And it might make sense for Constance to keep this, the only memento of her mother. There wasn’t a single photograph of their parents in the Quints’ home. But they had something much more precious. Hats their mother had made.
One for each of them, and one for herself.
And what had she put inside? Not her initials. Of course not. She stopped being Marie-Harriette when her girls had been born, and became Mama. Ma.
Maybe this was the key to Constance after all. And maybe, in giving it to Myrna, Constance was signaling her willingness to finally let go. Of the past. Of the rancor.
Gamache wondered if Constance and her sisters ever knew that their parents hadn’t sold them to the state, but that the girls had, in effect, been expropriated.
Did Constance finally realize that her mother had loved her? Was that the albatross she’d been lugging around all her life? Not some terrible wrong, but the horror that came from realizing, too late, she hadn’t been wronged? That she’d been loved all along?
Who hurt you once, / so far beyond repair?
Maybe the answer, for the Quints and for Ruth, was simple.
They’d done it to themselves.
Ruth in writing the poem and taking on an unnecessary burden of guilt, and the Quints in believing a lie and not recognizing their parents’ love.
He looked at the tuque again, rotated it, examining the pattern. Then he lowered it.
“How could this be a key to her home?” he asked. “Does the angel pattern mean anything to you?”
Myrna looked out the window, at the village green and the skaters, and she shook her head.
“Maybe it means nothing,” said the Chief. “Why reindeer or pine trees or snowflakes? The patterns Madame Ouellet knitted into the other hats are just cheerful symbols of winter and Christmas.”
Myrna nodded, kneading the hat and watching the happy children on the frozen pond. “Constance told me she and her sisters loved hockey. They’d get up a team and play the other village kids. Apparently it was Brother André’s favorite sport.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Gamache.
“I think they might have all bought into the belief that Frère André was their guardian angel. Hence,” she held up the tuque, “the hat.”
Gamache nodded. There were plenty of references to Brother André in the archived papers as well. Both sides had invoked the saint’s potent memory.
“But why would she give me the hat?” Myrna asked. “So that she could tell me about Brother André? Was he the key to their home? I don’t get it.”
“Maybe she wanted to get it out of her house,” said Gamache, rising to his feet. “Maybe that was the key. Breaking loose from the legend.”
Maybe, maybe, maybe. It was no way to run an investigation. And time was running out. If this crime wasn’t solved by the time he and the Brunels and Nichol returned to the schoolhouse, then it would not be solved.
Not by him anyway.
“I need to see the film again,” said Gamache, making for the stairs up to Myrna’s loft.
*
“There,” Gamache pointed at the screen. “Do you see it?”
But once again he’d hit the pause button a moment too late.
He rewound and tried again. And again. Myrna sat on the sofa beside him. Over and over he played the same twenty seconds of the recording. The old film, in the old farmhouse.
The girls laughing and teasing each other. Constance sitting on the rough bench, her father at her feet, lacing the skates. The other girls at the door, teetering on their blades and already holding hockey sticks.
Then their mother enters the frame and hands out the hats. But there’s an extra hat, which she throws offscreen.
Over and over, Chief Inspector Gamache played it. The extra hat was only visible for an instant as it whirled out of the frame. Finally, he captured it, frozen in that split second between when it left Marie-Harriette’s hand and when it left the screen.
They leaned closer.
The tuque was light in color, that much they could see. But in a black and white film it was impossible to say what the color was exactly. But now they could see the pattern. It was fuzzy, blurry, but clear enough.
“Angels,” said Myrna. “It’s this one.” She looked down at the hat in her hand. “It was the mother’s.”
But Gamache was no longer looking at the frozen hat. He was looking at Marie-Harriette’s face. Why was she so upset?
“May I use your phone?”
Myrna brought it over and he placed his call.
“I checked the death certificates, Chief,” Inspector Lacoste reported in answer to his question. “They’re definitely all dead. Virginie, Hélène, Josephine, Marguerite, and now Constance. All the Ouellet Quints are gone.”
“Are you sure?”
It was rare for the Chief to question her findings, and it made her question herself.
“I know we thought maybe one was still alive,” said Lacoste. “But I’ve found death certificates and burial records for all of them. All interred in the same cemetery close to their home. We have proof.”
“There was proof Dr. Bernard delivered the babies,” Gamache reminded her. “Proof Isidore and Marie-Harriette sold them to Québec. Proof Virginie died in an accidental fall, when we now suspect that was almost certainly not the case.”
Inspector Lacoste took his point.
“They were extremely private,” she said slowly, getting her head around what he was saying. “I suppose it’s possible.”
“They weren’t just private, they were secretive. They were hiding something.” The Chief thought for a moment. “If they are all dead, is it possible there was more to their deaths than we know?”
“Like Virginie’s, you mean?” asked Lacoste, her own mind churning to catch up with his.
“If they lied about one death, they could lie about them all.”
“But why?”
“Why does anyone lie to us?” he asked.
“To cover up a crime,” she said.
“To cover up murder.”
“You think they were murdered?” she asked, not succeeding in keeping the astonishment out of her voice. “All of them?”
“We know Constance was. And we know Virginie died a violent death. What do we really know about that?” asked the Chief. “The official record says she died from a fall down the stairs. Corroborated by Hélène and Constance. But the doctor’s notes and the initial police reports had a different version.”
“Oui. Suicide.”
“But maybe even that was wrong.”
“You think Hélène or Constance killed her?”
“I think we’re getting closer to the truth.”
It felt to Gamache as though they’d finally broken into the Ouellet home. He and Lacoste were stumbling around in the dark, but soon whatever that wounded family was hiding would be revealed.
“I’ll go back over my notes,” said Lacoste, “and dig deeper into the old files, see if there was even a hint that those deaths were anything but natural.”
“Good. And I’ll check the parish records.”
It was where the priest kept records of births and deaths. The Chief knew he’d find, written in longhand, the record of the five births. He wondered how many deaths he’d find.