A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [93]
Olympe led the way to a very old, very scarred settee set beneath the lake-side window, nudged aside an enormous gray cat, and sat beside him, turning the gris-gris carefully in the light. She kept the handkerchief between the dried bat and her palm, touched the dead thing only with her nail, but her face had the businesslike intentness of a physician’s during the examination of a stool or a sputum. The cat sniffed at January’s knee, then tucked its feet and stared slit-eyed into sleepy distance once more.
“John Bayou made this,” Olympe said at last. “It’s the kind hangs in the swamp near the lake where he goes, and you can still smell the turpentine on it.” She held it out for him to sniff. “He favors snuff and turpentine. Dr. Yah-Yah woulda made a wax ball with chicken feathers, ’stead of huntin’ down a bat. It’s bad gris-gris, death written all over it.” Her dark eyes flickered to him. “You been carryin’ this in your pocket?”
He nodded.
“You lucky you get off with just a couple beatin’s.” January’s hand went to the swollen lips of the cut cheek he’d taken Sunday afternoon. The gris-gris had, of course, been in his pocket at the time. Also today in the Swamp.
“What?” she said, seeing his face. “You thought it would only work against the one whose name was spoke at its making?” Her face softened a little, and the old, ready contempt she’d flayed him with at their last meeting was tempered now by years of bearing children and dealing with the helplessness of other people’s pain. “Or they teach you in France it was all nigger hoodoo?” Once she would have thrown the words at him like a challenger’s gauntlet. Now she smiled, exasperated but kind.
“Where would I find this John Bayou?”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” said Olympe. “He mean, Doctor John.” Her coffee-dark eyes narrowed, like the cat’s. “And what was Angelique Crozat to you?”
“A woman they’re saying I killed.”
“Who’s saying?”
“The police. Not saying it right out yet, but they’re thinking it louder and louder.” And he told her what had happened that night, leaving out only who it was who had given him the message to take to Angelique—“someone who couldn’t be at that ball”—and what Shaw had told him later.
“Phrasie Dreuze,” said Olympe, as if she’d bitten on a lemon, and her eyes had the look of an angry cat’s again. “Yes, her man made it worth her while to keep her mouth shut about him and her daughter. Mamzelle Marie had her cut of that, for showin’ Phrasie how to pass off Angelique as a virgin to Trepagier when the time come. But some people knew. Anybody who knew Angelique as a child didn’t have far to go to guess. No wonder she didn’t have much use for men.”
She shook her head. “Phrasie know you were the last person to see her girl alive?”
“I think so. She was there when Clemence Drouet told Shaw about it, but I don’t think she’s smart enough to put two and two together. Even if she was, I don’t think she’d care.”
“No. So long as she’s got her revenge.” She turned her head, to regard the withered bat on the windowsill. “I’ll need a dollar, two dollars, to find out from Doctor John.”
He took them from his wallet, heavy silver cartwheels, and she placed them on the sill on either side of the bat. The cat jumped up and sniffed the money, but didn’t go near the gris-gris. January told himself it was because the thing smelled of snuff and turpentine.
“Anybody ever ask you to witch Angelique?”
Olympe hesitated, but her eyes moved.
“Who?”
She pushed the silver dollars to and fro with a fingertip. “When you talked about goin’ to France, brother, you talked about becomin’ a doctor. A real doctor, a go-to-school doctor. You do that?”
January nodded.
“You take that oath they make doctors take, about not runnin’ your mouth about your patients who come to you with secrets? Secrets that are the seeds of their illness?