The other agent was making the final arrangements in the schoolhouse, and all they needed now was Beauvoir.
But the officer hesitated. A few minutes earlier he’d noticed a large black woman and an old woman with a cane heading to the church.
The same old woman who’d been talking to Beauvoir on the bench.
If Beauvoir was missing, she might know where he was.
He changed course and made for the church.
*
Armand Gamache parked beside the path into the woods. The one he and Gilles had forged just a few days earlier. It was freshly trodden, he could see.
He walked down the path, deeper and deeper into the forest. Toward the blind.
He saw Sylvain Francoeur first, standing at the base of the white pine. Then he looked up. Standing on the old wooden blind, beside the satellite dish, was Martin Tessier. Inspector Tessier, of the Serious Crimes division, was about to commit a very serious crime. He had an automatic trained on Chief Inspector Gamache.
Gamache stopped on the track, and wondered, fleetingly, if this was how the deer felt. He looked straight at Tessier and turned slightly toward him. Showing the marksman his chest. Daring him to pull the trigger.
If there was ever a time for that damned thing to collapse, thought Gamache, now was it.
But the blind held, and Tessier held him in his sights.
Gamache shifted his eyes to Francoeur and put his arms out at his sides.
The Chief Superintendent gestured and Tessier climbed rapidly and easily down the rickety ladder.
*
The agent entered the church and looked around. It appeared empty. Then he noticed the old woman, still in her gray cloth coat and tuque. She sat in a back pew. The large black woman sat in a front pew.
He stared into the corners but couldn’t see anyone.
“You there,” he said. “Who else is here?”
“If you’re talking to Ruth, you’re wasting your time,” said the woman at the front. She stood up and smiled at him. “She doesn’t speak French.”
She herself spoke to him in very good, though slightly accented, French.
“Can I help you?”
The agent walked down the aisle. “I’m looking for Inspector Beauvoir. You know him?”
“I do,” she said. “He’s been here before, with Chief Inspector Gamache.”
“Where is he now?”
“Beauvoir? I thought he was with you,” said Myrna.
“Why would I—”
But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. The muzzle of a Glock was thrust into the base of his skull and an expert hand reached in and took his gun from its holster.
He turned around. The elderly woman in the cloth coat and knitted tuque was holding a service revolver on him.
And she wasn’t old at all.
“S?reté,” said Agent Nichol. “You’re under arrest.”
*
Jean-Guy Beauvoir was on the highway heading toward Montréal. Rosa sat beside him, and hadn’t made a sound. Nor had she stopped staring at him.
But Beauvoir kept his eyes forward. Moving further and further away from the village. He didn’t know what Francoeur and Tessier and the others had planned, and he didn’t want to know.
When he’d emerged from Three Pines his device had blipped, a few times. All messages from Lacoste. Wondering where he was.
Beauvoir knew what that meant. It meant Gamache was looking for him, probably to finish what he’d started the day before. But then he’d read her last message, sent across the system.
Gamache had resigned. He was out of the S?reté.
It was over.
He glanced at the duck. Why in the world had he agreed to take her? Though he knew the answer to that. It wasn’t that he’d agreed to take her, but that he hadn’t the energy or willpower to fight.
Beauvoir wondered, though, why Ruth had given her to him. He knew how much she loved Rosa, and how much Rosa loved her.
I love you, Ruth had whispered to the duck.
I love you. But this time the voice didn’t belong to the demented old poet, but to Gamache. In the factory. Bullets slamming into the concrete floor, into the walls. Bam, bam, bam. The clouds of choking, blinding dust. The deafening sounds. The shouts, the shots, the screams.
And Gamache dragging him to safety, and staunching his wound. Even as the bullets hit around them.
The Chief had stared into his eyes and bent over and kissed him on his forehead and whispered, “I love you.”
As Gamache had the day before, when he thought Beauvoir was about to shoot him. Instead of struggling, of fighting back, as he could have, he’d said, I love you.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew then that he and Rosa hadn’t been abandoned, they’d been saved.
FORTY-ONE
“Now what?” Gabri asked.
He, Olivier, and Clara had come out from behind the altar, where they’d watched. Clara and Olivier each held one of the simple candlestick holders, and Gabri gripped the crucifix, ready to brain the gunman if he got away from Nichol and Myrna.
But there was no need. The gunman was now gagged and handcuffed to a long wooden pew.