by Louise Penny
Down, down, down. Laurent would have gained speed, his legs pumping, the stick almost certainly out in front. A lance in a heroic charge.
And then something happened. He’d hit a rut or a hole or a heave. What old townshippers called a cahoo.
Armand stood at a likely spot, a pothole. Had Laurent been frightened as he took flight? Gamache suspected not. The boy had probably been giddy with excitement. Maybe even shouting, “Caaaaah-hoooo.”
He was airborne. And then he wasn’t.
Blunt force trauma, it was called in the report. What the autopsy couldn’t show was the ongoing trauma to everyone who loved the child.
Armand stood on the pothole and lifted his body up on tiptoes, stretching his arms out in front of him. Mimicking taking off. He imagined sailing through the air. Up, up, and then down. Into the gully.
And where would the stick have landed? Perhaps quite a distance from Laurent, released from the little hand like a javelin slicing through the air.
Reine-Marie, Olivier and Gabri followed his actions and searched in the likeliest places. And then the least likely places.
“Nothing so far,” Reine-Marie said, then looking around she noticed her husband wasn’t with her. He was standing at the spot where Laurent had landed, looking at the ground. Then he turned and looked back up the hill.
“Find anything?” asked Olivier.
“No,” said Gabri, getting closer to the woods. “Just grass and mud.” He lifted his boots and there was a sucking sound as the ground reluctantly released him.
Armand had returned to the road and walked in the opposite direction of the hill. Reine-Marie, along with Gabri and Olivier, joined him.
“No stick?” Gamache asked.
They shook their heads.
“Maybe Al and Evie picked it up,” said Olivier.
But they doubted it. It was all Laurent’s parents could do to pick themselves up.
“Maybe he lost it,” said Gabri.
But they knew the only way Laurent would lose it was if he lost his hand. It was more than just a stick to Laurent.
* * *
Al Lepage came out of the barn when he heard their car drive up. He was back in his work clothes and was wiping his large hands.
“Armand.”
“Al.” The men shook hands and Reine-Marie gave him a quick embrace.
“Is Evie at home? I have a casserole.”
Al pointed to the house, and when Reine-Marie left he turned to Gamache.
“Is this a social call?”
“No, not really.”
They’d dropped Gabri and Olivier back in Three Pines and then driven to the farm. And now Armand contemplated the older man in front of him. Al Lepage looked like a paper bag that had been crumpled up before being thrown away. But for the first time, Armand really studied his face and noted not the beard or the leathered skin, but the blue, blue eyes, shaped like almonds. Laurent’s eyes. And his nose. Thin and slightly too long for the face. Laurent’s nose.
“I have a question for you.”
Al indicated a trough. The two men sat side by side.
“Do you have Laurent’s stick?”
Al looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “His stick?”
“He always had it with him but we couldn’t find it. We just wondered if you might have it.”
It seemed an eternity before Al answered. Armand quietly prayed that he’d say, Yes, yes I do. And then Armand and Reine-Marie could go home, and start the long process of remembering the boy alive and letting go of the boy dead.
“No.”
The large man didn’t meet Armand’s eyes, couldn’t. He stared straight ahead, his almond eyes hard with the effort of not going soft. But his lips trembled and his chin dimpled.
“It would be nice to have it back,” he managed to say.
“We’ll try to get it for you.”
“I made it for his birthday.”
“Oui.”
“Worked on it every night after he went to bed. He wanted an iPhone.”
“No he didn’t,” said Armand.
“He’s nine.”
Gamache nodded.
“Nine,” whispered Al Lepage.
And both men stared off, in opposite directions. Laurent’s father viewing a world where nine-year-old boys died in accidents. Gamache seeing a world where even worse things happened.
“It must be there,” Al said at last. “Where we found him. Or the cops picked it up.”
“No. We looked. And the police didn’t find it either. If it isn’t here at home, and it isn’t where Laurent was found, then we have to find it.”
“Why?”
Gamache didn’t hesitate. He knew there was never a good time for this.
“It could mean that Laurent might’ve been killed somewhere else, and put in that ditch.”
Al’s mouth formed the beginning of a word. Why, perhaps. Or, what. But it died there. And Gamache saw Laurent’s father pack up his home, take all his possessions, and move. To that other world. Where nine-year-old boys were killed. A world where nine-year-old boys were murdered.
Armand Gamache was the moving man, the ferryman, who took him there.
And once across there was no going back.
* * *
“A stick, patron?” Jean-Guy Beauvoir’s voice had grown shrill on the phone.
“Oui,” said Gamache. He stood in his living room and looked out the window, past their front porch to the village green.
He could see Clara and Myrna sitting on the bench chatting with Monsieur Béliveau.
“You want me to go to Chief Inspector Lacoste and say we have to reopen the investigation into Laurent Lepage’s death—an investigation we only did as a personal favor to you—because a stick is missing?”
“Oui.”
Armand Gamache understood how Laurent must have felt when trying to convince people he’d seen a monster. Gamache hadn’t yet seen the monster, but he knew it was out there. He just had to convince others.
