Authors: Louise Penny
‘A kind of “one-stop” shop,’ suggested Em. ‘She’d refurbish you inside and out.’
‘CC de Poitiers dreamed big, that’s certain,’ agreed Gamache. ‘You said you met CC a few times, but did you ever meet her family? Her husband and daughter?’
‘Only from a distance, not to speak to. They were at the Boxing Day curling, of course.’
‘And the Christmas Eve service at the church here, I understand.’
‘
C’est vrai.
’ Em smiled at the memory. ‘She’s deceptive, the daughter.’
‘How so?’ Gamache was surprised to hear this.
‘Oh, not in a devious way. Not like her mother, though CC wasn’t as deceptive as she would have liked to believe. Far too transparent. No, Crie was shy, withdrawn. Never looked you in the eye. But she had the most enchanting voice. Quite took our breath away.’
Émilie cast her mind back to the Christmas Eve service in the crowded chapel. She’d looked over at Crie and seen a girl transformed. Joy had made her lovely.
‘She looked just like David when he played Tchaikovsky.’
And then that scene outside the church.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Gamache asked quietly, noticing a troubled look settling on Em’s face.
‘After the service we were standing outside. CC was on the other side of the church. It’s a short cut to their home. We couldn’t see her, but we could hear her. There was also the strangest sound.’ Émilie pursed her lips, trying to recall it. ‘It was like Henri on the wood floors when I don’t clip his nails. A clicking, only louder.’
‘I think I can solve that mystery for you,’ said Gamache. ‘I believe those were her boots. She’d bought a pair of baby sealskin mukluks as a Christmas present for herself. They had metal claws attached to the soles.’
Em looked surprised and disgusted.
‘
Mon Dieu
, what must He think of us?’
‘You said you could hear more than her boots?’
‘She screamed at her daughter. Tore into her. It was awful.’
‘What about?’ asked Gamache.
‘What Crie was wearing. True, it was unconventional. A pink sundress I believe, but CC’s main complaint seemed to be Crie’s voice, her singing. Her voice was divine. Not the way Gabri uses the word, but really divine. And CC mocked her, belittled her. No, it was more than that. She eviscerated her. It was horrible. I heard it all and did nothing. Said nothing.’
Gamache was silent.
‘We should have helped her.’ Émilie’s voice was quiet, calm. ‘We all stood there on Christmas Eve and witnessed a murder, because that’s what it was, Chief Inspector. I’m under no illusion about that. CC killed her daughter that night, and I helped.’
‘You go too far, madame. Don’t mistake dramatics for a conscience. I know you feel badly about what happened and I agree, something should have been done. But I also know what happened outside the church wasn’t isolated. The tragedy of Crie’s life is that’s all she’s known. It became like the snow outside.’ They both looked out the window. ‘The insults piling up until Crie disappeared under them.’
‘I should have done something.’
They were both silent for a moment, Émilie looking outside and Gamache looking at her.
‘Blizzard coming tomorrow, I hear,’ said Em. ‘There’s a storm warning out.’
‘How much’s expected?’ This was news to him.
‘The weather channel said we might get thirty centimeters. Have you ever been caught in a snowstorm?’ she asked.
‘Once, driving to the Abitibi region. It was dark and the roads were empty. I got disoriented.’ He saw again the swarm of snow in his headlights, the world narrowing to that brilliant funnel. ‘I made a wrong turn and ended up in a cul de sac. The road kept narrowing. It was my own fault, of course.’ He leaned forward and whispered, ‘I was stubborn. Shh.’ He looked around.
Émilie smiled. ‘It’ll be our little secret. Besides, I’m sure no one would believe it. What happened?’
‘The track got narrower and narrower.’ He demonstrated with his hands, guiding them to a point until he looked like a man at prayer. ‘It was nearly impossible to make out the road any more. By then it was really a path, and then,’ he turned his hands over, palm up, ‘nothing. All that was left was forest and snow. The drifts were up to the car doors. I couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go back.’
‘What did you do?’
He hesitated, not sure which answer to give. All the answers that sprang to mind were true, but there were levels to the truth. He knew what he was about to ask her and decided she was owed the same respect.
‘I prayed.’
She looked at this large man, confident, used to command, and nodded. ‘What did you pray?’ She wasn’t letting him off the hook.
