The Cruelest Month

SEVENTEEN

Agent Yvette Nichol woke up early the next morning, too excited to sleep. Finally, it was here. The day she’d longed for. When Gamache would finally see what she was made of.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Short, reddish hair, brown eyes, skin with purple marks where she’d picked at it. Though she was slim her face always seemed a little pudgy, like a balloon with hair.

She sucked in her cheeks, biting them between her molars. Better, though she couldn’t go through life like that.

She’d gotten her father’s features and her mother’s personality. She’d always been told that, though she’d never much liked her mother and wondered whether her aunts and uncles said it to annoy her. Her mother had died suddenly, one day there and gone the next.

Her mother had always been an outsider. Tolerated by her father’s extended family of babbling aunts and uncles, but never loved. Or respected. Or accepted. She’d tried, Nichol knew. Taking on the petty prejudices and opinions of the Nickolevs. But they’d only laughed at her, and changed their opinions.

She was pathetic. Always striving to fit in, to get the affection of people who’d never, ever give it, and despised her for trying.

‘You’re just like your mother.’ The heavily accented words lay leaden in Yvette Nichol’s head. It was, perhaps, the only French her aunts and uncles spoke. Memorized as one might memorize a swear word. Fuck. Shit. You’re just like your mother. Hell.

No, it was her father she loved. And he loved her. And protected her from the swarm of accents and smells and insults in her own home.

‘Don’t put any make-up on.’ His voice penetrated the bathroom door. She smiled. He clearly felt she was beautiful enough.

‘You’ll look younger without it. More vulnerable.’

‘Dad, I’m a Sûreté officer. With homicide. I don’t want to look vulnerable.’

He was forever trying to get her to use tricks so people would like her. But she knew tricks were useless. People wouldn’t like her. They never did.

Her boss had called yesterday, interrupting Easter lunch with the relatives. All going on about how it was better in Romania or Yugoslavia or the Czech Republic. Speaking in their own languages then making a to-do when she didn’t understand. But she did understand, enough to know they asked her father every year why she never painted eggs or baked the special bread. Always finding fault. No one had commented on her new haircut or new clothes or asked about her job. She was an agent with the Sûreté du Québec, for God’s sake. The only successful one in the entire pathetic family. And could they ask about that? No. Had she been a goddamned painted egg they’d have shown more interest.

She’d run down the hallway with the phone and ducked into her bedroom, so her boss wouldn’t hear the hilarity at her expense, the cackling that passed as laughter.

‘Do you remember what we talked about a few months ago?’

‘About the Arnot case?’

‘Yes, but you must never mention that name again. Understand?’

‘Yes sir.’ He treated her like a child.

‘A case has come up. It’s not certain it’s murder, but if it is you’ll be on the team. I’ve made sure of it. It’s time. Are you sure you can do it, Agent Nichol? If not, you need to tell me now. There’s too much at stake.’

‘I can do it.’

And she’d believed it when she’d said it. Yesterday. But suddenly it was today. It was murder. It was time.

And she was scared to death. In less than two hours she’d be in Three Pines with the team. But while they tried to find a murderer, she’d try to find a traitor to the Sûreté. No, not find. Bring to justice.

Agent Yvette Nichol liked secrets. She liked gathering other people’s and she liked having her own. She put them all in her own secret garden, built a wall around them, kept them alive, thriving and growing.

She was good at keeping secrets. And she wondered whether maybe her boss had chosen her because of that. But she suspected the reason was more mundane. He’d chosen her because she was already despised.

‘You can do this,’ she said to the strange young woman in the mirror. Fear had suddenly made her ugly. ‘You can do it,’ she said with more conviction. ‘You’re brilliant, courageous, beautiful.’

She raised her lipstick to her lips with an unsteady hand. Lowering it for a moment she looked sternly at the girl in the mirror.

‘Don’t fuck this up.’

Clasping her wrist with her other hand she guided the bright red drug store hue over her lips, as though her head was an Easter egg and she was about to paint it. She’d make her relatives proud, after all.

Agent Isabelle Lacoste stood in the clear morning light on the road outside the old Hadley house staring at the buckled and heaved walk. It looked as though something was trying to tear itself from the earth.

Her courage had finally found its limits. After more than five years with Chief Inspector Gamache on homicide, facing deranged and demented murderers, she had finally been stopped by this house. Still, she forced herself to stand there a moment longer, then turned and walked away, her back to the house, feeling it watching her. She picked up speed until she was sprinting to her car.

