How the Light Gets In

SEVENTEEN

Armand Gamache woke to screams and shouts and a short, sharp explosion of sound.

Sitting bolt upright in bed, he went from deep sleep to complete awareness in a split second. His hand shot out and hovered over the nightstand where his gun sat in the drawer.

His eyes were sharp, his focus complete. He was motionless, his body tense.

He could see daylight through the curtains. Then he heard it again. An urgent shout. A cry for help. A command given. Another bang.

There was no mistaking that sound.

He put on his dressing gown and slippers, pulled back the curtain, and saw a pickup hockey game on the frozen pond, in the middle of the village green.

Henri was beside him, alert as well, nudging his nose out the window. Sniffing.

“This place’s going to kill me,” said the Chief Inspector to Henri. But he smiled as he watched the kids, skating furiously after the puck. Shouting instructions to each other. Howling in triumph, and screaming with pain, when a slap shot went in the net.

He stood, mesmerized for a moment, looking out the frosted pane of glass.

It was a brilliant day. A Saturday, he realized. The sun was just up, but the kids looked like they’d been at it for hours and could go on all day, with only short breaks for hot chocolate.

He lowered the window and opened the curtains all the way, then turned around. The house was quiet. It had taken him a moment to remember he wasn’t in Gabri’s bed and breakfast, but in Emilie Longpré’s home.

This room was larger than the one he had at the B and B. There was a fireplace on one wall, the floors were wide-plank pine, and the walls were covered in floral paper that was anything but fashionable. There were windows on two sides, making it bright and cheerful.

He looked at the bedside clock and was shocked to see it was almost eight. He’d overslept. Hadn’t bothered to set the alarm, sure he’d wake up on his own at six in the morning, as he normally did. Or that Henri would nudge him awake.

But both had fallen into a deep sleep and would still be in bed if it weren’t for a sudden breakaway goal in the game below.

After a quick shower, Gamache took Henri downstairs, fed him, put the coffee on to perk, then clipped the leash on Henri for a walk around the village green. As they strolled they watched the hockey game, Henri straining, anxious to join the other kids.

“I’m glad you keep the dumb beast on a leash. He’s a menace.”

Gamache turned to see Ruth and Rosa closing in on them over the frozen road. Rosa wore little knitted boots and seemed to walk with a slight limp, like Ruth. And Ruth appeared to have developed a waddle, like Rosa.

If people really did morph into their pets, thought Gamache, any moment now he’d sprout huge ears and a playful, slightly vacant, expression.

But Rosa was more than a pet to Ruth, and Ruth was more than just another person to the duck.

“Henri is not a dumb beast, madame,” said Gamache.

“I know that,” snapped the poet. “I was talking to Henri.”

The shepherd and the duck eyed each other. Gamache, as a precaution, tightened his grip on the leash, but he needn’t have worried. Rosa thrust out her beak and Henri leapt back and cowered behind Gamache’s legs, looking up at him.

Gamache and Henri raised their brows at each other.

“Pass,” Ruth screamed at the hockey players. “Don’t hog the puck.”

Anyone listening would have heard the implied “dumbass” tacked to the end of that sentence.

A boy passed the puck, but too late. It disappeared into a snow bank. He looked over at Ruth and shrugged.

“That’s OK, Etienne,” said Ruth. “Next time keep your head up.”

“Oui, coach.”

“Fucking kids never listen,” said Ruth, and turned her back on them, but not before a few had seen her and Rosa and stopped play to wave.

“Coach?” asked Gamache, walking beside her.

“It’s French for asshole. Coach.”

Gamache laughed, a puff of humor. “Something else you taught them, then.”

Small puffs came from Ruth’s mouth and he presumed it was a chuckle. Or sulphur.

“Thank you for the coq au vin last night,” said the Chief. “It was delicious.”

“It was for you? Christ, I thought that librarian woman said it was for the people in Emilie’s home.”

“That’s me and my friends, as you very well know.”

Ruth picked up Rosa and walked in silence for a few paces.

“Are you any closer to finding out who killed Constance?” she asked.

“A little.”

Beside them the hockey game continued, with boys and girls chasing the puck, some skating forward, some wiggling backward. As though life depended on what happened to that piece of frozen rubber.

