Gamache traded the hand towel for the ice, and pressed that to his face. It felt immediately better. Clearly André Pineault had done this before.
The older man popped a beer open, pulled out a chair, and joined Gamache at the laminate table.
“So, patron,” he said, “you wanted to talk about Isidore and Marie-Harriette? Or the girls?”
When Gamache had rung the doorbell, he’d introduced himself and explained he wanted to ask some questions about Monsieur et Madame Ouellet. His authority, however, was undermined by the fact he looked like he’d just lost a bar brawl.
But André Pineault didn’t seem to find that at all unusual. Gamache had tried to clean himself up in the car, but hadn’t done a very good job of it. Normally he’d have gone home to change, but time was short.
Now, sitting in the kitchen, sipping cool water, with half his face numb, he was beginning to feel human, and competent, again.
Monsieur Pineault sat back in his chair, his chest and belly protruding. Strong, vigorous, weathered. He might be over seventy by the calendar, but he seemed ageless, almost immortal. Gamache couldn’t imagine anyone or anything felling this man.
Gamache had met many Québécois like this. Sturdy men and women, raised to look after farms and forests and animals, and themselves. Robust, rugged, self-sufficient. A breed now looked down upon by more refined city types.
Fortunately men like André Pineault didn’t much care. Or, if they did, they simply slipped on ice, and took the city man down with them.
“You remember the Quints?” Gamache asked, and lowered the ice pack to the kitchen table.
“Hard to forget, but I didn’t see much of them. They lived in that theme park place the government built for them in Montréal, but they came back for Christmas and for a week or so in the summer.”
“Must’ve been exciting, having local celebrities.”
“I guess. No one really thought of them as local, though. The town sold souvenirs of the Ouellet Quints and named their motels and cafés after them. The Quint Diner, that sort of thing. But they weren’t local. Not really.”
“Did they have any friends close by? Local kids they hung out with?”
“Hung out?” asked Pineault with a snort. “Those girls didn’t ‘hang out.’ Everything they did was planned. You’d have thought they were the queens of England.”
“So no friends?”
“Only the ones the film people paid to play with them.”
“Did the girls know that?”
“That the kids were bribed? Probably.”
Gamache remembered what Myrna had said about Constance. How she ached for company. Not her ever-present sisters, but just one friend, who didn’t have to be paid. Even Myrna had been paid to listen. But then Constance had stopped paying Myrna. And Myrna hadn’t left her.
“What were they like?”
“OK, I guess. Stuck to themselves.”
“Stuck up?” Gamache asked.
Pineault shifted in his chair. “Can’t say.”
“Did you like them?”
Pineault seemed flummoxed by the question.
“You must’ve been about their age…” Gamache tried again.
“A little younger.” He grinned. “I’m not that old, though I might look it.”
“Did you play with them?”
“Hockey, sometimes. Isidore would get up a team when the girls were home for Christmas. Everyone wanted to be Rocket Richard,” said Pineault. “Even the girls.”
Gamache saw the slight change in the man.
“You liked Isidore, didn’t you?”
André grunted. “He was a brute. You’d have thought he was pulled from the ground, like a big dirty old stump. Had huge hands.”
Pineault spread his own considerable hands on the kitchen table and looked down, smiling. Like Isidore, André’s smile was missing some teeth, but none of the sincerity.
He shook his head. “Not one for conversation. If I got five words out of him the last ten years of his life, I’d be surprised.”
“You lived with him, I understand.”
“Who told you that?”
“The parish priest.”
“Antoine? Fucking old lady, always gossiping, just like when he was a kid. Played goalie, you know. Too lazy to move. Just sat there like a spider in a web. Gave us the willies. And now he lords it over that church and practically charges to show tourists where the Quints were baptized. Even shows them the Ouellet grave. ’Course, nobody much cares anymore.”
“After they were grown up they never came back to visit their father?”
“Antoine tell you that as well?”
Gamache nodded.
“Well, he’s right. But that was OK. Isidore and I were just fine. He milked the cows the day he died, you know. Almost ninety and practically dropped dead in the milk bucket.” He laughed, realizing what he’d said. “Kicked the bucket.”
Pineault took a swig of beer and smiled. “Hope it runs in the family. It’s how I’d like to die.” He looked around the small, neat kitchen and remembered where he was. And how he was likely to die. Though Gamache suspected facedown in a bucket of milk was probably not as much fun as it sounded.