by Louise Penny
“Thank you,” she said.
Armand took a deep breath. The bistro smelled of fresh pine and wood smoke and a hint of candy cane. A wreath hung over the mantel and a tree stood in the corner, decorated with mismatched Christmas ornaments and candies.
He turned to Myrna. “How’re you this morning?”
“Pretty awful,” she said with a small smile. And indeed, she looked as though she hadn’t had much sleep.
Clara reached out and held her friend’s hand.
“Inspector Lacoste will get all the hard evidence this morning from the Montréal police,” he told them. “I’ll drive into the city and we’ll go over the interviews. One main question is whether the person who killed Constance knew who she really was.”
“You mean, was it a stranger?” asked Olivier. “Or someone who targeted Constance on purpose?”
“That’s always a question,” admitted Gamache.
“Do you think they meant to kill her?” asked Clara. “Or was it a mistake? A robbery that got out of control?”
“Was there mens rea, a guilty mind, or was it an accident?” said Gamache. “Those are questions we’ll be asking.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gabri, who’d joined them, but been uncharacteristically quiet. “What did you mean, ‘who she really was’? Not ‘who she was,’ but ‘who she really was.’ What did you mean by that?”
Gabri looked from Gamache to Myrna, then back again.
“Who was she?”
The Chief Inspector sat forward, about to answer, then he looked over at Myrna, sitting quietly in her chair. He nodded. It was a secret Myrna had kept for decades. It was her secret to give up.
Myrna opened her mouth, but another voice, a querulous voice, spoke.
“She was Constance Ouellet, shithead.”
ELEVEN
“Constance Ouellet-Shithead?” asked Gabri.
Ruth and Rosa glared at him.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” muttered the duck.
“She’s Constance Ouellet,” Ruth clarified, her voice glacial. “You’re the shithead.”
“You knew?” Myrna asked the old poet.
Ruth picked up Rosa, placing the duck on her lap and stroking her like a cat. Rosa stretched her neck, straining her beak upward toward Ruth, and making a nest of the old body.
“Not at first. I thought she was just some boring old fart. Like you.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gabri, waving his large hand in front of him as though trying to clear away the confusion. “Constance Pineault was Constance Ouellet?”
He turned to Olivier.
“Did you know?” But it was clear his partner was equally amazed.
Gabri looked around the gathering and finally came to rest on Gamache.
“Are we talking about the same thing? The Ouellet Quints?”
“C’est ça,” said the Chief.
“The quintuplets?” Gabri insisted, still unable to fully grasp it.
“That’s it,” Gamache assured him. But it only seemed to increase Gabri’s bafflement.
“I thought they were dead,” he said.
“Why do people keep saying that?” Myrna asked.
“Well, it all seems so long ago. Once upon a time.”
They sat in silence. Gabri had nailed it. Exactly what most of them had been thinking. Not so much amazement that one of the Ouellet Quints was dead, but that any were still alive. And that one had walked among them.
The Quints were legend in Québec. In Canada. Worldwide. They were a phenomenon. Freaks, almost. Five little girls, identical. Born in the depths of the Depression. Conceived without fertility drugs. In vivo, not in vitro. The only known natural quintuplets to survive. And they had survived, for seventy-seven years. Until yesterday.
“Constance was the only one left,” said Myrna. “Her sister, Marguerite, died in October. A stroke.”
“Did Constance marry?” asked Olivier. “Is that where Pineault came from?”
“No, none of the Quints married,” said Myrna. “They went by their mother’s maiden name, Pineault.”
“Why?” asked Gabri.
“Why do you think, numb nuts?” asked Ruth. “Not everyone craves attention, you know.”
“So how did you know who she was?” Gabri demanded.
That shut Ruth up, much to everyone’s amazement. They’d expected a brusque retort, not silence.
“She told me,” Ruth finally said. “We didn’t talk about it, though.”
