A Trick of the Light

He felt like he’d been dropped from a great height. And somehow survived, but was bruised and flattened. Reaching out a shaky hand for the glass of water he gulped down what was left. That felt better.

Slowly he sat up, letting himself adjust to each new position. Finally he stood and pulled the bathrobe around his soft body. Never again, he said as he trudged to the bathroom and stared at his reflection. Never again.

But he’d said that yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

*   *   *

The Sûreté team spent the morning in the Incident Room, set up in the Canadian National Railway station. The low brick building, a century old, sat across the Rivière Bella Bella from Three Pines. The building was abandoned, the trains having simply stopped stopping there decades earlier. No explanation.

For a while the trains still chugged by, winding through the valley and between the mountains. And disappearing around a bend.

And then, one day, even they stopped. No twelve o’clock express. No three P.M. milk run into Vermont.

Nothing for the villagers to set their clocks by.

And so both the trains and time stopped in Three Pines.

The station sat empty until one day Ruth Zardo had a thought that didn’t include olives or ice cubes. The Three Pines Volunteer Fire Department would take over the space. And so, with Ruth in the vanguard, they’d descended on the lovely old brick building and made themselves at home.

As the homicide team did now. In one half of the open room sat firefighting equipment, axes, hoses, helmets. A truck. In the other half were desks, computers, printers, scanners. The walls held posters with fire safety tips, detailed maps of the region, photos of past winners of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, including Ruth, and several large boards with headings like: Suspects, Evidence, Victim, and Questions.

There were a lot of questions, and the team spent the morning trying to answer them. The detailed coroner’s report came in and Inspector Beauvoir handled that, as well as the forensic evidence. He was looking into how she died while Agent Lacoste tried to figure out how she’d lived. Her time in New York City, her marriage, any friends, any colleagues. What she did, what she thought. What others thought of her.

And Chief Inspector Gamache put them all together.

He started out at his desk, with a cup of coffee, reading all the reports from the day and night before. From that morning.

Then picking up the large blue book on his desk he went for a walk. Instinctively he made for the village, but paused on the stone bridge that arched over the river.

Ruth was sitting on the bench on the village green. Not doing much of anything, apparently, though the Chief Inspector knew differently. She was doing the most difficult thing in the world.

She was waiting and she was hoping.

As he watched she tilted her gray head to the skies. And listened. For a distant sound, like a train. Someone coming home. Then her head dropped back down.

How long, he wondered, would she wait? It was already almost mid-June. How many others, mothers and fathers, had sat right where Ruth was, waiting, hoping? Listening for the train. Wondering if it would stop and a familiar young man would step down, having been spewed back from places with pretty names, like Vimy Ridge or Flanders Fields or Passchendaele? By Dieppe and Arnhem.

How long did hope live?

Ruth tilted her head to the sky and listened again, for some far cry. And then she lowered it again.

An eternity, thought Gamache.

And if hope lasted forever, how long did hate last?

He turned around, not wanting to disturb her. But neither did he want to be disturbed. He needed quiet time, to read and think. And so he walked back, past the old railway station and down the dirt road, one of the spokes that radiated out from the village green. He’d taken a lot of walks around Three Pines but never down this particular road.

Huge maples lined the road, their branches meeting overhead. Their leaves almost blocking out the sun. But not quite. It filtered through and hit the dirt, and hit him and hit the book in his hand in soft dots of light.

Gamache found a large gray rock, an outcropping by the side of the road. Sitting down he put on his reading glasses, crossed his legs and opened the book.

An hour later he closed it and stared ahead. Then he got up and walked some more, further down the tunnel of shade and light. In the woods he could see dried leaves and tight little fiddlehead ferns and hear the scrambling of chipmunks and birds. He was aware of all that, though his mind was somewhere else.

Finally he stopped, turned around and walked back, his steps slow but deliberate.

SIXTEEN

“Right,” said Gamache settling into his chair at the makeshift conference table. “Tell me what you know.”