The Long Way Home (36 page)

The
Loup de Mer
lurched, and left the dock.

“Bon voyage,” said the steward as he shut the door.

Out of the slimy porthole the men saw the land recede.

*   *   *

Myrna turned off the taps and swished the water, making sure it was the right temperature. The aroma of lavender, from the bubble bath, filled the mahogany bathroom.

Candles were lit, and their steward had brought two strong cappuccinos and a basket of warm croissants and jams.

Armand had called to tell them that their steward had definitely recognized Peter. Clara was relieved and felt she could finally relax.

She tore the tip off a flaky croissant and sat back on the sofa in their cabin.

They were under way.

Across the suite, in the bathroom, Clara saw Myrna sink deeper into the copper tub, the bubbles forming foaming mountains and valleys over her body.

“I see your ship has finally come in,” said Clara, as Myrna hummed “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”

“I’m a born mariner,” she said.

While Myrna bathed, Clara took a sip of cappuccino and gazed through the large window, watching the thick old forests and bays slip by as the
Loup de Mer
headed east.

*   *   *

Jean-Guy and Armand leaned on the railing of the
Loup de Mer
. The ship was pointed directly into the waves, and both men stared over the side, almost hypnotized by the rhythm. The ship’s bow rose and fell, cutting the waves, sending light spray into their faces.

It was both refreshing and lulling.

Had Gamache been humming an old Québécois lullaby, Jean-Guy knew he’d have dropped off to sleep right there and then.

C’est un grand mystère

Depuis trois nuit que le loup, hurle la nouvelle

Just remembering the tune, Jean-Guy felt his eyelids beginning to droop. Then fluttering open. Heavier, heavier.
C’est un grand mystère.
It’s a big mystery. The voice of his mother sang to him. About the wilderness. The wolves and foxes. About being afraid. And being saved. Being safe.

His head slowly lowered, then jerked up as he came to.

“Let’s get some breakfast,” said Gamache. “There must be a cafeteria.”

They’d let Marcel Chartrand use the toilet first. When they were paying for the room, the clerk had assured them it was an en suite.

It was not. Unless “en suite” in maritime terms meant sharing a tiny, grimy water closet at the end of the dark corridor.

“If we have the Admiral’s cabin, can you imagine how bad the Captain’s must be?” said Jean-Guy.

“When I called to tell them about Peter, I asked how they were. They didn’t complain.”

“Amazing,” said Jean-Guy. “I sure would, if I were them.”

“If you were them?” Gamache asked.

They found the cafeteria, but it had just closed.

“
Désolé
,” said the steward. “You can get coffee over there.”

He pointed to a coin-operated machine.

“I don’t have any change,” said Gamache, feeling in his pockets. “Do you?”

Beauvoir, increasingly frantic, turned his pockets inside out.

“
Merde
.”

They stared at the machine.

*   *   *

“That was wonderful,” said Myrna, leaning back in her chair at their mahogany dining table.

Their breakfast of bacon and eggs, with the unexpected treat of a small fillet of smoked trout, was finished, and now they sipped their coffee and nibbled on the fruit.

“If our cabin’s this good,” said Clara, getting up to run her own bath, “can you imagine how great the men’s must be? The Admiral’s Suite. Wow.”

Myrna changed from the fluffy bathrobe the ship provided into clean clothes and heard Clara moan as she slid into the tub.

“I’m heading out,” said Myrna, pausing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Are you safe in there? You won’t fall asleep, will you?”

“Drown and miss the rest of this voyage?” asked Clara. “No way. They’re going to have to call the cops to get me off this ship. Where’re you going?”

“To see the cops.”

Myrna found their cabin down a surprisingly dingy hallway.

Double-checking to make sure the plaque on the door really said Admiral’s Suite, she knocked. It was opened by Jean-Guy, and in the background, which wasn’t really all that far back, she could see Armand. Going through Chartrand’s coat pocket.

“I was looking for change,” he stammered, then regaining his composure he squared his shoulders and said with some dignity. “For the coffee machine.”

“Of course,” said Myrna. She’d have entered the room, had it been possible. Instead she got her head in and looked around.