“Oh, come on,” said Myrna. “She told you she was a Ouellet Quint and you didn’t ask a single question?”
“I don’t care if you believe me,” said Ruth. “It’s the truth, alas.”
“Truth? You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you on the alas,” said Gabri.
Ruth ignored him and focused on Gamache, who’d been watching her closely.
“Was she killed because she was a Ouellet Quint?” Ruth asked him.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I can’t see why,” Ruth admitted. “And yet…”
And yet, thought Gamache, as he rose. And yet. Why else would she be killed?
He looked at his watch. Almost nine. Time to get going. He excused himself to make a phone call from the bar, remembering in time that his cell phone didn’t work in Three Pines, and neither did email. He almost expected to see messages fluttering back and forth in the sky above the village, unable to descend. Waiting for him to head up the hill out of Three Pines, and then dive-bombing him.
But as long as he was here, none could reach him. Armand Gamache suspected that partly explained his good night’s sleep. And he suspected it also explained Constance Ouellet’s growing ease in the village.
She was safe there. Nothing could reach her. It was only in leaving that she’d been killed.
Or …
As the phone rang his thoughts sped along.
Or …
She hadn’t been killed when she left, he realized. Constance Ouellet had been murdered when she’d tried to return to Three Pines.
“Bonjour, patron.” Inspector Lacoste’s bright voice came down the landline.
“How’d you know it was me?” he asked.
“The caller ID said ‘Bistro.’ It’s our code word for you.”
He paused for a moment, wondering if that was true, then she laughed.
“You’re still in Three Pines?”
“Yes, just leaving. What do you have?”
“We got the autopsy and forensics from the Montréal police, and I’m reading through the statements from the neighbors. It’s all been sent to you.”
Among the messages hovering overhead, thought Gamache.
“Anything I should know?”
“Not so far. It seems the neighbors didn’t know who she was.”
“Do they now?”
“We haven’t told them. Want to keep it quiet for as long as possible. There’ll be a media storm when it comes out that the last Quint hasn’t just died, but been murdered.”
“I’d like to see the scene again. Can you meet me at the Ouellet home in an hour and a half?”
“D’accord,” said Lacoste.
Gamache looked up, into the mirror behind the bar. In it he saw himself reflected, and behind him the bistro, with its Christmas decorations, and the window into the snowy village. The sun was now up, cresting the tree line, and the sky was the palest of winter blues. Most of the patrons of the bistro had gone back to their conversations, excited now, animated by the news that they’d met, in person, a Ouellet Quint. Gamache could sense the ebb and flow of their emotions. Excitement at the discovery. Then remembering she was dead. Then back to the Quint phenomenon. Then the murder. It was like atoms racing between poles. Unable to rest in any one place.
Around the fireplace, the friends were commiserating with Myrna. And yet— He’d had the impression that as he’d looked into the reflection, there’d been a movement. Someone had been staring at him and had quickly dropped their eyes.
But one set of eyes remained on him. Staring, unyielding.
Henri.
The shepherd sat perfectly contained, oblivious to the hubbub around him. He stared at Gamache. Transfixed. Waiting. He would wait forever, secure in the absolute certainty that Gamache would not forget him.
Gamache held the shepherd’s eyes and smiled into the mirror. Henri’s tail twitched, but the rest of his body remained stone still.
“What now, patron?” asked Olivier, coming around the bar as Gamache replaced the phone.
“Now I head back to Montréal. Work to do, I’m afraid.”
Olivier picked up the phone. “And I have work to do as well. Good luck, Chief Inspector.”
“Good luck to you, mon vieux.”
*
Chief Inspector Gamache met Isabelle Lacoste just outside Constance’s home and they went in together.
“Where’s Henri?” she asked, turning on the lights in the house. It was a sunny day, but the home felt dull, as though the color was draining from it.
“I left him in Three Pines with Clara. They both seemed pretty happy about that.”
He’d assured Henri he’d be back, and the shepherd had believed him.
