Cruelest Month

by Louise Penny

  ‘Watch out for bears,’ she’d sung cheerily after him.

  He’d picked up a stick when he’d entered the woods. To knock the bear on the nose. Or was that sharks? Well, he was ready either way. The bear could always use the stick as a toothpick after eating him.

  He had a gun but he’d been so thoroughly trained by Gamache not to ever take it out unless he was certain to use it, it remained holstered.

  Beauvoir had watched enough news reports about bear attacks to know that black bears weren’t generally dangerous, unless you got between mother and child. He also knew they were dangerous if startled. So screaming ‘Monsieur Sandon’ had taken on a dual purpose.

  ‘Monsieur Saaaandonnnn.’

  ‘I’m here,’ came the sudden response. Beauvoir stopped and looked around.

  ‘Where?’ he yelled.

  ‘Over here. I’ll find you.’

  Now Beauvoir heard footsteps through the autumn leaves, and the cracking of twigs. But he saw no man. The sound grew louder and still no man. It was like the approach of a ghost.

  Damn, shouldn’t have thought that, thought Beauvoir, feeling his anxiety rise. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Beauvoir turned round and on the top of a slight rise stood a massive man. Broad-chested, powerful and tall. He wore a shaggy knitted hat and his red beard stuck out in all directions. He was covered in mud and bark.

  Yeti. Big Foot. There was some old creature his grandmother had told him about. The Green Man. Half man, half tree. This was him.

  Beauvoir gripped his stick.

  ‘Inspector Beauvoir, Sûreté du Québec.’

  It had never sounded more feeble. Then the Green Man laughed. Not a malicious, ‘I’m going to tear you limb from limb’ laugh. But a laugh of genuine amusement. He came down the small hill, winding gracefully between old growth trees and saplings.

  ‘Thought you were a tree talking to me just now.’ He put out his massive, filthy hand and Beauvoir took it. He too laughed. It was hard not to feel cheerful in this man’s company. ‘Though they’re generally a little less obvious when they speak.’

  ‘The trees?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But you’re probably not here to talk about them. Or to them.’ Sandon reached out and put his hand squarely on a massive trunk beside him. Not leaning against it, but as a sort of touch-stone. Even without Odile’s obscure comments Beauvoir could tell this man had a singular relationship with the woods. If Darwin had concluded man evolved from trees, Gilles Sandon would be the missing link.

  ‘That’s true. I’m investigating the murder of Madeleine Favreau. I believe—’ Beauvoir stopped. The large man in front of him had taken a step back as though Beauvoir had physically pushed him.

  ‘Her murder? What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I assumed you knew. You do know she’s dead.’

  ‘I was there. I took her to the hospital.’

  ‘I’m afraid the coroner’s report says her death wasn’t natural.’

  ‘Well of course it wasn’t natural. There was nothing natural about that night. Should never have invited those spirits into the room. It was that psychic.’

  ‘She’s a witch,’ said Beauvoir and couldn’t believe he’d let that out. Still, it was the truth. He thought.

  ‘Not surprised,’ said Sandon, recovering himself a little. ‘Should have known better. All of us, but especially her. There are strange things done in this world, son. And strange things done in the next. But I’ll tell you something.’ He stepped closer to Beauvoir and leaned down. Beauvoir braced himself for the stench of hard work and little soap. Instead this man smelled of fresh air and pine. ‘The strangest is what happens between the worlds. That’s where those spirits live, trapped. Not natural.’

  ‘And listening to trees is?’

  Sandon’s face, so stern and troubled for a moment, smiled once again. ‘One day you’ll hear them. In the quiet, some whisper you’d mistaken for the wind all your life. But it’ll be the trees. Nature is talking to us all the time, it’s just hearing that’s the problem. Now I can’t hear water or flowers or rocks. Well, actually, I can but just a little. But trees? Their voices are clear to me.’

  ‘And what do they say?’ Beauvoir couldn’t quite believe he’d asked the question and certainly couldn’t believe he actually wanted to know the answer.