Chipped and curling wood veneer covered the walls, making a minuscule room seem all the smaller. A single berth sat against a wall, converted into a narrow sofa during the day. The porthole was covered with grime. The place smelled of mothballs and urine.

“We’re sorry about taking the better cabin,” said Gamache. “Yours must be pretty grim. Would you like to switch?”

Jean-Guy turned and gave him a filthy look.

Myrna assured him that she and Clara were fine where they were. They’d soldier on, somehow. She gave them all the change she had.

Then left.

*   *   *

Their first port of call along the coast was Anticosti Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“Says here,” said Clara, reading from a guidebook she found in the passenger lounge, “that there’ve been four hundred shipwrecks off Anticosti.”

“Oh really,” said Jean-Guy, folding his arms across his chest. “Tell me more.”

“Apparently it’s known as the cemetery of the Gulf,” she said.

“I was being sarcastic,” said Beauvoir.

“I know,” said Clara. “But at least we now know what that pilot meant when he said the big challenge for the ship was the Graves. We get it behind us early.”

“This isn’t the Graves,” said Gamache. He got up from the arborite table in the lounge and walked to the windows. Through the dirty streaks he could see the island approaching. It was huge and almost completely uninhabited. By humans.

The only settlement was Port-Menier, where fewer than three hundred people lived.

But the waters teemed with huge salmon and trout and seals. And the forests were full of deer and moose and grouse.

Gamache stepped through the door to the deck, followed by Clara, Myrna, Jean-Guy, and Marcel Chartrand. The air was cooler than in Baie-Saint-Paul. Fresher. A mist hung over the forest and crept onto the river, softening the line between land and water and air.

It felt as though they were approaching the past. A primordial forest so lush and green and unspoiled it could not possibly exist in the age of space travel, cell phones, Botox.

The only signs of habitation were the lighthouse and the row of bright wooden homes along the shore.

“What’s that?” asked Clara.

“What?” asked Chartrand.

“That.” Clara cocked her head to one side and pointed into the air.

Applause. Clapping.

She scanned the shore. Perhaps it was a tradition. Perhaps when the supply ship arrived, the residents came out and applauded. She would.

But that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite human.

“It’s the trees,” said Chartrand. He guided her gently around until Clara was looking away from the harbor, toward the forest.

“They’re happy to see us,” he said quietly.

Clara looked into his face, into his eyes. He wasn’t watching her. He was taking in the woods. The joyous trees with the leaves that clapped together in the slightest breeze.

Beside her Myrna looked down at the guidebook, and didn’t have the heart to tell them that the trees were called quaking aspens. And if they felt anything on seeing the ship approach, it was alarm. She would too, if she was a tree.

“We’ll be docking and unloading supplies,” the tinny voice over the PA system advised. “You are free to go ashore, but be aware that we will be leaving in four hours.”

With or without you was the implication.

“We can jump ship,” said Beauvoir. “There must be a plane we can charter.”

“No. We stay with the ship,” said Clara. “I’m sorry, Jean-Guy, I know this isn’t your first choice, but if Peter took this route, then we do too. We don’t know where he got off. It might be here.”

It did not take four hours to comb Port-Menier.

They split up, with Clara and Chartrand taking one part of town and the others taking the other. An hour after leaving the ship, and speaking to every merchant and villager they could find, Myrna, Jean-Guy, and Gamache arrived at the only restaurant in town.

“You must be starving,” Gamache said to Myrna. “I know I am.”

“I could eat,” she said.

They ordered fish and chips, and Beauvoir ordered a pizza as well. “And one to go,” he shouted. “You never know,” he told Gamache.

“I honestly don’t think we can get the pizza box into the cabin,” said Gamache, taking his reading glasses off and putting the menu aside. “And I’m a little worried if we eat the pizza we won’t fit in either.”

When the food came, they discovered that the fish was cod.

“Caught today,” said the young server. “And the potatoes are fresh today too.”

He gestured out the window to the huge ship they’d come in on. Clearly “fresh” was a sliding scale.

“You get many people off the ship?” Gamache asked. He cut into the crispy fish.

“Some. Most just want to stretch their legs. Like you.”