Gamache and Lacoste sat at the kitchen table and went over the interviews and forensics. The Montréal police had been thorough, taking statements and samples and fingerprints.
“Only her prints, I see,” said Gamache, not looking up as he read the report. “No sign of forced entry and the door was unlocked when we arrived.”
“That might not mean anything,” said Lacoste. “When you get to the statements by the neighbors, you’ll see that most don’t lock their doors during the day, when they’re at home. It’s an old, established neighborhood. No crime. Families have lived here for years. Generations in some cases.”
Gamache nodded but suspected Constance Ouellet had probably locked her doors. Her most valued possession seemed to be privacy, and she wouldn’t have wanted any well-meaning neighbor stealing it.
“Coroner confirms she was killed before midnight,” he read. “She’d been dead a day and a half by the time we found her.”
“That also explains why no one saw anything,” said Lacoste. “It was dark and cold and everyone was inside asleep or watching television or wrapping gifts. And then it snowed all day and covered any tracks there might’ve been.”
“How did he get in?” Gamache asked, looking up and meeting Lacoste’s eyes. Around them the dated kitchen seemed to be waiting for one of them to make a pot of tea, or eat the biscuits in the tin. It was a hospitable kitchen.
“Well, the door was unlocked when we arrived, so either she left it unlocked and he let himself in, or she had it locked, he rang, and she let him in.”
“Then he killed her and left,” said Gamache, “leaving the door unlocked behind him.”
Lacoste nodded and watched as Gamache sat back and shook his head.
“Constance Ouellet wouldn’t have let him in. Myrna said she was almost pathologically private, and this confirms it.” He tapped the forensics report. “When was the last time you saw a house with only one set of prints? No one came into this home. At least, no one was invited in.”
“Then the door must’ve been unlocked and he let himself in.”
“But an unlocked door was also against her nature,” said the Chief. “And let’s say she’d gotten into the habit of keeping her door unlocked, like the rest of the neighborhood. It was late at night and she was getting ready for bed. She’d have locked the door by then, non?”
Lacoste nodded. Constance either let her killer in, or he let himself in.
Neither possibility seemed likely, but one of them was the truth.
Gamache read the rest of the reports while Inspector Lacoste did her own detailed search of the house, starting in the basement. He could hear her down there, moving things about. Beyond that, though, there was just the clunk, clunk as the clock above the sink noted the passing moments.
Finally he lowered the reports and took off his glasses.
The neighbors had seen nothing. The oldest of them, who’d lived on the street all her life, remembered when the three sisters moved into the home, thirty-five years ago.
Constance, Marguerite, and Josephine.
As far as she knew, Marguerite was the oldest, though Josephine was the first to die, five years ago. Cancer.
The sisters had been friendly, but private. Never having anyone in, but always buying boxes of oranges and grapefruit and Christmas chocolate from the children when they’d canvassed to raise money, and stopping to chat on warm summer days as they gardened.
They were cordial without being intrusive. And without allowing intrusion.
The perfect neighbors, the woman had said.
She lived next door and had once had a lemonade with Marguerite. They’d sat together on the porch and watched as Constance washed the car. They’d called encouragement and jokingly pointed out areas she’d missed.
Gamache could see them. Could taste the tart lemonade and smell the cold water from the hose as it hit the hot pavement. He wondered how this elderly neighbor could not have known she was sitting with one of the Ouellet Quints.
But he knew the answer to that.
The Quints only existed in sepia photographs and newsreels. They lived in perfect little castles and wore impossibly frilly dresses. And came in a cluster of five.
Not three. Not one.
Five girls, forever children.
The Ouellet Quints weren’t real. They didn’t age, they didn’t die. And they sure didn’t sip lemonade in Pointe-Saint-Charles.
That’s why no one recognized them.
It helped, too, that they didn’t want to be recognized. As Ruth said, not everyone seeks attention.
“It’s the truth, alas,” Ruth had said.
