by Louise Penny
They all knew it would lead to the office right above them. To the very highest level in the Sûreté.
But Gamache had long since begun to wonder if they were asking the right question. Not who, but why. He suspected they’d find that the video was simply the disgusting dropping of a much larger creature. They’d mistaken the merde for the actual menace.
Armand Gamache looked at the gathering. A senior Sûreté officer, past her retirement age. A rotund doctor. And himself. A middle-aged, marginalized officer.
Just the three of them. And the creature they sought seemed to grow each time they caught a glimpse of it.
Gamache knew, though, that what was a disadvantage was also an advantage. They were easily overlooked, dismissed, especially by people who believed themselves invisible and invincible.
“I think we’re getting closer, Armand, but I keep hitting dead ends,” said Jérôme. The doctor suddenly looked a little furtive.
“Go on,” said Gamache.
“I’m not certain, but I think I detected a watcher.”
Gamache said nothing. He knew what a watcher was, in physical as well as cyber terms. But he wanted Jérôme to be more precise.
“If I have, he’s very cunning and very skilled. It’s possible he’s been watching me for a while.”
Gamache rested his elbows on his knees, clasping his large hands in front of him. Like a battleship plowing toward its target.
“Is it Francoeur?” Gamache asked. No need to pretend otherwise.
“Not him personally,” said Jérôme, “but I think whoever it is is within the Sûreté network. I’ve been doing this for a long time now, and I’ve never seen anything this sophisticated. Whenever I stop and look, he fades into the background.”
“How do you even know he’s there?” asked Gamache.
“I don’t for sure, but it’s a sense, a movement, a shift.”
Brunel paused and for the first time Gamache saw in the cheerful doctor a hint of concern. A sense that as good as he was, Dr. Brunel might be up against someone better.
Gamache sat back in his chair as though something had walked by him, and pushed. What have we uncovered?
Not only were they hunting the creature, it seemed the creature might now be hunting them.
“Does this watcher know who you are?” he asked Jérôme.
“I don’t think so.”
“Think?” asked Gamache, his voice sharp, his eyes hard.
“No,” Jérôme shook his head. “He doesn’t know.”
Yet. The word was unspoken, but implied. Yet.
“Be careful, Jérôme,” said Gamache, as he rose and picked up Henri’s leash. He said his good-byes, left them, and headed into the night.
The lights of the cities and towns and villages faded in his rearview mirror as they drove deeper into the forest. After a while the darkness was complete, except for the beams of his headlights on the snowy roads. Eventually he saw a soft glow ahead, and knew what it was. Gamache’s car crested a hill, and there in the valley he saw three huge pines lit with green and red and yellow Christmas lights. Thousands of them, it seemed. And around the village cheery lights were hung along porches and picket fences and over the stone bridge.
As his car descended, the signal on his device disappeared. No phone reception, no emails. It was as though he and Henri, asleep on the backseat, had fallen off the face of the earth.
He parked in front of Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore and noted the lights still on upstairs. So often he’d come here to find death. This time he’d brought it with him.
EIGHT
Clara Morrow was the first to notice the car arrive.
She and Myrna had had a simple dinner of reheated stew and a salad, then she’d gotten up to do the dishes, but Myrna soon joined her.
“I can do them,” said Clara, squirting the dishwashing liquid into the hot water and watching it foam. It was always strangely satisfying. It made Clara feel like a magician, or a witch, or an alchemist. Not, perhaps, as valuable as turning lead into gold, but useful all the same.
Clara Morrow was not someone who liked housework. What she liked was magic. Water into foam. Dirty dishes into clean. A blank canvas into a work of art.
It wasn’t change she liked so much as metamorphosis.
“You sit down,” she said, but Myrna took the tea towel and reached for a warm, clean dish.
“It helps take my mind off things.”
They both knew drying the dinner dishes was a fragile raft on a rough sea, but if it kept Myrna afloat for a while Clara was all for it.
They fell into a reassuring rhythm. She washed and Myrna dried.
When Clara was finished she drained the water, wiped the sink, and turned to face the room. It hadn’t changed in the years since Myrna had given up her psychologist’s practice in Montréal and packed her tiny car with all her worldly possessions. When she rolled into Three Pines she looked like someone who’d run away from the circus.
Out she climbed, an immense black woman, surely larger than the car itself. She’d gotten lost on the back roads, and when she found the unexpected village she’d stopped for a coffee, a pastry, a bathroom break. A pit stop on her way somewhere else. Somewhere more exciting, more promising. But Myrna Landers never left.
Over café au lait and patisserie in the bistro, she realized that she was fine where she was.
Myrna had unpacked, leased the empty shop next to Olivier’s Bistro, and opened a new and used bookstore. She’d moved upstairs, into the loft space.
That’s how Clara had first really gotten to know Myrna. She’d dropped by to check out how the new bookstore was going and heard sweeping and swearing from above. Climbing the stairs at the back of the shop, Clara had found Myrna.
Sweeping and swearing.
They’d been friends ever since.