“Do many stay?” Jean-Guy took up the line of questioning while Gamache ate.

“Here? No,” the young man laughed. “Some hunters come for a week or so later in the season. Some fishermen. But no one lives here. Except us.”

He didn’t seem upset about that. If anything, he seemed relieved.

“We’re looking for a friend of ours,” said Gamache. It was Beauvoir’s turn to eat, and his turn to talk. “He’d have been on the
Loup de Mer
a few months ago. Tall, English.”

He showed the waiter the photograph.

“No, sorry,” said the waiter, after studying it and handing it back.

By now the restaurant was filling with people who called the young man Cyril. They ordered scallops and cod cheeks and all sorts of things not on the menu.

“Would you like to try some, b’y?”

One of the older women, stout and dressed like a man, came over and offered her basket of cod cheeks to Beauvoir.

He shook his head.

“Ach, come on. I can see you drooling from across the room.”

That brought laughter from the rest of the crowd, and now a middle-aged man joined her. “Come along, Mother. Don’t be bothering these nice people.”

“Oh, it’s no bother,” said Beauvoir. He’d seen the look of slight hurt in the old woman’s face. “Can I have one?”

He took one of the tiny, deep-fried nuggets from her basket, dipped it in sauce, and ate it.

The room grew quiet.

When he reached for another one, they cheered as though the World Cup was theirs.

The elderly woman pretended to bat Jean-Guy’s hand away.

“Cod cheeks for the table, Cyril,” the man beside her said.

By the time Clara and Marcel arrived an hour later, Myrna and a group of women were dancing in the middle of the room and singing along to the jukebox.

“Man Smart (Woman Smarter),” they sang and danced with their arms waving above their heads, to great cheers.

Jean-Guy was across the diner, chatting with some fishermen.

“Any luck?” Clara asked as she and Marcel slid into the booth beside Gamache.

“No. You?”

Clara shook her head and tried to say something, but the music and laughter drowned her out.

“Let’s go outside,” Gamache shouted into her ear. He held on to Chartrand’s arm, pinning the man in place. “Order the cod cheeks and chips. You won’t regret it.”

And then he and Clara left.

“What is it?” he asked. He’d noticed the urgency with which she’d tried to make herself heard in the restaurant.

“Marcel and I have been walking around the village and out along the shore,” she said. “It gave me time to think.”

“
Oui?
”

“That pilot shouldn’t have recognized Peter from the old picture.”

They’d walked rapidly through the town, and now stood on a small dock. The rowboat tied there knocked gently against the floats.

Gamache stared at her, remembering the image.

“It was too old, too small,” said Clara, watching as Gamache’s mind raced. “And Peter’s face was almost completely hidden behind the smoke.”

“My God, it was Massey,” said Armand, arriving at the same conclusion as Clara. “The pilot recognized Professor Massey, not Peter.”

He pulled out his cell phone. It was only just registering, clinging to one bar of contact with the outside world. He tapped the screen so rapidly and so expertly Clara was surprised. He always seemed the sort who’d be uncomfortable with computers and tablets and devices.

But watching him, she realized this was a tool as powerful as any gun. It gave him information. And no investigator could survive without that.

He tapped it a few more times, turned, walked quickly toward the village, then stopped.

The lone bar was wavering. Appearing, then disappearing. The thread to the outside world fraying and breaking. Then reappearing.

“
Oui, allô
,” he spoke loudly. “Is this Vols Côte Nord?”

Clara watched his strained face. The phone was pressed to his ear as though trying to grip that one bar.

“We took a flight this morning, from La Malbaie to Sept-Îles—”

The person on the other end was obviously speaking, and Gamache’s eyes narrowed as he concentrated on the voice that faded in and out.

“That’s right. He let us off at Sept-Îles. Is the pilot back yet?”

Gamache listened. Clara waited, trying to read his expression.

“When?”

Gamache listened some more.

“Can you patch me through to the plane?”

Even Clara, a couple feet away, heard the laugh.

“But you must be able to,” said Gamache.

Now Clara heard words, in rapid French, that sounded like “idiotic,” “impossible,” “delusional.”