by Louise Penny
Then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again.
“I’m sorry,” said Gamache. “I’d give my life to save you.”
Or will it be, as always was, / too late?
“Too late.” Beauvoir’s words were muffled, spoken into Gamache’s shoulder.
“I love you,” Armand whispered.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir leapt back and swung the gun, catching Gamache on the side of the face. He stumbled sideways against a filing cabinet, putting his arm out against the wall to stop himself from falling. Gamache turned to see Beauvoir pointing the Glock at him, his hand wavering madly.
Gamache knew there were agents on the other side of the door who could have come in. Who could have stopped this. Could stop it still. But didn’t.
He straightened and held out his hand, now covered with his own blood.
“I could kill you,” said Beauvoir.
“Oui. And maybe I deserve it.”
“No one would blame me. No one would arrest me.”
And Gamache knew that was true. He’d thought if he was ever gunned down, it wouldn’t be in Sûreté headquarters, or at the hands of Jean-Guy Beauvoir.
“I know,” the Chief said, his voice low and soft. He took a step closer to Beauvoir, who didn’t retreat. “How lonely you must be.”
He held Jean-Guy’s eyes and his heart broke for this boy he’d left behind.
“I could kill you,” Beauvoir repeated, his voice weaker.
“Yes.”
Armand Gamache was face to face with Jean-Guy. The gun almost touching his white shirt, now flecked with blood.
He held out his right hand, a hand that no longer trembled, and he felt the metal.
Gamache closed his hand over Jean-Guy’s hand. It felt cold. Like the gun. The two men stared at each other for a moment, before Jean-Guy released the gun.
“Leave me,” Beauvoir said, all fight and most of the life gone from him.
“Come with me.”
“Go.”
Gamache put the gun back in his holster and walked to the door. There he hesitated.
“I’m sorry.”
Beauvoir stood in the center of his office, too tired to even turn away.
Chief Inspector Gamache left, walking into a cluster of Sûreté agents, some of whom he’d taught at the academy.
Armand Gamache had always held unfashionable beliefs. He believed that light would banish the shadows. That kindness was more powerful than cruelty, and that goodness existed, even in the most desperate places. He believed that evil had its limits. But looking at the young men and women staring at him now, who’d seen something terrible about to happen and had done nothing, Chief Inspector Gamache wondered if he could have been wrong all this time.
Maybe the darkness sometimes won. Maybe evil had no limits.
He walked alone back down the corridor, pressed the down button, and in the privacy of the elevator he covered his face with his hands.
*
“You sure you don’t need a doctor?”
André Pineault stood at the door to the washroom, arms folded across his broad chest.
“No, I’ll be fine.” Gamache splashed more water on his face, feeling the sting as it hit the wound. Pink liquid swirled around the drain, then disappeared. He lifted his head and saw his reflection, with the jagged cut on his cheekbone, and the bruise just beginning to show.
But it would heal.
“Slipped on the ice, you say?” Monsieur Pineault handed Gamache a clean towel, which the Chief pressed to the side of his face. “I’ve slipped like that. Mostly in bars, after a few drinks. Other guys were slipping too. All over the place. Sometimes we’re arrested for slipping.”
Gamache smiled, then winced. Then smiled again.
“That ice is pretty treacherous,” agreed the Chief.
“Maudit tabarnac, you speak the truth,” said Pineault, leading the way down the hall into the kitchen. “Beer?”
“Non, merci.”
“Coffee?” It was offered without enthusiasm.
“Perhaps some water.”
Had Gamache asked for piss, Pineault could not have been less enthusiastic. But he poured a glass and got out ice cubes. He plopped one in the water and wrapped the rest in a tea towel. He gave both to the Chief.
Gamache traded the hand towel for the ice, and pressed that to his face. It felt immediately better. Clearly André Pineault had done this before.
The older man popped a beer open, pulled out a chair, and joined Gamache at the laminate table.
“So, patron,” he said, “you wanted to talk about Isidore and Marie-Harriette? Or the girls?”
When Gamache had rung the doorbell, he’d introduced himself and explained he wanted to ask some questions about Monsieur et Madame Ouellet. His authority, however, was undermined by the fact he looked like he’d just lost a bar brawl.
But André Pineault didn’t seem to find that at all unusual. Gamache had tried to clean himself up in the car, but hadn’t done a very good job of it. Normally he’d have gone home to change, but time was short.
Now, sitting in the kitchen, sipping cool water, with half his face numb, he was beginning to feel human, and competent, again.
Monsieur Pineault sat back in his chair, his chest and belly protruding. Strong, vigorous, weathered. He might be over seventy by the calendar, but he seemed ageless, almost immortal. Gamache couldn’t imagine anyone or anything felling this man.
Gamache had met many Québécois like this. Sturdy men and women, raised to look after farms and forests and animals, and themselves. Robust, rugged, self-sufficient. A breed now looked down upon by more refined city types.
Fortunately men like André Pineault didn’t much care. Or, if they did, they simply slipped on ice, and took the city man down with them.
“You remember the Quints?” Gamache asked, and lowered the ice pack to the kitchen table.
