Bury Your Dead (49 page)

They’d seen the video, all of them. That much was obvious. He was the only one in Three Pines who hadn’t, he and maybe Ruth, who was barely out of the stone ages.

But while the people of Three Pines might know something about him, he knew something about them, something no one else knew. He knew who’d killed the Hermit.

It was late Friday afternoon. The sun had long since set and the bistro was clearing out, people heading home for dinner after a drink.

Beauvoir looked round. Clara, Peter and Myrna were sitting with Old Mundin and The Wife, who held a sleeping Charles. At another table Marc and Dominique Gilbert sipped beer while Marc’s mother, Carole, had a white wine. The Parras were there, Roar and Hanna. Their son Havoc was waiting tables.

Ruth sat alone and Gabri stood behind the bar.

The door opened and someone else blew in, batting snow off his hat and stomping his feet. Vincent Gilbert, the asshole saint, the doctor who’d been so tender with Beauvoir and so cruel with others.

“Am I late?” he asked.

“Late?” said Carole. “For what?”

“Well, I was invited. Weren’t you?”

Everyone turned to Beauvoir then to Clara and Myrna. Old and The Wife had been invited for drinks by the two women, as had the Parras. The Gilberts had come at Beauvoir’s invitation and Ruth was just part of the décor.

“Patron,”
said Beauvoir, and Gabri locked the front door then closed the side entrances from the other shops.

“What’s all this about?” Roar Parra asked, looking perplexed but not alarmed. He was short and squat and powerful and Beauvoir was glad he wasn’t alarmed. Yet.

They stared at Beauvoir.

He’d quietly had a word with Gabri earlier and asked him to ask the other patrons to leave, discreetly, so that only these few remained. Outside snow was falling and beginning to blow about, visible in the glow from the homes. The cheery Christmas lights on the three pine trees on the village green bobbed in the wind. They’d be battling a small blizzard by the time they left.

Inside, it was snug and warm and though the wind and snow swirled against the windows it only increased their sense of security. Fires were lit in the hearths and while they could hear the wind outside the sturdy building never even shuddered.

Like the rest of Three Pines, and its residents, it took what was coming and remained standing. And now, together, they stared at him.

With just a touch of pity?

“OK, numb nuts, what’s all this about?” asked Ruth.

Armand Gamache sat in the library of the Literary and Historical Society marveling that a week ago he barely knew it, barely knew the people, and now he felt he knew them well.

The board had assembled one more time.

Tense, suspicious Porter Wilson at the head of the table, even if he wasn’t a natural leader. The real leader sat beside him and had all their lives, quietly running things, picking up pieces dropped and broken by Porter. Elizabeth MacWhirter, heir to the MacWhirter shipyard fortunes, a fortune long faded away until all that remained were appearances.

But appearances mattered, Gamache knew, especially to Elizabeth MacWhirter. Especially to the English community. And the truth was, they were at once stronger and weaker than they appeared.

The English community was certainly small, and diminishing, dying out. A fact lost on the Francophone majority who, despite every evidence, still saw the Anglos, if they saw them at all, as threats.

And why not, really? Many of the Anglos still saw themselves as wielding, and deserving, of power. A manifest destiny, a right conferred on them by birth and fate. By General Wolfe, two hundred years earlier on the field belonging to the farmer Abraham.

Like whites in South Africa or the Southern states who knew that things had changed, who even accepted the changes, but who couldn’t quite shake the certainty deeply, diplomatically, hidden, that they should still be in charge.

There was Winnie, the tiny librarian who loved the library and loved Elizabeth and loved her work among things and ideas no longer relevant.

Mr. Blake was there, in suit and tie. A benign older gentleman, whose home had shrunk from the entire city, to a house, and finally to this one magnificent room. And what, Gamache wondered, would someone do to defend their home?

Tom Hancock sat quietly, watching. Young, vital, wise, but not really one of them. An outsider. But that gave him clarity, he could see what was only visible from a distance.

And finally, Ken Haslam. Whose voice was either silent or shrieking.

No middle ground, a man of extremes, who either sat quietly in his chair or fought his way across a frozen river.

A man whose wife and daughter were buried in Québec but who was not considered a Québécois, as though even more could be expected.

They’d adjourned to the library once the coffin had been removed and the others had gone, leaving Émile, Gamache and the board.

Gamache looked at the board members, resting finally on Porter Wilson. Expecting an outburst, expecting a demand for information, tinged perhaps with a slight accusation of unfairness.

Instead they all simply looked at the Chief Inspector, politely. Something had changed, and Gamache knew what.

It was the damned video. They’d seen it, and he hadn’t. Not yet.
They knew something he didn’t, something about himself. But he knew something they didn’t, something they wanted to know.

Well, they’d have to wait.

“You were out practicing this afternoon, I believe,” said Gamache to the Reverend Mr. Tom Hancock.

“We were,” he agreed, surprised by the topic.

“I saw you.” The Chief turned to Ken Haslam.

Haslam smiled and mouthed something Gamache couldn’t make out. There was a nodding of heads. The Chief turned to the others.

“What did Mr. Haslam just say?”

Now several faces blushed. He waited.

“Because,” he finally said, “I didn’t hear a word and I don’t think you did either.” He turned again to the upright, distinguished man. “Why do you whisper? In fact, I don’t think it can even be called a whisper.”

Gamache had spoken respectfully, quietly, without anger or accusation but wanting to know.

Haslam’s lips moved and again no one heard anything.

“He speaks—” began Tom Hancock before Gamache put up a hand and stopped him.

“I think it’s time Mr. Haslam spoke for himself, don’t you? And you, perhaps uniquely, know he can.”