  Gilles looked at Beauvoir for a moment. ‘One day I’ll tell you, but not just now. I don’t think you’ll believe me so it’d be a waste of your time and mine. But one day, if I think you won’t mock or hurt their feelings, I’ll tell you what the trees are saying.’

  Inspector Beauvoir was surprised to find his own feelings were hurt. He wanted this man to trust him. And he wanted to know. But he also knew Sandon was right. He thought it was bullshit. Maybe.

  ‘Can you tell me about Madeleine Favreau?’

  Sandon stooped and picked up a stick. Beauvoir expected him to break it and worry it in his leather hands, but instead he just held it as one might hold a small hand.

  ‘She was beautiful. I’m not good with words, Inspector. She was like that.’ He pointed the stick into the woods. Beauvoir looked over and saw sunlight glowing on light green buds and falling on the golden autumn leaves. There was no need for words.

  ‘She was new to this area,’ said Beauvoir.

  ‘Only came a few years ago. Lived with Hazel Smyth.’

  ‘Were they lovers, do you think?’

  ‘Hazel and Madeleine?’ This seemed to be a new, though not revolting, idea for Sandon. He frowned and considered it. ‘Might have been. Madeleine was full of love. People like that sometimes don’t need to distinguish between men and women. I know they loved each other, if that’s what you mean, but I think you mean something else.’

  ‘I do. And you’re saying it wouldn’t surprise you?’

  ‘No, but only because I think Madeleine loved a lot of people.’

  ‘Including Monsieur Béliveau?’

  ‘I think if she felt anything for that man it was pity. His wife died a few years ago, you know. And now Madeleine dies.’

  The rage boiled up and out of the man so quickly Beauvoir wasn’t prepared for it. Sandon looked as if he wanted to hit something, or someone. He glared around savagely, his fists clenched, tears running from his eyes. Beauvoir could see the calculation in his mind. Tree or man, tree or man. Which one would he smash?

  Tree, tree, tree, Beauvoir pleaded. But the rage passed and now Sandon was leaning against the huge oak for support. Hugging it, Beauvoir saw, and felt absolutely no inclination to mock.

  Turning back to Beauvoir Sandon dragged his checkered sleeve across his face, rubbing away the tears and other stuff.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought I’d gotten it all out, but I guess not.’ Now the huge man smiled sheepishly at Beauvoir over the gigantic sleeve he held to his face. Then he lowered it. ‘Came here yesterday. It’s where I feel most at home. I walked over to the creek and just screamed. All day. Poor trees. But they didn’t seem to mind. They scream too, sometimes, when there’s clear cutting going on. They can feel the terror of the other trees, you know. Through their roots. They scream and then they weep. Yesterday I screamed. Today I wept. I thought it was over. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Did you love Madeleine?’

  ‘I did. I challenge you to find someone who didn’t.’

  ‘Someone didn’t. Someone killed her.’

  ‘Still can’t quite take that in. Are you sure?’ When Beauvoir was silent the big man nodded, but still seemed numb to the idea.

  ‘There’s a drug called ephedra. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘Ephedra?’ Gilles Sandon thought about it. ‘Can’t say I have, but I don’t go in much for pharmaceuticals. I have an organic shop in St-Rémy.’

  ‘La Maison Biologique. I know. I was there earlier talking to Odile. Does she know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you loved Madeleine?’

&nbs
p; ‘Probably, but she’d know it wasn’t the same sort of love. Madeleine was the sort you adore from a distance, but I couldn’t imagine approaching her. I mean, look at me.’

  Beauvoir did and knew what Sandon meant. Huge, filthy, at home in the woods. Not many women would fall for this. But Odile had and Beauvoir knew enough about women, and certainly enough about murder, to recognize a motive.

  Ruth Zardo walked very slowly down the path from her tiny clapboard home to the opening in the dry stone wall that led onto the Commons. Gamache and Jeanne watched. Across the village green Robert Lemieux, Myrna and Monsieur Béliveau watched. A few people were interrupted mid-errand to stare.

  All eyes were on the elderly woman limping and quacking.

  Ruth, her head uncovered and her short-cropped white hair ruffling slightly in the breeze, looked behind her at the ground and stopped. Then she did something Gamache had never seen before. She smiled. A simple, easy smile. Then she continued walking.