It might appear trivial, but Gamache knew that this was where so much was learned. Trust and teamwork. When to pass, when to advance and when to retreat. And to never lose sight of the goal, no matter the chaos and distractions around you.

“Why did you take that book by Dr. Bernard?” he asked.

“What book?”

“How many books by a Dr. Bernard do you have?” he asked. “The one on the Ouellet Quints. You took it from Myrna’s bookstore.”

“It’s a bookstore?” Ruth asked, looking over at the shop. “But it says ‘library.’”

“It says librairie,” said the Chief. “French for ‘you’re lying.’”

Ruth snorted with laughter.

“You know perfectly well librairie in French means bookstore,” he said.

“Fucking confusing language. Why not just be clear?”

Gamache looked at her with amazement. “A very good question, madame.”

He spoke without exasperation. He owed Ruth a great deal, not the least of which was patience.

“Yes, I took the book. As I said earlier, Constance told me who she was, so I wanted to read up on her. Morbid curiosity.”

Gamache knew that Ruth Zardo might be morbid but she wasn’t curious. That would demand an interest in others.

“And you figured you’d learn something from Dr. Bernard’s account?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to learn it from her, was I? It was the best I could do. Boring book. Talked mostly about himself. I hate self-centered people.”

He let that one pass.

“Had some rude things to say about the parents, though,” she continued. “All couched in polite terms, of course, in case they ever read it, which I suspect they did. Or had it read to them.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Gamache.

“According to Bernard, they were poor and ignorant and dumb as a puck. And greedy.”

“How so?”

“They basically sold their kids to the government, then got huffy when the money ran out. Figured they were owed more.”

Chief Inspector Gamache had himself found the details of the accounting. It showed a large payment, or certainly large for the time, to Isidore Ouellet, disguised as an expropriation of his farm for a hundred times what it was really worth.

The dirt-poor farmer had won the lottery, in the form of five fantastical daughters. And all he’d had to do was sell them to the state.

Gamache had also come across letters. Lots of them. Written over a period of years in laborious longhand, demanding their daughters back, saying they were tricked. Threatening to go public. The Ouellets would tell everyone how the government had stolen their children. Isidore even invoked Frère André, who was dead by then, but an increasingly potent symbol in Québec.

In reading the letters it struck Gamache that what Isidore Ouellet really wanted was not the girls, but more money.

Then there were the letters in response from a newly formed branch of the government called Service de protection de l’enfance. They were addressed to the Ouellets, and while the language was extremely civil, Gamache could see the counter-threat.

If the Ouellets opened their mouths, so would the government.

And they had a great deal to say. They too invoked Brother André. It seemed the saint played for both teams. Or so they hoped.

Eventually the letters from the Ouellets petered out, but not before the tone became more pathetic, more demeaning. Begging. Explaining they had rights and needs.

And then the letters stopped.

“Did Constance tell you about her parents?” Gamache asked. It was their second time around the village green. He looked down at Henri, who was staying close to Gamache’s legs, eyes fixed on Rosa. A spectacularly stupid expression on his face.

Could it be? Gamache wondered. No. Surely not.

He stole another look at Henri, who was all but slobbering as he watched Rosa. It was difficult to tell, but the shepherd either wanted to eat the duck, or had fallen in love with her.

Gamache decided not to explore either thought further. It was far too star-crossed.

“Honestly, you can’t be that stupid,” said Ruth. “I told you yesterday that I knew who Constance was but we didn’t talk about it. You really aren’t listening, are you?”

“To your sparkling conversation? Who wouldn’t? No, I was paying attention, I just wondered if Constance had said something to you, but, alas, she didn’t.”

Ruth shot him a look, her blue eyes bleary but sharp. Like a knife in a cold, shallow stream.

They stopped in front of Emilie Longpré’s home.

“I remember visiting Madame Longpré here,” said Gamache. “She was a remarkable woman.”

“Yes,” said Ruth, and he waited for some snide qualifier, but none came.

“It’s nice to see lights on, and smoke coming from the chimney again,” she said. “It’s been empty far too long. This home was meant for people.” She turned to him. “It wants company. Even company as banal as yours.”

