Fever Season (30 page)

Not Rose. Not Rose.

“The first night they took her, she wrote out a paper giving me quitclaim to her books—backdated to a week before her arrest, so they can’t be seized in payment of her debts when they foreclose on the building. I’ve brought some of them over here already.” Hannibal nodded. January had been vaguely aware of what, in the dense darkness, he had taken for packing boxes in the corners of the little room. Peering through the gloom, he saw now that they were stacks of books, piled crazily on top of one another.

“There’s more in your room. And all the science texts and atlases yet to bring over. I’ve tried to find her,” Hannibal added. “It was a long night, Friday. Geneviève must have died a little before sunset, but neither of us knew it at the time. Victorine and Antoinette both went just before dawn. As I said, Rose took it hard. I didn’t like to leave her but she insisted, saying she needed to sleep. I went over there as soon as I was awake Saturday afternoon and found
the place locked tight, with police seals on it. So I went to the Cabildo and she asked me to bring her some things like clean clothing and a comb and brush, and some paper and ink—that’s when she gave me the books—and she told me what happened. The police evidently walked straight in and went to the compartment in her desk where she had the pearls.…”

“Why didn’t she get rid of them?” moaned January. Somehow, it was all he could think of to say.

“Well,” said Hannibal, “I did ask her that. She had some kind of idea of faking Cora’s death to get pursuit off her and using the pearls as evidence of identity. Only, of course, the girls’ illness intervened. She wouldn’t write to you, and made me promise not to do so either. She said she had a note from you that morning saying that your sister was ill. Is Minou better?”

January nodded wearily. “Her baby died.”

“Her first.” The fiddler closed his eyes, as if seeing again the three girls in the stifling attic. “I’m sorry.”

“It happens.” January spoke without bitterness. His mind was full of disjointed pictures, reaching back and back through the previous days: Henri Viellard, asleep in the chair beside Minou’s bed, clasping the hand of the sleeping woman. The soft chatter of the women in Minou’s front room, and how they would come to keep him and Minou and one another company.

Whores, white society would call them, or those who didn’t understand. But they looked after one another.

“Her friends are with her. I couldn’t leave before this evening. Maybe it’s best that neither of you wrote.”

The pain in him was a hot weight, a fever he could not shake. A slow roll of thunder shuddered the air.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. He felt helpless, battered. Madame Clisson and Marie-Anne and Iphègénie
had been there for Minou. Who had been there for Rose? “I don’t know. Was she all right in the jail?”

“Well, she was pretty stunned,” said Hannibal. “She said she kept thinking she was dreaming, or that this was all happening to someone else. This was after she started hearing the rumors about the money, too.”

“What happened about that?” January looked up angrily. I
was warned
, Agnes Pellicot had said. “Who says that?”

Hannibal shook his head. “I only know it’s being said. They locked up the school the day she was arrested—her creditors, and her backers, I mean, demanding it as an asset. Their agents, really, because, of course, all the Forstalls and Bringiers and McCartys are still at the lake. Hence the backdated quitclaim on the books. I’ve been sneaking them out a few at a time for the past three nights. Most of them are her personal possessions, anyway, not the school’s. She’s got a wonderful volume of the Lyric Poets in the original—I haven’t seen this edition since I left Dublin.

“She hasn’t even been able to get in and get her own clothing; I looked. I’ve asked around the Swamp.…”

“She’d never go there.” January hadn’t meant the words to come out so harshly. He closed his fist against the urge to strike his friend across the face.

The fiddler’s coffee black eyes were weary within the bruised erosion of lines. “No woman
goes
there,” he said quietly. “But a lot of them end up there all the same. As it happens,” he went on, as January opened his mouth again
to protest, “she didn’t, or hasn’t yet. Myself, I think she’s left the town completely.”

January was silent.
I am ruined
, the note had said.

Every penny I own is tied up in this building.…

And after all he felt for her—after running off to try to clear Cora for her—he hadn’t been there when she most needed him. Only came in to view the wreckage, like the horrified survivor of a Euripides play. As he had come in on Ayasha, too late.

“Where?” January meant to speak a sentence. Only a word came out.

“Baton Rouge,” guessed Hannibal promptly. “Though that’s a little close to New Orleans, if she was planning on opening another school. Maybe Charleston. Maybe New York.”