  Out the opening she came, inching along. And behind her came the quacking. Two tiny, fluffy birds.

  ‘There’s a crone,’ said Jeanne.

  ‘Ruth Zardo,’ said Gamache, laughing and thinking she wouldn’t get much argument in this village.

  Jeanne turned to him, stunned.

  ‘Ruth Zardo? The poet? She’s Ruth Zardo? Who wrote,

  ‘I didn’t feel the aimed word hit

  and go in like a soft bullet.

  I didn’t feel the smashed flesh

  closing over it like water

  over a thrown stone.

  ‘That Ruth Zardo?’

  Gamache smiled and nodded. Jeanne had quoted from one of his favorite poems by Ruth, ‘Half-Hanged Mary’.

  ‘Oh, wow.’ Jeanne was almost trembling. ‘I thought she was dead.’

  ‘Only parts of her,’ said Gamache. ‘She seems to be doing it in stages.’

  ‘She’s a legend in my circles.’

  ‘Witches’ circles?’

  ‘Ruth Zardo. That poem, “Half-Hanged Mary”? It’s about a real woman, Mary Webster. They thought she was a witch so they strung her up from a tree. This was back in the witch-hunt days. Late sixteen hundreds.’

  ‘Here?’ Gamache asked. He was a student of Quebec history and while he’d come across many odd and brutal events, none would match the witch-hunts.

  ‘No, Massachusetts.’ She was still staring at Ruth, though so was everyone else. Ruth had progressed about a foot along the Commons, the baby birds behind her flapping their tiny wings, like vestiges, and going up on their little webbed feet. ‘Amazing woman,’ said Jeanne, almost in a dream.

  ‘Ruth or Mary?’

  ‘Both, really. Have you read her poems?’

  Gamache nodded.

  ‘I was hanged for living alone,

  for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,

  tattered skirts, few buttons,

  a weedy farm in my own name,

  and a surefire cure for warts.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Jeanne, following Ruth with her eyes as a morning glory follows the sun.

  ‘Up I go like a windfall in reverse,

  a blackened apple stuck back into the tree.

  ‘Unbelievable. And yet,’ Jeanne finally broke contact with Ruth and turned a slow but full circle, ‘I can believe it of this village. Where else would people go to be safe? To get away from the burning times.’

  ‘Is that why you came here?’

  ‘I came because I was tired, burned out. Now there’s something. A burned-out witch.’ She laughed and they both turned back toward the small white clapboard chapel on the side of the hill, and walked toward it.

  ‘And yet you agreed to do a séance.’

  ‘It’s the training. Hard to say no.’

  ‘The training or the woman? You don’t have to be a healer to find it hard to say no.’

  ‘I’ve always found it difficult, it’s true,’ she said. They’d reached St Thomas’s and climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to the small veranda. Gamache opened the large wooden door but Jeanne was standing with her back to him. Looking at Ruth, then shifting her gaze to the three great pine trees on the village green.

  ‘Is that just a coincidence? A village called Three Pines with three pines on the green?’

  ‘No. This village was created by the United Empire Loyalists fleeing across the border from the States in the war with Britain. It was just woods then. Still is, I guess.’ Gamache had joined her and now the two of them stood side by side looking over the village, and the dense forests beyond.

  ‘It was impossible for the Loyalists to know when they were safe. So a code was devised. Three pine trees in a clearing meant they could stop running.’

  ‘They were safe,’ said Jeanne, and seemed to sag. ‘Oh, dear Lord, thank you,’ she whispered.

  Gamache stood in the gentle, golden sun and waited until Jeanne was ready to go inside.

  ‘We were in a circle and that witch put salt down,’ said Gilles. The two men were sitting on stones by the creek in full flight. Beauvoir was listening and tossing pebbles into the water. Sandon was staring at the creek, its surface covered in dancing silver flecks where the sun caught movement. ‘I should have left then, but I don’t know, we all got caught up. It was a sort of hysteria, I think. I could hear things in the dark. It was scary.’

  Beauvoir stole a quick glance at Sandon, but the man didn’t seem embarrassed by his admission.

