by Louise Penny
But to have the whole body scald in the freezing water?
“What happened?” whispered Gabri.
“I died,” she snapped, coming back to life. “What do you think happened, you knucklehead?”
“What happened, Ruth?” asked Reine-Marie.
“My cousin skated over to help me, and that’s when he fell in. My mother could save only one of us.”
“You?” asked Olivier, and braced for the caustic retort. That never came.
Instead the old woman nodded, her eyes focused on the distance.
She took a deep breath.
“She never forgave me. Long dead and buried in another town, / My mother hasn’t finished with me yet,” she quoted from her own poem. “I never forgave me.”
“Alas,” said Armand.
Ruth nodded. And Rosa nodded.
“We had to move here,” said Ruth. “Away from family and friends, who also blamed me. Blamed her. For saving the wrong one.”
Beside her, Olivier moaned and put his arm around the bony shoulder.
Ruth lowered her head. And tried to bring herself to say the next thing. The last thing.
But she couldn’t speak. Neither could she forget.
“I dropped a friend when he told me he was HIV positive,” said Gabri. “I was young and afraid.”
“I had a drug prescribed for a patient,” said Myrna. “A young mother. Depressed. It had a bad reaction. She called me, and I told her to come in first thing in the morning. But she killed herself that night.”
Clara took her hand.
“I disobeyed you,” said Clara, looking beyond Myrna to Armand. “I went looking for you and Peter, that day in the fishing village. You told me not to, and if I hadn’t…”
Gabri took her hand.
“I’ve lied and cheated old men and women out of their antiques,” said Olivier. “Giving them a fraction of what they were worth. I don’t do it anymore. But I did.”
He sounded amazed, as though describing a man who was unrecognizable.
“We knew about that, mon beau,” said Ruth, patting his hand. “You’re an asshole.”
Olivier grunted in near amusement.
A commotion, at first dull, reached them from the village green. A raising of voices that was growing louder. And then turned into shouting.
The friends stared at each other in surprise. Armand was out of his chair. Throwing open the front door, he saw what it was.
A crowd had gathered on the village green. He could just see the top of the cobrador’s head.
It was surrounded by people.
Armand ran out the door and the others followed, except Ruth, who was struggling to get up.
“Don’t leave me here.”
But they had.
And once again she saw the hand of her mother, plunging into the icy water. Reaching out. Desperate. Straining.
For her cousin.
But Ruth had gripped that hand instead, and risen. Unwanted.
Then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again / or will it be, as always was, / too late?
“Alas,” she muttered.
“Come on, you old crone.”
Clara had returned, and now she reached out. Ruth looked at the hand for a moment, then gripped it.
And she was hauled out.
They rushed down the path and to the village green.
CHAPTER 9
“You fucker,” a large man was shouting.
He stood in the center of the circle and held up an iron rod, ready to swing.
“Stop,” Gamache shouted, breaking through the crowd and coming to a halt a few feet from the man.
He recognized him as a new member of Billy Williams’s road crew, but didn’t know his name.
The man either didn’t hear or didn’t care, so focused was he on his target. The cobrador. Who just stood there. Didn’t step away. Didn’t cringe. Didn’t brace itself.
“Do it,” someone yelled.
The crowd had turned into a mob.
Armand had run out of the house without sweater or coat, and now he stood, in shirtsleeves, in the cold drizzle. While surrounding him, surrounding the cobrador, were young parents. Grandparents. Neighbors. Men and women he recognized. Not any he’d call hooligans or troublemakers. But who had been infected by fear. Warped by it.
Gamache approached the man from the side. Carefully. Edging his way into the bell jar.
He didn’t want to surprise him, make him react. Lash out at the cobrador, easily within swinging distance.
“Get the fuck outta here,” the man screamed at the cobrador. “Or I’ll beat the crap out of you. I swear to God I will.”
The mob was egging him on, and the man tightened his grip and lifted what Armand could now see was a fireplace poker even higher.
The rod had a nasty hook, used to move logs about in the flames. It would kill someone, easily.
“Don’t, don’t,” Gamache said, moving forward, his voice calm but firm. “Don’t you do it.”
And then he saw movement. Someone else had come out from the crowd.
It was Lea Roux. And within a moment she’d stepped between the cobrador and the man.
The attacker, surprised, hesitated.
Gamache quickly stepped beside Lea, and in front of the cobrador.
The man pointed the rod at them and waved it. “Get out of my way. He doesn’t belong here.”
“And why not?” ask Lea. “He’s doing no harm.”
“Are you kidding,” another man shouted. “Look at him.”
“He’s terrified my kids,” someone else shouted. “That’s harm.”
“And whose fault is that?” asked Lea, turning around to look at them all. “You taught them to be afraid. He’s done nothing. He’s stood here for two days and nothing bad’s happened. Except this.”
“You’re not even from here,” a man shouted. “This isn’t your home. Get out of the way.”
“So you can beat the shit out of him?” Lea looked at the mob. “You want your children playing on bloodstained grass?”
