.
    And in fact, with the first cool of evening already drowning the high-walled courtyard in shadow, the kitchen wasn't nearly as infernal as it must have been in the hot part of the day. How old Martine-Veryl St. Chinian's cook had endured turning out a full-on Creole dinner in this weather, January couldn't imagine. Frequent trips outside to chop vegetables or roll pastry on the table under the pepper-tree, probably. But now that most of the work was done, Martine was prepared to tolerate Rose coming in to make coffee.
    The cook was dearly fond of old St. Chinian's nephew Artois, and extended this benevolence to Artois' tutor, even if she didn't think it quite right that the tutor was a woman. If Michie Artois was happy, it was well with her.
    January shook his head. “No one came,” he said. The last sunlight gilded the roof-slates and fleckered the peppertree's feathery leaves. A rust-red dragonfly darted into the kitchen, perched briefly on Rose's tignon, then whirled away.
    “It isn't as if they're inundated with work at this time of year.”
    Rose said nothing. She concentrated instead