She took a deep breath and turned to stare again at the house. She needed to go in. But how? Alone wasn’t any good; she knew she’d never make it past the threshold alone. She needed company. Looking down into the village, to the smoke drifting from chimneys, to the lights in the homes, imagining people just sitting down for their first cup of coffee and warm toast and jam, she wondered whom she’d pick. It was a strangely powerful feeling, and she wondered if this was how judges had felt when Canada still had the death penalty.

Then her gaze fell on one home in particular. And she realized then that there had never been much doubt whom she’d pick.

‘I’ll get it,’ Clara called from her studio. She’d risen early hoping in the fresh morning light she’d see what Peter had seen a few days ago. The flaw in the work. The colors that were off. The wrong shade of blue perhaps? Or green? Should it be viridian green instead of celadon? She’d deliberately stayed away from Marian Blue, but maybe that was the mistake.

She had just a week now to complete the painting before Denis Fortin arrived.

Time was running out. And something was wrong with the work and she didn’t know what. She sat on the stool, sipping her strong morning coffee, eating a Montreal bagel, hoping the spring sun would tell her.

But it was silent.

Dear God, what am I going to do?

Just then someone knocked on the door. She wondered whether that was God, but thought he probably didn’t knock.

‘No, you’re working,’ called Peter from the kitchen, glancing at the clock. Just after seven. ‘I’ll get it.’

He’d felt horrible about what he’d said about Clara’s work. He’d since tried to tell her he’d over-reacted. There was nothing wrong with it. Just the opposite. But she’d thought he’d been condescending then. It would never occur to her that he’d lied the first time. That her painting was brilliant. It was luminous and extraordinary and all the words he dreamed would be applied to his own works.

True, gallery owners and decorators loved his paintings. He took an object from life, a twig say, and got in so close it was unrecognizable, abstract. For some reason the idea of obscuring the truth appealed to him. Critics used words like complex and deep and riveting. And all that had been enough, until he’d seen Clara’s painting. Now he longed for someone, just one person, to look at his works and call them ‘luminous’.

Peter hoped Clara wouldn’t change a thing in this painting. And he hoped she would.

Now he strolled to the door, opening it to reveal Agent Isabelle Lacoste.

‘Bonjour,’ she smiled.

‘Is it God?’ Clara called from her studio.

Peter looked at Lacoste who shook her head apologetically.

‘No, not God, honey. Sorry.’

Clara appeared wiping her hands on a rag and smiled warmly. ‘Hello, Agent Lacoste. Haven’t seen you in a while. Would you like a coffee?’

Isabelle Lacoste really wanted a coffee. Their home smelled of fresh brew and toasted bagel and a warm fire on this chilly spring morning. She wanted to sit and talk to these welcoming people, warming her hands on a mug. And not go back to the house. And she could, she knew. No one on the homicide team knew she was there. Her purpose was deeply personal, a private little ritual.

‘I need your help,’ she said to Clara, who raised her eyebrows in surprise. And lowered them when she heard what Isabelle Lacoste wanted.

Myrna Landers was humming to herself and grinding coffee to press into her Bodum. Bacon was frying and two brown eggs sat on her wooden kitchen counter, ready to be broken into the frying pan. She didn’t often have more than toast and coffee but every now and then she set her face for a full breakfast. She’d heard someone say once that all the English secretly crave is breakfast three times a day. And for herself she knew it to be true. She could live on a diet of bacon, eggs, croissants, sausages, pancakes and maple syrup, porridge and rich, brown sugar. Fresh-squeezed orange juice and strong coffee. Of course, she’d be dead in a month.

Dead.

Myrna’s spatula hovered over the bacon she’d been prodding. It spat at her hand but she didn’t react. She was back in that dreadful room on that dreadful night. Turning Madeleine over.

‘God, that smells good,’ came a familiar voice from the other end of the loft. Myrna brought herself back and turned to see Clara and another woman standing there, taking off their muddy boots. The other woman was looking around in amazement.

‘C’est magnifique,’ said Lacoste, wide-eyed. Now all she wanted was to sit at the long refectory table, eat bacon and eggs and never leave. She took in the whole room. Exposed wood beams, darkened with age, ran above their heads. The four walls were brick, almost a rose color, with bold, striking abstracts on the walls, broken only by bookcases stuffed full and large mullioned windows. Worn armchairs sat on either side of the wood stove in the center of the room, with a large sofa facing it. The floors were wide-plank honey pine. Two doors led, Lacoste suspected, into a bedroom and a bathroom.

She was at home. Lacoste suddenly wanted to take Clara’s hand. Her home was here. In this loft. But it was also with these women.

‘Bonjour.’ The large, black woman in a caftan was walking toward her, arms outstretched and a smile on her lovely face. ‘C’est Agent Lacoste, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Oui.’ Lacoste gave and received kisses on each cheek. Then Myrna turned and exchanged hugs and kisses with Clara.

