A Great Reckoning

CHAPTER 36

“So that was Roof Trusses after all,” said Jacques, when Nathaniel and Amelia finally joined them at their table in the bistro. “You can’t tell the little shithole was ever there.”

“True,” agreed Amelia. “It wasn’t obvious. We had to actually work at it.”

She glared at Jacques before taking the rich hot chocolate, topped with fresh whipped cream, from Olivier. “Merci.”

Slightly startled by the pleasantry, Olivier smiled. “De rien.”

“And after all that, all you found were a couple of buckets of maple syrup.” Jacques shoved his empty mug toward Olivier, who took it and left. “Well done.”

“Sap,” said Nathaniel.

Huifen had been watching the younger cadets’ earlier conversation with the old poet, and while she couldn’t hear what was being said, she could see that it had held the crazy old woman’s attention.

It was more than sap they’d found.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“What’s it to you?” asked Amelia.

“What’s it to us?” asked Huifen. “We might not have been there, but we’re all working together.”

“No, we’re not,” said Nathaniel. “You left me on the side of the road. You got in the car and were about to drive away.”

“No, I wasn’t,” said Jacques. “I just turned it on to get heat and to hurry you up.”

“I wasn’t slow, I was still looking for Roof Trusses and you gave up, you lazy shit.”

“You little piece of crap—” Jacques leaned toward Nathaniel, who jerked away. But Huifen stopped Jacques with a hand to his arm.

Amelia noticed the subtle gesture and not for the first time wondered at the power this small woman held over the large man. And, not for the first time, wondered just how much influence she did have over Jacques.

Huifen could stop him from doing something, but could she also get him to act?

“You’re just afraid to admit you were wrong,” said Amelia.

“I’m not afraid. Of anything.” Jacques glared at Amelia. “How many times do I have to prove it?”

“Oh, you’re afraid now,” Huifen said quietly. “And you were afraid then. We all were.”

The laughter, the warmth of the bistro disappeared as the four young people stared at each other.

And then with a bang they were brought back to the bistro, as the front door slammed shut.

Commander Gamache and Deputy Commissioner Gélinas had just arrived, the door blowing closed behind them.

They stomped their feet, brushed wet snow off their coats, and slapped their hats against their legs. It was a singular Québec jig learned in the womb.

The snow had turned back to sleet as night fell and now it was pelting against the bistro windows and piling up on the mullions.

Gamache took off his wet coat and, after hanging it on a peg by the door, he looked around, rubbing his hands together for warmth and taking in the fires crackling away in stone hearths at either end of the beamed room. The bistro was surprisingly full for such a dreadful night. But some of the regulars were missing.

He’d left Reine-Marie, Clara, Myrna, Ruth, and Gabri at his home in front of the roaring fire in the living room, sipping red wine and going through the boxes and boxes of items found in the basement of the Royal Canadian Legion.

“Look.” Clara had picked up a picture. “There’s my place in the background.”

She showed them the photo of two young men in puttees tied from their knees to their ankles. Their uniforms were too tight and their grins, Clara knew, way too big.

They stood on the village green and between them was a farm woman in her Sunday best, awkward and bashful and full of pride, her robust sons on either side of her, their arms around her soft shoulders.

“Look at the pines,” said Gabri. “They’re the same size as the boys.”

They’d walked right by those same trees on their way to the Gamaches’ home. They now towered over the village, strong and straight and still growing.

“I thought the trees had been here for centuries,” said Myrna. “Like Ruth.”

“They have,” said Ruth. “Three pines of some sort have always been on the village green.”

She spoke with such authority that Myrna began to wonder if Ruth really was a few centuries old. Rooted and pickled. Like an old turnip.

“Maybe the originals died,” said Clara. “Is either of the boys in this photograph also in the stained-glass window?”

Clara passed the picture around.

“Hard to tell,” said Myrna. “They aren’t the main boy, but the other two are in profile.”

“Is there a name?” Gabri asked.

Ruth turned the picture over.

“Joe and Norm Valois,” she read.

The friends looked at her, their encyclopedia of loss.

Ruth nodded. “And there was a third Valois on the wall. Pierre. Probably another brother.”

“Oh, dear God,” sighed Reine-Marie, and looked away from the picture, unable to meet the eyes of Madame Valois.

“I wonder if Pierre was taking the picture,” said Gabri. “Or maybe it was their father.”