“Hard to forget, but I didn’t see much of them. They lived in that theme park place the government built for them in Montréal, but they came back for Christmas and for a week or so in the summer.”
“Must’ve been exciting, having local celebrities.”
“I guess. No one really thought of them as local, though. The town sold souvenirs of the Ouellet Quints and named their motels and cafés after them. The Quint Diner, that sort of thing. But they weren’t local. Not really.”
“Did they have any friends close by? Local kids they hung out with?”
“Hung out?” asked Pineault with a snort. “Those girls didn’t ‘hang out.’ Everything they did was planned. You’d have thought they were the queens of England.”
“So no friends?”
“Only the ones the film people paid to play with them.”
“Did the girls know that?”
“That the kids were bribed? Probably.”
Gamache remembered what Myrna had said about Constance. How she ached for company. Not her ever-present sisters, but just one friend, who didn’t have to be paid. Even Myrna had been paid to listen. But then Constance had stopped paying Myrna. And Myrna hadn’t left her.
“What were they like?”
“OK, I guess. Stuck to themselves.”
“Stuck up?” Gamache asked.
Pineault shifted in his chair. “Can’t say.”
“Did you like them?”
Pineault seemed flummoxed by the question.
“You must’ve been about their age…” Gamache tried again.
“A little younger.” He grinned. “I’m not that old, though I might look it.”
“Did you play with them?”
“Hockey, sometimes. Isidore would get up a team when the girls were home for Christmas. Everyone wanted to be Rocket Richard,” said Pineault. “Even the girls.”
Gamache saw the slight change in the man.
“You liked Isidore, didn’t you?”
André grunted. “He was a brute. You’d have thought he was pulled from the ground, like a big dirty old stump. H
ad huge hands.”
Pineault spread his own considerable hands on the kitchen table and looked down, smiling. Like Isidore, André’s smile was missing some teeth, but none of the sincerity.
He shook his head. “Not one for conversation. If I got five words out of him the last ten years of his life, I’d be surprised.”
“You lived with him, I understand.”
“Who told you that?”
“The parish priest.”
“Antoine? Fucking old lady, always gossiping, just like when he was a kid. Played goalie, you know. Too lazy to move. Just sat there like a spider in a web. Gave us the willies. And now he lords it over that church and practically charges to show tourists where the Quints were baptized. Even shows them the Ouellet grave. ’Course, nobody much cares anymore.”
“After they were grown up they never came back to visit their father?”
“Antoine tell you that as well?”
Gamache nodded.
“Well, he’s right. But that was OK. Isidore and I were just fine. He milked the cows the day he died, you know. Almost ninety and practically dropped dead in the milk bucket.” He laughed, realizing what he’d said. “Kicked the bucket.”
Pineault took a swig of beer and smiled. “Hope it runs in the family. It’s how I’d like to die.” He looked around the small, neat kitchen and remembered where he was. And how he was likely to die. Though Gamache suspected facedown in a bucket of milk was probably not as much fun as it sounded.
“You helped around the farm?” Gamache asked.
Pineault nodded. “Also did the cleaning and cooking. Isidore was pretty good with the outdoor stuff, but hated the inside stuff. But he liked an orderly home.”
Gamache didn’t have to look around to know André Pineault also liked one. He wondered if years with the exacting Isidore had rubbed off, or if it came naturally to the man.
“Luckily for me his favorite meal was that spaghetti in a can. The alphabets one. And hot dogs. At night we played cribbage or sat on the porch.”
“But you wouldn’t talk?”
“Not a word. He’d stare across the fields and so would I. Sometimes I’d go into town, to the bar, and when I got back he’d still be there.”
“What did he think about?”
Pineault pursed his lips, and looked out the window. There was nothing to see. Just the brick wall of the building next door.
“He thought about the girls.” André brought his eyes back to Gamache. “The happiest moment of his life was when they were born, but I don’t think he ever really got over the shock.”
Gamache remembered the photograph of young Isidore Ouellet looking wild-eyed at his five daughters wrapped in sheets and dirty towels and dish rags.
Yes, it had been a bit of a shock.
But a few days later there was Isidore, cleaned up like his daughters. Scrubbed for the newsreels. He held one of his girls, a little awkwardly, a little unsure, but so tenderly. So protectively. Deep in those tanned, strapping arms. Here was a rough farmer not schooled, yet, in pretense.
Isidore Ouellet had loved his daughters.
“Why didn’t the girls visit him when they got older?” Gamache asked.
“How’m I supposed to know? You’ll have to ask them.”
Them? thought Gamache.
“I can’t.”
“Well, if you’ve come to me for their address, I don’t have it. Haven’t seen or heard from them in years.”
Then André Pineault seemed to twig. His chair gave a long, slow scrape on the linoleum as he pushed back from the table. Away from the Chief Inspector.
“Why’re you here?”
“Constance died a few days ago.” He watched Pineault as he spoke. So far there was no reaction. The large man was simply taking it in.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
But Gamache doubted that. He might not be happy about the news, but neither was he unhappy. As far as the Chief could tell, André Pineault didn’t care either way.
“So how many are left?” Pineault asked.
“None.”
