She wrapped them up again.
“Look at this,” said Gamache. He held up what he’d found in the center of the sweater. It was a photograph.
“That wasn’t listed in the search by the Montréal cops,” said Lacoste.
“Easy to miss,” said Gamache. And he could imagine their thinking. It was late, it was cold, they were hungry, and this would soon not even be their case.
They hadn’t been so much incompetent as less than thorough. And the small black and white photo was almost hidden in the thick wool sweater.
He took it over to the window, and he and Lacoste examined it.
Four women, in their thirties Gamache guessed, smiled at them. Their arms were around each other’s waists, and they looked directly at the camera. Gamache found himself smiling back, and noticed Lacoste was as well. The girls’ smiles weren’t big, but they were genuine and infectious.
Here were four happy people.
But while their expressions were identical, everything else about them was different. Their clothes, their hair, their shoes, their style. Even their bodies were different. Two were plump, one skinny, one average.
“What do you think?” he asked Lacoste.
“It’s obviously four of the sisters, but it looks like they’ve done all they can to make sure they’re not alike.”
Gamache nodded. That was his impression as well.
He looked at the back of the picture. There was nothing there.
“Why only four?” Lacoste asked. “What happened to the other one?”
“I think one died quite young,” he said.
“Shouldn’t be hard to find out,” said Lacoste.
“Right. Sounds like a job for me, then,” said Gamache. “You can look after the hard stuff.”
Gamache put the photograph in his pocket and they spent the next few minutes searching Constance’s room.
A few books were stacked on the bedside table. He went back to the suitcase and found the book she was reading. It was Ru by Kim Thúy.
He opened it to the bookmark and deliberately turned the page. He read the first sentence. Words Constance Ouellet would never get to.
As a man who loved books, a bookmark placed by the recently dead always left him sad. He had two books like that in his possession. They were in the bookcase in his study. They’d been found by his grandmother, on the bedside table of his parents’ room, after they’d been killed in a car accident when Armand was a child.
Every now and then he pulled the books out and touched the bookmarks, but hadn’t yet found the strength to pick up where they left off. To read the rest of the story.
Now he lowered Constance’s book and looked out the window into the small backyard. He suspected that, beneath the snow, there was a small vegetable garden. And in the summer the three sisters would sit on the cheap plastic chairs in the shade of the large maple and sip iced tea. And read. Or talk. Or just be quiet.
He wondered if they ever talked about their days as the Ouellet Quints. Did they reminisce? He doubted it.
The home felt like a sanctuary, and that was what they were hiding from.
Then he turned back to look at the stain on the carpet, and the police tape. And the book in his hand.
Soon he’d know the full story.
“So, I can understand why the Ouellet sisters might not want everyone to know they were the Quints,” said Lacoste, when they were ready to leave. “But why not have personal photographs and cards and letters in the privacy of their own home? Does that strike you as strange?”
Gamache stepped off the porch. “I think we’ll find that very little about their life could be considered normal.”
They walked slowly down the snow-packed path, squinting against the brilliant sun bouncing off the snow.
“Something else was missing,” the Chief said. “Did you notice?”
Lacoste thought about that. She knew this wasn’t a test. The Chief Inspector was beyond that, and so was she. But her mind was drawing a blank.
She shook her head.
“No parents,” he said.
Damn, thought Lacoste. No parents. She’d missed that. In the crowd of Quints, or missing Quints, she’d missed something else.
Monsieur et Madame Ouellet. It was one thing to blank out a part of your own past, but why also erase your parents?
“What do you think it means?” she asked.
“Perhaps nothing.”
“Do you think that’s what the killer took?”
Gamache thought about that. “Photographs of the parents?”
“Family photographs. Of the parents and the sisters.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” he said.
“I’m just wondering…” she said when they reached her car.
“Go on.”
“No, it’s really too stupid.”
He raised his brows, but said nothing. Just stared at her.
“What do we really know about the Ouellet Quints?” she asked. “They deliberately dropped from view, became the Pineault sisters. They were private in the extreme…”
“Just say it, Inspector,” said Gamache.
“Maybe Constance wasn’t the last.”