before the fever season ends. There's a hidden compartment, a false back behind the left-hand upper drawer. And I'd say it's fairly clear why the five thousand isn't mentioned. The advertisement must have been placed Tuesday. When did Otis Redfern come down sick, M'sieu Janvier?
Tuesday? Wednesday?"
"Wednesday night." January leaned over to take the paper from Hannibal. "When did Cora come to you?"
"Wednesday night, after the girls were asleep. It must have been ten or ten thirty."
"This would have been placed Tuesday. Cora told me she slept out in the Swamp the night before coming down here. Obviously whoever placed this didn't know yet that the five thousand dollars were missing."
"Do you think she took it?" asked Hannibal.
Rose Vitrac sighed again and sat for a time with folded arms, hands on shoulders as if instinctively protecting her breasts. Not wanting to be disloyal, thought January. But she knew Cora.
At length she sighed, surrendering one bastion of the fortress she could no longer defend. "I think she would have, if she'd known it was in the house," she admitted. "If both the Redferns were ill, and she saw her chance to get away in the confusion. But she didn't have it when she came to me. I know she didn't.
And if she'd taken it..." She had clearly been about to say, She would have told me, but the discovery of the hundred and eighty dollars, and the necklace of pearls, had proven that trust untrue.
"In any case," she finished, after that sentence had died untouched, "I know she wouldn't have done murder.
"She may not have," said January. He sorted two sheets from the pile and went over to one of the stripped beds; Hannibal went to help him. "But you're going to have a hard time proving she didn't. What I'm trying to figure out is why the money was in cash instead of a draft."
"Easy," said Hannibal. "If you were a gambling man yourself Benjamin, you wouldn't be asking a silly question like that. No, stay where you are, Athene, we don't want your help."
Rose smiled a little at the nickname and settled back on the edge of Genevi?ve's bed gathering the girl's hand again in hers. Grateful, January thought, to be still.
"It takes only an hour to come downriver from Twelve-Mile Point," said January thoughtfully. "Cora could have slipped back into the house Wednesday evening sometime..."
"Wouldn't she have known the Redferns were sick, then?"
He shook his head. "According to Shaw, at least, that didn't take place until after dinner." He didn't add that if Cora had slipped back into the Redfern house Wednesday evening she would have had access to the food, but he saw the searching look Mademoiselle Vitrac gave him. "Monkshood acts fast. The coroner would know what time, exactly, they started to show signs of illness. And he's the only one, now that the servants have all been sold off." He spread the clean sheet over the bed, and gently lifted the girl Victorine from her soiled, sweaty, wrinkled sheets to the clean ones, the endless, brutal labor of sick nursing.
After a time he went on, "If Cora took the five thousand dollars, it might explain why she left the hundred and eighty dollars here-a hundred and ninety, counting Madame Lalaurie's money-and the pearls. If she had the five thousand with her, in a pocket or a reticule, she might not feel she needed what was here. I certainly would think twice about trying to bribe Madame Lalaurie's coachman. But if the five thousand was on her when she was taken, it'll show up somewhere. And given human nature, I suspect I know where."
Chapter Twelve
I will never in my life, Abishag Shaw had said, understand a gamblin' man.
But at least, thought January, if you did happen to want one you knew where he'd be.
Naturally, no man of color was permitted through the front doors of John Davis's casino on the corner of Rues Bourbon and d'Orleans. From the small service courtyard in the building's rear, January could look through the windows to the salons within. The flickering glow of gas lent a curious cast to the faces of the men grouped so intently around the roulette wheels, to the polished tabletops scattered with the garish reds and golds of the cards.
Maybe it was just the heavy buzzing of sleeplessness in his head, the too-recent memory of that stifling dormitory bedchamber he had just left, but there was something weirdly disjointed about that sight.
Money lay on the tables,