“Just one question then,” said Ruth. She turned to the Gamaches. “What happened?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Olivier.
Armand opened his mouth, then started laughing. “That is the question, Ruth.”
With that, the levee broke.
Clara leaned forward. “It started when we realized there was a hidden room, right? What would’ve happened if we hadn’t? I mean, it’s been there, bricked up for more than a century.”
Armand was shaking his head. “It all started—”
“With the letter,” said Billy. “From Pierre Stone. Was it real, or did Fleming forge it?”
It was one of the first questions Armand asked too.
“It was real, and you’re right. That’s where it started. John Fleming was in the SHU, but determined to get out. He knew how, and he knew he’d pay me back for what I did to him. What he needed was a plan. He spent years researching me, researching all of us. Working out our desires, our triggers, our core beliefs, our fears. All those details became the building blocks—”
“The bricks,” said Harriet. She’d been staring at the young man building the bonfire, but now turned to meet Armand’s eyes.
“The bricks,” he agreed. How she’d changed, he thought, as he regarded the self-possessed young woman. “But what he needed was the structure. Sylvie’s job was to find something that would act as a catalyst. It took a long time, but finally, on searching the local historical society archives, she came across the Stone letter. She recognized the potential.”
“But how did something that important go unnoticed for so long?” asked Gabri. “It’s been around for a hundred and fifty years.”
Reine-Marie sighed. “It’s our fault. Historians, archivists, researchers, professors, biographers. We look to the so-called important figures. We value the papers left behind by Premiers, Prime Ministers, Presidents—by the most prominent witnesses to history—and forget there are other witnesses. The people who actually lived it. The First Nations. The farmers. The cooks and cleaners and salespeople. The laborers. The immigrants, the minorities.”
“The women,” said Harriet.
“Yes. The Stone letter was among the papers of a stonemason. A bricklayer. No one thought they could be of value.” She shook her head. “It is a terrible flaw in written history.”
“We were also wrong to assume Pierre Stone was next to illiterate,” said Armand. “The fact is, he went to university, but had to drop out when his parents died. He needed to find a skill to support his family.”
“The most obvious one was as a stonemason,” said Billy. “Like his father and grandfather. He discovered he was not only good at it, but liked it.”
“Sylvie found the letter and gave it to the head guard to give to her husband,” said Armand.
“So they knew there was some hidden room,” said Olivier, “but how did they know where it was?”
“Sylvie had all Pierre Stone’s papers,” said Armand.
“There were more?” asked Myrna.
“Oh, yes. All his letters to his fiancée, who became his wife. Whenever they were separated, he wrote her. Every day. He told her everything, including where the room was. Sylvie stole the letters. We found them in their home.”
The “we” of it wasn’t completely accurate. The investigators, led by Inspector Lacoste, found them while Armand was cheating at cribbage with the children.
“As soon as he saw the Stone letter, Fleming recognized the potential,” Armand continued. “From there he built his plan. It sounds, when I talk about it now, as though it all fell into place easily. It didn’t. It took years to put together all the elements.”
He stopped and took a small breath, suddenly visited by that voice.
Time and patience. Time and patience, Armand.
His friends waited for him to recover.
“All right?” said Ruth.
“All right,” he said.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Rosa.
He looked at the duck, and the duck looked at him.
“You got that right,” said Armand, nodding. But then, he often did. “The next big breakthrough for Fleming was when Sylvie sent him a photo of The Paston Treasure. He knew he could use it as a sort of Trojan horse, hiding within it all the items designed to alert but also alarm me. The art conservator from the Musée called it offensive, and that’s what he wanted.”
“But, but,” sputtered Gabri. “The room. If the Stone letter is real, why was Pierre hired to brick it up?”
“He doesn’t say in his letters. I doubt he looked into the room. Probably frightened.” Armand turned to Ruth. “But I think you know what was in there.”
“I think I do. What was the one thing that didn’t really belong?”
“The book,” said Myrna.
“Yes,” said Reine-Marie. “The grimoire.”
“We’ll never know for sure,” said Ruth in a rare admission of uncertainty, “but I think it was dug up when they were first excavating for the building, back in the 1870s. The guy who was putting up the buildings realized what it was, and it scared him. As far as he knew, the grimoire was a book of the damned, designed to raise demons. He tried to destroy it. There’re burn marks on it. But then he changed his mind, either because the leather wouldn’t catch, or he was afraid of angering the evil spirits.”
“And bricking them up wouldn’t?” asked Gabri.
“Out of sight, out of mind,” said Olivier.
“Well, he must’ve been out of his mind,” said Ruth. “I’m no expert, but I suspect demons can get through walls.”
They suspected Ruth was, in fact, an expert. She did have the ability to show up unexpectedly, and uninvited.
“It’s hard to get rid of—” Clara began.
“Ruth?” said Gabri.
“—beliefs. Think about what we’re planning to do later.”
“What are you planning to do?” asked Armand, half afraid of the answer.
“You’ll see,” said Clara.
It was the answer he was afraid of.
“Did you say it?” Myrna asked Harriet.
“Of course. It’s the first of the month. Did you?”
Auntie Myrna nodded. She’d taught Harriet to say Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit when her niece was just a child.
“It brings good luck,” she’d explained to the wide-eyed girl, who seemed to need luck. “But you have to say it first thing, before anything else, at the beginning of each month.”
And Harriet did. Even as a rational scientist, she still did it. Because … because you just never knew. It did no harm. And Harriet Landers was beginning to understand that believing something was even more powerful than knowing it.
I’ve seen worse, I’ve seen worse was her new mantra.
Fear no longer had her by the throat. She would always be afraid, but she’d come to realize it was not so much a matter of less fear, but of more courage. And Harriet Landers had that. Now.
“So, the owner put the grimoire in the attic and commissioned the stonemason to brick it up,” said Billy, guessing the rest. “He chose Pierre Stone because he hadn’t worked on the original building and he wasn’t known in the village. He couldn’t tell anyone about the commission, even if he wanted to.”
“But he did tell one person,” said Reine-Marie. “His fiancée.”
Armand nodded. Each of Pierre’s letters to her, and there were many through their lifetime together, ended with the same thing.
I love you. I miss you.
The letters had sat, in a box in the basement of a rural historical society, buried and dismissed. The unimportant memories of a stonemason and his wife.
Or maybe, thought Gamache, they were waiting. For Sylvie Fleming to find them and set all this in motion.