‘Come for breakfast? There’s plenty. I can put on more. What is it?’

She could see the strain in Clara’s face.

‘Agent Lacoste needs our help.’

‘What can I do?’ Myrna looked at the young woman, simply and elegantly dressed, like most young Québécoises. Myrna felt like a house next to her. A comfortable and happy home.

Lacoste told her, feeling as though her very words were soiling this wonderful place. When she’d finished Myrna stood very still and closed her eyes, and when she opened them she spoke.

‘Of course we’ll help, child.’

Ten minutes later, the bacon off the element, the kettle unplugged and Myrna fully dressed, the three women walked slowly through the gently stirring village. A slight mist hung over the pond and clung to the hills.

‘I remember when your neighbor died,’ Lacoste said to Clara, ‘you did a ritual.’

Myrna nodded. She remembered walking through Three Pines with a stick of smoking sage and sweetgrass. It was meant to invite joy back into a place burned by the brutal act of murder. It had worked.

‘An old pagan ritual from a time when pagan meant peasant and peasant meant worker and being a worker was a significant thing,’ said Myrna.

Agent Isabelle Lacoste was silent. She hung her head, looking down at her rubber boots as they squelched into the muddy road. She loved it here. Nowhere else could she walk in the very middle of a road and trust no one would run her down. She could smell the earth and the sweet pine forest on either side of them.

‘Was Madeleine murdered?’ Clara asked. ‘Is that why you want to do this?’

‘Yes, she was.’

Myrna and Clara stopped.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Myrna.

‘Poor Madeleine,’ said Clara. ‘Poor Hazel. She does so much for others and now this.’

If kind acts could protect us from tragedy, thought Lacoste, the world would be a kinder place. Enlightened self-interest, perhaps, but at least enlightened. Is that what I’m about now? Trying to buy favor? Trying to prove how kind I am to whatever power decides life and death and hands out rewards?

The three women looked once more at their destination, rising over the village. Goddamned Hadley house, thought Clara as they trudged forward. Taken another life.

She hoped it was satisfied, hoped it was full. She was glad she hadn’t had breakfast yet and hoped she didn’t smell of bacon and eggs.

‘Why do you do this?’ Myrna asked Lacoste, quietly.

‘Because I think it’s possible the…’ She stopped and tried again. ‘Because you never know…’

Myrna turned and took her hand. Agent Lacoste wasn’t used to suspects and witnesses holding her hand, but she didn’t pull back.

‘It’s all right, child. Look at us. We’re two old crones, Clara and I. We lit a fucking great pole of sage and sweetgrass and fumigated the village for evil spirits. I think we might understand.’

Isabelle Lacoste laughed. All her adult life she’d been ashamed of her beliefs. She’d been raised a Catholic, but one cold, dreary morning while looking at a purple stain on the asphalt where a young man had died in a hit and run she’d closed her eyes and spoken to the dead man.

Told him he was not forgotten. Never forgotten. She’d find out who did this to him.

That had been her first. It had seemed innocent enough, but another sort of instinct had kicked in. It had told her to be careful. Not of the dead, but of the living. And when she was caught by a colleague her fears had proved well founded. She’d been mocked and ridiculed mercilessly. She’d been hounded through the halls of the Sûreté, laughed and sneered at for communicating with spirits.

Just as she was about to quit, when she actually had the letter in hand and was waiting outside her supervisor’s office, the door opened and out came Chief Inspector Gamache. Everyone knew him, of course. Even without the notoriety of the Arnot case, he was famous.

He’d looked at her and smiled. Then he did the most extraordinary thing. He put out his large hand, introduced himself and said, ‘I’d consider it a privilege, Agent Lacoste, if you’d come and work with me.’

She’d thought he was kidding. His eyes never left her.

‘Please say yes.’

And she had.

She suspected Chief Inspector Gamache knew that at each and every homicide scene, when the activity subsided, the teams had gone home and the air had closed back in around the place, Isabelle Lacoste was still there.

Speaking to the dead. Reassuring them Chief Inspector Gamache and his team were on the case. They would not be forgotten.

Now, standing in the fresh, gentle light, holding Myrna’s rough hands and looking into Clara’s warm blue eyes, she let her guard down.

‘I think Madeleine Favreau’s spirit is still there.’ She looked over to the desolate house on the hill. ‘Waiting for us to free it. I want her to know we’re trying and we won’t forget her.’

‘It’s a sacred thing you do,’ said Myrna, squeezing her hands. ‘Thank you for asking us to help.’

Isabelle Lacoste wondered if they’d be thanking her in a few minutes. Finally the three women stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the old Hadley house.

‘Come on,’ said Clara. ‘It’s not going to get easier.’

