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"Could have?" said Olympe. "She was there, cherie, and right in Angelique's pocket the whole time."
January's eyes met hers, and he knew with a sinking sense of shock of whom she spoke. "Clemence Drouet" And then, "That's ridiculous. She worshiped Angelique."
The eyes of both sisters rested on him, older and younger, with the same exasperated patience, the same slight wonderment at his blindness. It was Dominique who spoke.
"Oh, Ben, you don't think the plain girls, the fat girls, the ones who fetch and carry and follow around after the pretty ones, don't know exactly how they get talked about behind their backs?" There was pity and a little grief in her voice. "You think Clemence couldn't have hated Angelique at the same time she loved her?"
"Doctor John, he say he made Clemence a couple fine gris-gris," said Olympe. "The one you gave me and another that may still be under the back step, and it can stay there, for all of me, if Phrasie Dreuze is going to live in that house. Mamzelle Marie tell me," she added, as Dominique went to pull a bundle of yellow notepaper from the drawer of the secretaire, "the men who beat you up was Clemence's brother
Marquis and his friend, tryin' to get that gris-gris back before you could find out who laid it and tell on her."
January remembered how the men's hands had torn at his coat. For money, he'd thought at the time. Remembered too the young woman's round, tear-streaked face in the shadows of Angelique's house, the look of terror in her eyes as Euphrasie Dreuze had wailed of murder. She's been underfoot all morning, his mother had said. "Mostly they do stop at gris-gris, you know," added Olympe quietly, leaning back on the divan like a slim black serpent and stroking the cat's white feet. "Women who have hate in them. They'll put a pasteboard coffin on somebody's back step, or a cross of salt, as a way of doing murder and not doing murder. Some of them, it makes them stop and think."
"I know last fall that American Jenkins came over and talked to Clemence, at just about every Blue Ribbon Ball," said Dominique. She lowered the papers, her dark eyes sad. "But of course Angelique never could stand to see men paying attention to anyone but her. Still, I'd never have thought Clemence would harm a hair of An-gelique's head."
"Nor would she," said January softly. "If she went to Doctor John for a gris-gris, she could have gone for something else. Poison, to slip in her glass-and she'd have had every opportunity in the world. Even an emetic on the night of the ball, if she wasn't up to doing murder. Strangling her with a scarf at a public ball..." He shook his head.
"Cheri, I was ready to strangle her with a scarf at that ball," retorted Dominique, returning to shuffling her papers. "And I hadn't just seen her walk off with the first man who'd paid me any attention in my life. There," she said, poking her finger down. "I thought I saw her go ru
"What is that?" January craned his head to see what was written. "I thought Shaw came and got his notes when they opened the case again."
"Silly." She crossed to him, handed them over- neat, small, perfect French handwriting on creamy gilt-edged notepaper. "I copied them. If there's going to be a nine days wonder in this town, of course I'm going to make sure I'm the one who has all the facts."
Minou had rearranged the notes in chronological order. At quarter of nine, Clemence Drouet was listed as "downstairs-court? lobby?" Also listed in the court at the time was the orange-and-green Turk, and Indian with a question mark, which could have been anyone.
Shortly thereafter, Xavier Peralta had been seen going into Froissart's office with the dueling party- Granger, Mayerling, the purple pirate, Bouille, Jenkins- but when one Doucette Labayadere (costumed as a mulberry tree-a mulberry tree?) saw them emerge, the party had consisted solely of Froissart, Granger, and Bouille. The others, presumably, had left at some earlier time.
No one had seen Galen Peralta in the downstairs lobby after the progressive waltz, but at least one other person had seen Augustus Mayerling.
He sat for a time, turning the notes over and over in his hand.
Mayerling was an outsider. A white man, true, but a man raised outside of slave-holding society. A man who would pick a surgeon on the grounds of experience rather than color.
If nothing else, it was worth asking what he knew.
"May I take these?"
"You may not!" retorted his sister indignantly. Then, relenting, "I'll make you out a copy; you can get it tomorrow."
"You're a peach." He kissed her hand, then looked out the open French doors, where the light was fading to final, rainy dusk. "Something tells me we may need an extra copy where we can get at it."
"I have the original notes, too," she said. "I mean the ones the officer made that night. Monsieur Shaw left them here when he had his fair copy and I just put them in a drawer. Will you be speaking to Monsieur Shaw?"
January set down the notes. "I don't know," he said. "If I can do it without being arrested on the spot, yes. You say you gave him my letter. Did he read it?"
She nodded.
"Did he say anything?"
"Nothing. Just put it in his pocket. But he can read," she added quickly. "I saw him read these notes when he took them."
Olympe sniffed, sounding extremely like their mother. "There's miracles every day. Will you need a place to stay, brother? This Shaw will know Mama's house-this house, too," she added, and January noted, a little cynically, that for one tiny unguarded second Dominique looked relieved. "If worse comes to worst there are other places you can stay as well, until we can get you out of town."
"Good," said January bitterly. "So I can be a fugitive, because witnesses don't want to testify anything that'll make a jury think a white killed that woman."
"Better than bein' a corpse for the same reason." She shifted the cat off her lap and fetched an oiled-silk umbrella from behind the door. "I'll find somebody who can get a letter to this Shaw, set up a meetin'." She went to the French doors, looked out at the street, where the oil lamps suspended high on the walls cast flashing coins of light in the dark water of the gutters. "Darn few on the streets now, so you should be safe enough."
January put on the jacket she'd brought him, kissed Minou, and stepped down from the French doors, helping his sister-who needed it no more than a gazelle- down to the brick banquette, and from there across the plank to the street. Only a few spits of rain flecked them now, but the darkening sky was heavily pregnant with more.
"I'll still want to find this Sally girl and speak to Clemence Drouet if I can."
"You really think that poor spaniel of a girl was clever enough to know if she killed Angelique in public that way, people'd go lookin' in all directions but at her?" Olympe shook her head. "Unless she was clever all these years-deep clever-I'd say if she killed her friend in anger over her walkin' off with Jenkins, she'd just have sat down beside the body and howled."
"Maybe," agreed January, knowing Olympe was probably right.
"I've told you what I know about it," his sister went on, "and so I'll ask you this, Ben: Be careful what you do with that knowledge. I think Clemence went off cryin' into the night, same as that boy Galen did. But Clemence is a colored gal, where Galen's white. And she did pay for that gris-gris. If the law's out lookin' for someone to hang, like you say, all you'll have to do is speak her name and she'll be a dead woman, for no more crime than hating a woman she wasn't strong enough to leave." January was silent, knowing again that Olympe spoke true and wondering wearily how he had happened to have the responsibility not