The Nature of the Beast

by Louise Penny

  * * *

  “Where’s Ruth?” Myrna never thought she’d hear herself asking that question.

  “Don’t know,” said Clara, looking around the crowded bistro. “She’s normally here by now.”

  It was five thirty, and every chair in the place was taken. They could barely hear themselves think for the hubbub.

  Clara saw Monsieur Béliveau at the door connecting Sarah’s boulangerie with the bistro. He was scanning the room.

  “I’ll ask him if he’s seen her,” said Clara, getting up and weaving her way gracefully through the room.

  As she passed the tables, she caught snippets of conversation. The words were slightly different, the language changing depending on the grouping. But the sense was the same.

  “Meurtre,” she heard in hushed tones. “Murder.”

  And then, even lower, “Mais qui?”

  “But who?”

  And then the look, the furtive scan. Taking in friends, acquaintances, neighbors, strangers. Who would suspicion, like an ax, fall on?

  Clara had always found comfort in the bistro, never more so than after losing Peter. But while still soothing, the atmosphere was closing in on her. Words she’d worked hard to exorcise from her mind appeared again. Fresh and new and powerful. “Murder,” “blame,” “killing” crowded out the comfort.

  Laurent was dead, and there was a good chance one of them did it.

  “Have you seen Ruth?” Clara asked the grocer.

  “Non, not yet. She isn’t here?”

  “No.”

  “I have some groceries for her. I’ll take them over and check on her.”

  On her way back to the table Clara caught more bits of conversation.

  “… drugs. A cartel…”

  “… booze, left from Prohibition…”

  One table was listening as a passionate man told them about Area 51, and the irrefutable evidence that aliens had landed decades ago in New Mexico. And, according to him, Québec.

  “Mark my words, it’s an alien spacecraft in there,” he said. “Wasn’t the kid always warning us about an invasion?”

  Incredibly, the others at the table, whom Clara knew to be sensible and thoughtful people, were nodding. It seemed a more comforting explanation than that one of them had suddenly become alien, and killed a little boy.

  Clara sat down next to Myrna, grim-faced.

  “Have you been listening to what people are saying?” Clara asked.

  “Yes. It’s getting ugly. That table is ordering more and more drinks and talking about going into the woods and forcing their way into that thing we found.”

  Myrna pushed her glass of red wine away. Nature, she knew, abhorred a vacuum, and these people, faced with an information vacuum, had filled it with their fears.

  The line between fact and fiction, between real and imagined, was blurring. The tether holding people to civil behavior was fraying. They could see it, and hear it, and feel it coming apart.

  Most of these people knew Laurent. Had children of their own. Were tired, and cold, and filled with fear and booze and not enough facts. These were good people, frightened people. Justifiably so.

  Olivier bent down and placed a bowl of mixed nuts on the table. He whispered to them, “I’m going to start cutting people off.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” said Myrna.

  Clara got up. “I think Armand needs to come over. I think he’s stayed away because he doesn’t want to create a difficult situation, but it’s beyond that now.”

  Voices were raised at a table in the corner, where Gabri was explaining that they could not have more drinks.

  Clara went to the bar and called the Gamache home.

  * * *

  “Is it true what I’m hearing, Clément?” Ruth asked, as the old grocer took a seat in her living room.

  “What are you hearing?” he asked.

  “That the child was murdered.”

  She said the word as though it had no emotional load, contained nothing more than any other word. But her thin hands trembled and she made small, powerful fists.

  “Yes.”

  “And that they found something in the woods, where Laurent was killed.”

  “Yes. I showed them the way in,” he said. “The path. No one else could see it, of course. It was overgrown.”

  Ruth nodded. She’d thought the memories had also been obscured, hidden under so many other events. Poems written, books published, awards won. Dinners and discussions. New neighbors. New friends. Rosa.

  Years and years of rich and fertile topsoil.

  But now it was back, clawing its way to the surface. The dark thing.

  “What’s in there, Clément? What did they do?”

  * * *

  The moment Armand and Reine-Marie stepped into the bistro, the turmoil died out.

  A hush fell over the cheerful room, with its beamed ceiling and fieldstone fireplaces lit and welcoming, so at odds with the angry faces.

  “Is there a problem?” Armand asked, his steady gaze going from familiar face to familiar face.

  “Yes,” said a man standing at the back. “We want to know what you found in the woods.”

  Gabri, Olivier and their servers took advantage of the distraction to clear away drinks from the tables and put out boards of bread and cheese.

  “We have a right to know,” said another patron. “This’s our home. We have kids. We need to know.”

  “You’re right,” said Gamache. “You do have a right to know. You need to know. You have children and grandchildren who need protecting. One child has already been killed, we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

  Anger dissipated as they realized he agreed with them.

  “The problem is, you see,” said Armand, stepping further into the room, his voice calm and reasonable, “it’s possible one of you killed Laurent.”

  Beside him, Reine-Marie whispered, “Armand?”

  But she saw his face in profile, determined. His eyes unwavering, as he looked out at the faces of his neighbors. He radiated certainty and calm.

