this Robois Roque, who vanished off the banquette? My sister asked me to watch for him."
"And me." For a moment he thought she'd been about to say something else, for she turned her head to sweep the street with those dark eyes. But whatever it was she put it aside, and looked back at him. Her strongly drawn brows pinched in a frown. "Now they're-What? The third or fourth people who've asked me about someone who disappeared. Taken sick, they said, or thought... Nobody knows for sure, because two of these people I've been asked of are slaves sleeping out. They didn't go by their masters' with the money from their work. I've prayed, and looked into the ink, and asked of other slaves and those who sell berries in the streets, and no one's quite sure when they last were seen."
January had heard of Mamzelle Marie's network of spies and informers, a gossamer cobweb of words and conversations and bits of intelligence that covered the town like a mist, funneling information back to her house on Rue St. Ann. The voodoos know everything. Who hated their husbands or were waiting for their fathers to die, who had come into money lately and whose menses had stopped, who had spent what at the market or the silk shops, and what curious things had been found in the trash or the gutter or the river. Those who didn't serve her from love did it from fear, bringing her sometimes the nails and hair of this person or that, and sometimes love letters extracted from their mistresses' desks.
It could have been Mamzelle Marie in the first place, he thought, who'd asked Olympe to ask him to look for Robois Roque at the hospital, weaving him into the web as well.
"They could have run," said January. Past her shoulder he, too, was watching the street-for Cora or for Shaw.
"Why?" Marie Laveau shook her head. "These men were saving for their freedom. They knew their masters here; they had work, on the levee or at the cotton press. Their friends were here. If a man's set free he has to leave the state. They had no call to run. It might be the sickness took them far from home, but... I don't like it. There is that about it that-" She made a gesture, like a woman testing the hand of silk for slubs, and she shook her head again. "Speak to me if you hear anything, M'sieu Janvier, if you would be so kind."
Cora was waiting for him in the Pellicots' yard. At first he didn't see her; then she emerged from behind the banana plants that grew around and behind the cistern, and her eyes were scared. "Who was that woman?" She whispered the words as if she feared they'd be heard from the street. "The one in the yellow tignon, that you were talking to?"
"That's Marie Laveau. She's the Queen of the Voodoos," he added, seeing the incomprehension in the girl's eyes.
She crossed herself quickly.
"She was at Black Oak," said Cora. "In the evening, when I went out there once to meet Gervase. She was waiting on the porch, in the twilight. I ran back and Gervase and I, we went elsewhere, but it was her."
"Marie Laveau? You're sure?"
"I saw her close. She had her tignon like that, in seven points. I never saw nobody wore it with so many before."
"They don't," said January. "That's something only the Queen Voodoo in New Orleans is allowed to do.
Marie Laveau." His mind was racing. Not Olympe. Mamzelle Marie herself. "Did she see you?"
Cora nodded. "Here, or there?"
"Both," the girl said, despair and panic in her voice. "I mean, she saw me when I came out of the woods-I didn't see her till I got right up close to the porch-then I turned and ran, since I wasn't supposed to be at Black Oak, ever. None of us was. And just now, I was crossing the street to come here, and she saw me, stopped to watch me pass. I didn't see it was her till I was close. She knows I'm in town."
"And probably doesn't think a thing of it," said January soothingly. "I don't think she'd even recognize you." He remembered how she'd looked back over her shoulder, scanning the street, and knew perfectly well that Mamzelle Marie recognized anything or anyone she'd seen once, however briefly, before. Most of the voodoos did.
"Then it wasn't me she spoke of?"
He shook his head.