Eventually Annie pulled away and Reine-Marie handed her some tissues.
“Would you like me to shoot David?” Gamache had asked as she blew her nose with a mighty honk.
Annie laughed, catching her breath in snags. “Maybe just knee cap him.”
“I’ll move it to the very top of my to-do list,” said her father. Then he bent down so that they were eye to eye, his face serious now. “Whatever you decide to do, we’re behind you. Understand?”
She nodded, and wiped her face. “I know.”
Like Reine-Marie, he wasn’t necessarily shocked, but he was perplexed. There seemed something Annie wasn’t telling them. Something that didn’t quite add up. Every couple had difficult periods. He and Reine-Marie argued at times. Hurt each other’s feelings, at times. Never intentionally, but when people lived that close it was bound to happen.
“Suppose you and Dad had been married to different people when you met,” Annie finally asked, looking them square in the face. “What would you have done?”
They were silent, staring at their daughter. It had been, thought Gamache, exactly the same question Beauvoir had recently asked.
“Are you saying you’ve met someone else?” Reine-Marie asked.
“No,” Annie shook her head. “I’m saying the right person is out there for David and for me. And holding on to something wrong isn’t going to fix it. This will never be right.”
Later, when he and Reine-Marie were alone, she’d asked him the same question.
“Armand,” she’d asked, taking off her reading glasses as they lay in bed, each with their own books. “What would you have done if you’d been married when we met?”
Gamache lowered his book and stared ahead. Trying to imagine it. His love for Reine-Marie had been so immediate and so complete it was difficult seeing himself with anyone else, never mind married.
“God help me,” he finally said, turning to her. “I’d have left her. A terrible, selfish decision, but I’d have made a rotten husband after that. All your fault, you hussy.”
Reine-Marie had nodded. “I’d have done the same thing. Brought little Julio Jr. and Francesca with me, of course.”
“Julio and Francesca?”
“My children by Julio Iglesias.”
“Poor man, no wonder he sings so many sad songs. You broke his heart.”
“He’s never recovered.” She smiled.
“Perhaps we can introduce him to my ex,” said Gamache. “Isabella Rossellini.”
Reine-Marie snorted and picked up her book, but lowered it again.
“Not still thinking about Julio, I hope.”
“No,” she’d said. “I was thinking about Annie and David.”
“Do you think it’s over?” he’d asked.
She’d nodded. “I think she’s found someone else but doesn’t want to tell us.”
“Really?” She’d surprised him, but now he thought it might be true.
Reine-Marie nodded. “I think he might be married. Maybe someone at her law firm. That might explain why she’s changing jobs.”
“God, I hope not.”
But he also knew there was nothing he could do either way. Except be there to help pick up the pieces. But that image reminded him of something.
“Well, gotta get back to work,” said Beauvoir, rising. “The porn doesn’t look itself up.”
“Wait,” said Gamache. And seeing his Chief’s face Beauvoir sank back into his chair.
Gamache sat silently, his forehead furrowed. Thinking. Beauvoir had seen that look many times. He knew Chief Inspector Gamache was following a lead in his head. A thought, that led to another, that led to another. Into the darkness, not so much an alley as a shaft. Trying to find the thing most deeply hidden. The secret. The truth.
“You said the raid on the factory was what finally made you decide to separate from Enid.”
Beauvoir nodded. That much was the truth.
“I wonder if it had the same effect on Annie.”
“How so?”
“It was a shattering experience, for everyone,” said the Chief. “Not just us. But our families too. Maybe, like you, it made Annie reexamine her life.”
“Then why wouldn’t she tell you that?”
“Maybe she didn’t want me to feel responsible. Maybe she doesn’t even realize it herself, not consciously.”
Then Beauvoir remembered his conversation with Annie, before the vernissage. How she’d asked him about his separation. And made a vague allusion to the raid, and the fall-out.
She’d been right of course. It was the final push he’d needed.
He’d shut her down, refused to discuss it out of fear he’d say too much. But had she really been wanting to talk about her own turmoil?
“How would you feel if that’s what happened?” Beauvoir asked his Chief.
Chief Inspector Gamache sat back, his face slightly troubled.
“It might be a good thing,” suggested Beauvoir, quietly. “It would be good, wouldn’t it, if something positive came out of what happened? Maybe Annie can find real love now.”
Gamache looked at Jean Guy. Drawn, tired, too thin. He nodded.
“Oui. It would be good if something positive came out of what happened. But I’m not sure the end of my daughter’s marriage could be considered a good thing.”
But Jean Guy Beauvoir disagreed.
“Would you like me to stay?” he asked.
Gamache roused himself from his reverie. “I’d like you to actually do some work.”
“Well, I do have to look up ‘schnaugendender.’”
“Look up what?”
“That word you used.”
“‘Schadenfreude,’” smiled Gamache. “Don’t bother. It means being happy for the misfortunes of others.”
Beauvoir paused at the table. “I think that describes the victim pretty well. But Lillian Dyson took it the next step. She actually created the misfortune. She must’ve been a very happy person.”
But Gamache thought differently. Happy people didn’t drink themselves to sleep every night.
Beauvoir left and the Chief Inspector sipped his coffee and read from the AA book, noting passages underlined and comments in the margins, losing himself in the archaic but beautiful language of this book that so gently described the descent into hell and the long climb back out. Eventually he closed the book over his finger and stared into space.
“May I join you?”
Gamache was startled. He got to his feet, bowing slightly, and pulled out a chair. “Please do.”
Myrna Landers sat, putting her éclair and café au lait on the bistro table. “You looked lost in thought.”
Gamache nodded. “I was thinking about Humpty Dumpty.”
“So the case is almost solved.”
The Chief smiled. “We’re getting closer.” He looked at her for a moment. “May I ask you a question?”
“Always.”
“Do you think people change?”
Myrna, the éclair on its way to her mouth, paused. Lowering the pastry she looked at the Chief Inspector with clear, searching eyes.
“Where did that come from?”
“There’s some debate over whether the dead woman had changed, whether she was the same person everyone knew twenty years ago, or if she was different.”
“What makes you think she’d changed?” Myrna asked, then took a bite.
“That coin you found in the garden? You were right, it’s from AA and it belonged to the dead woman. She’d stopped drinking for eight months now,” said the Chief. “People who knew her in AA describe a completely different person than Clara does. Not just slightly different, but completely. One is kind and generous, the other is cruel and manipulative.”
Myrna frowned and thought, taking a sip of her café au lait.