She’d watched Myrna work her magic, turning an empty store into a bookshop. Turning an empty space into a meeting place. Turning a disused loft into a home. Turning an unhappy life into contentment.
Three Pines might be stable but it was never still.
When Clara surveyed the room, seeing the Christmas lights through the windows, she wasn’t sure she’d seen that brief flash. Headlights.
But then she heard the car engine. She turned to Myrna, who’d also heard it.
They were both thinking the same thing.
Constance.
Clara tried to stomp down the relief, knowing it was premature, but found it bubbled up and around her caution.
There was the tinkle of the door downstairs. And steps. They could hear a person, one person, walking across the floor below them.
Myrna grabbed Clara’s hand and called out, “Hello?”
There was a pause. And then a familiar voice.
“Myrna?”
Clara felt Myrna’s hand grow cold. It wasn’t Constance. It was the messenger. The telegraph man, pulled up on his bicycle.
It was the head of homicide for the Sûreté.
*
Myrna held the mug of tea, untouched, in both hands. The purpose was to warm, not to drink.
She stared into the window of the woodstove, at the flames and embers. They reflected off her face, giving it more animation than it actually held.
Clara was on the sofa and Armand sat in the armchair across from Myrna. He too held a cup of tea in his large hands. But he watched Myrna, not the fire.
Henri, after sniffing around the loft, had come to rest on the rug in front of the hearth.
“Do you think she suffered?” Myrna asked, her eyes not leaving the fire.
“I don’t.”
“And you don’t know who did it?”
It. It. Myrna couldn’t yet bring herself to say out loud what “it” was.
When a day had gone by and Constance hadn’t shown up, hadn’t even called, Myrna had prepared herself for the worst. That Constance had had a heart attack. A stroke. An accident.
It had never occurred to her that it
could be even worse. That her friend hadn’t lost her life, but that it had been taken from her.
“We don’t know yet, but I’ll find out.” Gamache was sitting forward now.
“Can you?” asked Clara, speaking for the first time since he’d broken the news. “Didn’t she live in Montréal? Isn’t that out of your jurisdiction?”
“It is, but the head of homicide for Montréal’s a friend. He handed the case over to me. Did you know Constance well?” he asked Myrna.
Myrna opened her mouth, then looked over at Clara.
“Oh,” said Clara, with sudden understanding. “Would you like me to leave?”
Myrna hesitated then shook her head. “No, sorry. Force of habit, to not talk about a client.”
“She was a client then,” said Gamache. He didn’t take out his notebook, preferring to listen intently. “Not just a friend.”
“A client first, then a friend.”
“How did you meet?”
“She came for counseling a number of years ago.”
“How long ago?”
Myrna thought. “Twenty-three years.” She seemed a little amazed by that. “I’ve known her for twenty-three years,” Myrna marveled, then forced herself back to the reality. “After she stopped coming for therapy, we stayed in touch. We’d go for dinner, a play. Not often, but as two single women we found we had a lot in common. I liked her.”
“Was that unusual,” Gamache asked, “becoming personal friends with a client?”
“A former client, but yes, extremely. It’s the only time it’s happened with me. A therapist has to have clear boundaries, even with former clients. People already get into our heads—if they also get into our lives, there’s a problem.”
“But Constance did?”
Myrna nodded. “I think we were both a little lonely, and she seemed pretty sane.”
“Pretty?” Gamache asked.
“Who among us is totally sane, Chief Inspector?”
They looked at Clara, whose hair was again standing on end, the terrible convergence of hat head, static electricity, and the habit of running her hands through it.
“What?” asked Clara.
Gamache turned back to Myrna. “Had you seen Constance since you moved to Three Pines?”
“A couple of times, when I went in to Montréal. Never out here. Mostly we kept in touch through cards and phone calls. The truth is, we’d drifted apart in recent years.”
“So what brought her down for a visit now?” the Chief asked. “Did you invite her?”
Myrna thought about that, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I think it was her idea, though it’s possible she hinted she’d like to come and I invited her.”
“Did she have any particular reason for wanting to visit?”
Again, Myrna considered before answering. “Her sister died in October, as you probably heard—”
Gamache nodded. It had been in the news, as Constance’s death would be. The murder of Constance Pineault was a statistic. The murder of Constance Ouellet was headline news.
“With her sisters gone there was no one else in her life,” said Myrna. “Constance was very private. Nothing wrong with that, but it had become a sort of mania with her.”
“Can you give me the names of some of her friends?”
Myrna shook her head.
“You don’t know any?” he asked.
“She didn’t have any.”
“Pardon?”
“Constance had no friends,” said Myrna.
Gamache stared at her. “None?”
“None.”
“You were her friend,” said Clara. “She was friends with everyone here. Even Ruth.”
Though even as she said it, Clara realized her error. She’d mistaken being friendly for being friends.
Myrna was quiet for a moment before she spoke.
“Constance gave the impression of friendship and intimacy without actually feeling it.”
“You mean that was all a lie?” asked Clara.
“Not totally. I don’t want you to think she was a sociopath or anything. She liked people, but there was always a barrier.”
“Even for you?” asked Gamache.