“None?” That did seem to surprise him. He sat back and grabbed his beer. “Well, that’s it then.”
“It?”
“The last of them. No more Quints.”
“You don’t seem upset.”
“Look, I’m sure they were very nice girls, but as far as I could see a pile of merde dropped on Isidore and Marie-Harriette the moment they were born.”
“It was what their mother prayed for,” Gamache reminded him. “The whole Brother André story.”
“What do you know about that?” Pineault demanded.
“Well, it’s hardly a secret, is it?” asked Gamache. “Your sister visited Brother André at the Oratory. She climbed the steps on her knees to pray for children and ask for his intercession. The girls were born the day after Frère André died. It was a big part of their story.”
“Oh, I know,” said Pineault. “The Miracle Babies. You’d have thought Jesus Christ had delivered them himself. Marie-Harriette was just a poor farmer’s wife who wanted a family. But I’ll tell you something.” Pineault leaned his thick body closer to Gamache. “If God did that, he must’a hated her.”
“Did you read the book by Dr. Bernard?” Gamache asked.
He’d expected Pineault to get angry, but instead he grew quiet and shook his head.
“Heard about it. Everyone did. It was a bunch of lies. Made Isidore and Marie-Harriette out to be dumb farmers, too stupid to raise their own children. Bernard heard about the visit to Brother André and turned it into some Hollywood crap. Told the newsreels, the reporters. Wrote about it in his book. Marie-Harriette wasn’t the only one to go to the Oratory for Brother André’s blessing. People still do. No one talks about all the others climbing those stairs on their Goddamned knees.”
“The others didn’t give birth to quintuplets.”
“Lucky them.”
“You didn’t like the girls?”
“I didn’t know them. Every time they came home, there were cameras and nannies and that doctor and all sorts of people. At first it was fun, but then it became…” he looked for the word. “Merde. And it turned everyone’s lives into merde.”
“Did Marie-Harriette and Isidore see it that way?”
“How would I know? I was a kid. What I do know is that Isidore and Marie-Harriette were good, decent people just trying to get by. Marie-Harriette wanted to be a mother more than anything, and they didn’t let her. They took that from her, and from Isidore. That Bernard book said they’d sold the girls to the government. It was bullshit, but people believed it. Killed her, you know. My sister. Died of shame.”
“And Isidore?”
“Got even quieter. Didn’t smile much anymore. Everyone whispering behind his back. Pointing him out. He stayed pretty close to home after that.”
“Why didn’t the girls visit the farm once they grew up?” Gamache asked. He’d asked before and been rebuffed, but it was worth another try.
“They weren’t welcome and they knew it.”
“But Isidore wanted them to come, to look after him,” said Gamache.
Pineault grunted with laughter. “Who told you that?”
“The priest, Father Antoine.”
“What does he know? Isidore wanted nothing more to do with the girls. Not after Marie-Harriette died. He blamed them.”
“And you didn’t keep in touch with your nieces?”
“I wrote to tell them their father was dead. They showed up for the funeral. That was fifteen years ago. Haven’t seen them since.”
“Isidore left the farm to you,” said Gamache. “Not to the girls.”
“True. He’d washed his hands of them.”
Gamache brought the tuque from his pocket and put it on the table. For the first time in quite a few minutes, he saw a genuine smile on André’s face.
“You recognize it.”
He picked it up. “Where’d you find it?”
; “Constance gave it to a friend, for Christmas.”
“Funny kind of present. Someone else’s tuque.”
“She described it as the key to her home. Do you know what she might’ve meant by that?”
Pineault examined the hat, then returned it to the table. “My sister made a tuque for all the kids. I don’t know whose this is. If Constance was giving it away it probably belonged to her, don’t you think?”
“And why would she call it the key to her home?”
“Câlice, I don’t know.”
“This tuque didn’t belong to Constance.” Gamache tapped it.
“Then one of the others, I guess.”
“Did you ever see Isidore wearing it?”
“You must’ve fallen harder on the ice than you think,” he said with a snort. “That was sixty years ago. I can’t remember what I wore, never mind him, except that he wore plaid shirts summer and winter, and they stank. Any other questions?”
“What did the girls call their mother?” Gamache asked, as he got up.
“Tabarnac,” Pineault swore. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’ve started asking stupid questions. What did the girls call their mother?”
“Well?”
“How the fuck should I know? What does anyone call their mother?”
Gamache waited for the answer.
“Mama, of course,” said André.
They hadn’t gone two paces before Pineault stopped.
“Wait a minute. You said Constance died, but that doesn’t explain the questions. Why’re you asking all this?”
Gamache was wondering when Pineault would get around to asking. It had taken the older man quite a while, but then he was probably distracted by the stupid questions.
“Constance didn’t die a natural death.”
“How did she die?” He was watching Gamache with sharp eyes.
“She was murdered. I’m with homicide.”
“Maudit tabarnac,” muttered Pineault.
“Can you think of anyone who might have killed her?” Gamache asked.
André Pineault thought about that and slowly shook his head.
Before he left the kitchen, Gamache noticed Pineault’s dinner waiting on the counter.
A can of Alphagetti and hot dogs.