The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

Agents pointed flashlights at it, like weapons. More floodlights were turned on. Playing over it, but not altogether capturing the enormity of it.

“He was telling the truth,” said Lacoste beneath her breath. “My God, Laurent wasn’t lying after all.”

Before them was a massive gun, a cannon, its long barrel stretching beyond the reach of their lights to disappear into the darkness.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir lowered his light until it hit the base. And there they saw a monster etched onto the metal, twisting, writhing out of the ground. Its wings were extended. Its many serpent heads coiling, entwining like the vines that had hidden it for decades.

“We’re going to need more light,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “And longer ladders.”





CHAPTER 9

The Lepages had parked their truck on the road by the bistro and Gamache walked them back to it.

“I’ll make sure you’re told everything,” he said, leaning into the window as Al started it up.

“So far we haven’t been told anything,” said Evie. “Except that they found Laurent’s stick inside that thing. What was it doing there?”

“We know what it was doing there, Evie,” said Al. “Laurent was killed there, and moved, wasn’t he?”

Gamache nodded. “Chief Inspector Lacoste and her team will know more in a few hours, but it looks that way.”

“But what was Laurent doing there?” asked Evie. “Did he surprise someone? What’s in there? Is that a meth lab or a grow op? Did he stumble into some drug operation? Why did they kill him, Armand?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know what’s in there,” said Al. “What Laurent found.”

“I can’t tell you anything more right now,” said Armand.

“You can,” said Al. “You just choose not to. You know you’re making it worse by not telling us.”

“I’m sorry,” said Armand, stepping back as Al hit the gas.

He watched the battered pickup drive around the village green, then up the road out of the village. Then he walked back home, deep in thought.

He did know all those things. But he also knew something else.

As he’d leaned into the open window of the Lepages’ truck he’d seen, scattered on the console between the seats, a pile of cassette tapes.

*

“Where’s Ruth?” Myrna never thought she’d hear herself asking that question.

“Don’t know,” said Clara, looking around the crowded bistro. “She’s normally here by now.”

It was five thirty, and every chair in the place was taken. They could barely hear themselves think for the hubbub.

Clara saw Monsieur Béliveau at the door connecting Sarah’s boulangerie with the bistro. He was scanning the room.

“I’ll ask him if he’s seen her,” said Clara, getting up and weaving her way gracefully through the room.

As she passed the tables, she caught snippets of conversation. The words were slightly different, the language changing depending on the grouping. But the sense was the same.

“Meurtre,” she heard in hushed tones. “Murder.”

And then, even lower, “Mais qui?”

“But who?”

And then the look, the furtive scan. Taking in friends, acquaintances, neighbors, strangers. Who would suspicion, like an ax, fall on?

Clara had always found comfort in the bistro, never more so than after losing Peter. But while still soothing, the atmosphere was closing in on her. Words she’d worked hard to exorcise from her mind appeared again. Fresh and new and powerful. “Murder,” “blame,” “killing” crowded out the comfort.

Laurent was dead, and there was a good chance one of them did it.

“Have you seen Ruth?” Clara asked the grocer.

“Non, not yet. She isn’t here?”

“No.”

“I have some groceries for her. I’ll take them over and check on her.”

On her way back to the table Clara caught more bits of conversation.

“… drugs. A cartel…”

“… booze, left from Prohibition…”

One table was listening as a passionate man told them about Area 51, and the irrefutable evidence that aliens had landed decades ago in New Mexico. And, according to him, Québec.

“Mark my words, it’s an alien spacecraft in there,” he said. “Wasn’t the kid always warning us about an invasion?”

Incredibly, the others at the table, whom Clara knew to be sensible and thoughtful people, were nodding. It seemed a more comforting explanation than that one of them had suddenly become alien, and killed a little boy.

Clara sat down next to Myrna, grim-faced.

“Have you been listening to what people are saying?” Clara asked.

“Yes. It’s getting ugly. That table is ordering more and more drinks and talking about going into the woods and forcing their way into that thing we found.”

Myrna pushed her glass of red wine away. Nature, she knew, abhorred a vacuum, and these people, faced with an information vacuum, had filled it with their fears.