“I know how ridiculous it sounds, Jean-Guy.”
“I don’t think you do, patron, or you’d never have said it.”
“Please, just do it.”
“But what are we supposed to do? We’ve already done a thorough investigation. It was an accident.”
“It was not,” said Gamache, his voice gruff. “And it’s not just the stick. We went to the site yesterday afternoon and searched, but something else struck me. How his body was lying. If you assume, as we have, that he was riding his bike down the hill and hit a bump, he’d have flown headfirst, right?”
“Which he did. Hit his head. I’m sorry, Chief, but where’s this going?”
“He was pointed in the wrong direction, Jean-Guy. Your own photos confirm it.”
“What?”
Gamache could hear Jean-Guy scrambling, and tapping on his computer to bring up the file and the photos.
Then there was silence.
“Christ,” he finally said, exhaling the word like a sigh. “Are you sure?”
“If you go to the site you’ll see immediately. Laurent could not have been heading down the hill when he fell.”
“And the other direction?”
“Is flat. He might’ve hit his wheel against a rock or a pothole and fallen, but at worst he’d have skinned a knee, maybe broken an arm. He could never have flown that far.”
“Jeez, you might be on to something. But now what?”
“If he was killed, the murderer made a huge mistake. He moved the body but left the stick. If we can find the stick, we might know where Laurent was killed.”
“And who did it,” said Beauvoir. “But even if all this is true, how in the world are you going to find a stick in the forest?”
Gamache looked out the window and raised his eyes past the village green, past the old homes. To the woods. The forest. Hundreds of square miles radiated out from the village. With millions of sticks on the ground.
But Laurent was nine years
If he was murdered, it was close by.
“You were playing soccer on the village green when Laurent came running into the village a few days ago.”
“Right,” said Jean-Guy.
“Which direction did he come from?”
“He came past the old train station,” said Beauvoir.
“Over the bridge,” said Gamache. “Yes, I remember him saying that. We’ll start there.”
“Why there?”
“You asked me the other day why anyone would kill a nine-year-old boy,” said Armand. “And there’re only two things I can think of. It was either for no reason except the pleasure of the killer. A psychopath. Or there was a reason.”
“But again,” said Jean-Guy. “Why?”
“Look at Laurent,” said Armand. “What did he do? He made up stories. All sorts of stories. All of which were in his imagination. Myrna thinks he wanted attention. The boy who cried wolf. But even he was finally telling the truth. Suppose Laurent was too.”
“About the alien invasion?”
“About the gun.”
“And the monster riding it?” asked Jean-Guy.
Armand sighed. “He was given to exaggeration,” he admitted. “And that’s where he lost us. Had Laurent stuck to just the gun story—”
“—the gun that was bigger than any house?”
“—then we might’ve believed him. As it was no one even listened. We just tuned him out. He begged me to go with him and I never even considered it,” said Gamache. “Had I gone with him…”
His voice trailed off. It was a realization that had been creeping up on him most of the day, but this was the first time he’d voiced it.
“I’m coming down,” said Jean-Guy.
“It’s all right, I’ve lined up some people to search,” said Armand. “It could take a while. We might never find it.”
“Well, what can I do?”
“Ask the coroner to reexamine the medical evidence. Ask her if it’s possible the injuries were inflicted by something other than an accident.”
“D’accord. I’ll also go over the photographs and other evidence.” Jean-Guy paused. “You really think someone killed the kid? You know what that means?”
Armand Gamache knew exactly what it meant.
It took a certain kind of person to kill a child. Chief Inspector Gamache had tracked a few of them down in his long career. Fighting to find the murderer, but also fighting to keep his own repugnance, his own rage, at bay. Fighting to keep the thought of his own children out of an already complex and volatile mix.
That was the problem. They were the most difficult murderers to find, not simply because if they were willing to kill a child, they were willing to do anything, but also because the emotions of the family, the witnesses, the friends, the public and the investigators were heightened. Volcanic. It could obscure the truth, warp perceptions.
And that gave the murderer a huge advantage.
It was also the kind of murder that could pull a community apart. Even he, looking out the window at the villagers going about their lives, was thinking only one thing.
Was it one of them?
* * *
People from miles around volunteered to help scour the woods for the little boy’s stick. Armand hadn’t explained why they were looking, not the truth anyway. Instead he’d told people it would mean a great deal to Al and Evie to have Laurent’s prized possession.
It would take two days of searching the forest before they found it. And what they found wasn’t the stick. Not at first. The first thing they found was the monster.
CHAPTER 8
Jean-Guy Beauvoir had come down to Three Pines to help on the second day of the search.
It was mind-numbing, back-breaking, frigid work in the dark, dank forest. But none of the villagers had dropped out. They took it in rotations, two hours at a time, and just about everyone had volunteered for a stint.
“The coroner agreed it was possible Laurent’s injuries were caused by being hit, rather than hitting the ground,” said Jean-Guy. “He was a little kid, even for a nine-year-old. It wouldn’t take much. It’s a terrible thing, to take the life of a child.”