  ‘Then she started calling the spirits, and saying she could hear them, and I could too. It was terrible. She’d lit candles and somehow that made the darkness even deeper. And then there was the shuffling. There was something there, I know it. That witch brought something back from the dead. Even I know that’s a mistake.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  Sandon was breathing heavily, back in that wicked room, surrounded by darkness and terror and something else.

  ‘She could hear something coming. Then she clapped her hands. I thought I’d die. There were two screams, maybe more. Horrible sounds. Then a thump. I was almost blind with fear but I saw Madeleine drop. I was too scared to move at first, but Clara got there and so did Myrna. By the time I could move a few people were gathered around Madeleine.’

  ‘Including Monsieur Béliveau?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t there. I got there before him. I thought she’d just fainted. Honestly I was grateful it was her and not me. And then we turned her over.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Jeanne, remembering back to that face she’d spent the last two days running from. ‘We tried to find a pulse, tried to do CPR, but she was so rigid it was impossible. It was as though she was frozen in place, as though the life had been ripped right out of her. You say a drug called…’ she seemed to struggle for the name. Gamache let her, wondering whether this was an act. ‘I’ve forgotten the name, but some drug did that?’

  ‘Ephedra. It’s actually an herb, a natural substance. It’s used by people who want to diet, but it’s been banned. Too dangerous. What was your impression of the group?’

  ‘This was actually the second séance. The first was Friday night at the bistro.’

  ‘Good Friday,’ said Gamache.

  ‘There were tensions I could feel, mostly from two of the men. Not Gabri. The other two. The tall, sad man and the huge bearded one. But men are often like that at séances. They either don’t believe and are full of negative energy, or they do believe and are embarrassed by their fear. Again, negative energy. But I actually had the impression they weren’t just upset about being there. I think they didn’t like each other. The big man was more obvious about it, but that grocer man—’

  ‘Monsieur Béliveau,’ said Gamache.

  ‘There’s something dark about him.’

  Gamache looked at her with surprise. What little he knew of the man he liked. He seemed courtly and almost timid.

  ‘He’s hiding something,’ said Jeanne.

  ‘We all are,’ said Gamache.

&nbs
p; ‘You come here every day?’ Beauvoir asked after Sandon had finished his story. It sounded like a pickup line and Beauvoir tried not to blush.

  ‘Uh huh. To find the wood for my furniture.’

  ‘I saw some of your stuff at the store. It’s fantastic.’

  ‘The trees let me do it.’

  ‘They let you cut them down?’ asked Beauvoir, surprised.

  ‘Of course not, what do you think I am?’

  A murderer? Beauvoir completed his thought. Did he think that?

  ‘I walk the woods and wait for inspiration. I only use dead trees. I guess we have a lot in common, you and me.’

  For some reason this pleased Beauvoir, though he couldn’t think what they had in common.

  ‘We both deal in death, profit by it you might even say. Without dead trees I’d have no furniture, without dead people you’d have no job. Course, you people sometimes hurry it along.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on, did you read the paper today?’ Sandon reached behind him and pulled a folded and crushed tabloid from his back pocket. He handed it to Beauvoir, pointing with one filthy finger.

  ‘See. I thought they’d put all the rotten ones in jail, but I guess there’s one still out there. Or out here, really. You seem like a decent sort. Must be tough having a dirty boss.’

  Beauvoir barely heard the comments. He felt as though he’d tumbled into the paper and was trapped by the words. One word.

  Arnot.

  Jeanne was quiet for a moment, taking in the small wooden chapel. Simple white and green lily of the valley filled it with fragrance so that the place smelled of old wood, lemon Pledge, books and flowers. And it looked like a jewel. Sunlight was made green and blue and red as it passed through the stained glass windows, the most prominent of which wasn’t the risen Christ behind the altar, but the one on the side of the chapel. With the three young men in uniform. The sun passed through them and spilled their colors onto Gamache and Jeanne, so that they were sitting in the warmth, the essence, of the boys.

  ‘Be careful.’ She turned away from Gamache and looked at a patch of red light at his feet.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All around you, I can see it. Be careful. Something’s coming.’