“Oh, Henri, you’d better want to do more than just play,” he sighed, and fished in Henri’s satchel for the tennis ball and a bag.
They went quietly down the stairs. Gamache put his parka, gloves, and hat back on, unlocked the door and the two headed into the night. He didn’t put Henri on the leash. There was very little danger he’d run away, since Henri was among the least adventurous dogs Gamache knew.
The village was completely dark now, the homes just hinted at in front of the forest. They walked over to the village green. Gamache watched with satisfaction and a silent prayer of thanks as Henri did his business. The Chief picked it up with the bag, then turned to give Henri his treat.
But there was no dog. Every walk, over hundreds of walks, Henri had stood beside Gamache, looking up expectantly. One treat deserved another. A quid pro quo.
But now, inconceivably, Henri wasn’t there. He’d disappeared.
Gamache cursed himself for a fool and looked at the empty leash in his hand. Had Henri gotten a whiff of deer or coyote, and taken off into the woods?
“Henri,” the Chief called. “Come here, boy.”
He whistled and then noticed the paw prints in the snow. They headed back across the road, but not toward the bed and breakfast.
Gamache bent over and followed them at a jog. Across the road, over a snow bank. Onto a front lawn. Down an unshoveled walkway. For the second time that day, the Chief felt snow tumble down his boots and melt into his socks. Another soaker. But he didn’t care. All he wanted was to find Henri.
Gamache stopped. There was a dark figure, with immense ears, looking up expectantly at a door. His tail wagging. Waiting to be let in.
The Chief felt his heart simmer down and he took a deep, calming breath.
“Henri,” he whispered vehemently. “Viens ici.”
The shepherd looked in his direction.
Gone to the wrong house, thought Gamache, not altogether surprised. While Henri had a huge heart, he had quite a modest brain. His head was taken up almost entirely by his ears. In fact, his head seemed simply a sort of mount for those ears. Fortunately Henri didn’t really need his head. He kept all the important things in his heart. Except, perhaps, his current address.
“Come here,” the Chief gestured, surprised that Henri, so well trained and normally so compliant, hadn’t immediately responded. “You’ll scare the people half to death.”
But even as he spoke, the Chief realized that Henri hadn’t made a mistake at all. He’d meant to come to this house. Henri knew the B and B, but he knew the house better.
Henri had grown up here. He’d been rescued and brought to this house as a puppy, to be raised by an elderly woman. Emilie Longpré had saved him, and named him, and loved him. And Henri had loved her.
This had been, and in some ways always would be, Henri’s home.
Gamache had forgotten that Henri knew Three Pines better than he ever would. Every scent, every blade of grass, every tree, every one.
Gamache looked down at the paw and boot prints in the snow. The front walk hadn’t been shoveled. The steps up to the verandah hadn’t been cleaned. The home was dark. And empty.
No one lived there, he was sure, and probably hadn’t in the years since Emilie Longpré had died. When Armand and Reine-Marie had decided to adopt the orphan puppy.
Henri hadn’t forgotten. Or more likely, thought Gamache as he climbed the snowy steps to retrieve the dog, he knew this home by heart. And now the shepherd waited, his tail swishing back and forth, for a woman long dead to let him in and give him a cookie, and tell him he was a good boy.
“Good boy,” whispered Gamache into the immense ears, as he bent down and clipped the leash on Henri. But before going back down the stairs, the Chief peered into a window.
He saw furniture covered in sheets. Ghost furniture.
Then he and Henri stepped off the porch. Under a canopy of stars he and Henri walked slowly around the village green.
One of them thinking, one of them remembering.
*
Thérèse Brunel got up on one elbow and looked over the lump in the bed that was Jér?me, to the clock on the bedside table.
It was past one in the morning. She lowered herself onto the mattress and watched her husband’s easy breathing, and envied him his calm.
She wondered if it was because he really didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation, though he was a thoughtful man and should.
Or, perhaps most likely, Jér?me trusted his wife and Armand to know what to do.
For most of their married life, Thérèse had been comforted by the thought that as an emergency room physician Jér?me would always be able to help. If she or one of the children choked. Or hit their head. Or were in an accident. Or had a heart attack. He’d save them.