and combs still lay on the small vanity table, though the drawers of that table had clearly been opened and gone through for earrings, bracelets, whatever could be found. A cheap French Bible lay on the floor.
"No sign of violence." Hannibal pushed open the door that led through into the parlor. Shadows reeled as he put the candelabra through to look. "Though I suppose if one woke in the middle of the night with a man pointing a shotgun at one, one's impulse to violence would be limited." He came back into the bedroom, stroking at his graying mustache.
"No," said January softly. "No sign of violence. No smell of fever or sign of disease. A band of men," he said. "A band of men roving the streets, carrying clubs-proba bly carrying guns-breaking into houses where the neighbors are gone, where the inhabitants would not be missed."
"That means they were watching the place."
"Maybe," said January. "You can make a fortune in a year, in the new Indian lands, planting cotton-if you have the hands." He touched the small porcelain bowl of hairpins on the little dresser, something no woman would have gone to the lake-or anywhere else-without. "It would be worth putting a little time in, to learn who has no family to miss them and no neighbors to be able to say exactly when they vanished.
Marie Laveau isn't the only one to employ spies. And in the fever season, no one would look. Everyone would assume they simply died and were buried. By the time anyone who knew them came back to town, they couldn't even identify a body."
He shivered, the fear he had felt that night turning to anger, a deep and burning rage. Remembered the boatman's dark eyes gazing out from string-wrapped picka ninny braids: I don't go up there anymore...
"As they would have assumed of me."
Hannibal set the candles down and trimmed the wicks. What person leaving town for a few weeks wouldn't have taken the candle scissors from the corner of the dresser? What woman, who couldn't afford more than two corsets, would have left both behind?
Very softly, January went on, "Americans coming into town complain about our people sticking together.
They make jokes how everybody knows everybody's cousins and sisters and friends and business: how you need an introduction to so much as have dinner. But there's a reason for it."
He stepped back through the shutters to the yard, drew them closed behind him and worked a wedge of the splintered wood between them to hold them shut. Hanni bal blew out the candles, plunging the tiny yard from shadow to Erebean darkness.
"It's so we can prove who we are," said January. "So none of us is out there alone."
He slept the remainder of the night at the D?lier town house, unwilling to walk the streets of the French town until daylight. In the morning he and Hannibal made their way back to Gallatin Street, to the shabby groggery operated by the freedman Lafr?nni?re. Lafr?nni?re told them the woman Nani? usually could be found there around noon-"Before she starts her work," he put it and as it was already well past ten, January paid a couple of picayunes for two bowls of beans and rice, and asked if Nani? had ever found her friend.
"Who-Virgil?" Lafrenniere winked. "Nani?, she got lots of friends. Virgil, I think Bronze John must have got him."
"He wouldn't have run away?"
Two or three children peeked in through the back door, staring at the unprecedented spectacle of a white man consuming beans and rice in their father's grocery. Hannibal, who abhorred children whatever their race, ignored them.
"Run away? Why?" The barman shrugged. "Virgil had four hundred dollars saved up in the Bank of Louisiana, to buy his freedom with. He paid his wages at the cotton press over to Michie Bringier, and Michie Bringier gave his word not to sell him. And why should he, when he's bringin' in five dollars a week? Michie Bringier, he has six, seven men that sleep out-two of 'em livin' in the attic just down the street. Why'd Virgil want to run away? Where'd he go, that he'd have it this good?"
Nani?, when she came in, confirmed this. "I think it have to be fever," she said, a worried frown on her gaptoothed face. "It musta took him away from home. I keep hopin' I'll find him in one of the hospitals, but this was a week ago now that Virgil didn't come visit me like he