Fleming hid the plans, then he wrote the play. A play set in a fictional Three Pines. His eyes narrowed. There was one thing every character was looking for.
Milk. In the hardware store. They came there to find it. But it wasn’t there, of course. So where would you find it?
Gamache got up and walked to the door.
“My store?” asked Monsieur Béliveau. “You think he hid the plans in my store?”
“Where else do you find milk?” asked Beauvoir, walking to the window. Looking out, he saw Gamache standing at the bistro door, also looking toward Monsieur Béliveau’s general store.
But then Gamache turned away.
Jean-Guy followed the Chief’s gaze. Past Monsieur Béliveau’s store, past the village green, past the three tall pines, past Clara’s place to Jane’s home. At Jane Neal’s now-empty house, Gamache’s gaze paused.
Ruth’s best friend. Instead of recommending Jane for the artwork, she’d tossed Al Lepage into the pit.
“Ruth,” Jean-Guy asked. “After you spoke to Fleming, did you go over to your friend Jane’s place? Did you talk to her about this?”
Gamache turned from Jane’s home and looked directly across the village green, to Ruth’s place.
He saw movement in the window. Jean-Guy.
Ruth had wanted to see Beauvoir, urgently, but didn’t want anyone else to know why. That’s why she sent the message about Lysol.
Ruth.
Who’d saved herself by betraying someone else. Ruth. Who’d been forced to face a terrible truth. She was a coward.
She’d have turned in the Jews hiding in her attic.
She’d have named names to McCarthy.
She’d have pointed out heretics to the Inquisition, to avoid the flames and save herself.
And she’d almost certainly have looked at the crosses on a distant hill and whispered “Gethsemane” into a Roman ear.
And then she’d have sat down and wept.
“No, I didn’t go to Jane’s,” said Ruth. “I was too ashamed. I needed to be by myself.”
“So you stayed here?” Jean-Guy asked. “You drew the curtains and locked the door and stayed in your home.”
“At first.”
“And then?”
“My God,” said Monsieur Béliveau to Ruth. “He must’ve seen.”
“Seen what?” Jean-Guy demanded.
Gamache’s eyes moved on, swiftly now. Up the hill. Past the old schoolhouse.
And then his gaze stopped. And Armand Gamache started walking. Then running.
“The church,” said Beauvoir. “You went to St. Thomas’s. That’s what Fleming saw.”
He ran out of Ruth’s home. Gamache was already at the bottom of the wide wooden stairs. He took them two at a time. Beauvoir got there just as Gamache yanked open the large door to the small church.
“Where do you find milk?” Gamache asked, turning around only briefly to speak to Beauvoir.
“A church,” said Jean-Guy. “The milk in the play isn’t literal.”
“It’s a metaphor. For kindness and healing.”
Gamache was scanning the rows of wooden pews, the simple altar, the unadorned walls. More a chapel than a church.
“And forgiveness,” said Beauvoir. “You don’t find it in a hardware store, but you might find it here. Ruth came to St. Thomas’s after betraying Al Lepage. To pray for forgiveness. Looking for milk.”
“John Fleming was a churchgoing man. Enjoying his relationship with a God he mocked and taunted,” said Gamache. “He either followed her or had come here himself, for a moment of gloating, knowing what he’d done to her.”
They heard movement behind them as Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau arrived.
“Where did you sit?” Gamache asked her.
“Over there,” she pointed. “By the boys.”
“The boys,” the soldiers of the Great War, who lived forever in the stained-glass window. They marched through mud and chaos. This was no civilian monument to the glories of war. They were young and they were far from home and they were afraid.
But one young man had turned so that he was looking directly at the congregation. And on his face, alongside the terror, was something else.
Forgiveness.
Beneath the window were written the names of the dead from Three Pines. The boys who would never return to the old railway station, to the parents who waited.
And under their names the words “They Were Our Sons.”
Ruth had sat in the light pouring through their bodies. And wept.
And when she left? Someone came out of the shadows.
Gamache dropped to his knees and pushed the pew to one side. Beauvoir joined him and together they started prying up the wide wooden floorboards.
And there, in a long metal tube, they found what they were looking for. The plans for Armageddon hidden in the chapel of St. Thomas. The doubter.
Gamache looked at his watch. It was six o’clock.
CHAPTER 41
“Good evening, I’m Susan Bonner and this is the World at Six.”
Adam Cohen could barely hear the words for the pounding in his ears.
“Our top story tonight, an astonishing find in Québec’s Eastern Townships.”
He checked his device. All electronics were blocked inside the penitentiary, but there was a code the guards used and Cohen had programmed it in. His device showed five bars. And no messages.
Closing his eyes for just a moment, Adam Cohen gathered himself and then got out of the car and walked, resolutely, toward the small door in the thick wall.
“Our top story tonight, an astonishing find in Québec’s Eastern Townships.”
“Merde,” said Isabelle Lacoste. The broadcast streamed over her laptop in the Incident Room.
It was six o’clock, and it was worse than they thought. The CBC did not yet know the exact location of Gerald Bull’s Supergun, but they’d narrowed it down to this region.
The story unfolded. One journalist had a report on Gerald Bull’s unlikely life and mysterious death. Another told the story of Project Babylon, and Saddam Hussein, and the coming together of two madmen.
Three, Lacoste knew. Three madmen.
“I heard you coming,” said Fleming in his soft, flawed voice. He studied the young man in front of him. “You used to be a guard here, didn’t you?”
But Adam Cohen heeded Gamache’s warning, not to tell Fleming anything. Not to engage the man.
“Does he need a change of clothes?” one of the five guards who’d accompanied Cohen asked.
“No,” said Cohen. “We won’t be gone for long. He’ll be back by midnight.”
“Before I turn into a pumpkin?” asked Fleming as they put the cuffs and restraints on him. “Or something.”
“You sure you want to do this?” asked another guard. The one who’d been Cohen’s friend when he’d worked at the SHU. The one Adam Cohen had gone to with the authorization. Because he knew this man would trust him.
And he had. He’d accepted without question the letter from the Sûreté authorizing Cohen to take Fleming.
Fleming was watching this exchange, his reptile eyes sliding from one man to the other, sensing, perhaps, a betrayal in progress.
Jean-Guy skidded to a stop. He’d turned the corner and was sprinting across the bridge to the Incident Room to tell Lacoste to call off Cohen.
“Where’re you going?” he called after Gamache, who’d missed the turn and was running, plans in hand, toward the bistro.
“We have to make sure these are the plans.” Gamache held them up but didn’t stop running.
“They say Project Babylon, patron. What else could they be?”