Clara took the photograph back. Was Pierre the younger son, or the oldest? Had he joined up later, to be with his brothers? Or was he already there? Did they find each other before they died? Most of the boys joined the same regiment, often the same unit. And ended up in the same battles.

Ypres, Vimy, Flanders, the Somme, Passchendaele. All familiar names now, but unknown to the three in the photo.

Clara stared and stared at the picture, with the young men and the young trees and her house, unchanged, in the background.

Had they grown up in her home? Had the telegram been delivered there? Had they fluttered out of their mother’s hand, to the flagstone floor, one after the other? Piling up. A storm of grief.

We regret to inform you …

Is that why her cottage always felt so soothing? It was used to offering comfort to the inconsolable.

Clara put the photograph on the sofa beside her and went back to the job at hand, searching through the boxes, looking for the boys in the window.

Photograph after photograph showed fields of mud where French and Belgian villages had been bombed to oblivion. Disappeared, until they were a divot in the landscape.

“Can we help?” Armand had asked when they’d changed out of their office clothes before heading to the bistro.

He’d spoken to Reine-Marie, but she was silent, staring into a shoe box on her lap. He leaned over and saw what was in there.

Telegrams.

“Look at this,” said Gabri, breaking the silence. He held a compass and was turning it this way and that. “I never did learn how to read one of these things.”

“A lost boy if there ever was one,” said Myrna, and Ruth snorted in amusement, or because she had an olive lodged in her nostril again.

“You should take up orienteering,” said Gamache as Gabri handed him the compass.

“I’m quite happy with my orientation, thank you,” said Gabri.

The glass was shattered, but as Armand turned it, the needle still found true north.

“When you stop playing with that, Clouseau, go see to your young people,” said Ruth. “They’re over at the bistro. They want to speak to you.”

“Shall we?” Gamache asked Gélinas, who nodded.

“A quiet Scotch by the fire sounds good.”

After arriving at the bistro, Gamache gestured to Olivier for two Scotches, then he and Gélinas wound their way through the tables toward the cadets. Once at the table, the cadets rose and Commander Gamache waved them to sit back down.

“Ruth said you’d like to speak to me,” Gamache said, smoothing his hair, disheveled from his tuque, and sitting down. “Is something wrong?”

The four young people looked upset. Two of them pale, two of them flushed.

“We were just arguing,” said Huifen. “Nothing new.”

“About what?” asked Gélinas, taking a seat.

“These two found Roof Trusses, or Notre-Dame-de-Doleur, or whatever it’s called,” said Huifen. “We gave up.”

“Hardly matters,” said Jacques. “There’s nothing there but snow. And maple syrup.”

“Sap,” said Nathaniel. “And there was something there.”

“What did you find?” asked Gamache, after thanking Olivier for the Scotches.

“The cemetery.” Nathaniel’s voice was eager now and his eyes bright.

“It was overgrown,” said Amelia. “But still there.”

“And?” asked Gamache.

Nathaniel shook his head. “No Antony Turcotte.”

“No Turcotte at all,” said Amelia.

Gamache sat back, surprised. Considering.

“Didn’t the toponymie man say Turcotte had been buried there?”

“Yes. It was even in the Canadian Encyclopedia.”

Gamache leaned forward again and, putting his elbows on the table, he folded his hands together and rested his chin on them. And stared out at the darkness, the snowflakes furious in the bistro light.

“Could the gravestone have fallen over or been buried?” he asked.

“It’s possible,” Amelia admitted. “But it’s not a big cemetery and most of the stones were fairly easy to find. We can go back tomorrow and take a closer look.”

“But why bother?” asked Jacques. “He’s just trying to keep us busy. Can’t you see that? How can it possibly matter? Besides, he’s not part of the investigation anymore.”

“And you’re not Sûreté officers,” snapped Gamache. “You’re cadets and I’m your commander. And you’ll do as I say. I’m losing patience with you, young man. The only reason I tolerate your insubordination is because I think someone messed with your head. Told you all sorts of things that aren’t true.”

“So you’re here to reeducate me, is that it?” demanded Jacques.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. You’re very close to graduation, and then what?”

“I’ll be a Sûreté officer.”

“Will you? Things have changed at the academy and you’re not changing with them. You’re stuck. Frozen. Perhaps even petrified.” Gamache lowered his voice, though the rest of the table could still hear. “The time has come, Jacques, to decide if you are going to move forward, or not.”

“You have no idea who I am, and what I’ve done,” Jacques hissed back.

“What have you done?” Gamache demanded, holding the young man’s eyes. “Tell me now.”

