It was not as cavalier as it sounded, Gamache knew.
“You’ll join us for dinner and stay over, I hope,” he said. “And perhaps we can compare notes.”
With him at the interviews, everyone would be on a short leash. Forced to tell the truth. Which, granted, was helpful in a murder investigation.
But not, perhaps, quite as helpful as a lie.
A lie didn’t necessarily make someone a killer. But it hurried the sorting process. The truthful from the untruthful. Those with nothing to hide. And those with a secret.
A lie was a light. One that grew into a floodlight, that eventually illuminated the person among them with the biggest secret. The most to hide.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir made himself comfortable in the study at the Gamache home and waited for the Internet to connect.
Few could find Three Pines, hidden in the valley, and that included the satellites that provided Internet coverage for most of the planet. The village was civilization adjacent. The information superhighway zoomed overhead. And Three Pines was a pothole.
But having witnessed untold brutality in cities and towns, Jean-Guy Beauvoir had come to believe that “civilization” might be overrated. Except for pizza delivery, of course.
But it was possible to get a book from Myrna’s shop, take it into Olivier’s bistro, and read it in peace, while drinking rich café au lait and eating a buttery croissant from Sarah’s Boulangerie.
Did that make up for no iPhone or pizza delivery?
“Non,” he muttered as he shifted impatiently in his chair and yearned for high-speed wireless and a large all-dressed.
The dial-up, primitive, maddening, noisy and unreliable, had reached the shrieking stage, as though it was afraid to connect to the outside world.
“It’s still better than what we’ve had in some places,” the chief always reminded Beauvoir when he grumbled about the wood-burning modem.
While Beauvoir waited, he looked out the window. He could see technicians taking equipment off vans and lugging it into St. Thomas’s. He marveled at Lacoste’s luck. To have such an Incident Room right next to the crime scene. Warm, dry, with running water, a fridge. A toilet.
“A coffeemaker, for chrissake,” he mumbled.
She didn’t even have to go outside, which, in Beauvoir’s opinion, was always an advantage.
It was a far cry from some of the places he and his father-in-law had been forced to use as they’d investigated murders across Québec.
The tents, the bobbing and corkscrewing fishing boats, the shacks, the caves.
He’d told Annie about the outhouse that’d once been their headquarters, but she’d refused to believe him.
“Ask your dad,” he’d said.
“I will not.” She laughed in her easy way. “You’re just trying to set me up. Entrapment, monsieur. I’ll have you up on charges.”
“You’d punish me?” he asked in a mock-hopeful voice. “I’m a bad, bad boy.”
“No, you’re a silly, silly boy. And, God help us, you’re a father now. There’re all sorts of new punishments I have lined up for you. I gave Honoré prunes for the first time. He liked them.”
But he’d been telling the truth. He and then–Chief Inspector Gamache had been investigating the murder of a survivalist in the Saguenay. The body had been found in a burned-out cabin, and the only structure left was the outhouse.
“A two-holer,” Gamache had pointed out, as though that was luxury.
“I’ll just sit out here,” Beauvoir had said, pulling a rock up to a stump and setting out his notebook.
At two in the morning, the rains came, and Beauvoir had knocked on the outhouse door.
“Who is it?” Gamache had asked, politely.
Jean-Guy had peered through the half moon cut into the rickety door. “Let me in.”
“It’s unlocked. But wipe your feet first.”
They’d spent a day and a half there, sifting through evidence in the charred rubble. And interviewing “neighbors” scattered through the forest. Most were trappers or fellow survivalists. The investigators were trying to find someone, anyone, who admitted to knowing the victim. But these people barely admitted to knowing themselves.
There’d been no Internet there at all. No laptops. No dial-up. No telephones. No nothing. Except, thankfully, toilet paper. And the sleeping bags, water, food packets and matches they’d marched in with.
They’d tacked up notepaper on the weathered walls of the outhouse and made flowcharts of suspects. It became almost cozy.
“Did you catch whoever did it?” Annie had asked. She’d been seduced by the story, and her lawyer mind had reluctantly told her that he was telling the truth.
She listened, rapt. As he listened, rapt, to her stories.
“We did. Through cunning, finely honed reasoning, animal—”
“He gave himself up, didn’t he?”
“No.” Though Jean-Guy couldn’t help but smile at the memory. “He came back looking for the water filtration system the dead man had. You should’ve seen his face when your father and I strolled out of the outhouse.”
Annie had laughed until she almost wet herself.
The Internet connected and Jean-Guy swung around, his hands hovering over the keyboard.
He had a bunch of competing priorities. But the first was obvious.
He fired off a quick email to Annie, to let her know what had happened and that he’d be spending at least the night, perhaps longer, at her parents’ place.
As he wrote, he ached for her. For Honoré. For the feel and scent of them.
“Miss you,” Annie wrote back. “Hope it’s not a two-holer.”
It had become their code for big shit.
And then he typed in Lord of the Flies, and hit enter.
“Clara?” Myrna called.
The cottage was in near darkness, just a lamp on in the living room.
Myrna switched on the lights and the cheerful kitchen appeared. Empty.
She didn’t want to disturb her friend if she was napping. But Myrna suspected after the discovery of the day, they’d all have trouble sleeping.
When Armand had returned home, they’d left. Knowing the two of them would want to be alone.
“Jesus, you woke me up, you great pile of … clothing.”
Myrna, once she’d returned to her skin, looked over at the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Framed there was the demented and bedraggled old poet. And her duck. Feathers ruffled.
“Clothing?”
“Okay, I meant shit, but Michael has asked me to be more polite. So I’d appreciate it if anytime I speak to you, you replace the appropriate word with ‘shit.’”
Myrna took a deep breath in through her nostrils, and out through her mouth. And began to worry that Ruth might actually wiggle her way into heaven with the help of a seriously deluded archangel. In which case …
“Where’s Clara?”
“How the fuck should I know, shithead?”
“Which word would you like me to replace?”
“Hmmm, let me think about that.”
There was really only one place Clara might be. The place she always went when things went bad.
“There you are,” said Myrna, tapping softly on the door of Clara’s studio.
The lights were on. Not bright. Just enough to mimic indirect morning sun.
Clara swiveled on her stool, a fine oil brush in her hand and a portrait on the easel.
Myrna could only see the edges of the painting. Clara’s body blotted out the rest.
Canvases leaned against the walls of the studio. There must’ve been a dozen portraits. Some almost finished. Most not even close.