  Her gaze shifted to the patrons of the bistro. They were sober now. Quiet. His words had slammed into them, knocking the booze, knocking the anger, knocking the stuffing out of them.

  A few sat down. Then more. Until they were all sitting.

  Gamache took a long, deep breath. “I’m not saying anything you haven’t already figured out for yourselves. That you haven’t already said to each other. You’ve almost certainly looked around and wondered who did it. Which of you killed a nine-year-old boy.”

  And now they looked around again, lowering their eyes as they met a friend, a neighbor staring back at them.

  “I know what’s in those woods,” he said. “And I could tell you, but I won’t. Not because I want to hide it from you. I don’t. But because it would compromise the hunt for the killer. Laurent’s murderer is counting on your help. He’s sitting, perhaps among us now, hoping you’ll storm into the woods. He’s praying you trample evidence and disrupt the investigation. A killer hides in chaos. You need to not give him that.”

  “Then what should we do?” a woman asked.

  “You should stay out of the woods. You should keep your children out of the woods. You should be absolutely open and honest when the investigators ask you questions. The more light thrown onto an investigation, the fewer places he can hide. Laurent was not killed by some serial killer, or some errant madman. There was purpose to this. You need to make sure you and your children don’t get in his way, or in the investigators’ way.”

  He let that sink in, making eye contact with many of the people there.

  “Reine-Marie and I are proud to be your neighbors. And your friends. We could’ve lived anywhere, but we chose here. Because of you.”

  He took her hand and together they walked further into the silent bistro.

  “May we?” he asked Clara and Myrna.

  “Please,” said Clara, indicating the empty seats

.

  Slowly a murmur of conversation grew around them, the voices a moderate level as reason was restored. For now.

  Across from her, Clara saw Armand close his eyes briefly, and take a deep breath.

  “Bet you thought you left all the talk of murder behind when Armand retired from the Sûreté,” said Myrna.

  “Well, we did move to Three Pines,” said Reine-Marie. “We had our doubts.”

  “Patron,” said Olivier, bending down to speak into Gamache’s ear. “Isabelle called from the old railway station. She’d like to speak to you.”

  “Do you mind?” he asked Reine-Marie.

  As he left, he heard Clara ask his wife, “So, did he tell you what they found?”

  * * *

  Ruth opened her worn and dog-eared notebook to the page she’d been reading before Monsieur Béliveau arrived.

  He’d gone now, back to the bistro. She’d promised to join him there later. To put on a show of normalcy, if such a thing existed for Ruth. For Three Pines. For anyone.

  She smoothed the page, thought for a moment, then read.

  Well, all children are sad

  but some get over it.

  Count your blessings. Better than that,

  buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.

  Ruth looked over at Rosa, snoring in her flannel nest. It sounded like merdemerdemerde. Ruth smiled.

  Take up dancing to forget.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Sûreté Incident Room had once again been set up in what had been the railway station, before it was abandoned and put to other use. The long, low brick building across the Rivière Bella Bella from the village was the home of the Three Pines Volunteer Fire Brigade, of which Ruth Zardo was the chief, being familiar, everyone figured, with hellfire.

  And now it was being put to an even more dire use.

  The old railway station was alive with activity as technicians and agents set up the equipment necessary to investigate a modern murder. Desks, computers, printers, scanners. Telephone lines. Lots of those. Since the village was so deep in the valley, no high-speed Internet, or even satellite signal, reached it. They had to resort to dial-up.

  It was infuriating, frustrating, grindingly slow. But it was better than nothing.

  Armand Gamache had just arrived and was standing in the disarray. In his late fifties now, he’d started at the Sûreté when there weren’t even faxes, just teletype machines.

  Isabelle Lacoste watched him and remembered being with Gamache on one of her first murder investigations. They found themselves in a hunting camp, with a body and fingerprints, and no way to transmit the information.

  Chief Inspector Gamache had taken the old telephone receiver off its cradle, unscrewed the lower section, removed the voice disc, and hooked directly into the line.

  “You hot-wired the phone?” she’d asked.

  “Kind of,” he’d said. And then he’d taught her how to do it.

  “It must’ve been tough back then,” she’d said. “When this was all you had.”

  “It gave us more time to think,” he’d explained.

  And then they’d sat by the woodstove, and they’d thought. And by the time the information had chugged its way back down the phone line, they’d all but solved the case.

  And now she was the Chief Inspector. And she looked at all the technology being installed, in the absolute certainty it was crucial to solving the case.

  But she knew differently. And Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew differently.

  And the man who’d just arrived knew differently.

  “Thank you for coming, sir,” she said, walking with them through the boxes and wires.

  “Anytime,” said Gamache. “How can I help?”

  She indicated the conference table, set up at the far end of the old railway station.

  “It’s time for a think,” she said, and saw him smile.

  She hesitated by the chair at the head of the conference table. This was awkward. Every other time they’d sat there, Chief Inspector Gamache had assumed that seat.

  This time, though, he walked right by it and sat to her left. Leaving Inspector Beauvoir to sit on her right-hand side.

  Armand Gamache knew his place. Had, in fact, chosen it.

