Katie looked at him with a weary patience, as though she were the adult and he was very, very young.
“What language would you choose to die in? It matters. We were lucky to get my grandfather into this one. I was visiting him and noticed that this one old woman hardly ever had visitors. Her family came when they could, and they seemed to care, but the days are long when you’re sitting all alone. She always smiled at me and had the nicest face. A little eccentric, you know?”
The adults, as one, nodded. They could see that this young woman would be drawn to the eccentric.
“So one day I took her a tin of homemade cookies.”
“Those cookies with a hole on the top filled with jam,” said Benedict. “Except Katie’s holes are different shapes—”
Katie patted his hand, and he stopped talking.
“Thank you,” she said.
Far from being a way to shut him up, it was said with great kindness.
Affection, thought Armand. He was not only listening closely, he was watching them closely as well. Studying the dynamic. Often what seemed obvious was not a fact, or even the truth.
“We got to talking,” Katie continued the story, “and she asked me to call her ‘Baroness.’ Well, I thought that was strange.”
“Who wouldn’t?” said Myrna.
“No, I mean I found it strange because I called my grandfather ‘Baron.’”
“Why?” asked Myrna, her voice wary.
“It was just what he liked to be called. He was Baron, and my grandmother was Baroness. I didn’t think anyone else did that. Madame Baumgartner reminded me of my grandmother, who I adored, so I’d sit with her in the home and we’d talk. Then one day I suggested they should meet. The Baron and this new Baroness. My grandmother had died the year before, and I know he was lonely.”
“Did you know who she was?” asked Armand.
“By then, yes.”
“And, knowing who she was, you still suggested they meet?”
Armand was leaning forward. His voice was friendly, as though this were a pleasant gathering of friends and murder wasn’t hovering in the background.
“Yes.”
“Did he know?” he asked.
Katie smiled for the first time. It was, they both knew, the vital question.
“He did. The Baroness Baumgartner.”
Armand sat back on the sofa, not bothering to hide his amazement. “Did she know who he was?”
“No. I was afraid she’d refuse to see him. It wasn’t until I introduced him that she found out.”
“Who was he?” asked Myrna.
“The Baron Kinderoth,” said Jean-Guy. “Katie here is a Kinderoth.”
He’d discovered that when he’d been going over the file on the Kinderoths from Taylor and Ogilvy. In it were notes on the estate and who got the small amount of money in the investment account. The Kinderoths had two daughters. One had married a Burke and moved to Ontario. And had a daughter named Katherine. Katie Burke.
While Jean-Guy had started with the Kinderoths and ended up with Katie, Isabelle Lacoste had started with Katie and ended up with the Kinderoths.
She too had called Gamache and told him her findings, confirming what Beauvoir had just told him.
Different roads, but the same destination. Here. Now.
Myrna stared at Jean-Guy, taking this in. Then turned to Katie. “You’re a Kinderoth?”
The young woman nodded.
“And you knew the history between the Kinderoths and the Baumgartners?” asked Myrna.
“Yes. I was raised on the story. That my great-great-grandfather was the eldest son. And the money, the title, the estates were ours. But the Baumgartners—filthy, greedy, cheating, and lying Baumgartners—had been trying to steal it for more than a hundred years.”
“A hundred and thirty-two,” said Benedict.
“What happened when they met?” asked Myrna.
“I introduced my grandfather. The Baron Kinderoth. He was in a wheelchair but managed to get up. He offered her the flowers he’d asked me to buy for him. Edelweiss. Then he bowed and called her Baroness.”
The only sound in the room now was the muttering and crackling of logs in the fireplace. Shadows from the fire threw macabre, distorted shadows against the walls.
“And Madame Baumgartner?” asked Armand.
“She stared for a long time. It seemed forever,” said Katie.
“A hundred and thirty-two years,” said Benedict.
“Then she got up too. I went to help, but she refused. She stood straight, staring at the Baron. I thought she was going to say, or do, something awful. Then she reached out and took the flowers. ‘Danke schön,’ she said.” Katie smiled. “‘Baron Kinderoth.’”
They sat in silence. Imagining the moment.
Then, very softly, as though from far away, Myrna heard humming.
Edelweiss. Edelweiss.
She looked at Benedict. Edelweiss, he hummed.
“What happened then?” Myrna asked.
“I wish I could say all was forgiven on both sides, but it wasn’t,” said Katie. “Each time I visited, I’d take my grandfather into the solarium to have tea with the Baroness. They’d sit in silence. Then, one week, they were already there. Talking quietly together. I just left the cookies in their rooms and went home.”
“They became friends?” asked Reine-Marie.
“It took a while,” said Katie. “But yes.”
“So how’d they get over all that history?” asked Myrna.
She’d known clients of hers when she was a practicing psychologist who never got over much less deep-seated resentments.
“Loneliness,” said Katie. “They needed each other. They understood each other in ways no one else could.”
“Ahhh,” said Myrna. There was nothing like the pain of the present to cure the pain of the past.
“After a month or so, they were almost inseparable. Eating every meal together. She got him out into the garden, and he got her playing cribbage.”
“Did they tell their families?” Armand asked.
If they had, the Baumgartner siblings had chosen not to mention it.
“They were planning to,” said Katie. “But they were worried that too much damage had been done. They knew the judgment in Vienna was coming soon, and both worried that when it was announced, whichever family won wouldn’t want to share. And the family that lost would have their bitterness cemented in place. But they had a solution.”
“They’d get married,” said Benedict. And, not for the first time, he saw a group of people staring at him as though he were mad.
“Married?” asked Myrna. “Because of the money?”
“Because they loved each other,” said Katie. “I think he loved her even more than he loved my grandmother. She made him laugh. He’d had a hard life, and it’d hardened him. But with her he could just be himself. A taxi-driver baron.”
“And she could be a cleaning-woman baroness,” said Reine-Marie.
“Yes. They thought if they made that sort of commitment to each other, not just in words but in action, the rest of the family would have to accept it and drop the feud.”
“And share the fortune?” said Myrna. “No matter who won?”
“Yes. The plan was to leave everything to each other, with the proviso it be split equally among both families, when the last one died. But of course they wanted their children to not just accept grudgingly but wholeheartedly. As they had.”
“But—” said Myrna.
“But my grandfather died before they could get married.”
“Oh,” said Reine-Marie as though she’d suffered a physical blow. “It must’ve been awful for the Baroness.”
“It was. She hadn’t told her children, and by then it was too late. His death sent her into a tailspin. Partly physical, but mostly mental. She became confused. She called the notary in, with the intention of changing her will, as she and the Baron had discussed. Leaving everything, in the event she won the case in Vienna, split equally between the families.”
“But the notary wouldn’t do it,” said Benedict.
“He saw the state she was in,” said Katie, “and said he couldn’t in all conscience allow her to change her will. He thought her mind wasn’t sound. He knew the family history, the court challenges, and felt she must’ve been coerced somehow. He believed that the Baroness, who’d been so embittered about it all her life, would never willingly share with a Kinderoth.”