"I know it sounds foolish," Corbier went on. "She has the knowledge, and she has-had-the things in the house." He nodded through the archway that separated the dining room from the front half of the parlor. The candles on the table, and the squiggling fragments of reflected glare from the streetlamps hanging over the intersection of Rue Douane and Rue Burgundy, showed up dimly the shelves that filled the parlor's inner wall, planks and packing boxes neatly arranged, lined with intricately cut paper and aromatic leaves.

Bottles glinted, painted and decorated, between dark fat-bellied pots of cheap terra-cotta bought from Chickasaw and Choctaw on the Cathedral steps. Gimcrack gilding winked on small bright-colored tins such as candies and tea that were shipped in from England, and beads caught the light, woven in strings around calabashes stoppered with wax. A dish of beads, and another of animal bones; a third of brown glistening lump sugar set before a crooked stick in a sealed bottle. Strings of dried guinea peppers. Swags of lace. Clusters of feathers, tied with thread, hung from the shelves above, and clumps of drying herbs or bundles of hair. Strange-shaped sticks and roots; candles red, black, white, and green. The skin of a ground puppy that had been dried in the sun. Squares of red flannel. A ball of string. A snakeskin nailed to the wall, with a slip of paper rolled up in its mouth. A name written on that paper. Silver coins, and a few cigars. Salt, brick dust, graveyard dust.

Three spaces gapped in the confusion, like teeth knocked out in a fight. "It's got to been some other voodoo," said Gabriel reasonably. "He poisoned this oku and made the Guards think Mama did it. That's all."