Brutal Telling

by Louise Penny

  “How did he wash?” asked Beauvoir as they walked back to the cabin. They knew he had, and regularly, according to the coroner.

  “There’s a river,” said Gamache, pausing. Ahead sat the cabin, a tiny perfect gem in the middle of the forest. “You can hear it. Probably the Bella Bella, as it heads into the village.”

  Sure enough Beauvoir heard what sounded strangely like traffic. It was comforting. There was also a cistern beside the cabin, designed to catch rainfall.

  “We’ve found fingerprints.” Beauvoir held the door open for the Chief as they entered the cabin. “We think they belong to two different people.”

  Gamache’s brows rose. The place looked and felt as though only one person lived here. But judging by events, someone else had found the cabin, and the man.

  Could this be their break? Could the murderer have left his prints?

  The cabin was growing dimmer. Morin found a couple more lamps and some candles. Gamache watched the team at work. There was a grace to it, one perhaps only appreciated by another homicide officer. The fluid motions, stepping aside, leaning in and out and down, bowing and lifting and kneeling. It was almost beautiful.

  He stood in the middle of the cabin and took it in. The walls were made of large, round logs. Strangely enough there were curtains at the windows. And in the kitchen a panel of amber glass leaned against the window.

  A hand pump at the sink was attached to the wooden kitchen counter, and dishes and glasses were neatly placed on the exposed shelves. Gamache noticed food on the kitchen counter. He walked over and looked, without picking anything up. Bread, butter, cheese. Nibbled, and not by anything human. Some Orange Pekoe tea in an open box. A jar of honey. A quart of milk sat opened. He sniffed. Rancid.

  He motioned Beauvoir over.

  “What do you think?”

  “The man did his shopping.”

  “How? He sure didn’t walk into Monsieur Béliveau’s general store, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t walk to Saint-Rémy. Someone brought this food to him.”

  “And killed him? Had a cup of tea then bashed his head in?”

  “Maybe, maybe,” murmured the Chief Inspector as he looked around. The oil lamps threw light very unlike anything an electric bulb produced. This light was gentle. The edges of the world seemed softer.

  A woodstove separated the rustic kitchen and the living area. A small table, covered in cloth, seemed to be his dining table. A riverstone fireplace was on the opposite wall with a wing chair on either side. At the far end of the cabin was a large brass bed and a chest of drawers.

  The bed was made, the pillows fluffed and ready. Fabric hung on the walls, presumably to keep out the cold drafts, as you’d find in medieval castles. There were rugs scattered about the floor, a floor marred only, but deeply, by a dark stain of blood.

  A bookcase lining an entire wall was filled with old volumes. Approaching it Gamache noticed something protruding from between the logs. He picked at it and looked at what he held.

  A dollar bill.

  It’d been years, decades, since Canada used dollar bills. Examining the wall more closely he noticed other paper protruding. More dollar bills. Some two-dollar bills. In a couple of cases there were twenties.

  Was this the man’s banking system? Like an old miser, instead of stuffing his mattress had he stuffed his walls? After a tour of the walls Gamache concluded the money was there to keep the cold out. The cabin was made of wood and Canadian currency. It was insulation.

  Next he walked over to the riverstone fireplace, pausing at one of the wing chairs. The one with the deepest impressions in the seat and back. He touched the worn fabric. Looking down at the table beside the chair he saw the whittling tools Beauvoir had mentioned, and leaning against the table was a fiddle and bow. A book, closed but with a bookmark, sat beside the tools. Had the man been reading when he was interrupted?

  He picked it up and smiled.

  “I had three chairs in my house,” Gamache read quietly. “One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

  “Pardon?” said Lacoste, from where she was crouching, looking under the table.

  “Thoreau. From Walden.” Gamache held up the book. “He lived in a cabin, you know. Not unlike this, perhaps.”

  “But he had three chairs,” smiled Lacoste. “Our man had only two.”

  Only two, thought Gamache. But that was enough, and that was significant. Two for friendship. Did he have a friend?

  “I think he might have been Russian,” she said, straightening up.

  “Why?”

  “There’re a few icons on the shelf here, by the books.” Lacoste waved behind her, and sure enough, in front of the leather-bound volumes were Russian icons.

  The Chief frowned and gazed around the small cabin. After a minute he grew very quiet, very still. Except for his eyes, which darted here and there.

  Beauvoir approached. “What is it?”

  The Chief didn’t answer. The room grew hushed. He moved his eyes around the cabin again, not really believing what he saw. So great was his surprise he closed his eyes then opened them again.

  “What is it?” Beauvoir repeated.

  “Be very careful with that,” he said to Agent Morin, who was holding a glass from the kitchen.

  “I will,” he said, wondering why the Chief would suddenly say that.

  “May I have it, please?”

  Morin gave it to Gamache who took it to an oil lamp. There, in the soft light, he saw what he expected to see, but never expected to hold in his own hands. Leaded glass, expertly cut. Hand cut. He couldn’t make out the mark on the bottom of the glass, and even if he could it would be meaningless to him. He was no expert. But he was knowledgeable enough to know what he held was priceless.