“Merci,” said the Chief, with a small bow. “Might I come over later and pick up the book?”

“What book?”

It was all Gamache could do to not roll his eyes. “The book by Dr. Bernard on the Ouellet Quintuplets.”

“You still want that? You’d better pay that librarian woman for it then, now that she’s changed her place from a library to a bookstore. Is that legal?”

“À bientôt, coach,” said Gamache, and watched Ruth and Rosa limp and waddle next door.

Henri embarrassed himself by crying a little.

Gamache tugged on the leash and the shepherd reluctantly followed.

“And I thought you were in love with the arm of our sofa,” said the Chief, as they entered the warm house. “Fickle brute.”

Thérèse was in the living room in front of the fireplace, reading an old paper.

“From five years ago,” she said, putting it down beside her. “But if I hadn’t looked at the date I’d swear it was today’s.”

“Plus ça change…” said Gamache, joining her.

“The more it changes, the more it stays the same,” Thérèse finished the quote, then thought about it. “Do you believe it?”

“No,” he said.

“You’re an optimist, monsieur.” She leaned toward him and lowered her voice. “Neither do I.”

“Café?” he asked, and went to the kitchen to pour them both a coffee. Thérèse followed him and leaned against the marble counter.

“I feel out of sorts without my phone and emails and laptop,” she admitted, her arms around her body, like an addict in withdrawal.

“Me too,” he said, passing her a mug of coffee.

“When you’ve come here for murder investigations, how did you connect?”

“Not much we could do except tap into the telephone lines and boost them.”

“But that’s still dial-up,” said Thérèse. “Better than nothing, though. I know you also use hubs and mobile satellite dishes when you’re in remote areas. Do they work here?”

He shook his head. “Not very reliable. The valley’s too deep.”

“Or the mountains too high,” said Thérèse with a smile. “Perspective.”

Gamache opened the fridge and found bacon and eggs. Thérèse brought a loaf out of the bread box and began slicing it while the Chief put bacon into a cast-iron skillet.

It sizzled and popped, while Gamache poked it and moved the slices around.

“Morning.” Jérôme entered the kitchen. “I smelled bacon.”

“Almost ready,” said Gamache from the stove. He cracked the eggs into the frying pan while Jérôme put preserves on the table.

A few minutes later they all sat in front of plates of bacon, eggs over easy and toast.

Through the back window, over the sink, Gamache could see Emilie’s garden and the forest beyond covered in snow so bright it looked more blue and pink than white. A more perfect place to hide would be impossible to find. A safer safe house did not exist.

They were safe, the Chief knew, but they were also stuck.

Like the Quints, he thought, as he took a sip of rich, hot coffee. While the rest of the world had been in the depths of the Depression, they’d been scooped up, taken away, and made safe. They were given everything they wanted. Except their freedom.

Gamache looked at his companions, eating bacon and eggs, and spreading homemade jam on homemade bread.

They too had everything they could want. Except their freedom.

“Jérôme?” he began, his voice uncertain.

“Oui, mon ami.”

“I have a medical question for you.” The thought of the Quints reminded him of his conversation the night before with Myrna.

Jérôme lowered his fork and gave Gamache his full attention.

“Go on.”

“Twins,” said Gamache. “Do they generally share the same amniotic sac?”

“In the womb? Identical twins do. Fraternal twins don’t. They have their own egg and their own sac.”

He was clearly curious, but didn’t ask why.

“Why?” But Thérèse did. “A happy announcement for you and Reine-Marie?”

Gamache laughed. “As wonderful as having twins at this stage in life would be, no. I’m actually interested in multiple births.”

“How many?” asked Jérôme.

“Five.”

“Five? Must’ve been IVF,” he said. “Fertility drugs. Multiple eggs so almost certainly not identical.”

“No, no, these are identical. Or were. And there was no IVF at the time.”

Thérèse stared at him. “Are you talking about the Ouellet Quintuplets?”

Gamache nodded. “There were five of them, of course. From a single egg. They split off into twos in the womb and shared amniotic sacs. Except one.”

“What a thorough investigator you are, Armand,” said Jérôme. “You go all the way back to the womb.”