“Yes it is.”
“I also looked again at the photos from the scene and stopped there on my way out. You could be right.”
“Merci,” said Gamache, picking up a stick, examining it and tossing it behind him.
“And since you begged for my help, it was the least I could do.”
Armand smiled. “I’m lost without you.”
Jean-Guy looked around. They could hear the shuffling of the other searchers, but couldn’t see them.
“You might be lost with me.”
Decades’, centuries’ worth of fallen leaves had dried and decayed on the forest floor, so that as they walked it gave off a musky, woody scent that was not unpleasant.
The leaves overhead were changing, and with the bright sun on them it felt like they were walking under a massive stained-glass dome.
“Over here,” came a yell.
Gamache and Beauvoir stopped and turned in the direction of the voice.
“I’ve found something.”
It was Monsieur Béliveau, the grocer. He stood, tall and thin, in the middle of the woods, waving. Gamache and Beauvoir began to walk quickly, then broke into a jog.
Others, hearing the shout, also began to head over.
“Stop,” shouted Gamache, picking up speed, running between the trees, trying to get ahead of the stampede. “Arrêtez. Right now. Stop.”
And they did. Not all at once, but the authority in his voice eventually registered and everyone ground to a halt, scattered through the woods.
“Did you find Laurent’s stick?” Beauvoir asked as he approached the grocer.
“Non,” said Monsieur Béliveau. “I found that.”
“What?” demanded Antoinette. She stood deeper in the woods, Brian by her side. She was unmistakable and unmissable in a bright pink woolly sweater that was covered in dried leaves and bark. She looked like an escapee from a Dr. Seuss book. On the lam from green eggs and ham.
Monsieur Béliveau was pointing at something but they couldn’t see what.
“What is it?” Gamache asked quietly as he got closer.
“Can’t you see it?” Monsieur Béliveau whispered. He moved his hand in a circle, but all Gamache could see was a particularly thick section of forest.
“Holy shit,” Gamache heard someone say behind him. He thought it might be Clara, but he didn’t turn around. Instead Armand Gamache stopped. Then stepped back. And back again.
And tilted his head up.
“Merde,” he heard Jean-Guy whisper.
Then he peered at where Monsieur Béliveau was pointing. It was a small tear in the vines. And beyond that it was black.
“Do you have your flashlight?” he asked Jean-Guy, holding out his hand.
“I do, but I’m going first, patron.”
Beauvoir put on gloves, knelt on the ground, turned on the light, and stuck his head through the hole. Jean-Guy looked, though Gamache would never say it to his face, a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh stuck in the honey jar.
But when he came back out there was nothing childish about his expression.
“What is it?” Gamache asked.
“I’m not sure. You need to see.”
This time Beauvoir crawled all the way through the hole and disappeared. Armand followed, first telling everyone else to stay where they were. It did not seem a hard sell. As he squeezed through the opening, Gamache noticed bits of torn camouflage netting.
And then he was through into a world where there was no sun. It was dark and silent. Not even the scampering of rodents. Nothing. Except the beam from Beauvoir’s flashlight.
He felt the younger man’s strong grip on his arm, helping him to his feet.
Neither spoke.
Gamache stepped forward and felt a cobweb cling to his face. He brushed it aside and moved another cautious step forward.
“What is this place?” Jean-Guy asked.
“I don’t know.”
Both men whispered, not wishing to disturb whatever else might be in there. But Gamache’s instincts told him there was nothing else. At least, nothing living.
Jean-Guy moved the flashlight around quickly at first trying to assess their situation. Then the rapid, sweeping movements of the circle of light slowed.
It fell here and there. And then it stopped and Beauvoir leapt back, pushing into Gamache and dropping the flashlight.
“What is that?” Armand asked.
Jean-Guy stooped quickly to pick up the light. “I don’t know.”
But he did know there was something else in there with them.
Beauvoir tilted the beam up. Up. Straight up. And Armand felt his jaw go slack.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
What he saw was unbelievable. Inconceivable.
The camouflage netting and old vines concealed a vast space. It was hollow. But not empty. Inside it was a gun. A massive artillery piece. Ten times, a hundred times bigger than anything Gamache had ever seen. Or heard of. Or thought possible.
And stretching up from the base, apparently out of the ground, was a figure.
A winged monster. Writhing.
Gamache stepped forward, then stopped as his boot fell on something.
“Jean-Guy,” he said, and motioned to the ground.
Beauvoir pointed the flashlight and there, in the circle of light, was a stick.
* * *
Word spread fast. Within minutes everyone in the village knew that something had been found.
Al and Evie Lepage had been on every shift, searching the forest for their son’s stick, only taking breaks when the damp and cold got into their bones and they couldn’t take it anymore.
They were in the bistro taking a rare break to warm up when Jean-Guy Beauvoir strode past on his way to the Gamache home. They followed him and were standing in the doorway when they heard his phone call to the local Sûreté detachment.
And the next call. To his own office in Montréal. Telling them to send a forensics team.
“What did you find?” Evie asked from the doorway to the study.
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