SIXTEEN
“It was, of course,” said Gamache, voicing Myrna’s thoughts, “considered a miracle. The first quintuplets to have ever survived childbirth. They became sensations.”
The Chief leaned forward and placed a photograph on the coffee table.
It showed Isidore Ouellet, their father, standing behind the babies. He was unshaven, his farmer’s face weather-beaten, his dark hair unkempt. It looked like he’d spent the night running his immense hands through it. Even in the grainy picture, they could see the dark circles under his eyes. He wore a light shirt with a collar, and a frayed suit jacket, as though he’d thrown on his Sunday best at the last minute.
His daughters lay on the rough kitchen table in front of him. They were tiny, newborn, wrapped in hastily brought sheets and dish towels and rags. He was looking at his children in amazement, his eyes wide.
It would be comical if there wasn’t so much horror in that beaten face. Isidore Ouellet looked as though God had come for dinner and burned down the house.
Myrna picked up the picture and took a close look. She’d never seen it before.
“You found this in her home, I imagine,” she said, still distracted by the look in Isidore’s eyes.
Gamache put another photograph on the table.
She picked it up. It was slightly out of focus, but the father had disappeared and now standing behind the babies was an older woman.
“Midwife?” asked Myrna, and Gamache nodded.
She was stout, no-nonsense, her hands on her hips and a stained pinafore covering her large bosom. She was smiling. Weary and happy. And, like Isidore, amazed, but without his horror. Her responsibility, after all, was over.
Then Gamache put down a third black and white picture. The older woman had disappeared. The rags and wooden table had disappeared, and now each newborn was neatly wrapped in her own warm, clean flannel blanket and laid on a sterile table. A middle-aged man, dressed head to toe in white, stood proudly behind them. This was the famous photo. The world’s introduction to the Ouellet Quintuplets.
“The doctor,” said Myrna. “What was his name? Bernard. That’s it. Dr. Bernard.”
It was a testament to the Quints’ fame that almost eight decades on, Myrna would know the name of the doctor who’d delivered them. Or not.
“You mean,” she said, going back to the original pictures, “Dr. Bernard didn’t deliver the Quints after all?”
“He wasn’t even there,” said Gamache. “And when you think about it, why would he be? In 1937 most farmers’ wives had midwives at their deliveries, not doctors. And while they might have suspected Marie-Harriette was carrying more than one child, no one could have guessed there were five of them. It was the Depression, the Ouellets were dirt-poor, they could never have afforded a doctor even if they knew they needed one.”
They both looked down at the iconic picture. The smiling Dr. Bernard. Confident, assured, paternal. Perfectly cast for a role he’d play for the rest of his life.
The great man who’d delivered a miracle. Who, because of his skill, had done what no other doctor had managed. He’d brought five babies into the world, alive. And kept them alive. He’d even saved their mother.
Dr. Bernard became the doctor every woman wanted. The poster boy for competence. A point of pride for Québec, that they had trained and produced a physician of such skill and compassion.
A shame, thought Gamache as he put on his glasses and studied the photo, that it was a lie.
He put it aside and went back to the original photograph, of the Quints and their horrified father. It was the first of what would prove to be thousands of pictures of the girls taken during their lifetimes. The babies were imperfectly wrapped in sheets soiled with their mother’s blood and feces and mucus and membranes. It was a miracle, but it was also a mess.
It was the first picture, but it was also the last time the real girls were photographed. Within hours of the Quints being born, they were manufactured. The lies, the role-playing, the deceit, had begun.
He turned the original photo over. There, scrawled in neat, rounded schoolchild letters, were the children’s names.
Marie-Virginie, Marie-Hélène, Marie-Josephine, Marie-Marguerite, Marie-Constance.
They must have been quickly wrapped in whatever the midwife and Monsieur Ouellet could find, and laid on the kitchen table in the order in which they were born.
Then he picked up the picture with Dr. Bernard, taken just hours later. On the back someone had written M-M, M-J, M-V, M-C, M-H.
No longer their full names, now they were just initials. Today it would have been bar codes, thought the Chief. He could guess whose handwriting he was seeing, and again he looked at the kindly country doctor whose life had also changed that night. A whole new Dr. Bernard had been born.
Gamache pulled one more photo from his breast pocket and placed it on the coffee table. Myrna picked it up. She saw four young women, probably in their early thirties, arms around each other and smiling for the camera.
She turned the photograph over, but nothing was written on the back.
“The girls?” she asked, and Gamache nodded.
“They all look so different,” she marveled. “Hairstyles, taste in clothing, even their bodies.” She looked over the picture, to Gamache, who was watching her. “It’s impossible to tell they’re even sisters. Do you think that was on purpose?”
“What do you think?” he said.
Myrna went back to the photo, but she knew the answer. She nodded.
“That’s what I think too,” said the Chief, taking off his glasses and leaning back in his armchair. “They were obviously very close. They didn’t do it to distance themselves from each other, but from the public.”
“They’re in disguise,” she said, lowering the picture. “They made their bodies a costume, so no one would know who they were. More like armor really, than a costume.” She tapped the photo. “There’re four of them. Where’s the other one?”
“Dead.”
Myrna tilted her head at the Chief. “Pardon?”
“Virginie,” said Gamache. “She died in her early twenties.”
“Of course. I forgot.” She scoured her memory. “It was an accident, wasn’t it? Car? Drowning? I can’t quite remember. Something tragic.”
“She fell down the stairs at the home they shared.”
Myrna was quiet for a moment before she spoke. “I don’t suppose it was more than that? I mean, twenty-year-olds don’t normally just fall down stairs.”
“What a suspicious mind you have, Madame Landers,” said Gamache. “Constance and Hélène saw it happen. They said she lost her footing. There was no autopsy. No obituary notice in the paper. Virginie Ouellet was quietly buried in the family plot in Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu. Someone at the mortuary leaked the news a few weeks later. There was quite a public outpouring of grief.”
“Why hush up her death?” asked Myrna.
“From what I gather, the surviving sisters wanted to grieve in private.”
“Yes, that would fit,” said Myrna. “You said, ‘They said she lost her footing.’ There seems a bit of a qualifier there. They said it, but is it true?”
Gamache smiled slightly.
“You’re a good listener.” He leaned forward so that they looked at each other across the coffee table, their faces half in the firelight, half in darkness. “If you know how to read police reports and death certificates, there’s a lot in what isn’t said.”
“Did they think she might’ve been pushed?”