Alas, thought Chief Inspector Gamache. He left the kitchen and began his own search.
*
Clara Morrow placed a bowl of fresh water on the floor but Henri was too excited to notice. He ran around the home, sniffing. Clara watched, her heart both swelling and breaking. It hadn’t been all that long ago that she’d had to put her golden retriever, Lucy, down. Myrna and Gabri had gone with them, and yet Clara felt she’d been alone. Peter wasn’t there.
She’d debated calling to tell him about Lucy, but Clara knew that was just an excuse to make contact.
The deal was, they’d wait a year, and it hadn’t been six months since he’d left.
Clara followed Henri into her studio, where he found an old banana peel. Taking it from him, she paused in front of her latest work, barely an outline so far.
This ghost on the canvas was her husband.
Some mornings, some evenings, she came in here and talked to him. Told him about her day. She even, sometimes, fixed dinner and brought a candle in and ate by candlelight, in front of this suggestion of Peter. She ate, and chatted with him, told him the events of her day. The little events only a good friend would care about. And the huge events. Like the murder of Constance Ouellet.
Clara painted and talked to the portrait. Adding a stroke here, a dab there. A husband of her own creation. Who listened. Who cared.
Henri was still sniffing and snorting around the studio. Having found one banana peel, there was reason to hope there’d be more. Pausing in her painting for a moment, Clara realized he wasn’t looking for a banana peel. Henri was looking for Armand.
Clara reached into her pocket for one of the treats Armand had left, then she bent down and called the dog over. Henri stopped his scurrying and looked at her, his satellite ears turning toward her voice, having picked up his favorite channel. The treat channel.
He approached, sat, and gently took the bone-shaped cookie.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, resting her forehead against his. “He’ll be back.”
Then Clara returned to the portrait.
“I asked Constance to sit for me,” she said to the wet paint. “But
she refused. I’m not really sure why I asked. You’re right, I am the best artist in Canada, perhaps the world, so she should’ve been pleased.”
Might as well exaggerate—this Peter couldn’t roll his eyes.
Clara leaned away from the canvas and put the brush in her mouth, smearing raw umber paint on her cheek.
“I stayed over at Myrna’s last night.” She described for Peter how she’d pulled the warm duvet around her, rested the old Life magazine on her knees, and studied the cover. As she’d looked at it, the image of the girls moved from endearing, to uncanny, to vaguely unsettling.
“They were all the same, Peter. In expression, in mood. Not just similar, but exactly the same.”
Clara Morrow, the artist, the portraitist, had searched the faces for any hint of individuality. And found none. Then she’d sat back in bed and remembered the elderly woman she’d met. Clara didn’t ask many people to sit for a portrait. It demanded too much of her to be done on a whim. But, apparently on a whim, she’d popped the question to Constance. And been firmly rebuffed.
She hadn’t really exaggerated to Peter. Clara Morrow had become surprisingly famous for her portraits. At least, it surprised her. And it had sure surprised her artist husband.
She remembered what John Singer Sargent had said.
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
Clara had lost her husband. Not because she’d painted him, but because she’d outpainted him. Sometimes, on dark winter nights, she wished she’d stuck to gigantic feet and warrior uteruses.
“But my paintings didn’t send you from our home, did they?” she asked the canvas. “It was your own demons. They finally caught up with you.”
She considered him closely.
“How much that must have hurt,” she said quietly. “Where are you now, Peter? Have you stopped running? Have you faced whatever ate your happiness, your creativity, your good sense? Your love?”
It had eaten his love, but not Clara’s.
Henri settled on the worn piece of carpet at Clara’s feet. She picked up her brush and approached the canvas.
“He’ll be back,” she whispered, perhaps to Henri.
*
Chief Inspector Gamache opened drawers and closets and cupboards, examining the contents of Constance Ouellet’s home. In the front hall closet he found a coat, a small collection of hats, and a pair of gloves.