“Neither do I,” admitted Reine-Marie. “And I’m not sure Armand knows. Maybe nothing.”
“It’s funny how often nothing becomes something when Armand is around. But it’s at least kept the students busy. They were off all day.”
The two women had continued to watch the cadets through the windows. But Reine-Marie realized that Clara wasn’t watching the cadets. She was looking at just one. Closely.
“Is it much of an imposition, Clara? Putting her up?”
“Amelia?” Clara was quiet for a moment. Studying the girl. “I wonder how old she is.”
“Armand would know. Nineteen, twenty, I’d guess.”
“In certain light she looks very young. Maybe it’s her skin. But then she’ll turn and her expression will change. She’s like a prism.”
Feeling chilled standing in the damp March evening, the two women had gone inside to join the others around the fireplace.
“A clowder of cats?” said Gabri, reading the huge reference book open on Myrna’s lap.
“A misery,” said Ruth.
“Pardon?” asked Reine-Marie.
“The students,” said Ruth, cocking her wineglass in the direction of the cadets, who were talking animatedly among themselves. “A misery of cadets.”
“I think that’s a misery of poets,” said Gabri.
“Oh, right.”
*
“What’re we going to tell him?” asked Huifen, reaching for another fry, even though she was now feeling overstuffed and a little nauseous. One fry over the line, sweet Jesus. “It’s almost seven. He’s going to be here any minute. Oh, shit.”
Headlights flashed through the window.
“He’s here.”
The light caught their faces, and Reine-Marie, a few tables over, saw what Clara meant. There was anxiety in Huifen’s face. Nathaniel was clearly afraid. Jacques looked defensive, marshaling his excuses.
And Amelia looked resigned. Like she knew what was about to happen. Had been waiting a long time, a lifetime, for it. Perhaps even longer.
She looked old. And very, very young.
She looked a bit like the boy in the stained-glass window.
And she looked a bit like the portrait Clara was painting. Reine-Marie turned to her friend in astonishment.
*
Jean-Guy and Isabelle got out of the car. The snow, which had been melting during the day, was now freezing again as the sun and the temperature dropped.
“The sap’ll be running,” said Jean-Guy, knocking his gloves together in the chill. He turned to look back up the hill, where a car’s headlights had appeared, shining like eyes.
“A good year for maple syrup,” said Isabelle. “We’re taking the kids to a cabane à sucre this weekend.”
Jean-Guy felt a moment of utter joy, like a breath on his face. Next year, he and Annie would be taking their child to a maple sugar shack for the annual sugaring-off celebration. They’d get in a horse-drawn sleigh and go deep into the woods, to a log cabin. There they’d listen to fiddle music and watch people dance, and eat eggs and bacon and baked beans and sweet, sticky tire d’érable, the boiled maple sap poured over spring snow and turned into toffee. Then rolled onto a twig, like a lollipop.
Just as he’d done as a child. It was a tradition, part of their patrimoine. And one they would pass on to their child. His and Annie’s son or daughter.
He glanced toward the bistro and saw the cadets, someone else’s sons and daughters, staring at them.
And he felt an overwhelming need to protect them.
“He’s here,” said Isabelle, and Jean-Guy turned to see that the car had pulled up right behind theirs.
Deputy Commissioner Gélinas and Armand Gamache got out. Gélinas was walking toward them, his feet crunching on the refrozen ice and snow, but Gamache had paused to tilt his head back and look into the night sky.
And then he lowered his eyes and looked straight at Jean-Guy.
And in an instant, Jean-Guy understood how Chief Inspector Gamache must have felt for all those years when he was head of homicide. Commanding young agents.
And losing some of those agents, until the loss had become too great. Until his heart had finally broken into too many pieces to be cobbled together again. When that had happened, he’d come here. To find peace.
But Monsieur Gamache had traded in his peace for the cadets’ safety. He’d left here to go clean up the academy, so that the next generation of young agents might survive long enough to brush gray hair from their faces. And to one day retire, to find their own peace and enjoy their own grandchildren.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir watched Armand Gamache approach, and had the overwhelming need to protect him.
He immediately dropped his eyes, staring at his feet until he could control his emotions.
Hormones, he thought. Damned pregnancy.
*
Gamache and Gélinas had made small talk in the car on the drive down, until it had petered out and both men had been left to the company of their own thoughts.
Paul Gélinas had no idea what was going through Gamache’s head, but he himself was preoccupied with what he’d found. And what it meant. And how it could be pertinent, and useful.
Gélinas had spent the afternoon researching the backgrounds of Michel Brébeuf and Armand Gamache. It was like archeology. There was digging and there was dirt. And there were broken things.
He’d thought Brébeuf and Gamache had first met in the academy, as roommates, but he soon found out he was wrong. Their friendship went back to the streets of Montréal as children. They’d been neighbors. Attended the same kindergarten, played on the same teams, double-dated and went to dances together. Bummed around Europe for six months before joining the academy. Together.
The only time they were really apart was when Armand Gamache went to Cambridge to read history. That’s where he’d picked up his English. While Brébeuf stayed behind and went to Laval University in Quebec City.
They’d been each other’s best man at their weddings, and stood up for each other at christenings.
Michel Brébeuf had excelled in the S?reté, rising quickly through the ranks to the position of Superintendent. Poised to become the next Chief Superintendent.
Armand Gamache had quickly achieved Chief Inspector in homicide, and built that department into one of the finest in the nation.
And then he’d stalled. And seen his best friend’s rise continue.
There had been no hint, though, of envy. They’d remained close friends outside of work, and collaborative colleagues at work.
Their lives had been lived side by side. Until the two roads, the personal and the professional, collided. And went downhill. Fast.
Armand Gamache had gotten whiffs of something wrong within the S?reté. There were always scandals, of course. Misuses of power. But they’d been swiftly dealt with in the past by the senior officers, including Brébeuf.
But this was different. So huge as to be almost invisible, the scale impossible to comprehend.
At first Gamache gave little credence to the rumors. They’d come through back channels. People who had reason to smear the S?reté.
But something stuck, and he started to quietly investigate.
It started in the northern territories. Among the Cree and the Inuit. Remote areas that were almost impossible to penetrate. And for good reason, Gamache knew.
Try as he might, he couldn’t get purchase on the rumors.
Until one day he’d met a Cree elder on a bench outside the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City. Her community had spent months raising enough money to send her down south, to speak to the leaders. To tell them about the beatings and murders. The missing. So desperate was their need, they’d finally risked trusting the white authorities.
But no one would listen. No one would even let her past the front door.
And so she’d sat down. Exhausted, hungry, out of money and hope.
Until she was joined on the bench by the large man with the kind eyes. Who asked if she needed help.
She told him everything. Everything. Not knowing who he was, but having no choice. He was the last house, the last ear, the final hope.
He’d listened. And he’d believed her.
And so began a battle that lasted years and that landed at the door of the very person Gamache trusted the most.