“Well, no one suspects a fetus,” said Gamache. “That’s their great advantage.”

“Though there are a few disadvantages.” Jérôme paused to gather his thoughts. “The Ouellet Quints. We studied them in medical school. It was a phenomenon. Not simply a multiple birth, and identical at that, but the fact all five survived. Remarkable man, Dr. Bernard. I heard him lecture once, when he was a very old man. Still sharp, and still very proud of those girls.”

Gamache wondered if he should say something, but decided against it. There was no need to throw dirt on that idol. Yet.

“What was your question, Armand?”

“The one Quint who was alone in the womb. Would that have made any difference once they were born?”

“What sort of difference?”

Gamache thought about that. What did he mean?

“Well, she would have looked like her sisters, but would she have been different in other ways?”

“It’s not my specialty,” Jérôme qualified, then answered anyway. “But I think it couldn’t help but affect her. Not necessarily in a bad way. It could make her more resilient and self-reliant. The others would have a natural affinity for the girl they shared the sac with. Being that close physically, physiologically for eight months, they couldn’t help but bond in ways that go beyond personality. But the girl who developed on her own? She might have been less dependent on the others. More independent.”

He went back to spreading jam on his toast.

“Or not,” said Gamache, and wondered what life would have been like for a perpetual outsider in a closed community. Would she have yearned for that bond? Seen their closeness, and felt left out?

Myrna had described Constance as lonely. Is this why? Had she been alone and lonely all her life, from before her first breath even?

Sold by her parents, excluded by her sisters. What would that do to a person? Could it twist her into something grotesque? Pleasant, smiling, the same as all the others on the outside, but hollow on the inside?

Gamache had to remind himself that Constance was the victim, not a suspect. But he also remembered the police report on the first sister’s death. Virginie had fallen down the stairs. Or maybe, he thought, been pushed.

The sisters had entered into a conspiracy of silence. Myrna assumed it was in reaction to the extreme glare of publicity they’d suffered as children, but now Chief Inspector Gamache wondered if there was another reason for their silence. Something from within their own household, not from outside.

And yet, he had the impression that seventy-seven-year-old Constance was returning to Three Pines, to Myrna, and bringing with her not simply the only photo that existed of the grown-up girls, but also the story of what really happened in that home.

But Constance was killed before she could say anything.

“She’d have brought it on herself, of course,” said Jérôme.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she killed her sister.”

Gamache gawked. How could Jérôme possibly know that, or know Gamache’s suspicions?

“The reason she was alone in the sac. There were almost certainly six of them, two to a sac, but the singleton would have killed and absorbed her twin,” Jérôme explained. “Happens all the time.”

“Why do you want to know all this, Armand?” Thérèse asked.

“There’s been no public announcement, but the last Quint, Constance Ouellet, was murdered two days ago. She was preparing to come down here, to Three Pines.”

“Here?” asked Jérôme. “Why?”

Gamache told them. He could tell, as he spoke, that this was more than another death to them, even more than another murder. There was an added weight to this tragedy, as though Thérèse and Jérôme had lost someone they knew and cared about.

“Hard to believe they’re all gone,” said Thérèse, then she thought about it. “But they never seemed completely real. They were like statues. Looked human but weren’t.”

“Myrna Landers said it was like finding out her friend was a unicorn, or a Greek goddess. Hera, come to earth.”

“An interesting thing to say,” said Thérèse. “But how did this get to be your case, Armand? Constance Ouellet was found in Montréal. It would be the jurisdiction of the Montréal police.”

“True, but Marc Brault handed it to me when he realized there was a connection.”

“Lucky you,” said Jérôme.

“Lucky all of us,” said Gamache. “If not for that, we wouldn’t be in this home.”

“Which brings us to another issue,” said Jérôme. “Now that we’re here, how are we going to get out?”

“The plan?” asked Gamache.

They nodded.

The Chief paused to gather his thoughts.

Jérôme knew now would be the time to tell them what he’d found. The name. He’d only just glimpsed it in the moment before he realized he’d been caught. In the moment before he’d run. Run away. Back down the virtual corridor. Slamming doors, erasing his trail. Running, running.

