For almost half an hour, the site is utterly still.  The occasional complaint of a hen, the droning electric buzz of cicadas, and the distant, occasional rustle of the cane are the only sounds.  The place feels utterly desolate.<br/><br/>The layout of the house is as follows:<br/><br/>The main house is surrounded by a seven-foot pallisade fence that, apparently, was open during the day.  The cook stove is out back under a long, collapsible awning.  There's a flat-rock cooking surface, with a very large iron kettle, a wash-tub nearby, and a still for water purification.  The front porch has another thatched awning that looks, for all purposes, removable.  Smoke-pots are scattered around the house—cauldron-like braziers for burning various herbs to repel insects.  A processing building (sugar shack) sits outside the main fence.<br/><br/>The cane harvest stops mid-field about one hundred yards from the house, and baskets, scythes, machetes scatter that area.  There are worming swaths of trampled stalks cut through the cane fields… seemingly, they are at random.<br/><br/>The house is on one-foot stilts, the thatched roof valuted about 15 feet at the peak.  The floor is interlocked wood and covered with tight-sealed wicker-like wood over a layer of hewn, narrow logs for support.  The floor is decorated with reed mats.  The one-room home is split by seven-foot partitions tacked to support poles that vault the roof.  There are two hammocks in the main room, two in the each of the smaller sections.  The sparse furniture is very simple, with only one large rocker in the main room, a few small stools, a pile of hand-sewn quilted pillows, a few books… a low table folds down from one wall, held in place by adjustable wooden pins.<br/><br/>Details that the group can identify upon their careful inspection:<br/><br/><ul class="bbc_list"><li>The front door appears to have been bashed open by a mattock, or dull axe.  One of the screens inside has been smashed.  There’s blood all over one corner of that room, then a drag-mark blood trail out into the yard and dust.</li><li>There’s a dug-out trench to the crawlspace under the house like a huge dog might dig to make a hiding spot from the heat.</li><li>Land crabs swarm a couple of partial corpses.  One of them is of a mule, one a human being, in the cane fields.  The body was probably Hallen’s mother, from the remnants of clothing, but there’s not much left.</li><li>For Quinta, there are several strategic points for vantage, depending on the formation, but it would have been nearly impossible to see a field in these marshlands without elevation of some kind.  It is possible that someone could have supervised the vantage from the sugar shack, which stands on eight-foot poles.  But there, all she can find is a woven basket with a draw-closed top.  The inside is nicked and scarred as if it’s been carrying many very, very sharp things.</li></ul>A hush falls over the fields.  Cicadas go silent, and only the distant rumble of swamp-frogs can be heard.  ((Perception checks with your next posts, please))