Huifen reached out. The warning touch. Again. Subtle, but Gamache saw it.

And the moment passed when Jacques might have said something.

Gamache glared at Huifen, then turned to Nathaniel and Amelia. “You’ve done well.”

“What should we do now?” Nathaniel asked.

“Now you join us for dinner,” said Gamache, getting up. “You must be hungry.”

“Us too?” asked Huifen, also rising along with Jacques.

The Commander looked at them and gave a brusque nod before going to the long wooden bar and paying for the cadets’ food and drinks for that day, and inviting Olivier to join them.

“You okay?” asked Annie.

Jean-Guy was rubbing her swollen feet and both were on the sofa, watching the news. Though Jean-Guy was clearly distracted.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

He hesitated, not wanting to upset Annie with ideas that seemed at one moment crazy and the next perfectly plausible.

“Do you think your father could have ever…”

“Oui?”

She took a huge bite of the éclair she’d been having as an hors d’oeuvre.

Now, looking into his wife’s unsuspecting gaze, it seemed crazy to Jean-Guy. Armand Gamache would never—

“Nothing.”

“What is it?” She lowered the éclair to a plate. “Tell me. Is Dad in trouble? Is something wrong?”

There, he’d upset her after all, and he knew she wouldn’t let it go until he told her.

“There’s a senior officer from the RCMP who’s joined us as an independent observer and he seems to think your father might’ve—”

“Had something to do with the murder?” asked Annie.

“Well, no, not really, it’s just, well—”

She swung her legs off his lap and sat up. Annie the lawyer was in the building.

“Is there any evidence?” she asked.

Jean-Guy sighed. “Circumstantial, at best.”

“And what’s the worst?”

“Fingerprints.”

Annie’s brows shot up. She hadn’t expected that.

“Where?”

“On the murder weapon.”

“Jesus. Which was a revolver, right?”

“Your father said he never touched it, never even knew Leduc had it.”

“He wouldn’t allow it,” said Annie, her eyes narrowing in thought.

“That’s what he said. The prints are partials. His and one of the cadets and Michel Brébeuf’s.”

“Partials?” The tension left her face. “Then they’re not admissible. And they’re obviously not his.”

“He told me this afternoon that they were.”

“Wait a minute.” She leaned toward her husband. “He says he never touched it, but also says the prints are his. That doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. He said he thinks the solution to the murder lies in those prints.”

“The other ones, then. Uncle Michel and the cadet,” said Annie. “That’s what he must mean. Who is he?”

“The cadet? She. Amelia Choquet.”

He watched his wife, but there was no reaction to the name. Jean-Guy struggled with what to say next and Annie homed in on that.

“There’s more. What is it?”

“There seems a kind of connection between them.”

“Between Dad and Michel Brébeuf, yes, of course. You know that.”

“No, between Amelia Choquet and your father.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice guarded.

“I don’t know. I just wondered if the name meant anything.”

“Should it? Come on, Jean-Guy, tell me what you’re thinking.”

He heaved a sigh and wondered how much damage he was about to do.

“Do you think your father could’ve had an affair?”

The question landed on Annie like an anvil on a cartoon cat. She looked dazed and he could almost see stars and little birds flying around her head.

Annie stared at him, incapable of speech. Finally blurting out, “Of course not.”

“Many men do,” said Jean-Guy gently. “Away from home. Tempted. A moment of weakness.”

“My father is as human as the next man, and he has his weaknesses,” said Annie. “But not that. Never that. He would never, ever betray my mother. He loves her.”

“I agree. But I had to ask.” He took her hand and absently turned her wedding ring around and around. “Have I hurt you?”

“You’ve made me angry that you’d even ask. And if you have to ask, then what must others think? Like that RCMP person. He doesn’t know Dad, does he?”

“No, but he’s staying with your folks in Three Pines.”

“You have to go down there, Jean-Guy. You have to be with Dad. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“Like kill someone or have an affair?”

“Well, seems you’ve already messed that up,” she said with a wan smile.

“I offered to go down, but he wanted me to be with you.”

“I’ll be fine. Baby isn’t due for a few weeks.”

He got up and hauled her off the sofa.

“You want me gone so you can finish off that box of éclairs, don’t you?”

“Actually, the pizza boy’s arriving in a few minutes. I need you gone by then. He’s very jealous.”

“Replaced by a pepperoni. My mother said it would come to that.”

“So did Gloria Steinem.”