What?”
“Woo,” repeated the Chief Inspector.
“Woo?” Olivier seemed baffled, but he’d feigned that at every turn in this interview. Beauvoir had long stopped believing anything the man said.
“Did the Hermit ever mention it?” Gamache asked.
“Mention woo?” Olivier asked. “I don’t even know what you’re asking.”
“Did you notice a spider’s web, in a corner of the cabin?”
“A spider’s web? What? No, I never noticed one. But I’ll tell you something, I’d be surprised if there was one. The Hermit kept that cabin spotless.”
“Propre,” said Gamache.
“Propre,” Olivier repeated.
“Woo, Olivier. What does it mean to you?”
“Nothing.”
“And yet it was the word on the piece of wood you took from the hand of the Hermit. After he’d been murdered.”
It was worse than Olivier had imagined, and he’d imagined pretty bad. It seemed Gamache knew everything. Or at least almost everything.
Pray God he doesn’t know it all, thought Olivier.
“I picked it up,” Olivier admitted. “But I didn’t look at it. It was lying on the floor by his hand. When I saw there was blood on it I dropped it. It said Woo?”
Gamache nodded and leaned forward, his powerful hands lightly holding each other as his elbows rested on his knees.
“Did you kill him?”
TWENTY-SIX
Finally Myrna spoke. She leaned forward and took Clara’s hand.
“What you did was natural.”
“Really? Because it feels like shit.”
“Well, most of your life is shit,” said Myrna, nodding her head sagely. “So it would feel natural.”
“Har, har.”
“Listen, Fortin is offering you everything you ever dreamed of, everything you ever wanted.”
“And he seemed so nice.”
“He probably is. Are you sure he wasn’t kidding?”
Clara shook her head.
“Maybe he’s gay himself,” suggested Myrna.
Clara shook her head again. “I thought of that, but he has a wife and a couple of kids and he just doesn’t seem gay.”
Both Clara and Myrna had a finely honed gay-dar. It was, they both knew, imperfect, but it probably would have picked up the Fortin blip. But nothing. Only the immense, unmistakable object that was Gabri, sailing away.
“What should I do?” Clara asked.
Myrna remained silent.
“I need to speak to Gabri, don’t I?”
“It might help.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
As she left she thought about what Myrna had said. Fortin was offering her everything she’d ever wanted, the only dream she’d had since childhood. Success, recognition as an artist. All the sweeter after years in the wilderness. Mocked and marginalized.
And all she had to do was say nothing.
She could do that.
No, I didn’t kill him.”
But even as Olivier said it he realized the disaster of what he’d done. In lying at every turn he’d made the truth unrecognizable.
“He was already dead when I arrived.”
God, even to his own ears it sounded like a lie. I didn’t take the last cookie, I didn’t break the fine bone china cup, I didn’t steal the money from your purse. I’m not gay.
All lies. All his life. All the time. Until he’d come to Three Pines. For an instant, for a glorious few days he’d lived a genuine life. With Gabri. In their little rented wreck of an apartment above the shop.
But then the Hermit had arrived. And with him a trail of lies.
“Listen, it’s the truth. It was Saturday night and the place was hopping. The Labor Day long weekend’s always a madhouse. But by midnight or so there were only a few stragglers. Then Old Mundin arrived with the chairs and a table. By the time he left the place was empty and Havoc was doing the final cleanup. So I decided to visit the Hermit.”
“After midnight?” Gamache asked.
“That’s normally when I went. So no one could see.”
Across from Olivier the Chief Inspector slowly leaned back, distancing himself. The gesture was eloquent. It whispered that Gamache didn’t believe him. Olivier stared at this man he’d considered a friend and he felt a tightening, a constriction.
“Weren’t you afraid of the dark?”
Gamache asked it so simply, and in that instant Olivier knew the genius of the man. He was able to crawl into other people’s skins, and burrow beyond the flesh and blood and bone. And ask questions of deceptive simplicity.
“It’s not the dark I’m afraid of,” said Olivier. And he remembered the freedom that came only after the sun set. In city parks, in darkened theaters, in bedrooms. The bliss that came with being able to shed the outer shell and be himself. Protected by the night.
It wasn’t the dark that scared him, but what might come to light.
“I knew the way and it only took about twenty minutes to walk it.”