‘Just before this happened Inspector Beauvoir and I had been on a case in a small fishing village called Baie des Moutons, on the Lower North Shore.’
‘The land God gave to Cain,’ she said unexpectedly. Gamache was familiar with the quote, but he hadn’t run across many others who were. In the 1600s when the explorer Jacques Cartier first set eyes on that desolate outcropping of rocks at the mouth of the St Lawrence River, he’d written in his diary,
This must be the land God gave to Cain.
‘Perhaps I’m attracted to the damned.’ Gamache smiled. ‘Maybe that’s why I hunt killers, like Cain. The area’s barren and desolate; practically nothing grows, but to me it’s almost unbearably beautiful, if you know where to look. Out here it’s easy. Beauty is all around. The rivers, the mountains, the villages, especially Three Pines. But in Mutton Bay it’s not so obvious. You have to go looking for it. It’s in the lichen on the rocks and the tiny purple flowers, almost invisible, you have to get on your knees to see. It’s in the spring flowers of the bakeapples.’
‘Did you find your murderer?’
‘I did.’
But his inflection told her there was more. She waited, but when nothing more came she decided to ask.
‘And what else did you find?’
‘God,’ he said simply. ‘In a diner.’
‘What was he eating?’
The question was so unexpected Gamache hesitated then laughed.
‘Lemon meringue pie.’
‘And how do you know He was God?’
The interview wasn’t going as he’d imagined.
‘I don’t,’ he admitted. ‘He might have been just a fisherman. He was certainly dressed like one. But he looked across the room at me with such tenderness, such love, I was staggered.’ He was tempted to break eye contact, to stare at the warm wooden surface where his hands now rested. But Armand Gamache didn’t look down. He looked directly at her.
‘What did God do?’ Émilie asked, her voice hushed.
‘He finished his pie then turned to the wall. He seemed to be rubbing it for a while, then he turned back to me with the most radiant smile I’d ever seen. I was filled with joy.’
‘I imagine you’re often filled with joy.’
‘I’m a happy man, madame. I’m very lucky and I know it.’
‘
C’est ça.
’ She nodded. ‘It’s the knowing of it. I only became really happy after my family was killed. Horrible to say.’
‘I believe I understand,’ said Gamache.
‘Their deaths changed me. At some point I was standing in my living room unable to move forward or back. Frozen. That’s why I asked about the snowstorm. That’s what it had felt like, for months and months. As though I was lost in a whiteout. Everything was confused and howling. I couldn’t go on. I was going to die. I didn’t know how, but I knew I couldn’t support the loss any longer. I’d staggered to a stop. Like you in that snowstorm. Lost, disoriented, at a dead end. Mine, of course, was figurative. My cul de sac was in my own living room. Lost in the most familiar, the most comforting of places.’
‘What happened?’
‘The doorbell rang. I remember trying to decide whether I should answer the door or kill myself. But it rang again and I don’t know, maybe it was social training, but I roused myself enough to go. And there was God. He had some crumbs of lemon meringue pie on the corner of His mouth.’
Gamache’s deep brown eyes widened.
‘I’m kidding.’ She reached out and held his wrist for a moment, smiling. Gamache laughed at himself. ‘He was a road worker,’ she continued. ‘He wanted to use the phone. He carried a sign.’
She stopped, unable for a moment to go any further. Gamache waited. He hoped the sign didn’t say
The End is Nigh
. The room faded. The only two people in the world were tiny, frail Émilie Longpré and Armand Gamache.
‘It said
Ice Ahead
.’
They were silent for a moment.
‘How did you know He was God?’ Gamache asked.
‘When does a bush that burns become a Burning Bush?’ Em asked and Gamache nodded. ‘My despair disappeared. The grief remained, of course, but I knew then that the world wasn’t a dark and desperate place. I was so relieved. In that moment I found hope. This stranger with the sign had given it to me. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but suddenly the gloom was lifted.’
She paused a moment, remembering, a smile on her face.
‘Annoyed the hell out of Mother, I’ll tell you. She had to go all the way to India to find God and He was here all along. She went to Kashmir and I went to the door.’
‘Both long journeys,’ said Gamache. ‘And Kaye?’
‘Kaye? I don’t think she’s made that journey and I think it scares her. I think a lot of things scare Kaye.’