“Better stained with his blood than theirs,” said a woman. But her voice was no longer so loud, so certain.
“Well, they’ll have to play in my blood too,” said Lea.
“And mine,” said Armand.
“And mine.”
Someone else detached from the crowd. It was the dishwasher, Anton. He looked frightened as he took his place beside Armand and glared at the large man with the fire iron.
Clara, Myrna, Gabri and Olivier joined them. Ruth handed Rosa to a bystander and stepped forward.
“Aren’t we on the wrong side?” she whispered to Clara.
“Be quiet and look resolute.”
But the best the old poet could manage was crazed.
Armand stepped forward and held out a hand for the fireplace poker.
The man lifted it again.
Behind him he heard Reine-Marie whisper, “Armand.”
But he just stood there, his hand out. Staring at the man. Whose eyes were locked on the cobrador. Then he slowly lowered the weapon, until Gamache could take it from him.
“If anything happens,” shouted someone in the crowd, “it’s on you.”
But the mob had turned back into a crowd, and while unhappy, unsatisfied, they at least dispersed.
“Not you,” said Gamache, grabbing at the man’s arm as he started to walk away. “What’s your name?”
“Paul Marchand.”
“Well, Monsieur Marchand”—Gamache patted him down for other weapons and noticed a Sûreté vehicle coming down the hill—“you’re in some trouble.”
Armand brought a small pouch out of Marchand’s pocket. It had two pills in it.
Gamache recognized them.
“Where did you get these?” He held up the pouch.
“They’re medicine.”
“They’re fentanyl.”
“Right. For pain.”
The Sûreté agents had parked, and were walking
swiftly across the village green.
Toward the cobrador.
“Over here,” called Gamache. “This is the one you were called about.”
“In a moment, sir,” said the agent, ignoring the man in the shirtsleeves, soaked through in the rain.
There seemed an abundance of strange behavior for the Sûreté agents to choose from. Starting with the robed and masked man.
“No, I mean it,” said Gamache, his voice taking on authority.
It was almost completely dark now, and the agents turned to get a better look at the man who’d just spoken. They walked closer and then their expressions moved from scowls to astonishment.
“Crap,” muttered one.
“I’m sorry, patron,” said the more senior officer, saluting. “I didn’t know it was you.”
“No, and why would you?”
Gamache explained the situation. “Keep him overnight. Watch him. I don’t know if he’s taken any of these.” He gave them the pouch. “Have this sent to the lab.”
Gamache watched as the agents led Marchand away. Something had set the man off, and Gamache wondered if there’d been more pills in that pouch when the evening began.
Ruth, with Rosa back in her arms, turned to the cobrador and whispered, “Can you leave me alone now?”
But as she walked back to the Gamache home with the others, she knew it would not.
Before he left, Armand, beginning to shiver in the cold, walked up to the cobrador and spoke to him.
*
“What did you say?” Reine-Marie asked as Armand got into warm, dry clothes.
“I said that I knew he was a cobrador, a conscience. I asked who he was there for.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“A still and quiet conscience,” she said.
“I also told him to leave Three Pines. That this had gone far enough. Too far. Those were good people out there, who’re frightened. And fear can make decent people do terrible things. I asked if he wanted that on his conscience.”
“He won’t leave,” said Reine-Marie.
“Non,” her husband agreed. “He’s not done yet.”
He looked out the window. In the darkness, the cobrador looked like another pine. A fourth tree. A now permanent part of their lives setting down roots deep in their little community.
Then Gamache followed the line of the cobrador’s eyes. The stare he’d held, unflinching, even while being threatened with a beating. Possibly death.
There, framed in a mullioned window, was one of the few people who hadn’t come out onto the village green. To defend or attack the cobrador.
Then Jacqueline turned away, to go back to her kneading.
CHAPTER 10
“You told him to leave. You must’ve known then what would happen,” said the Crown Prosecutor. “There’d even been a death threat.”
“The man was enraged and provoked,” said Chief Superintendent Gamache. “People say things they don’t mean.”
“And people do things they later regret,” said the Crown. “When they’re angry. But it’s still done and can’t be undone. It might be manslaughter and not murder, but still a man would have been slaughtered. Surely your experience as head of homicide taught you that.”
“It has,” Gamache admitted.
“And still you didn’t act. If not then, when? What were you waiting for?”
Gamache looked into the face of the prosecutor, then at the crowd jammed into the stuffy courtroom. He knew how it sounded. How it probably would’ve sounded to him.
But there was nothing he could have done that would have been legal. Or effective.
What happened that November evening proved that the cobrador was having an effect.
Chief Superintendent Gamache had doubted what happened had been Marchand’s idea. He was fairly new to the village and hadn’t been any trouble, until that night. It seemed someone had gotten to him. Told him, either directly or through manipulation, to threaten the cobrador.
Gamache doubted that the goal was to kill the Conscience. More likely, it was to scare him away. After all, who wouldn’t run when faced with a poker-wielding madman?
