Kingdom of the Blind

CHAPTER 8

“Armand, are you awake?”

“Hmmmm.”

He turned over so that he was on his side, facing Reine-Marie. The air was chilly, but the duvet was warm. He reached under the covers for her hand.

They’d moved their mattress down to the kitchen and were camped by the woodstove. So that they could get up in the night and feed more logs into it.

“This afternoon, when you heard that the blizzard covered most of Québec, you seemed pleased.”

“Relieved,” he admitted.

“Why?”

That, he thought, was harder to explain.

Henri and Gracie, curled on the floor beside them, stirred, and then, with reassuring pats from Armand and Reine-Marie, they went back to sleep.

“I needed to go to the Sûreté Academy yesterday afternoon, to a meeting,” Armand whispered. “I told them not to do anything until I arrived. Then the storm hit and the phones went out, and I was worried that they’d proceed without me. But with the blizzard being so big, I knew nothing could happen. They were snowed in too.”

And he could relax. Knowing for the next number of hours, as the blizzard howled, the world was on hold. Frozen in place.

In the hectic, often frantic pace of life, there was something deeply peaceful about not being able to do anything. No Internet, no phone, no TV. No lights.

Life became simple, primal: Heat. Water. Food. Companionship.

Armand crawled out of bed, feeling the chill immediately as the warmth of the duvet slid off and the cold took hold.

Stepping over the other mattress on the kitchen floor, he fed more split logs into the fire.

Before returning to the warm bed, Armand stared out the mullioned windows into the darkness. Then bent and tucked the duvet around Reine-Marie.

As he did that, a voice, sharp and unexpected, came to him out of the darkness.

The evening before, those who weren’t snowed in dug out those who were, clearing paths from homes to the road.

Gabri and Olivier had been invited over to the Gamaches’ after they’d finished but had declined.

“Want to keep the bistro open,” Olivier explained.

“And we have unexpected guests at the B&B,” Gabri shouted into the battering wind. “Can’t get their cars out to drive home.”

“Can’t find their cars.” Olivier used his shovel to point to the burial mounds around the village green.

“Do you think we can get kids to do it? Convince them that it’s a game?” Gabri yelled into Olivier’s tuque. “Whoever digs a car out first wins a prize?”

“The prize would have to be a brain,” said Olivier.

A path had been shoveled to Ruth’s home, and Reine-Marie had knocked, but the old woman had refused to open the door.

“Come to our place for dinner,” Reine-Marie shouted through it. “Bring Rosa. We have plenty of food.”

“And drink?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t want to leave.”

“Ruth, please. You shouldn’t be alone. Come over. We have scotch.”

“I don’t know. The last bottle I had tasted strange.”

Reine-Marie could hear the fear in her voice. An old woman leaving her home to venture into a blizzard. Every survival instinct screamed no. While Ruth Zardo was not well endowed with survival instincts, she still had managed to claw her way into her eighties.

And not by walking into snowstorms.

One by one over the course of the early evening, they’d gone over to Ruth’s, clearing the fresh snow ahead of them. And one by one they’d been rebuffed.

“Okay, enough of this,” said Armand, getting up.

He grabbed a Hudson Bay blanket before heading to the door.

“What’re you going to do?” asked Reine-Marie.

“I’m going to get Ruth here, if I have to break down her door.”

“You’re going to kidnap her?” asked Myrna.

“Isn’t that against the law?” asked Reine-Marie.

“It is,” said Lucien, who had no ear for sarcasm. “Who’s this Ruth? Why’s she so important?”

“She’s a person,” said Armand, his parka and boots now on.

“But is she really?” Myrna mouthed to Reine-Marie.

“You do know if you kidnap her, no one will pay the ransom,” said Reine-Marie. “And we’ll be stuck with her.”

“Ruth’s not so bad,” said Myrna. “It’s the duck that worries me.”

“Duck?” asked Lucien.

“I’ll go with you, sir,” said Benedict.

“You don’t think I can take her on my own?” asked Armand with some amusement.

“Her, yes,” said Benedict. “But the duck?”

Armand looked at him for a moment, then laughed. Unlike Lucien, Benedict had slipped easily into the stream of conversation. Understanding what was banter and what was important.

Benedict got his boots, parka, tuque, and mitts on, and Gamache opened the door. Only to step back in surprise.

Ruth was standing there, covered in snow. Her heavy winter coat bulging and squirming.

“I hear there’s scotch,” she said, walking past them as though they were the guests and she the owner of the place.

As she walked, she dropped tuque, mitts, coat on the floor. And left puddles from her huge boots.

“Who’re they?” Ruth used Rosa to indicate Lucien and Benedict.

Reine-Marie introduced them. “They’re not drinking scotch,” she said, rightly assuming that was all Ruth really wanted to know.

A buffet of bread, cheese, cold chicken, roast beef, and pastries had been set out on the dining table at the far end of the living room, with storm lanterns and candles placed on it.

