Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Read Online Free PDF

long slow grumble of thunder. “He worked with Basile Nogent the marble carver, and had just married Célie Gérard, the coffee seller's daughter, back at the end of May. They lived behind Nogent's shop. Isaak hadn't had anything to do with his mother in many years.”
    “Did they say why she killed him?” asked January. “I assume they're saying someone paid her to do it.”
    “No one paid her.” Paul glanced swiftly at his son. “She wouldn't kill for pay, not a colored man, not a white man, nobody!”
    There was silence.
    Corbier turned to Mamzelle, his face working with concern and fear. “Can you help us?” he asked. “Do anything? Learn anything? Or you, Ben? You have friends in the Guards.” Paul was a man of deep goodness, but without Olympe's brilliance. Not a man, thought January, to know how to fight the law.
    “I know one man in the Guards,” January corrected him quietly. “And if he was the one who came and arrested Olympe, it's because he thinks she's guilty. But I'll find out what I can.”
    “I also.” Mamzelle Marie got to her feet, a movement both languid and filled with energy, like a cat's. Or a snake's. “But the ink bowl can only tell me so much. And I won't learn anything faster than morning, when you'll be able to go to the Cabildo and ask her things yourself.” Thunder sounded again, hard on the heels of the flash this time. January said, “If we're to get to our homes dry we'd best leave now. May I escort you to your door, Mamzelle?”
    “There's nothing in the night that frightens me,” she replied. “If you'll bear me company as far along as your mother's house it will serve.”
    From the packed-earth banquette of Rue Douane, January looked back and saw Paul close up the parlor shutters, then the doors behind them. The shutters were fast, but the doors still open, in the front bedroom on the other side of the house, and slits of muddy-gold candle glow shone through the jalousies. Zizi-Marie and the younger children would be huddled together still on their parents' bed. The light grew momentarily stronger, as Paul and Gabriel entered with another candle, then snuffed out in increments to darkness.
    Paul Corbier would not sleep that night.
    For a time January and the woman walked in silence, the fetid night clogged with the pungence of rotting garbage. The city contractors who cleaned the gutters were dilatory at best, even up on Rue Chartres and Rue Royale, where the rich had their dwellings. Here dead dogs floated, swollen, in water that whined with mosquitoes. Oily streetlamp glow shone yellow on the backs of the huge roaches that lumbered across their path, or on the frogs that hunted them. Once a City Guard in his blue coat passed on the other side of the street and glanced their way, but decided not to notice them. January wondered whether the man had simply counted the points of Mamzelle Marie's tignon and thought better of it.
    As he walked he thought of a skinny little girl, like a coal-black spider, spitting on St.-Denis Janvier's polished calfskin shoes at that first meeting, then fleeing without a word. Don't hurt her, their mother's protector had said quickly. She's just a child, and afraid.
    But Olympe, January knew, had never feared anything in her life.
    It wasn't until they stopped at the throat of the passway that led back to the rear yard of his mother's pink stucco cottage on Rue Burgundy-the cottage St.-Denis Janvier had given her thirty-three years ago-that January asked softly, “Is there any reason you know of, that they'd think my sister poisoned this Jumon boy?”
    It was not something he could have asked in the presence of the man who loved Olympe, or of her children.
    Marie Laveau tilted her head, and regarded him with those mocking sibyl eyes. She knew everything, they said. She read your dreams. More to the point, January knew she listened to everything, watched everything; learned from the market-women who was buying what and meeting whom; from