He’d only just glimpsed it. And, thought Jérôme, maybe he got it wrong. In his panic, he must have gotten it wrong.

“Our only hope is to find out what Francoeur’s doing and stop it. And to do that we have to get you reconnected to the Internet,” Gamache said. “And not dial-up. It needs to be high-speed.”

“Yes,” said Thérèse, exasperated. “We know that. But how? There is no high-speed here.”

“We create our own transmission tower.”

Thérèse Brunel sat back and stared. “Have you hit your head, Armand? We can’t do that.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well, beside the fact it would take months and require all sorts of expertise, don’t you think someone would notice we were building a tower?”

“Ahh, they’d notice that, but I didn’t say ‘build,’ I said ‘create.’” Gamache got up and walked to the kitchen window. He pointed, past the village green, past the three huge pine trees, past the homes covered in snow. And up the hill.

“What’re we looking at?” Jérôme asked. “The hill over the village? We could put a tower on it, but again, that would take expertise.”

“And time,” said Thérèse.

“But the tower’s already there,” said Gamache, and they looked again. Finally Thérèse turned to him, astonished.

“You mean the trees,” she said.

“C’est ça,” said Gamache. “They make a natural tower. Jérôme?”

Gamache turned to the rotund man, wedged between the armchair and the window. His back to them. Staring up and out of the village.

“It might work,” he said, uncertainly. “But we’d need someone to put a satellite dish on a tree.”

They walked back to the breakfast table.

“There must be people who work with trees around here—what’re they called?” Thérèse’s city mind stumbled over itself. “Lumberjacks or something? We could get one of them to climb up with a dish. And from that height I bet we could find a transmission tower using line-of-sight. And from there we connect with a satellite.”

“But where do we find a satellite dish?” Jérôme asked. “It can’t be a regular one. It needs to be some satellite dish that can’t be traced.”

“Let’s say we do get online,” said Thérèse, her mind racing ahead, “we’d have another problem. We can’t use the Sûreté log-ins to get into the system, Francoeur would be looking for those. So how do we get back in?”

Gamache placed a piece of notepaper on the wooden table.

“What is it?” Thérèse asked.

But Jérôme knew. “It’s an access code. But using what network?”

Gamache turned the paper over.

“La Bibliothèque nationale,” said Thérèse, recognizing the logo. “The national archives of Québec. Reine-Marie works there, doesn’t she?”

“Oui. I did my research on the Ouellet Quints yesterday at the Bibliothèque nationale and I remembered Reine-Marie saying that the archive network goes all over the province, into the smallest library and into the massive archives at the universities. It’s connected to every publicly funded library.”

“It also goes into the Sûreté archives,” said Thérèse. “The files of all the old cases.”

“It’s our way in,” said Jérôme, his eyes glued to the bit of paper and the logo. “Is it Reine-Marie’s? A code belonging to Reine-Marie Gamache would trip an alarm.”

He knew he was looking for reasons this wouldn’t work, because he knew what was waiting on the other side of that electronic door. Prowling. Pacing. Looking for him. Waiting for him to do something stupid. Like go back in.

“I thought of that,” said Gamache, his voice reassuring. “It belongs to someone else. She’s one of the supervisors, so no one will question if that code is logged on.”

“I think it might work.” Thérèse’s voice was low, afraid to tempt the Fates.

Gamache pushed himself out of the chair. “I’m off to see Ruth Zardo, then I need to head in to Montréal. Can you speak with Clara Morrow and see if she knows anyone who puts up satellite dishes?”

“Armand,” said Thérèse at the door, as he collected his car keys and put on his coat and gloves. “You must know that you might’ve solved two ends of the problem. The satellite connection and the access codes, but how do we get from one to the other? The whole middle part is missing. We’ll need cables and computers and someone to connect it all.”

“Yes, that’s a problem. I might have an idea about that though.”

Superintendent Brunel thought Gamache looked even unhappier about the solution than the problem.

After the Chief Inspector left, Thérèse Brunel walked back into the kitchen and found her husband sitting at the table, staring at his now cold breakfast.

“The worm has turned,” she announced, joining him at the table.

“Yes,” said Jérôme, and thought that was a perfect description of them.