She plunged down the uneven walkway to the front door and tried the knob.

‘It’s locked,’ she said, images of returning to Myrna’s and feasting on maple-cured bacon and eggs over easy and warm toast and homemade marmalade rising in her mind. They’d tried, they’d done their best, no one could –

‘I have the key,’ said Lacoste.

Damn.

At that same moment Armand Gamache and Jean Guy Beauvoir were entering the Cowansville Hospital. A few people were lounging outside having cigarettes, one dragging an oxygen tank behind her. The two men gave her a wide berth.

‘What took you so long?’

Agent Yvette Nichol stood in the doorway of the gift boutique, her ill-fitting blue pant suit dirty at the cuffs from mud, her hair cut in a pageboy, out of fashion since the 1600s, and wearing lipstick that looked as though someone had taken a potato peeler to her lips.

‘Agent Nichol.’ Beauvoir nodded. That sullen, sulky face turned his stomach. He knew, just knew, Gamache had made a horrible mistake inviting her on the team. He was damned if he knew why the chief had done it.

But he could guess. It was Gamache’s personal mission to help every failing, falling, flawed creature. And not just help, like with a nice letter of recommendation, but actually put them on his team. He’d pick them up and put them on homicide, the most prestigious unit in the Sûreté, working for the most famous detective in Quebec.

Beauvoir himself had been the first.

He’d been so disliked at his detachment in Trois-Rivières, he’d been permanently assigned to the evidence cage. Literally a cage. The only reason he hadn’t quit was because he knew his very presence pissed off the bosses. He was full of rage. A cage was probably where he belonged.

Then the Chief Inspector had found him, taken him onto homicide and a few years later promoted him to inspector and his second in command. But Jean Guy Beauvoir never totally left the cage. Instead it had moved inside and in it he kept the worst of his rage, where it couldn’t cause damage. And beside that cage sat another, quieter cage. In it, curled up in a corner, was something that frightened him far more than his fury. Beauvoir lived in terror that one day the creature in there would escape.

In that cage he kept his love. And if it ever got out it would go straight to Armand Gamache.

Jean Guy Beauvoir looked over at Agent Nichol and wondered what she kept in her cage. Whatever it was, he hoped it was well locked. The stuff she allowed out was malevolent enough.

They descended to the lowest level of the hospital, into a room that held nothing natural. Not light, not air, which smelled of chemicals, not the furniture, which was aluminum. And not death.

A middle-aged technician matter-of-factly slid Madeleine Favreau from a drawer. He casually unzipped the bag then reeled back.

‘Oh, shit,’ he shrieked. ‘What happened to her?’

Even though they were prepared it still took a moment for the hardened homicide investigators to climb back into their bodies. Gamache was the first to recover, and speak.

‘What does it look like to you?’

The technician inched forward, craning his head to the limits of his neck, then peeked inside the bag again.

‘Fuck me,’ he exhaled. ‘I don’t know, but I sure don’t want to go that way.’ He turned to Gamache. ‘Murder?’

‘Scared to death,’ said Nichol, entranced. She couldn’t stop staring at that face.

Madeleine Favreau was stuck in a scream. Her eyes bulging, her lips stretched across her teeth, her mouth wide and silent. It was hideous.

What could cause that?

Gamache stared back. Then he took a deep breath.

‘When will Dr Harris be in?’ he asked. The technician consulted the work schedule.

‘Ten,’ he said, gruffly, trying to make up for his little shriek earlier.

‘Merci,’ Gamache said and walked out, the other two in his wake along with the stench of formaldehyde.

Myrna, Lacoste and Clara made straight for the stairs. Clara’s short legs strained to keep up with Myrna who was hauling herself up two at a time. Clara tried to stay hidden behind Myrna hoping the fiends would find her friend first. Unless they were coming up behind. Clara looked behind and rammed into Myrna, who’d stopped dead in the corridor.

‘Had my father seen that,’ she said to Clara, ‘he’d insist we get married.’

‘Nice that there are still some old-fashioned men.’

Myrna had stopped because Agent Lacoste, in the lead, had stopped. Suddenly. Halfway down the corridor.

Clara looked around her protective Myrna and saw Lacoste standing very alert.

Oh, God, she thought. What now?

Slowly Lacoste edged forward. Myrna and Clara edged with her. Then Clara could see it. Yellow strips of tape, scattered on the floor. Yellow strips of tape dangling from the frame of the door.

The police tape had been violated, not simply removed, or even cut. It had been shredded. Something had wanted very badly to get in.

Or to get out.

Through the open doorway Clara could see the dim room. Lying in the center of their chairs, on the salt circle, was a tiny bird, a robin.

Dead.