“Come with me.” Gilbert reached across Beauvoir and turned the Ski-Doo off, then he put his long arms around Beauvoir and gradually helped him up. The two men walked, slowly, along the path, Beauvoir pausing for breath now and then. He threw up once. Gilbert took his own scarf and cleaned Beauvoir’s face and waited. And waited. In the snow and cold, until Beauvoir could go on. Then carefully, wordlessly, they limped deeper into the woods, Beauvoir leaning heavily on the tall, elderly asshole.
His eyes closed, Beauvoir concentrated on putting one plodding foot in front of the other. He felt the pain radiating from his side but he also felt the kiss of the snowflakes on his face and tried to concentrate on that. Then the sensations changed. The snow stopped touching his face, and he heard his footsteps echo on wood.
They were at the log cabin. He almost wept, with exhaustion and relief.
Opening his eyes as they entered he saw, a million miles across the single room, a large bed. It was covered with a warm duvet and soft pillows.
And all Beauvoir wanted to do was make it across the room, so much larger than he remembered, to the bed at the very far end.
“Almost there,” whispered Dr. Gilbert.
Beauvoir stared at the bed, willing it to come to him, as he and Gilbert inched their way across the wooden floorboards. Until, finally, finally. There.
Dr. Gilbert sat him on the side and while Beauvoir sagged, his head lolling for the pillow, the doctor held him upright and undressed him.
Only then did he let Beauvoir slowly subside, until his weary head hit the pillow and the soft flannel sheets were pulled snug around him and finally, finally, the duvet.
And Beauvoir drifted off to sleep, smelling sweet maple smoke from the hearth, and homemade soup and feeling the warmth close in around him as out the window he saw the snow piling up and the darkness arriving.
Beauvoir awoke a few hours later, coming back to consciousness slowly. His side ached, as though he’d been kicked hard, but the nausea had passed. A hot water bottle had been placed in the bed and he found himself hugging it, curled around it.
Sleepily, lazily, he lay in the bed and slowly the room came into focus.
Vincent Gilbert was sitting in a large easy chair by the fireplace. He was reading a book, a glass of red wine on the table beside him, his slippered feet resting on a hassock.
The cabin seemed at once familiar but different.
The walls were still log, the windows and hearth unchanged. Rugs were scattered around the floorboards, but no longer the fine, hand-stitched Oriental rugs the Hermit had. These were rag rugs, also homemade, but much closer to home.
A few paintings hung on the walls, but not the masterpieces the Hermit had collected, and hidden here. Now they were modest examples of Québécois artists. Fine but not, perhaps, spectacular.
The glass Dr. Gilbert used looked like any other glass, not the cut leaded crystal they’d found here after the murder.
But the biggest change was where the Hermit had had silver and gold and fine bone china candelabras to provide light, Dr. Gilbert had a lamp. An electric lamp. And on the table next to Gilbert, Beauvoir noticed a phone.
Electricity had been brought deep into the forest to power this rustic little cabin.
Then Beauvoir remembered why he’d made the trek into the woods.
It was to see once again where the murder had been committed. He looked over to the door and noticed a rug there, right where the bloodstain had been. Might still be.
Death had come to this peaceful little cabin, but in what form? Olivier or someone else. And driven by what? As Chief Inspector Gamache impressed upon them, murder was never about a gun or a knife or a blow to the head, it was what powered that thrust.
What had taken the Hermit’s life? Greed, as the Crown prosecution and Gamache contended? Or was it something else? Fear? Rage? Revenge? Jealousy?
The treasures discovered here had been remarkable, but not the most amazing part of the case. The cabin had produced something else, something far more disquieting.
A word, woven into a spider’s web. Up in the corner of the cabin, where the shadows were the deepest.
Woo.
The word had also been found carved, not well, into a piece of bloodstained wood. It had tumbled from the dead man’s hand and ended up under the bed as though cowering there. A little wooden word. Woo.
But what did it mean?
Had the Hermit made the word?
It didn’t seem likely, since he was a master carver and the wooden Woo was rustic, child-like.
The prosecution had concluded Olivier had put Woo into the web and carved it in wood as part of his campaign to terrify the Hermit, keep him hiding in the cabin. And Olivier had admitted, finally, that had been his goal, to convince the mad old man that the outside world was dangerous. Filled with demons and Furies and terrible, terrible beings.
Chaos is coming, old son, the Hermit had whispered to Olivier the last night of his life. Olivier had done his job well. The Hermit was well and truly terrified.
But while admitting to everything else, Olivier denied two things.
Killing the Hermit.
And making the word, Woo.
The court hadn’t believed him. Olivier had been found guilty and sentenced to prison. It was a case Chief Inspector Gamache had painstakingly, painfully, built against his friend. A case Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir had collaborated on and believed in.
And one the Chief now asked him to dismantle and put together again. Only this time seeing if the same evidence could exonerate Olivier and point to someone else.
Like the man in the cabin with him.
Gilbert looked up and smiled.
“Hello,” he said, closing the book and getting up slowly. Beauvoir had to remember this tall, slender man, with the white hair and searching eyes was in his late seventies.
Gilbert sat on the side of the bed and smiled reassuringly. “May I?” he asked Beauvoir before touching him. Beauvoir nodded. “I’ve spoken to Carole and told her you’d be spending the night,” Dr. Gilbert said, pulling down the duvet. “She said she’d call the B and B and let Gabri know. No need to worry.”
“Merci.”
Gilbert’s warm, sure hands were pressing against Beauvoir’s abdomen.
Beauvoir had been prodded countless times in the past two months, especially those first days. It seemed his new alarm clock. Every few hours he awoke, dazed from medication, to someone else shoving their cold hands against his stomach.