Thérèse nodded. “I don’t know if he started out so corrupt, or if he was corrupted, but that’s what he did.”
Jér?me lowered his eyes and thought about the name he’d found. The one buried below Arnot. If Arnot had fallen, this other man had fallen further. Only to be dug up, years later, by Jér?me Brunel.
“When did Armand get involved?” asked Jér?me.
“A Cree elder, a woman, was selected to travel to Quebec City, to ask for help. She wanted to tell someone in authority that young men and women were disappearing. Dying. They were found hanged and shot and drowned. The S?reté detachment had dismissed the deaths as accidents or suicides. Some young Cree had disappeared completely. The S?reté concluded they’d run away. Probably down south. They’d be found in some crack house or drunk tank in Trois-Rivières or Montréal.”
“She came to Quebec City to ask for help in finding them?” asked Jér?me.
“No, she wanted to tell someone in authority that it was lies. Her own son was among the missing. She knew they hadn’t run away, and the deaths weren’t accidents or suicides.”
Jér?me could see how dredging up these memories was affecting Thérèse. As a senior S?reté officer. As a woman. As a mother. And it sickened him too, but they’d gone too far. They couldn’t stop in the middle of this quagmire. They had to keep going.
“No one believed her,” said Thérèse. “She was dismissed as demented. Another drunk native. It didn’t help that she didn’t know where to find the National Assembly, so she stopped people going into and out of the Chateau Frontenac.”
“The hotel?” asked Jér?me.
Thérèse nodded. “It’s such an imposing building, she thought it was where the leaders must be.”
“But how did Armand get involved?”
“He was in Quebec City for a conference at the Chateau and saw her sitting on a bench, distraught. He asked her what was wrong.”
“She told him?” asked Jér?me.
“Everything. Armand asked why she hadn’t gone to the S?reté with that information.” Thérèse lowered her eyes to her manicured hands.
Out of the corner of his eye Jér?me could see the gathering in the TV room breaking up, but he didn’t hurry his wife. They’d come to the bottom of the swamp at last, to the final words that needed to be dredged up. She was clearly struggling to speak the unspeakable.
“The Cree elder said she hadn’t reported it to the S?reté because the S?reté were doing it. They were killing the young Cree. Including, probably, her own son.”
Jér?me stared at his wife. Holding on to those familiar eyes. Not wanting to let go and slide into a world where such a thing was possible. He could tell that Thérèse was almost relieved. Believing she was near the end now. That the worst was over.
But Jér?me knew they were very far from the worst. And nowhere near the end.
“What did Armand do?”
He could see Clara heading to the kitchen and Olivier was making his way toward them. But still he held his wife’s eyes.
She leaned toward him and whispered, just before Olivier arrived.
“He believed her.”
TWENTY-TWO
“Dinner!” Clara called.
They’d watched to the end of the DVD. After the NFB footage and the newsreels, there were more clips of the Quints. At First Communion, meeting the young Queen, curtsying to the Prime Minister.
In unison, of course. And the great man laughing, delighted.
It was odd, thought Clara, as she took the casserole from the oven, to see someone she only knew as an elderly woman as an infant. It was odder still to see her grow up. To see so much of her, and so many of her.
Seeing those films one after the other went from charming, to disconcerting, to devastating. It was made even odder by not being able to tell which one was Constance. They were all her. And none were.
The films ended suddenly when the girls reached their late teens.
“Can I help?” asked Myrna, prying the warm bread from Clara’s hand.
“What did you think of the film?” Clara asked, putting the baguette Myrna sliced into a basket. Olivier was placing plates on the long pine table while Gabri tossed the salad.
Ruth was either trying to light the candles or set the house on fire. Armand was nowhere to be seen, and neither were Thérèse or her husband Jér?me.
“I keep seeing that first sister, Virginie, I think, looking at the camera.” Myrna paused in her slicing and stared ahead.
“You mean when their mother wouldn’t let them back into the house?” Clara asked.
Myrna nodded and thought how strange it was that, when talking with Gamache, she’d used the house analogy, saying that Constance was locked and barricaded inside her emotional home.
What was worse, Myrna wondered. To be locked in, or locked out?
“They were so young,” Clara said, as she took the knife from Myrna’s suspended hand. “Maybe Constance didn’t remember.”