ELEVEN
“Constance Ouellet-Shithead?” asked Gabri.
Ruth and Rosa glared at him.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” muttered the duck.
“She’s Constance Ouellet,” Ruth clarified, her voice glacial. “You’re the shithead.”
“You knew?” Myrna asked the old poet.
Ruth picked up Rosa, placing the duck on her lap and stroking her like a cat. Rosa stretched her neck, straining her beak upward toward Ruth, and making a nest of the old body.
“Not at first. I thought she was just some boring old fart. Like you.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gabri, waving his large hand in front of him as though trying to clear away the confusion. “Constance Pineault was Constance Ouellet?”
He turned to Olivier.
“Did you know?” But it was clear his partner was equally amazed.
Gabri looked around the gathering and finally came to rest on Gamache.
“Are we talking about the same thing? The Ouellet Quints?”
“C’est ?a,” said the Chief.
“The quintuplets?” Gabri insisted, still unable to fully grasp it.
“That’s it,” Gamache assured him. But it only seemed to increase Gabri’s bafflement.
“I thought they were dead,” he said.
“Why do people keep saying that?” Myrna asked.
“Well, it all seems so long ago. Once upon a time.”
They sat in silence. Gabri had nailed it. Exactly what most of them had been thinking. Not so much amazement that one of the Ouellet Quints was dead, but that any were still alive. And that one had walked among them.
The Quints were legend in Québec. In Canada. Worldwide. They were a phenomenon. Freaks, almost. Five little girls, identical. Born in the depths of the Depression. Conceived without fertility drugs. In vivo, not in vitro. The only known natural quintuplets to survive. And they had survived, for seventy-seven years. Until yesterday.
“Constance was the only one left,” said Myrna. “Her sister, Marguerite, died in October. A stroke.”
“Did Constance marry?” asked Olivier. “Is that where Pineault came from?”
“No, none of the Quints married,” said Myrna. “They went by their mother’s maiden name, Pineault.”
“Why?” asked Gabri.
“Why do you think, numb nuts?” asked Ruth. “Not everyone craves attention, you know.”
“So how did you know who she was?” Gabri demanded.
That shut Ruth up, much to everyone’s amazement. They’d expected a brusque retort, not silence.
“She told me,” Ruth finally said. “We didn’t talk about it, though.”
“Oh, come on,” said Myrna. “She told you she was a Ouellet Quint and you didn’t ask a single question?”
“I don’t care if you believe me,” said Ruth. “It’s the truth, alas.”
“Truth? You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you on the alas,” said Gabri.
Ruth ignored him and focused on Gamache, who’d been watching her closely.
“Was she killed because she was a Ouellet Quint?” Ruth asked him.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I can’t see why,” Ruth admitted. “And yet…”
And yet, thought Gamache, as he rose. And yet. Why else would she be killed?
He looked at his watch. Almost nine. Time to get going. He excused himself to make a phone call from the bar, remembering in time that his cell phone didn’t work in Three Pines, and neither did email. He almost expected to see messages fluttering back and forth in the sky above the village, unable to descend. Waiting for him to head up the hill out of Three Pines, and then dive-bombing him.
But as long as he was here, none could reach him. Armand Gamache suspected that partly explained his good night’s sleep. And he suspected it also explained Constance Ouellet’s growing ease in the village.
She was safe there. Nothing could reach her. It was only in leaving that she’d been killed.
Or …
As the phone rang his thoughts sped along.
Or …
She hadn’t been killed when she left, he realized. Constance Ouellet had been murdered when she’d tried to return to Three Pines.
“Bonjour, patron.” Inspector Lacoste’s bright voice came down the landline.
“How’d you know it was me?” he asked.
“The caller ID said ‘Bistro.’ It’s our code word for you.”
He paused for a moment, wondering if that was true, then she laughed.