  It was an extremely old, even ancient, piece of glass. Made in a method not seen in hundreds of years. Gamache gently put the glass down and looked into the kitchen. On the open rustic shelves there stood at least ten glasses, all different sizes. All equally ancient. As his team watched, Armand Gamache moved along the shelves, picking up plates and cups and cutlery, then over to the walls to examine the hangings. He looked at the rugs, picking up the corners, and finally, like a man almost afraid of what he’d find, he approached the bookcases.

  “What is it, patron?” asked Beauvoir, joining him.

  “This isn’t just any cabin, Jean Guy. This is a museum. Each piece is an antiquity, priceless.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Morin, putting down the horse figurine jug.

  Who was this man? Gamache wondered. Who chose to live this far from other people? Three for society.

  This man wanted no part of society. What was he afraid of? Only fear could propel a man so far from company. Was he a survivalist, as they’d theorized? Gamache thought not. The contents of the cabin argued against that. No guns, no weapons at all. No how-to magazines, no publications warning of dire plots.

  Instead, this man had brought delicate leaded crystal with him into the woods.

  Gamache scanned the books, not daring to touch them. “Have these been dusted?”

  “They have,” said Morin. “And I looked inside for a name, but they’re no help. Different names written in most of them. Obviously secondhand.”

  “Obviously,” whispered Gamache to himself. He looked at the one still in his hand. Opening it to the bookmark he read, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

  Gamache turned to the front page and inhaled softly.

  It was a first edition.

  NINETEEN

  “Peter?” Clara knocked lightly on the door to his studio.

  He opened it, trying not to look secretive but giving up. Clara knew him too well, and knew he was always secretive about his art.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not bad,” he said, longing to cl

ose the door and get back to it. All day he’d been picking up his brush, approaching his painting then lowering the brush again. Surely the painting wasn’t finished? It was so embarrassing. What would Clara think? What would his gallery think? The critics? It was unlike anything else he’d ever done. Well, not ever. But certainly since childhood.

  He could never let anyone see this.

  It was ridiculous.

  What it needed, clearly, was more definition, more detail. More depth. The sorts of things his clients and supporters had come to expect. And buy.

  He’d picked up and lowered his brush a dozen times that day. This had never happened to him before. He’d watched, mystified, as Clara had been racked by self-doubt, had struggled and had finally produced some marginal piece of work. Her March of the Happy Ears, her series inspired by dragonfly wings, and, of course, her masterpiece, the Warrior Uteruses.

  That’s what came of inspiration.

  No, Peter was much more clear. More disciplined. He planned each piece, drew and drafted each work, knew months in advance what he’d be working on. He didn’t rely on airy-fairy inspiration.

  Until now. This time he’d come into the studio with a fireplace log, cut cleanly so that the rings of age were visible. He’d taken his magnifying glass and approached it, with a view to enlarging a tiny part of it beyond recognition. It was, he liked to tell art critics at his many sold-out vernissages, an allegory for life. How we blow things out of all proportion, until a simple truth was no longer recognizable.

  They ate it up. But this time it hadn’t worked. He’d been unable to see the simple truth. Instead, he’d painted this.

  When Clara left Peter plopped down in his chair and stared at the bewildering piece of work on his easel and repeated silently to himself, I’m brilliant, I’m brilliant. Then he whispered, so quietly he barely heard it himself, “I’m better than Clara.”

  Olivier stood on the terrasse outside the bistro and looked into the dark forest on the hill. In fact, Three Pines was surrounded by forest, something he’d never noticed, until now.

  The cabin had been found. He’d prayed this wouldn’t happen, but it had. And for the first time since he’d arrived in Three Pines he felt the dark forest closing in.

  But if all these things,” Beauvoir nodded to the interior of the single room, “are priceless why didn’t the murderer take them?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself,” said Gamache from the comfort of the large wing chair by the empty fireplace. “What was the murder about, Jean Guy? Why kill this man who seems to have lived a quiet, secret life in the woods for years, maybe decades?”

  “And then once he’s dead, why take the body but leave the valuables?” Beauvoir sat in the chair opposite the Chief.

  “Unless the body was more valuable than the rest?”

  “Then why leave it at the old Hadley house?”

  “If the murderer had just left the body here we’d never have found it,” reasoned Gamache, perplexed. “Never known there’d been a murder.”

  “Why kill the man, if not for his treasure?” asked Beauvoir.

  “Treasure?”

  “What else is it? Priceless stuff in the middle of nowhere? It’s buried treasure, only instead of being buried in the ground it’s buried in the forest.”

  But the murderer had left it there. And instead, had taken the only thing he wanted from that cabin. He’d taken a life.

  “Did you notice this?” Beauvoir got up and walked to the door. Opening it he pointed upward, with a look of amusement.

  There on the lintel above the door was a number.

  16

  “Now, you can’t tell me he got mail,” said Beauvoir as Gamache stared, puzzled. The numbers were brass and tarnished green. Almost invisible against the dark wooden door frame. Gamache shook his head then looked at his watch. It was almost six.

  After a bit of discussion it was decided Agent Morin would stay at the cabin overnight, to guard the possessions.