“Does the name Bertha Baumgartner mean anything to you?” Armand asked Ruth as he handed her a plate he’d made for her and joined her on the sofa.

“No,” said Ruth.

Myrna stepped from the buffet table long enough to whisper into Armand’s ear. “Unless it’s Johnnie Walker or Glenfiddich, she’s not interested. Watch and learn.”

Going back to the table, Myrna placed a chicken leg, some camembert, and a slice of baguette on her plate and said, “Bertha Baumgartner? Olivier just got a case in. Twenty-five years old. Slow-aged in oak. Very smooth.”

“Bertha Baumgartner’s booze?” asked Ruth, rejoining the conversation.

“No, she isn’t, you old drunk,” said Myrna. “But we wanted your attention, as wavering as it is.”

“You’re a cruel woman,” said Ruth.

“We’re liquidators of her estate,” said Armand. “But we’ve never met her. She lived locally.”

“An old farmhouse down Mansonville way,” said Myrna.

“Bertha Baumgartner? Means nothing to me,” said Ruth. “You the notary?”

“Me?” asked Benedict, his mouth full of bread. Again.

“No, not you.” Ruth eyed him. And his hair. “I see Gabri has competition for village idiot. I meant him.”

“Me?” asked Lucien.

“Yes, you. I knew a Laurence Mercier. He came to discuss my will. Your father?”

“Yes.”

“I see the resemblance,” she said. It did not sound like a compliment.

“You’ve made a will?” asked Reine-Marie, carrying her plate back to her seat by the fireplace.

“No,” said Ruth. “Decided not to. Nothing to leave. But I have written instructions for my funeral. Flowers. Music. The parade. Tributes from dignitaries. The design of the postage stamp. The usual.”

“Date?” asked Myrna.

“Just for that, I might not die,” said Ruth.

“Unless we can find a wooden stake or a silver bullet.”

“Those are just rumors.” Ruth turned to Armand. “So this Bertha person made you her liquidators and you never even knew her. She sounds batty. Wish I’d met her.”

“Though she wouldn’t be the first person to leave something strange in a will,” said Reine-Marie. “Wasn’t there something in Shakespeare’s?”

“Oui,” said Lucien, finally on familiar ground. “It was fairly standard until the end, where he wrote, ‘I give unto my wife my second best bed.’”

This brought laughter, then silence, as they tried to figure out, as scholars had for centuries, what that meant.

“How about Howard Hughes?” said Myrna. “Didn’t he die without a will?”

“Yeah, well, he really was crazy,” said Ruth.

“My favorite Hughes quote was when he said, ‘I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddamn it, I’m a billionaire,’” said Reine-Marie.

“Now, that sounds familiar,” said Ruth.

“His will was finally settled,” said Lucien.

“Yeah,” said Ruth. “After about thirty years.”

“Holy shit,” said Benedict, turning to Armand. “Hope it doesn’t take us that long.”

“Well, it probably won’t take me that long,” said Armand, doing the math.

As the room grew colder, they leaned closer to the fire and listened as Lucien Mercier told them about the man who’d left a penny to every child who attended his funeral and about the husbands who punished wives and children from beyond the grave.

“‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do,’” Ruth quoted.

“I know that poem,” said Benedict, and all eyes swung to him. “But that’s not the way it goes.”

“Oh really?” said Ruth. “And you’re a poetry expert?”

“No, not really. But I know that one,” he said. If not oblivious to sarcasm, at least impervious to it. A useful trait, thought Armand.

“How do you think it goes?” asked Reine-Marie.

“‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad,’” said the young man, reeling it off easily. “‘They read you Peter Rabbit, too.’”

All around the hearth, eyebrows rose.

“‘They fill you with the faults they had,’” said Ruth, squaring herself to Benedict, like a duelist. “‘And add some extra, just for you.’”

“‘They give you all the treats they had,’” he replied. “‘And add some extra, just for you.’”

Ruth glared at him. While the others stared in open amazement.

“Go on,” said Reine-Marie.

And Ruth did.

“Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.”

Their eyes swung back to Benedict.

“Man hands on happiness to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

So love your parents all you can,

And have some cheerful kids yourself.”

“Is he for real?” Ruth demanded, going back to her scotch.

The fire muttered in the hearth, and the wind howled outside, and the blizzard settled in, trapping everyone in their homes.

And Armand thought that was a pretty good question.

Was Benedict for real?

It had been decided that Lucien, Myrna, and Benedict would stay the night, as would Ruth. She and Rosa were put on the mattress closest to the woodstove in the kitchen.

In the early-morning hours, after stoking the fire, Armand bent down and tucked the duvet closer around Reine-Marie.

Man hands on happiness to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Oddly enough, Benedict’s version of the famous poem now pushed the original to the back of his mind.

Then he heard a stirring in the other bed. And a voice came to him out of the darkness.

“I think I know who Bertha Baumgartner was,” said Ruth.