Despite the cliché, the dead weren’t silent. They told all sorts of tales. If the cobrador had been killed, they’d have unmasked him, and found out who he was. And probably found out why he was there.
But if the cobrador had just run away, no one would ever know who he was, or why he was in Three Pines.
Or who he was there for.
Though the why was beginning to dawn on Gamache. It had come in the form of a tiny plastic bag.
The plague.
But the plan had failed. The Conscience hadn’t budged. Hadn’t even flinched. Had been willing to risk death, for his cause.
The Conscience knew something about someone in the village. And that someone was getting mighty rattled.
But none of this came out in court. The Crown Prosecutor didn’t ask, and Armand Gamache didn’t offer this information.
“Mr. Zalmanowitz,” said the judge, and the Crown Prosecutor approached the bench. “Monsieur Gamache is not on trial. Censor yourself.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
But he looked like he thought Gamache should be another defendant, and not a witness for the prosecution.
Beyond Zalmanowitz’s desk, reporters were madly taking notes.
There were, Judge Corriveau knew, many ways of being on trial. And different types of courts.
Chief Superintendent Gamache would be found guilty.
She turned her attention back to the Crown Prosecutor. That horse’s ass.
Judge Corriveau no longer even tried to repress her private thoughts. But she fought hard to keep them from creeping into her public utterances.
Therein lay a mistrial. And this case would indeed find itself in a higher court.
“How did it strike you,” the Crown asked, “when you saw Lea Roux come to the defense of the cobrador?”
“I would’ve been surprised to see anyone standing between a man swinging a fireplace poker and his target.”
“And yet, that’s what you were planning to do, wasn’t it?”
“I’m trained.”
“Oh yes, I keep forgetting.”
That brought a round of appreciative chuckles from the crowd and a tap of the gavel from Judge Corriveau, who wished it could have been on top of the Crown’s head.
“I knew Madame Roux,” said Gamache. “Her rise in politics. It’s a fierce arena, especially in Québec.”
“Did you think it was a stunt, then? To gain political capital?”
“If it had been that, she’d have sided with the mob, don’t you think?” asked Gamache. “A populist feeding anger and fear is more likely to get elected. If that’s what she was after, I doubt she’d have protected the outsider, the intruder.”
That shut the Crown up and brought a slight snort from above Gamache and to his left.
“I began to say that I knew Madame Roux by reputation. In my position I have a lot of dealings with senior government officials, elected and appointed. You hear things in the halls of the National Assembly, in the chat before committees sit down to business. Lea Roux had a reputation for being fierce, but also principled. A potent combination. She’d brought forward many progressive bills in the National Assembly, often against her leader’s wishes.”
“So she would choose her principles over her career?” asked the Crown.
“It would appear so.”
Though Gamache’s time in homicide had taught him something else. Appearances could not be trusted.
*
“That was a very brave thing you did,” said Clara, when they’d returned to the Gamaches’ home.
“Can you believe it worked?” asked Lea, her eyes wide, her face flushed despite just coming in from the cold.
Reine-Marie had invited Lea and Matheo to join them for dinner.
Lea was on a high after confronting the mob. Adr
enaline. Something Gamache knew a lot about.
The pounding heart. The effort to keep terror in check. Standing your ground. The body taut, the mind whirring.
And then it was over. But the adrenaline still coursed, like a drug, through the body. They were all feeling it, but none more than Lea. The first to make the stand.
“Shame Patrick and Katie can’t join us,” said Reine-Marie, walking with them into the kitchen. “I saw them driving away earlier this evening.”
“They’re having dinner at Le Relais in Knowlton,” said Lea. “Steak-frites night. Missed all the fun.”
“Though I don’t think Patrick would’ve been much help, do you?” asked Matheo.
It was perhaps true, thought Gamache, who’d also picked up on Patrick’s timidity. But it didn’t need to be said, especially by a friend.
But then, maybe Patrick wasn’t really a friend. Anymore. They seemed to be spending less time together this visit than in the past.
“This looks delicious,” said Reine-Marie, ladling out the stew Olivier had brought. “Merci.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Come on, tell them the truth,” said Gabri, taking a warm dinner roll, substituted for the baguette. “He didn’t make it. Anton did.”
“The dishwasher?” asked Matheo, looking at the stew with some suspicion.
The chicken was tender, delicately seasoned. The stew was complex. Familiar, but exotic.
“It’s all things he collected in the woods,” said Myrna. “Nouveau Québec cuisine. That’s what he wants to create.”
“The dishwasher?” Matheo repeated.
“We all have to start somewhere,” said Myrna.
“How long’s he been here?” asked Lea. “I don’t remember him from our last visit.”
“And he is memorable,” said Clara, thinking of the lithe young man with the floppy hair and ready smile.
“He arrived a couple months ago,” said Gabri. “He and Jacqueline were working together in some home and both lost their jobs.”
“Home, like seniors’ home?” asked Lea.
“No,” said Olivier. “Home like private home. She was a nanny, I think, and he was their private chef.”
“Some home,” said Matheo.
“Are you enjoying your new job, Armand?” asked Lea.