by Louise Penny
“I didn’t expect one.”
“Even so,” said Gamache. “If she brought them for the others, she’d bring one for you, no?”
Myrna saw his logic. She nodded.
“Maybe that photograph she packed was for Myrna,” Clara suggested. “The one with the four sisters.”
“Possibly, but why not wrap it, like your gifts? Returning for Christmas wasn’t part of the original plan, was it?” he asked, and Myrna shook her head. “She initially came for a few days?”
Myrna nodded.
“So, as far as she knew, when she first came down, she wasn’t coming back,” said Gamache, and they looked at him strangely. The point had already been made, why pound it home?
“Right,” said Myrna.
Gamache stood up. “Can you come with me?”
He meant Myrna, but they all followed him through the door connecting the bistro to the bookstore. Ruth was already there, putting books into her oversized purse, whose bottom had long since taken on the shape of a Scotch bottle. Rosa stood beside Ruth, and looked at them as they arrived.
Henri stopped dead and lay down. Then he rolled over.
“Get up, you wretched thing,” said Gamache, but Henri only looked at him upside down and swished his tail.
“God,” Gabri stage-whispered. “Imagine their children. Big ears and big feet.”
“What do you want?” Ruth demanded.
“It’s my store,” said Myrna.
“It’s not a store, it’s a library.” She snapped her bag shut.
“Idiot,” they both muttered.
Gamache walked over to the large Christmas tree.
“Can you look at them, please?” He pointed to the presents under the tree.
“But I know what’s there. I wrapped them myself. They’re for everyone here, and Constance.”
And Constance, thought Gamache. Still that, even in death.
“Just look anyway, please.”
Myrna got on her knees and sifted through the wrapped gifts.
“Now there’s a full moon,” said Gabri with admiration.
Myrna sat back on her heels. In her hand was a gift wrapped in bright red paper, with candy canes.
“Can you read the card?” Gamache asked.
Myrna struggled to her feet and opened the small flap. “For Myrna,” she read. “The key to my home. Love, Constance.”
“What does that mean?” Gabri asked, looking from face to face and settling on Gamache’s.
But the Chief only had eyes for the package.
“Open it, please,” he said.
TWENTY-NINE
Myrna took the Christmas present to a seat by the window of her bookshop.
Everyone leaned forward as she peeled off the tape, except Ruth, who remained where she was and looked out the window at the endless snow.
“What did she give you?” Olivier craned his neck. “Let me see.”
“More mitts,” said Clara.
“No, I think it’s a hat,” said Gabri. “A tuque.”
Myrna lifted it up. It was light blue and it was indeed a tuque. And on it was a design.
“What’s the pattern?” asked Clara. It looked like bats to her, but that probably didn’t make sense.
“They’re angels,” said Olivier.
They leaned closer.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” said Gabri, stepping back. “You were her guardian angel.”
“It’s wonderful.” Myrna held up the hat, admiring it and trying to hide her disappointment. Myrna had let herself believe that the package would magically reveal Constance. Her most private life. That the gift would finally let Myrna enter Constance’s home.
It was a lovely gesture, but it was hardly a key to anything.
“How’d you know it was there?” Clara asked Gamache.
“I didn’t,” he conceded, “but it seemed unlikely she’d give you a gift and not bring one for Myrna. Then I realized if she had brought one for Myrna it would have been on her first visit, since she didn’t expect to return.”
“Well, mystery solved,” said Gabri. “I’m heading back to the bistro. You coming, Maigret?”
“Right behind you, Miss Marple,” said Olivier.
Ruth got up with a grunt. She stared at the package, then at Gamache. He nodded to her, and she to him. Only then did she and Rosa leave.
“You two seem to have developed telepathy.” Clara watched the old poet walk carefully down the snowy path, the duck in her arms. “Not sure I’d want her in my head.”
“She’s not in my head,” he assured her. “But Ruth is often on my mind. Did you know that her poem ‘Alas’ was written for Virginie Ouellet, after she died?”
“No,” admitted Myrna, her hand resting on the tuque, watching Ruth pause and give the hockey players instructions, or hell. “It made Ruth famous, didn’t it?”
Gamache nodded. “I don’t think she’s ever recovered from that.”
“The fame?” asked Clara.
“The guilt,” said Gamache. “Of profiting from someone else’s sorrow.”
“Who hurt you once, / so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture / with curling lip?”
Myrna whispered the words as she watched Ruth and Rosa, heads bowed into the snow. Making for home.
“We all have our albatrosses,” she said.
“Or ducks,” said Clara, and knelt by her friend’s chair. “Are you all right?”
Myrna nodded.
“Would you like to be alone?”
“Just for a few minutes.”
Clara stood, kissed Myrna on the top of her head, and left.
But Armand Gamache did not leave. Instead he waited for the connecting door to close, then he sat in the chair vacated by Ruth and stared at Myrna.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Myrna lifted the tuque and put it on. The knitted hat perched on Myrna’s head like a light blue light bulb. Then she handed it to him. After examining it, Gamache lowered the hat to his knee.