“Where would she get the money?”

And Hannibal only shook his head.

“There has to be some way to find her.”

“And what?” Hannibal asked. Lightning flashed again, white and cold on his thin, lined face, overwhelming the small warmth of the candle.

January had no reply.

“She wouldn’t come back, you know. Not to a town where she’s been accused of harboring a murderess, or even a runaway slave, for that matter.”

Still January said nothing. The thunder rolled over the town, far off and dim, like the breathing of some unknowable monstrosity in the distance.

Hannibal reached beneath his pillow, and brought out a sheet of creamy paper, on which Rose’s penmanship lay like Italianate lace. “We have her books,” he said logically. “If I know our Athene, it means we’ll see her again.”

•   •   •

In the breathless smolder of storm-weather, January made his way down the silent streets to the Cabildo the following morning. He found Abishag Shaw laboriously composing the report of the arrest of seven or eight men “of French and American extraction” for a brawl the previous evening that had begun outside the Ripsnorter Saloon on Gravier Street and had ended with a sordid biting, gouging, and hair-pulling match encompassing most of Canal Street. “Duelin’, they swears it was.” The Kentuckian sighed, shoving a greasy forelock out of his eyes. “With three or four so-called seconds per side takin’ swings at each other an’ everyone fallin’ in and out of the gutters an’ cussin’ fit to break a parson’s heart. We got the lot of ’em in the cells now, every man jack of ’em swearin’ cross-eyed as how the others busted the ‘Code’ an’ deserved the whalin’ they got.”

He leaned his bony elbows on the desk, arms extended flat on the plank surface like a resting cat, and blinked up at January with deceptively mild gray eyes. “I take it you come about Mademoiselle Vitrac?”

“Who told you Cora Chouteau took refuge with her?” January was far too angry to pretend he knew nothing of the matter now, and Shaw showed no surprise at the question. The letter January had sent asking for him to question Mrs. Redfern’s servants lay between them on his desk.

“That Isabel girl,” replied Shaw promptly. “Isabel Moine.” Any other American would have pronounced it ‘Moyne’ instead of opening the vowel like a Frenchman. “I got to admit, Maestro, considerin’ your friendship with the lady, and them inquiries you was makin’ at Madame Lalaurie’s, I wasn’t tetotaciously astonished. And them pearls, and that sack of money, they was right where that girl said they was in the desk.”

“Eavesdropping little bitch.” Isabel’s sulky dark face returned to him, flushed with sleep. The way Rose had brushed a strand of hair from the girl’s lips. The affection in Rose’s eyes, even for her.
Don’t you rip up at her.…

“Emily Redfern poisoned her husband. Cora found the poison the day before and fled, thinking it was intended for her. Maybe it was. She came to town on the
New Brunswick
Wednesday afternoon; half a dozen stevedores on the wharf can attest it was there by four, probably earlier than that. If the cook Leonide told you he saw Cora entering the house at twilight—”

“It was Mrs. Redfern that told me,” said Shaw mildly, and spat in the direction of the sandbox. The brown expectorant fell short of its target by at least a yard. Fifteen or sixteen previous efforts marked the stone floor between box and desk. “The cook was gone by the time I spoke with her.”

“The same way she told the magistrate about her own symptoms?” January produced the menus from his pocket, laid them on the desk. “That’s what they ate for supper that night. Bring in any cook in the city and ask him; there isn’t a thing there that takes over an hour to prepare. Cora Chouteau couldn’t have poisoned the supper before she left.”

Shaw turned the papers over with fingers like jointed oak sticks. “And you got these where?”

January met his eyes coldly. “The rubbish bins outside the house at Spanish Bayou.” He opened his mouth to add,
This was in Emily Redfern’s chimney
, but knew even as the words came to his lips that Shaw—and any lawyer—would only ask, Did Cora Chouteau have access to that chimney? And, of course, she had. So he waited, silent, while Shaw scratched his stubbled jaw.

“This is all very interestin’, Maestro. And believe me, with your permission I’ll sort of set it aside in a safe place to kind of ferment a spell, and see what else I can find. But I do think I should point out to you that even if Miss Chouteau gets cleared of Borgialatin’ the soup herself, it ain’t gonna win her freedom.”