Now it was the Reverend Mr. Hancock’s turn to blush. He looked at Gamache but said nothing.

Gamache leaned forward, toward Haslam. “I heard you out on the ice calling the strokes. No other crew could be heard, no other person. Just you.”

Ken Haslam looked frightened now. He opened his mouth, then shook his head, practically in tears.

“I can’t,” he said, his voice barely registering. “All my life I’ve been told to be quiet.”

“By whom?”

“Mother, Father, brothers. My teachers, everyone. Even my wife, God bless her, asked me to keep my voice down.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

The word was spoken clearly, too clearly. It wasn’t so much piercing as all enveloping, filling the space. It was a voice that carried, boomed, and drove all before it. No other voice could exist, but that one. An English voice, drowning out all others.

“And so you learned to be silent?” asked Gamache.

“If I wanted friends,” said Haslam, his words slamming into them. Was it some quirk of palate and brainpan and voice box so that the sound waves were magnified? “If I wanted to belong, yes, I learned never to raise my voice.”

“But that meant you could never speak at all, never be heard,” said Gamache.

“And what would you choose?” Haslam asked, his loud voice turning a rational question into an attack. “To speak up but chase people away, or to be quiet in company?”

Armand Gamache was silent then, looking down the long table at the solemn faces, and he knew Ken Haslam wasn’t the only one who’d faced that question, and made the same choice.

To be silent. In hopes of not offending, in hopes of being accepted.

But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside?

Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every word, thought, feeling rattled around inside, hollowing the person out. And into that chasm they stuffed their words, their rage.

“Perhaps you could explain the coffin in our basement,” Elizabeth broke the silence.

It seemed a reasonable request.

“As you know I came here to recover from my wounds.” Beauvoir wouldn’t let them think he didn’t know what they knew. A few villagers lowered their eyes, a few blushed as though Beauvoir had dropped his pants, but most continued to look at him, interested.

“But there was another reason. Chief Inspector Gamache asked me to look into the murder of the Hermit.”

That caused a stir. They looked at each other. Gabri, alone among them, stood up.

“He sent you? He believed me?”

“Hasn’t that case been solved?” said Hanna. “Haven’t you caused enough harm?”

“The Chief wasn’t satisfied,” said Beauvoir. “At first I thought he was wrong, that perhaps he’d been persuaded by the wishful thinking of Gabri here, who every day since Olivier was arrested sent the Chief a letter, containing the same question. Why did Olivier move the body?”

Gabri turned to Clara. “It was my query letter.”

“And we all know you’re quite a query,” said Ruth.

Gabri was bursting, beaming. No one else was.

“The more I investigated the more I began to think Olivier might not have killed the Hermit. But if not Olivier, then who?”

He stood with his hands on the back of a wing chair for support. Almost there. “We believed the motive had to do with the treasure. It seemed obvious. And yet, if it was the motive, why hadn’t the murderer taken it? So I decided to take a different tack. Suppose the treasure had very little to do with the killing of the Hermit? Except for one crucial feature. It led the murderer here, to Three Pines.”

They all stared at him, even Clara and Myrna. He hadn’t shared his conclusions with them. This close to trapping the killer he couldn’t risk it.

“If he hid all those things in his cabin, how could they lead anyone to Three Pines?” Old Mundin asked from the back of the room.

“They didn’t stay hidden,” Beauvoir explained. “Not all of them. The Hermit began to give some to Olivier in exchange for food and company and Olivier, knowing what he had, sold them. Through eBay, but also through an antique shop in Montreal on rue Notre-Dame.”

He turned to the Gilberts. “I understand you bought some things on rue Notre-Dame.”

“It’s a long street, Inspector,” said Dominique. “A lot of stores.”

“True, but like butchers and bakers, most people develop a loyalty for a specific antique shop, they go back to the same one. Am I right?”

He looked around. Everyone, except Gabri, dropped their eyes.

“Well, not to worry. I’m sure the owner will recognize your photographs.”

“All right, we used the Temps Perdu,” said Carole.

“Les Temps Perdu. Popular place. It happens to be where Olivier
sold the Hermit’s things.” Beauvoir wasn’t surprised. He’d already spoken to the owner about the Gilberts.

“We didn’t know that’s where he went,” said Dominique, her voice sounding squeezed, sharp. “It just had nice things. Lots of people go there.”

“Besides,” said Marc. “We only bought the home here in the last year. We didn’t need antiques before that.”

“You might have gone in to look. People window-shop up and down rue Notre-Dame all the time.”

“But,” said Hanna Parra, “you said the Hermit wasn’t killed for his treasure. Then why was he killed?”

“Exactly,” said Beauvoir. “Why? Once I set aside the treasure other things took on more importance, mostly two things. The word ‘Woo,’ and the repetition of another word. ‘Charlotte.’ There was
Charlotte’s Web,
Charlotte Brontë, the Amber Room was made for a Charlotte, and the violin’s maker, his wife and muse was named Charlotte. We might, of course, be reading more into it than it deserved, but at the very least it deserved another look.”

“And what did you find?” The Wife asked.

“I found the murderer,” said Beauvoir.

Armand Gamache was tired. He wanted to go home to Reine-Marie. But now wasn’t the time to show weakness, now wasn’t the time to flag. Not when he was so close.

He’d told them about Chiniquy, he’d told them about James Douglas. About Patrick and O’Mara. And he showed them the books, the ones they’d unwittingly sold from their collection.

Including perhaps the most valuable volume in Canada today.

An original Huguenot bible belonging to Samuel de Champlain.

That had brought groans from the board members, but no recriminations. They were beginning to band together, to shore up their differences.