  “Come with me,” Gamache said to Morin. “I’ll drive you in while the others finish the job. You can pack an overnight bag and arrange for a satellite phone.”

  Morin got on the ATV behind the Chief Inspector and searched for something to grip, settling on the bottom of the seat. Gamache started up the machine. His investigations had taken him into tiny fishing out-ports and remote settlements. He’d driven snowmobiles, power boats, motorcycles and ATVs. While appreciating their convenience, and necessity, he disliked them all. They shattered the calm with their banshee screams, polluting the wilderness with noise and fumes.

  If anything could wake the dead, these could.

  As they bounced along Morin realized he was in trouble, and letting go of the seat he flung his small arms around the large man in front of him and held on tight, feeling the Chief’s wax coat against his cheek and the strong body underneath. And he smelled sandalwood and rosewater.

  The young man sat up, one hand on the Mountain, the other to his face. He couldn’t quite believe what the Mountain had told him. Then he started to giggle.

  Hearing this, the Mountain was puzzled. It wasn’t the shriek of terror he normally heard from creatures who came near him.

  As he listened the Mountain King realized this was a happy sound. An infectious sound. He too started to rumble and only stopped when the people in the village grew frightened. And he didn’t want that. Never again did he want to scare anything away.

  He slept well that night.

  The boy, however, did not. He tossed and turned and finally left his cabin to stare up at the peak.

  Every night from then on the boy was burdened by the Mountain’s secret. He grew weary and weak. His parents and friends commented on this. Even the Mountain noticed.

  Finally, one night well before the sun rose the boy nudged his parents awake.

  “We need to leave.”

  “What?” his bleary mother asked.

  “Why?” his father and sister asked.

  “The Mountain King has told me of a wonderful land where people never die, never grow sick or old. It’s a place only he knows about. But he says we need to leave now. Tonight. While it’s still dark. And we need to go quickly.”

  They woke up the rest of the village and well before dawn they’d packed up. The boy was the last to leave. He took a few steps into the forest and kneeling down he touched the surface of the sleeping Mountain King.

  “Good-bye,” he whispered.

  Then he tucked the package under his arm, and disappeared into the night.

  Jean Guy Beauvoir stood outside the cabin. It was almost dark and he was starving. They’d finished their work and he was just waiting for Agent Lacoste to pack up.

  “I have to pee,” she said, joining him on the porch. “Any ideas?”

  “There’s an outhouse over there.” He pointed away from the cabin.

  “Great,” she said and grabbed a flashlight. “Isn’t this how horror movies start?”

  “Oh no, we’re well into the second reel by now,” said Beauvoir with a smirk. He watched Lacoste pick her way along the path to the outhouse.

  His stomach growled. At least, he hoped it was his stomach. The sooner they got back to civilization, the better. How could anyone live out here? He didn’t envy Morin spending the night.

  A bobbing flashlight told him Lacoste was returning.

  “Have you been into the outhouse?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding? The Chief looked in, but I didn’t.” Even thinking about it made him gag.

  “So you didn’t see what was in there.”

  “Don’t tell me, the toilet paper was money too.”

  “Actually it was. One- and two-dollar bills.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not. And I found this.” She held a book in her hand. “A first edition. Signed by E. B. White. It’s Charlotte’s Web.”

  Beauvoir stared at it. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “It was my favorite book as a child. Charlotte the spider?” she asked. “Wilbur the pig?”

  “If they didn’t get blown up I didn’t read it.”

  “Who leaves a signed first edition in an outhouse?”

  “Who leaves money there?” Beauvoir suddenly felt an urge to go.

  Salut, patron,” waved Gabri from the living room. He was folding tiny outfits and putting them into a box. “So, the cabin in the woods. Was it where the guy lived? The dead man?”

  “We think so.” Gamache joined him. He watched Gabri fold the small sweaters.

  “For Rosa. We’re collecting them from everyone to give to Ruth. Is this too big for Rosa?” He held up a boy’s blazer. “It’s Olivier’s. He says he made it himself but I can’t believe that, though he’s very good with his hands.” Gamache ignored that.

  “It’s a little big. And masculine, for Rosa, don’t you think?” he said.

  “True.” Gabri put it in the reject pile. “In a few years it might fit Ruth though.”

  “Did no one ever mention a cabin before? Not old Mrs. Hadley?”

  Gabri shook his head but continued working. “No one.” Then he stopped folding and put his hands in his lap. “I wonder how he survived? Did he walk all the way to Cowansville or Saint-Rémy for food?”

  One more thing we don’t know, thought Gamache as he went up the stairs. He showered and shaved and called his wife. It was getting dark and in the distance he could hear the shriek from the forest. The ATVs returning. To the village and to the cabin.

  In the living room of the B and B, Gabri had been replaced by someone else. Sitting in the comfortable chair by the fire was Vincent Gilbert.

  “I’ve been over to the bistro but people kept bothering me, so I came here to bother you. I’ve been trying to get out of my son’s way. Funny how coming back from the dead isn’t as popular as it once was.”

  “Did you expect him to be happy?”

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