‘Clara Morrow has painted you as the Three Graces.’
‘Has she now? One day that woman will be discovered and the world will see what an astonishing artist she is. She sees things others don’t. She sees the best in people.’
‘She certainly sees how much the three of you love each other.’
Em nodded. ‘I do love them. I love all this.’ She looked around the cheerful room, the fires crackling in the grates, Olivier and Gabri talking to customers, price tags dangling from chairs and tables and chandeliers. When he’d been annoyed at Olivier one day Gabri had waited on tables with a price tag dangling from himself.
‘My life’s never been the same since that day I opened the door. I’m happy now. Content. Funny, isn’t it? I had to go to Hell to find happiness.’
‘People expect me to be cynical because of my job,’ Gamache found himself saying, ‘but they don’t understand. It’s exactly as you’ve said. I spend my days looking into the last room in the house, the one we keep barred and hidden even from ourselves. The one with all our monsters, fetid and rotting and waiting. My job is to find people who take lives. And to do that I have to find out why. And to do that I have to get into their heads and open that last door. But when I come out again,’ he opened his arms in an expansive movement, ‘the world is suddenly more beautiful, more alive, more lovely than ever. When you see the worst you appreciate the best.’
‘That’s it.’ Émilie nodded. ‘You like people.’
‘I love people,’ he admitted.
‘What was your God doing to the wall in the diner?’
‘He was writing.’
‘God wrote on the wall of the diner?’ Em was incredulous, though she didn’t know why. Her God walked around with a prefabricated construction sign.
Gamache nodded and remembered watching the grizzled, beautiful fisherman at the screen door to the fly-filled diner that smelled of the sea. He’d looked back at Gamache and smiled. Not the radiant, full frontal beam of a few minutes earlier, but a warm and comforting smile, as though to say He understood and that everything would be all right.
Gamache had gotten up and slid into the booth and read the writing on the wall. He’d pulled out his notebook, stuffed with facts about death, about murder and sorrow, and he’d written down the four simple lines.
He knew then what he had to do. Not because he was a brave man or a good man, but because he had no choice. He had to return to Montreal, to Sûreté headquarters, and he had to sort out the Arnot case. He’d known for months he had to do it, and yet he’d run from it and hidden behind work. Behind dead bodies and the solemn, noble need to find killers, as though he was the only one on the force who could.
The writing on the wall hadn’t told him what to do. He knew that. It’d given him the courage to do it.
‘But how do you know you did the right thing?’ Em asked, and Gamache realized he’d said all that out loud.
The blue eyes were steady and calm. But something had shifted. The conversation seemed to have another purpose. There was an intensity about her that hadn’t been there before.
‘I don’t know. Even now I’m not absolutely sure. Lots of people are convinced I was wrong. You know that. I’m sure you read about it in the papers.’
Émilie nodded. ‘You prevented Superintendent Arnot and his two colleagues from killing more people.’
‘I stopped them from killing themselves,’ said Gamache. He remembered that meeting clearly. He’d been part of the inner circle of the Sûreté then. Pierre Arnot was a senior and respected officer in the force, though not by Gamache. He’d known Arnot since his days as a rookie and the two had never gotten along. Gamache suspected Arnot thought him weak, while he thought Arnot a bully.
When it was obvious what Arnot and two of his top men had done, when even his friends couldn’t deny it any longer, Arnot had had one request. That they not be arrested. Not yet. Arnot had a hunting cabin in the Abitibi region, north of Montreal. They’d go there and not return. It was decided it was best, for Arnot, for the co-defendants, for the families.
Everyone agreed.
Except Gamache.
‘Why did you stop them?’ Émilie asked.
‘There had been enough death. It was time for justice. An old-fashioned notion.’ He looked up and smiled into her face. After a moment’s silence he continued. ‘I believe it was right, but I still struggle sometimes. I’m like a Victorian preacher. I have doubts.’
‘Really?’
Gamache looked into the fire again and thought long and hard. ‘I’d do it again. It was the right thing to do, at least for me.’
He looked back at her and paused.
‘Who was L, madame?’
‘Elle?’
Gamache reached into his satchel and brought out the wooden box, turning it over to reveal the letters taped to the bottom. He pointed to the L. ‘L, Madame Longpré.’
Her eyes, while still holding his, seemed to drift and focus on a spot in the distance.