They could be human again.
This chief didn’t hide away, plotting and dividing. Chief Superintendent Gamache was in full view, though no one expected to view him in the church basement in this obscure village.
Their GPS had warned them they were literally in the middle of nowhere and the woman’s voice had advised them, in tones their mothers once used, to recalculate.
Gamache nodded to the agents and subtly gestured to them to continue what they were doing. He’d had no intention to disrupt, but he was learning that whenever the boss appeared, disruption was inevitable.
“S’il vous pla?t.” Isabelle Lacoste gestured to an empty chair, a hint of desperation in her voice. “Join us. You’re just in time.”
“Hello, Clouseau,” said Ruth, loudly enough for all the agents in the room to hear. “I was telling her that I didn’t kill that woman.” Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward the S?reté officers. She spoke out of one side of her mouth like a gangster. “But I can’t vouch for the duck.”
She leaned back in her chair and gave them a meaningful look. Rosa glanced from one to the other with her beady little eyes.
They knew that, if need be, Rosa would take the fall for Ruth. Though surely Ruth didn’t have that much further to fall.
“You were here this morning, I understand,” said Lacoste. Ruth nodded. “Did you come down here?”
“No.”
“Did you notice anything different about the church?” asked Lacoste.
Ruth thought. Then slowly shook her head. “No. Everything seemed normal. The church was unlocked, like it always is. I turned on the lights, then I sat in the pew by the boys.”
They all knew which bright, brittle boys she meant.
“No strange noises?” asked Lacoste, and braced for the caustic, sarcastic reply.
Like a murder happening downstairs?
But none came. The elderly woman just thought some more, and shook her head again.
“It was quiet. As always.”
She brought her elbows to the table and her hands to her face, and held Isabelle Lacoste’s steady eyes.
“She was down here then, wasn’t she? Already dead.”
Lacoste nodded. “We think so. Did you know about the root cellar?”
“Of course. I’m one of the church wardens. It was once used by rum runners, you know. During Prohibition. To get booze across the border.”
Gamache didn’t know that about the church, but it did explain why Ruth considered it an exceptionally sacred place.
Ruth looked over at the small room with the dirt floor and the crime scene tape. “It’s a terrible thing, to take another life. And somehow, it seems even worse to do it in a church. I wonder why that is?”
Her wizened face was open, genuinely seeking an answer.
“Because we feel safe here,” said Lacoste. “We feel God, or decency, will protect us.”
“I think you’re right,” said Ruth. “And maybe He did.”
“He didn’t protect Katie Evans,” said Lacoste.
“No, but maybe He protected us from her.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Look, I didn’t know her, but that conscience thing was here for a reason.”
“You mean the cobrador?” asked Lacoste. “You think the reason was Madame Evans?”
“I do. And so do you.”
Her gaze shifted to Gamache. The Chief Superintendent simply held those sharp eyes, without nodding. Imperceptibly or otherwise.
“You think the fellow in the costume killed her because of something she did?” asked Lacoste.
“It’d be ridiculous not to think that. He’s gone and she’s dead. Which would mean she did something so horrific she had to pay for it with her life. And he was here to collect. Now, whether she really had done something that bad or he was just crazy is another matter. I have to think someone who puts on a costume like that might not be all there.”
With great effort, Lacoste stopped herself from pointing out that Ruth might not be the best judge of “there.”
“If Madame Evans was the target all along, why not just kill her?” Lacoste asked. “Why the costume?”
“Have you never watched a horror film?” asked Ruth. “Halloween, for instance?”
“Have you?” she asked.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “Once Vincent Price died, the fun went out of them. But I know what they’re like.”
“Well, I’ve been investigating murders for years,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “I’ve never, in real life, seen a killer actually put on a costume, draw attention to himself, and then commit the murder. Have you?”
She turned to Gamache, who shook his head.
“Maybe the idea, at first, wasn’t to kill her,” said Ruth. “What’s a getup like that supposed to do? What’s its purpose?”
“To humiliate,” said Lacoste.
Ruth shook her head. “No, you’re thinking of the modern cobrador. The debt collector. He humiliates. But the old one? The original? What did he do?”
Lacoste thought back to what she’d been told about the dark men from those dark days. Following their tormentors.
“They terrify,” she said.
Ruth nodded.
Terror.
The cops and even the poet, and probably the duck, knew that terror wasn’t the act, it was the threat. The anticipation.
The closed door. The noise in the night. The shadowy figure half seen.
The actual act of terror created horror, pain, sorrow, rage, revenge. But the terror itself came from wondering what was going to happen next.
To watch, to wait, to wonder. To anticipate. To imagine. And always the worst.
Terrorists fed off threats more than actual acts. Their weapon of choice was fear. Sometimes they were lone wolves, sometimes organized cells. Sometimes the terror came from governments.
And the Conscience was no different. It joined forces with the person’s own imagination, and together they brewed dread. And if they were very successful, they took it one notch up, to terror.
“It wasn’t enough to kill her,” Ruth said quietly. “He had to torment her first. Let her know he knew. That he’d come for her.”
“And she couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t ask for help,” said Lacoste. “If what you say is true, this is a secret she’d kept for a very long time.”
“One that had literally come back to haunt her,” said Ruth.
Gamache listened and realized, with slight amusement, that Lacoste was treating Ruth as she would a colleague. As though the demented old poet was sitting in for Beauvoir.
Jean-Guy and Ruth were much alike actually, though he’d never, ever tell his son-in-law that he resembled a drunken old woman.
Despite the apparent antagonism, there was understanding there. Affection, and perhaps even love. Certainly an odd and old kinship neither could admit to, or escape.
Gamache wondered if Ruth and Jean-Guy had also been connected, through the ages, over lifetimes. As mother and son. Father and daughter.
Ducks in the same formation.