“This wasn’t made for you, was it?”
“No. And it’s not new,” she said.
Gamache could see the wool was worn, slightly pilled. And he saw something else. A tiny tag had been sewn into the inside of the tuque. Putting on his reading glasses, he brought the hat to his face so that the rough wool almost rubbed his nose.
It was difficult to read the tag, the printing was so small and the letters smudged.
He took off his glasses and handed the tuque back to Myrna. “What do you think it says?”
She examined it, squinting. “MA,” she finally said.
The Chief nodded, unconsciously fiddling with his glasses.
“MA,” he repeated, and looked out the window. His gaze was unfocused. Trying to see what wasn’t there.
An idea, a thought. A purpose.
Why had someone sewn MA into the tuque?
It was, he knew, the same as the tag they’d found in the other tuques in Constance’s home. Constance’s had had a pattern of reindeer, and MC on the tag. Marie-Constance.
Marguerite’s had MM inside. Marie-Marguerite.
Josephine’s tuque had MJ.
He looked down at the tuque in his hand. MA.
“Maybe it belonged to their mother,” said Myrna. “That must be it. She made one for each of the girls, and one for herself.”
“But it’s so small,” said the Chief.
“People were smaller back then,” said Myrna, and Gamache nodded.
It was true. Especially women. The Québécoise tended to be petite even today. He looked at the hat again. Would it fit a grown woman?
Maybe.
And it might make sense for Constance to keep this, the only memento of her mother. There wasn’t a single photograph of their parents in the Quints’ home. But they had something much more precious. Hats their mother had made.
One for each of them, and one for herself.
And what had she put inside? Not her initials. Of course n
Maybe this was the key to Constance after all. And maybe, in giving it to Myrna, Constance was signaling her willingness to finally let go. Of the past. Of the rancor.
Gamache wondered if Constance and her sisters ever knew that their parents hadn’t sold them to the state, but that the girls had, in effect, been expropriated.
Did Constance finally realize that her mother had loved her? Was that the albatross she’d been lugging around all her life? Not some terrible wrong, but the horror that came from realizing, too late, she hadn’t been wronged? That she’d been loved all along?
Who hurt you once, / so far beyond repair?
Maybe the answer, for the Quints and for Ruth, was simple.
They’d done it to themselves.
Ruth in writing the poem and taking on an unnecessary burden of guilt, and the Quints in believing a lie and not recognizing their parents’ love.
He looked at the tuque again, rotated it, examining the pattern. Then he lowered it.
“How could this be a key to her home?” he asked. “Does the angel pattern mean anything to you?”
Myrna looked out the window, at the village green and the skaters, and she shook her head.
“Maybe it means nothing,” said the Chief. “Why reindeer or pine trees or snowflakes? The patterns Madame Ouellet knitted into the other hats are just cheerful symbols of winter and Christmas.”
Myrna nodded, kneading the hat and watching the happy children on the frozen pond. “Constance told me she and her sisters loved hockey. They’d get up a team and play the other village kids. Apparently it was Brother André’s favorite sport.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Gamache.
“I think they might have all bought into the belief that Frère André was their guardian angel. Hence,” she held up the tuque, “the hat.”
Gamache nodded. There were plenty of references to Brother André in the archived papers as well. Both sides had invoked the saint’s potent memory.
“But why would she give me the hat?” Myrna asked. “So that she could tell me about Brother André? Was he the key to their home? I don’t get it.”
“Maybe she wanted to get it out of her house,” said Gamache, rising to his feet. “Maybe that was the key. Breaking loose from the legend.”
Maybe, maybe, maybe. It was no way to run an investigation. And time was running out. If this crime wasn’t solved by the time he and the Brunels and Nichol returned to the schoolhouse, then it would not be solved.
Not by him anyway.
“I need to see the film again,” said Gamache, making for the stairs up to Myrna’s loft.
* * *
“There,” Gamache pointed at the screen. “Do you see it?”
But once again he’d hit the pause button a moment too late.
He rewound and tried again. And again. Myrna sat on the sofa beside him. Over and over he played the same twenty seconds of the recording. The old film, in the old farmhouse.
The girls laughing and teasing each other. Constance sitting on the rough bench, her father at her feet, lacing the skates. The other girls at the door, teetering on their blades and already holding hockey sticks.
Then their mother enters the frame and hands out the hats. But there’s an extra hat, which she throws offscreen.
Over and over, Chief Inspector Gamache played it. The extra hat was only visible for an instant as it whirled out of the frame. Finally, he captured it, frozen in that split second between when it left Marie-Harriette’s hand and when it left the screen.
They leaned closer.
The tuque was light in color, that much they could see. But in a black and white film it was impossible to say what the color was exactly. But now they could see the pattern. It was fuzzy, blurry, but clear enough.
“Angels,” said Myrna. “It’s this one.” She looked down at the hat in her hand. “It was the mother’s.”