The lieutenant folded up the menus and secreted them in his desk. Scraps and shards of quill lay all over its tobacco-stained and scarified surface; the report he’d been working on looked as if a lizard had escaped from the inkwell and run madly about on the page.

At most, January thought, if Emily Redfern were hanged, Cora Chouteau would become the property of her estate. And he knew as he formed the words in his mind that Emily Redfern would never hang.

“I would suggest that you speak to Mademoiselle Vitrac about why Emily Redfern would want to shift the blame for the murder onto Cora,” he said, more quietly. “Except that Emily Redfern seems to have taken pains to have her driven out of town in disgrace.”

“Well, it’s a funny thing about that.” Shaw dug in the back of his desk drawer, and withdrew a double-strand of softly golden miniature moons. “Miz Redfern says these ain’t her pearls. And that hundred and ninety dollars we found at the school—Miz Redfern says the money that feller Granville from the Bank of Louisiana paid her Tuesday was all in banknotes. Not a coin in the lot.”

He trailed the pearls from one big hand to the other, as if admiring the smoothness of them, the organic satiny texture, like flower petals, so different from the jewels of the earth.

“What?”

“Well, them was my very sentiments, Maestro. You ever have the privilege of meetin’ the lady?”

January nodded. He had, he realized, only the dim vision of blurred whiteness behind crêpe veils, and the sharp hard voice biting out orders to the obsequious Fraikes. But he’d seen Emily Redfern in action. That was enough.

“She strike you as a lady who’d forbear to recover a necklace worth five hundred dollars out of consideration for a schoolmarm’s reputation? Or who’d pass up a hundred and ninety dollars which could be hers for the sayin’ of, ‘Yes, it’s mine?’ ‘Specially now, with her not able to even pay the rent where she’s stayin’?”

January opened his mouth, then shut it again. Someone came over behind Shaw’s desk and lit one of the oil lamps; with the thickening of the storm clouds the big room was fast becoming dark as evening, though it was barely ten. “Have you investigated?”

“Investigate what? Why a lady chooses not to prosecute or pursue the gal she claims killed her husband? Iff’n she says these ain’t her pearls I can’t shove ’em in her pocket for her, nor,” Shaw added shrewdly, “would you want me to.”

January was silent, trying to fit pieces together that would not fit.

“Now as for them servants,” Shaw went on after a moment. “I checked every exchange and barracoon from here to Carrollton. I got a passel of directions.” He delved into the drawer once more to produce a sheaf of unreadable notes. “But I can’t go traipsin’ to the Missouri frontier lookin’ for ’em to ask. ’Specially when you know and I know the case would be just as likely to go against her as for her, with the evidence we got.”

Shaw cached the notes back in his drawer, and dumped the pearls unceremoniously in after them. “That
whole business about havin’ only Miz Redfern’s word about her symptoms, and all the servants bein’ gone now, kind of itches me, too, Maestro. But if we took it to court there’d only be one person hurt.… And she’s gone missin’ anyway.”

Two people
, thought January.
Two
.

“And what about Mademoiselle Vitrac?” he asked, after Shaw’s words had lain silent on the air for a time. “Do you know where she went?”

“Once the charge against her was dropped,” pointed out Shaw, “it ain’t our lookout where she goes nor what she does. Miz Redfern sayin’ those pearls wasn’t hers, and that money wasn’t the banknotes that Cora girl stole, means we got no case against Miss Vitrac for harborin’ a fugitive—nor you, neither. Given what they’s sayin’ about her school, I’d say she left town.”

A blue-uniformed City Guard came through, leading a line of chained men with buckets and shovels. A city street-cleaning contractor ambled dispiritedly in their wake. Shaw smiled and saluted them as they went past; the contractor mouthed something, but didn’t make an audible noise.

“Who,”
asked January, slowly and coldly, “is saying about Rose’s—Mademoiselle Vitrac’s—school?”

“Well, everybody, now. Chief Tremouille’s been asked to investigate the finances of the place. Armand d’Anouy’s one of the backers; he’s close as a louse with Mayor Prieur. They all say one of the other backers tipped ’em, but they won’t say who. And if you think I can ask ’em,” Shaw added, scratching his long hair, “you don’t know as much about this town as I thought you did, Maestro.”