  “So, this is what we know,” said Lacoste. “We have a massive gun hidden in the forest and a boy who was killed there and then his body moved. You knew Laurent better than we did,” Lacoste said to Gamache. “What do you think happened?”

  “Well, he obviously found the gun,” said Gamache. “It looks like someone wanted to stop him from telling anyone about it.”

  “But he’d already told lots of people,” said Jean-Guy. “All of us, for a start. Everyone in the bistro that afternoon heard him.”

  “Maybe the murderer didn’t realize that,” said Gamache. “Maybe he wasn’t in the bistro when Laurent came running in.”

  “So you think after he left us, he told someone else?” asked Lacoste. “Someone who killed him to keep him quiet.”

  Gamache nodded. “It’s also possible he went back there on his own and interrupted someone. Though the site seems abandoned.”

  “We’ll know more when forensics is done,” said Lacoste. “But that was my impression too.”

  “So where does that leave us?” asked Beauvoir.

  “I think whoever killed Laurent didn’t know him well,” said Gamache.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Jean-Guy.

  “Well, for one thing, he believed Laurent. He was a great boy but he was a fantasist. Everyone knew he made up stories, and this one was as far-fetched as all the rest. A giant gun in the woods, bigger than any house.”

  “With a monster on it,” said Lacoste.

  The boy, like a specter, appeared. Skinny. Covered in mud and leaves and urgency. Eyes bright. His arms stretched as wide as he could make them. Reciting his tall tale. Too tall for any of them to climb.

  But someone had heard the story. And believed it.

  “The killer must’ve known Laurent was finally telling the truth,” said Beauvoir.

  “Exactement,” said Gamache, nodding.

  “You think someone knew about the gun and kept it secret for years? Decades?” asked Lacoste.

  “Might’ve even been guarding it,” said Beauvoir, warming to the theory. “And then Laurent finds it. Disaster. He had to silence the boy and the only way to do that was to kill him.”

  “So who knew it was there?” asked Lacoste.

  “Whoever put it there in the first place,” said Gamache.

  “You think whoever built that gun is still around?” asked Lacoste.

  “Maybe,” said Gamache, leaning forward in his chair.

  “So who else did Laurent tell?” asked Lacoste. “Where did he go after he left us?”

  “Home,” said Beauvoir, looking at Gamache. “You drove him home.”

  “I did. May I?”

  Gamache indicated the evidence they’d collected. It was bagged and sitting on the table.

  “Oui,” said Lacoste. “It’s been swabbed and fingerprinted.”

  Gamache picked up the cassette tape. The Very Best of Pete Seeger.

  Gamache read the song list. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” “Wimoweh.” He smiled. That had been Annie’s favorite song as a baby. He too was a Pete Seeger fan. Or had been until he’d spent the first year of her life listening to “the lion sleeps tonight.” All day and all night.

  He scanned the rest of the songs. All classic folk tunes, including “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Gamache had forgotten Seeger had written that song, based on Ecclesiastes.

  “To everything there is a season,” he said.

  “Pardon?” said Lacoste. “What did you say?”

  “Al Lepage has cassette tapes in his pickup truck.”

  He handed her the cassette and wondered if, in driving Laurent home, he’d delivered the boy into the hands of his murderer.

  * * *

  “General Langelier? This is Chief Inspector Lacoste, with the Sûreté du Québec.”

  “Good evening, Chief Inspector.”

  There was slight censure in his voice. Clearly a late call to the armed forces base was not to his liking. She could almost see him looking at his watch and thinking that the United States had better be invading, or this call was not warranted.

  It was past eight in the evening and she was alone in the Incident Room. They’d had sandwiches and drinks brought over from the bistro, and worked through dinner.

  She’d sent Jean-Guy off to organize their rooms at the B and B, and was just getting the paperwork done. How often had she left Chief Inspector Gamache alone in some far-flung incident room, in a shed, a barn, an abandoned factory? A single light burning late into the night.

  And now it was night. And it was her light.

  Sitting back in her chair, she’d stared at the photos on her computer. Then she’d looked up a number and made the call to Canadian Forces Base Valcartier.

  It was only by some bullying and veiled threats that she got through to the base commander at his home.

  “How can I help you, Chief Inspector?”

  “I’m investigating a homicide and need your help.”

  There was a pause before the clipped voice returned.

  “Is there a link to the base here in Valcartier? Is one of my soldiers involved?”

  “No, sir, not that we know of. It happened in the Eastern Townships, not far from the Vermont border.”

  “Then why are you calling me? I’m sure you know we’re a long way from there.”

  “Yes, sir. Your base is just outside Quebec City, but we’ve found something you might be interested in.”

  “What?”

  She could hear his anxiety lower and his curiosity rise.

  “A huge missile launcher. I’ve done some research and I can’t find anything even remotely like it.”

  “A missile launcher? In the Townships?” General Langelier was clearly perplexed. “We don’t have an armed forces base there. Never have. What’s it doing there?”

  She almost laughed, but didn’t. “That’s why I’m calling you. We don’t know. And this is no ordinary missile launcher. As I said, it’s massive.”

  “Well, yes, they are,” he said. “Are you sure that’s what it is? Maybe it’s some farm tool, or logging equipment.”

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