But Gamache was no longer looking at the frozen hat. He was looking at Marie-Harriette’s face. Why was she so upset?
“May I use your phone?”
Myrna brought it over and he placed his call.
“I checked the death certificates, Chief,” Inspector Lacoste reported in answer to his question. “They’re definitely all dead. Virginie, Hélène, Josephine, Marguerite, and now Constance. All the Ouellet Quints are gone.”
“Are you sure?”
It was rare for the Chief to question her findings, and it made her question herself.
“I know we thought maybe one was still alive,” said Lacoste. “But I’ve found death certificates and burial records for all of them. All interred in the same cemetery close to their home. We have proof.”
“There was proof Dr. Bernard delivered the babies,” Gamache reminded her. “Proof Isidore and Marie-Harriette sold them to Québec. Proof Virginie died in an accidental fall, when we now suspect that was almost certainly not the case.”
Inspector Lacoste took his point.
“They were extremely private,” she said slowly, getting her head around what he was saying. “I suppose it’s possible.”
“They weren’t just private, they were secretive. They were hiding something.” The Chief thought for a moment. “If they are all dead, is it possible there was more to their deaths than we know?”
“Like Virginie’s, you mean?” asked Lacoste, her own mind churning to catch up with his.
“If they lied about one death, they could lie about them all.”
“But why?”
“Why does anyone lie to us?” he asked.
“To cover up a crime,” she said.
“To cover up murder.”
“You think they were murdered?” she asked, not succeeding in keeping the astonishment out of her voice. “All of them?”
“We know Constance was. And we know Virginie died a violent death. What do we really know about that?” asked the Chief. “The official record says she died from a fall down the stairs. Corroborated by Hélène and Constance. But the doctor’s notes and the initial police reports had a different version.”
“Oui. Suicide.”
“But maybe even that was wrong.”
“You think Hélène or Constance killed her?”
“I think we’re getting closer to the truth.”
It felt to Gamache as though they’d finally broken into the Ouellet home. He and Lacoste were stumbling around in the dark, but soon whatever that wounded family was hiding would be revealed.
“I’ll go back over my notes,” said Lacoste, “and dig deeper into the old files, see if there was even a hint that those deaths were anything but natural.”
“Good. And I’ll check the parish records.”
It was where the priest kept records of births and deaths. The Chief knew he’d find, written in longhand, the record of the five births. He wondered how many deaths he’d find.
* * *
Chief Inspector Gamache drove directly to the Sûreté forensics lab and dropped the tuque off, with instructions to give him a full report by the end of the day.
“Today?” the technician asked, but he was speaking to the Chief Inspector’s back.
Gamache went up to his offices and arrived in time for the briefing. Inspector Lacoste was leading it, but only a few officers had bothered to show up. She rose as the Chief Inspector entered. The others did not, at first. But on seeing his stern face, they got up.
“Where’re the others?” Gamache asked brusquely.
“On assignment,” replied one of the officers. “Sir.”
“My question was for Inspector Lacoste.” He turned to her.
“They were told of the meeting, but chose not to come.”
“I’ll need their names, please,” said Gamache, and was about to leave when he stopped and looked at the agents, still standing. He considered them for a moment and seemed to sag.
“Go home,” he finally said.
This they hadn’t expected, and they stood there surprised and uncertain. As was Lacoste, though she struggled not to show it.
“Home?” one of them asked.
“Leave,” said the Chief. “Make of it what you will, but just go.”
The agents looked at each other and grinned.
He turned his back on them and made for the door.
“Our cases?”
Gamache stopped and turned back to see the young officer he’d tried to help a few days ago.
“Will your cases really be further along if you stay?”
It was a rhetorical question.
He knew these agents, looking at him so triumphantly, were spreading the word throughout the Sûreté that Chief Inspector Gamache was finished. Had given up.
And now he’d done them the very great favor of confirming it. By in effect closing his department.
“Consider this a Christmas gift.”
They no longer tried to hide their satisfaction. The coup was complete. They’d brought the great Chief Inspector Gamache to his knees.
“Go home,” he said, his voice weary. “I intend to, soon.”
He left the room, his back straight, his head up. But he walked slowly. A wounded lion just trying to survive the day.
“Chief?” said Inspector Lacoste, catching up.
“My office, please.”
They went in and he closed the door, then motioned her to take a seat.
“Anything more on the Ouellet case?” he asked.
“I spoke to the neighbor again, to find out if the sisters ever had any visitors. She told me what she first told the investigators. No one ever went to the house.”
“Except her, as I recall.”
“Once,” said Lacoste, “for lemonade.”
“Did she think it was strange that she was never invited inside?”
“No. She said after a few years you get used to different eccentricities. Some neighbors are nosy, some like parties, some are very quiet. It’s an old, established neighborhood and the sisters had been there for many years. No one seemed to question.”
Gamache nodded and was quiet for a moment, playing with the pen on his desk.
“You need to know that I’ve decided to retire.”
“Retire? Are you sure?”
-->