“Even for me. There were large parts of her life she kept well hidden.”
Clara remembered their exchange in the studio, when Constance had refused to let Clara paint her portrait. She hadn’t been rude, but she had been firm. It was certainly a shove back.
“What is it?” Gamache asked, seeing the look of concentration on Myrna’s face.
“I was just thinking about what Clara said, and she’s right. I think Constance was happy here, I think she genuinely felt comfortable with everyone, even Ruth.”
“What does that tell you?” Gamache asked.
Myrna thought. “I wonder…”
She stared across the room, out the window, to the pines lit for Christmas. The bulbs bobbed in the night breeze.
“I wonder if she was finally opening up,” said Myrna, bringing her gaze back to her guests. “I hadn’t thought about it, but she seemed less guarded, more genuine, especially as the days went on.”
“She wouldn’t let me paint her portrait,” said Clara.
Myrna smiled. “But that’s understandable, don’t you think? It was the very thing she and her sisters most feared. Being put on display.”
“But I didn’t know who she was then,” said Clara.
“Wouldn’t matter. She knew,” said Myrna. “But I think by the time she left, she felt safe here, whether her secret was out or not.”
“And was her secret out?” Gamache asked.
“I didn’t tell,” said Myrna.
Gamache looked at the magazine on the footstool. A very old copy of Life, and on the cover a famous photo.
“And yet you obviously knew who she was,” he said to Clara.
“I told Clara this afternoon,” Myrna explained. “When I began to accept that Constance would probably never show up.”
“And no one else knew?” he repeated, picking up the magazine and staring at the picture. One he’d seen many times before. Five little girls, in muffs and pretty little winter coats. Identical coats. Identical girls.
“Not that I know of,” said Myrna.
And once again, Gamache wondered if the man who’d killed Constance knew who she was, and realized he was killing the last of her kind. The last of the Ouellet quintuplets.
NINE
Armand stepped outside into the cold, crisp night. The snow had long since stopped and the sky had cleared. It was just past midnight, and as he stood there, taking deep breaths of the clean air, the lights on the trees went out.
The Chief Inspector and Henri were the lone creatures in a dark world. He looked up, and slowly the stars appeared. Orion’s Belt. The Big Dipper. The North Star. And millions and millions of other lights. All very, very clear now, and only now. The light only visible in the dark.
Gamache found himself uncertain what to do and where to go. He could return to Montréal, though he was tired and would rather not, but he hadn’t made any arrangements to stay at the B and B, preferring to go straight to Myrna. And now it was past midnight and all the lights were out at the B and B. He could only just make out the outline of the former coach inn against the forest beyond.
But as he watched, a light, softened by curtains, appeared at an upstairs window. And then, a few moments later, another downstairs. Then he saw a light through the window in the front door, just before it opened. A large man stood silhouetted on the threshold.
“Come here, boy, come here,” the voice called, and Henri tugged at the leash.
Gamache dropped it and the shepherd took off along the path, up the stairs and into Gabri’s arms.
When Gamache arrived, Gabri struggled to his feet.
“Good boy.” He embraced the Chief Inspector. “Get inside. I’m freezing my ass off. Not that it couldn’t use it.”
“How’d you know we were here?”
> “Myrna called. She thought you might need a room.” He regarded his unexpected guest. “You do want to stay, don’t you?”
“Very much,” said the Chief, and had rarely meant anything more.
Gabri closed the door behind them.
*
Jean-Guy Beauvoir sat in his car and stared at the closed door. He was slumped down. Not so far as to disappear completely, but far enough to make it look like he was trying to be discreet. It was calculated and, somewhere below the haze, he knew it was also pathetic.
But he didn’t care anymore. He just wanted Annie to look out her window. To recognize his car. To see him there. To open the door.
He wanted …
He wanted …
He wanted to feel her in his arms again. To smell her scent. He wanted her to whisper, “It’ll be all right.”
Most of all, he wanted to believe it.
*
“Myrna told us that Constance was missing,” said Gabri, reaching for a hanger for Gamache’s coat. He took the parka from the Chief and paused. “Are you here about her?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Gabri hesitated just an instant before asking, “She’s dead?”
The Chief nodded.
Gabri hugged the parka and stared at Gamache. While he longed to ask more questions, he didn’t. He could see the Chief’s exhaustion. Instead he finished hanging up the coat and walked to the stairs.
Gamache followed the immense, swaying dressing gown up the stairs.
Gabri led them along the passage and stopped at a familiar door. He flicked a switch to reveal the room Gamache always stayed in. Unlike Gabri, this room, indeed the entire bed and breakfast, was a model of restraint. Oriental throw rugs were scattered on the wide-plank floor. The dark wood bed was large and inviting and made up with crisp white linens, a thick white duvet, and down pillows.
It was uncluttered and comforting. Simple and welcoming.
“Have you had dinner?”
“No, but I’ll be fine until morning.” The clock on the bedside table said 12:30.
Gabri crossed to the window, opened it a sliver to let the fresh, cold air in, and pulled the curtains closed.
“What time would you like to get up?”
“Six thirty too early?”
