Her home in Switzerland was to be sold, as was the building in Vienna. The proceeds to be divided among her children and grandchildren. With a million dollars going to the local animal shelter.
“That’s nice,” said Benedict.
Section 8, thought Armand, scanning the figures on the page. In the U.S. military that was the section for the mentally unfit. Benedict might have found exactly the right word.
“‘The title will, of course,’” the notary read, “‘be passed to my eldest son, Anthony.’”
“Huh?” said Myrna.
By now words had failed her, and she could just make sounds.
“Title?” asked Benedict. “What’s that?”
“Must be the title to the property,” said Armand.
All the lights in the kitchen flickered.
All the people in the kitchen fell silent, staring up at the chandelier over the pine table. Willing it to stay on.
But willing something to happen, as they were discovering with Madame Baumgartner, and having it happen were often two different things.
The lights wavered again, then came back to full brightness.
They looked at one another and breathed a sigh of relief.
Then the lights, all at once, went out.
No flicker this time. Just gone. And with it went all sound. No hum of the fridge, no rumble of the furnace. No tick of a clock. They sat at the kitchen table in silence.
Sunlight still struggled through the windows of the kitchen. But it was weak. As though it had fought long and hard to get that far.
Before it too died.
Armand struck a match and lit the storm lamps at either end of the table while Myrna lit the candles on the kitchen island. Put there in case.
“You okay?” Armand asked, going to the door between the kitchen and the living room.
There he saw the fire in the hearth and one lantern already lit.
“No worries,” said Reine-Marie. “And no surprise.”
“We’re almost finished. Be with you in a few minutes.”
He took two small logs off the neat pile in the kitchen and shoved them into the woodstove. It was now their main source of heat. There was no emergency, yet. But if this blackout lasted a long time, days even, and the temperature dropped still further, and the fire went out …
“Well, this’s nice,” said Benedict, looking around at the pools of light.
“Let’s call it a day,” said Armand, and when Lucien protested, Myrna hauled herself out of the chair and just left. Taking her beer into the living room to join Reine-Marie.
Benedict followed.
Armand held his arm out, inviting Lucien to join them. After a moment’s hesitation, he grudgingly got up.
Once seated, Myrna asked, “How’re we supposed to liquidate a will that makes no sense? We can’t give away money that isn’t there.”
“Madame Baumgartner overestimated her estate?” asked Reine-Marie.
“By about twenty million,” said Myrna.
Reine-Marie grimaced. “That is overshooting.”
“We’re all assuming she didn’t have the money,” said Lucien. “Maybe she did.”
“You think so?” asked Armand.
“Conrad Cantzen.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Armand.
“Conrad Cantzen,” the notary repeated. “My father told me about him. Monsieur Cantzen was a bit actor on Broadway back in the 1920s. He’d beg for money and go through the garbage for food, and when he died, he left a quarter of a million dollars. It’s a lot of money today. Back when he died, that was a fortune.”
They were silent, absorbing this.
“You just never know,” said Lucien.
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, primaclass="underline" 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.