Dead Water Read Free Page B

resisted the urge to head straight for the mortuary chapel of St. Jude that stood at the corner of the cemetery, to confess and take Communion again.
    Confess what? That he believed that the name of the Guédé spirits had the power to harm him?
    Oh, God will appreciate hearing that
.
    He made his way out of the graveyard, walking carefully, for it was well and truly dark now and he had no desire to stumble into the brimming brown fluids of the gutter of the Rue des Ramparts.
    Along that street, lamps had been lit in a few of the small pastel cottages, where plaçées would be setting tables for a light supper for when their protectors dropped by, seeking quiet and relief after the inevitable and interminable Sunday-dinner gatherings of French Creole families. Most of those houses were dark. Plaçées, protectors, and families alike had retreated to the cooler precincts of Milneburgh or Spanish Fort, or Mandeville on the other side of the lake, leaving the city to the mosquitoes and to the sweltering poor. The Americans, in their own faubourg of big wooden houses and wide yards on the other side of Canal Street, had retreated to such northern resorts as White Sulfur Springs or to the White Mountains of New England. Along the levee the river was low. Most of the big side-wheel steamboats lay drawn up at the wharves to wait until autumn brought higher water and the successive harvests of corn, cotton, and sugar to turn a profit again.
    January looked for Olympe as he passed Congo Square, but only a few market-women remained, gathering the last of their produce into baskets and folding up the blankets on which it had been spread. The smell of ashes vied with the stink of sewage and the cemetery reek in the air.
    Except for the gambling-parlors along Rue Orleans and Rue Royale—which never closed and never emptied—New Orleans was dark, and quiet save for the roar of the cicadas and the incessant whine of mosquitoes in January's ears.
    No, he admitted to himself, he didn't think Queen Régine's curse, or the power of the Guédé spirits, would be able to harm him.
    But poison, and surreptitious fires set in the kitchen while he and Rose slept, were another matter. They had bought their house from the French Creoles who owned it for nine thousand dollars, of which half had been paid immediately and another twenty-five percent was due in September, three months away. January didn't think the DeLaHaye family would remit a penny—or allow more time on the loan—should the house itself burn down one night.
    He found himself listening behind him, all the way down the breathless street, for the whisper of the voodoo's feet and the rustle of her skirt. He heard nothing.
    But he knew she was there.

TWO
    The house January and Rose bought when they married the previous October stood on Rue Esplanade, and before this corner of the old French town had been built up, it had been surrounded by extensive grounds. January recalled the place from his childhood, a Spanish house of the kind usually seen on the smaller plantations, two rows of five rooms each with galleries front and behind, built high off the ground to avoid the Mississippi floods. It was angled on its lot so that it wouldn't face directly into the dilapidated old city wall that had still stood at that time—the “Rampart” of Rue des Ramparts—but would instead catch the river breezes.
    As a result, the courtyard behind it was an awkward, narrow triangle. A poor man couldn't afford to keep up a house of that size, and a rich one would purchase a regular town-house on one of the more fashionable streets of the French town, Rue Royale or Rue Bourbon, not back here, where these days mostly artisans and free colored plaçées lived. But when, as the result of a singular chain of circumstances, January and Rose had unearthed a small pirate-cache of gold coins in the bayou country, they had bought this place to establish Rose's long-held dream of a school for young girls of