‘Yes sir.’
Brébeuf hung up. As soon as this case was over he’d have to figure out what to do with Robert Lemieux. The young agent was really too impressionable.
Agent Lemieux hung up, a strange sensation in his chest. Not the tightening he’d had ever since Superintendent Brébeuf had appealed for his help, but a loosening, a euphoria.
Had Superintendent Brébeuf just offered him a promotion? Could he do what was best and benefit at the same time? How far up could he ride this? It might turn out all right after all.
Hazel Smyth was waiting for Madeleine to come home. Each footfall, each creak of the floorboards, each turn of a knob was her.
Then not. Every minute of the day Hazel lost Madeleine again. And now the door to the living room opened and Hazel looked up, expecting to see Mad’s cheery face and a tea tray – it was tea time after all. But instead she saw her daughter’s cheery face.
Sophie stepped in holding a huge glass of red wine for herself and made her way around the crowded room until she’d reached the sofa.
‘So, what’s for dinner?’ she said, flopping into a chair and picking up a magazine.
Hazel stared at this stranger. It was as though she’d lost both of them last night. Madeleine dead and Sophie possessed. This wasn’t the same girl. What had happened to morose, selfish Sophie?
The thing in front of her was radiant. It was as though the spirit of Madeleine had entered Sophie. Only without the heart. Without the soul. Whatever was radiating from Sophie wasn’t joy or love or warmth.
But it was happiness. Madeleine was dead, horribly, grotesquely dead. And Sophie was happy.
It scared Hazel almost to death.
Beauvoir drove while Gamache navigated, trying to read the map while the car bounced along the heaved and holed road. He saw nothing of their progress except lurching squiggles and dots. It was fortunate he didn’t get car sick.
‘It’s just beyond here.’ Gamache folded the map and looked through the windshield. ‘Watch out.’
Beauvoir yanked the steering wheel but they hit the pothole anyway.
‘You know I was doing just fine before you looked up,’ he said.
‘You hit every hole between here and Three Pines. Watch out.’
The car rammed into another hole and Gamache wondered how long his tires would hold.
‘We go through the village of Notre-Dame-de-Roof Trusses and out the other side. There’s a turn off to the right. Chemin Erablerie.’
‘Notre-Dame-de-Roof Trusses?’ Beauvoir couldn’t believe his ears.
‘You expected maybe St-Roof Trusses?’
At least Three Pines made sense, thought Beauvoir. Williamsburg and St-Rémy made sense. Weren’t Roof Trusses something to do with building?
Goddamned English. Trust them to choose a name like that. Like calling a village Royal Bank or Concrete Foundation. Always building, always bragging. And what was with this case? Didn’t anyone die a normal death in Three Pines? And even their murders weren’t normal. Couldn’t they just haul off and stab each other, or use a gun or a bat? No. It was always something convoluted. Complicated.
Very unQuébécois. The Québécois were straightforward, clear. If they liked you they hugged. When they murdered you they just whacked you over the head. Boom, done. Convicted. Next.
None of this ‘is it’ or ‘isn’t it’ shit.
Beauvoir was beginning to take this personally, though he was grateful the case had taken him away from the Easter egg hunt with his in-laws. There weren’t actually any children. Just him and his wife, Enid. Her parents had expected them to spend the morning searching for chocolate eggs they’d hidden all over the house. They’d even kidded that it should be easy for him since he was an investigator, after all. He thought the easiest way would be to simply put his gun to his father-in-law’s head and force him to say where the goddamned eggs were. But then the miraculous call had come. His calling.
He wondered how poor Enid was doing. Well, too bad. They were her crazy parents.
They were through the village of Notre-Dame-de-Roof Trusses in no time. Sure enough there was a huge faded sign in the yard of a small factory advertising ‘Roof Trusses’. Beauvoir shook his head.
The old brick house overlooked the road, a few large maples on the front lawn and what Gamache suspected would be lush perennial beds full of flowers in a few weeks close to the house and along the drive. It was a tiny, tidy home that today spoke of potential. Leaves not yet out, flowers not yet up, grass not yet growing.
Gamache loved to see inside the homes of people involved in a case. To look at the choices they made for their most intimate space. The colors, the decorations. The aromas. Were there books? What sort?
How did it feel?
He’d been in shacks in the middle of nowhere, carpets worn, upholstery torn, wallpaper peeling off. But stepping in he’d also noticed the smell of fresh coffee and bread. Walls were taken up with immense smiling graduation photos and on rusty pocked TV trays stood modest chipped vases with cheery daffodils or pussy willows or some tiny wild flower picked by worn hands for eyes that would adore it.
And he’d been in mansions that felt like mausoleums.
He was anxious to see how Madeleine Favreau’s home felt. From the outside it felt sad, but he knew most places felt just a little sad in spring, when the bright and playful snow had gone and the flowers and trees hadn’t yet bloomed.
The first thing that struck him on entering the house was that it was almost impossible to move. Even in the narrow mudroom they’d somehow managed to stuff an armoire, a bookcase and a long wooden bench under which piles of muddy boots and shoes had been thrown.
‘My name is Armand Gamache.’ He bowed slightly to the middle-aged woman who opened the door.
She was neatly dressed in slacks and a sweater. Comfortable, conventional. She smiled a little as he brought out his warrant card.
‘It’s all right, Chief Inspector. I know who you are.’ She stepped aside and let them in. Gamache’s first impression was of a decent person trying to find her way in an indecent situation. She spoke French to them, though with a heavy English accent. She was courteous and contained. The only sign of something amiss were dark circles under her eyes, as though grief had physically struck her.
But Armand Gamache knew something else. Grief sometimes took time to tell. The first days for relatives or close friends of murder victims were blessedly numb. They almost always held together, going through the motions of a normal life, so that a casual observer would never know disaster had just rammed into them. Most people fell to pieces gradually, like the old Hadley house.
As he watched Gamache could almost see the inevitable horsemen on the hill, above Hazel, snorting and pounding the ground, straining to be released. They brought the end of everything Hazel knew, all that was familiar and predictable. This contained woman was courageously holding off the marauding army of grief, but soon it would break free and sweep down and over her, and nothing familiar would be left standing.
‘Clara Morrow called to see how I was doing and offer some food. She told me you might be coming.’
‘I could have brought the food. I’m sorry.’ He was trying to get his coat off without whacking Beauvoir, who was crammed against the now closed door. A few books fell from the case and Gamache rapped his knuckles on the armoire, but eventually the coat came off.
‘No need to be,’ said Hazel, taking the coat and trying to open the armoire. ‘Told her we have plenty. In fact I can’t talk long. Poor old Madame Turcotte’s had a stroke and I need to take her dinner.’
They followed Hazel deeper into her home.