Brutal Telling

“OWSVI,” she read. “Upper case. Scratched into the wood, not painted.” She sounded like a coroner, dissecting and dictating. “It’s a heavy wood, a hardwood. Cherry?” She looked closer and even sniffed. “No, the grain isn’t right. Cedar? No, the color is off, unless . . .” She took it to the window and placed it in a stream of sunshine. Then lowering it she smiled at Gamache over her glasses. “Cedar. Redwood. From British Columbia almost certainly. It’s a good choice of wood, you know. Cedar lasts forever, especially the redwood. It’s a very hard wood too. And yet it’s surprisingly easy to sculpt. The Haida on the west coast used it for centuries to make totem poles.”

“And they’re still standing.”

“They would be, if most of them hadn’t been destroyed in the late 1800s by the government or the church. But you can still see a fine one in the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.”

The irony wasn’t lost on either of them.

“So what are you doing here?” she said to the sculpture. “And what are you so afraid of?”

“Why do you say that?”

Over at her desk Agent Lacoste looked up, wanting to know the answer too.

“Surely you felt it too, Armand?” She’d used his first name, a sign that while she appeared composed she was in fact nonplussed. “There’s something cold about this work. I hesitate to say evil . . .”

Gamache cocked his head in surprise. Evil wasn’t a word he heard often outside a sermon. Brutal, malevolent, cruel, yes. Horror, even; investigators sometimes talked about the horror of a crime.

But never evil. But that was what made Thérèse Brunel a brilliant investigator, a solver of puzzles and crimes. And his friend. She placed conviction above convention.

“Evil?” asked Lacoste from her desk.

Superintendent Brunel looked at Agent Lacoste. “I said I hesitated to call it that.”

“And do you still hesitate?” Gamache asked.

Brunel picked up the work once again and bringing it up to eye level she peered at the Lilliputian passengers. All dressed for a long voyage, the babies in blankets, the women with bags of bread and cheese, the men strong and resolute. And all looking ahead, looking forward to something wonderful. The detail was exquisite.

She turned it round then jerked it away from her as though it had bitten her nose.

“What is it?” Gamache asked.

“I’ve found the worm,” she said.

Neither Carole Gilbert nor her son had slept well the night before, and she suspected Dominique hadn’t either. To Vincent, sleeping in the small room off the landing, she gave no thought. Or rather every time he emerged into her conscious mind she shoved him back into his little room, and tried to lock the door.

It had been a lovely, soft dawn. She’d shuffled around the kitchen making a pot of strong French Pressé coffee, then putting a mohair throw round her shoulders she’d picked up the tray and taken it outside, installing herself on the quiet patio overlooking the garden and the mist-covered fields.

The day before had felt like one endless emergency, with claxtons sounding in her head for hours on end. They’d pulled together as a family and presented a united front through revelation after revelation.

That Marc’s father was still alive.

That Vincent was in fact standing right there.

That the murdered man had been found in their new home.

And that Marc had moved him. To the bistro. In a deliberate attempt to hurt, perhaps even ruin, Olivier.

By the time Chief Inspector Gamache had left they all felt punch-drunk. Too dazed and tired to go at each other. Marc had made his feelings clear, then gone into the spa area to plaster and paint and hammer. Vincent had had the sense to leave, only returning late that night. And Dominique had found the cabin while out riding on the least damaged of the horses.

’Twould ring the bells of Heaven, Carole thought to herself as she stared at the horses, now in the misty field. Grazing. Leery of one another. Even from there she could see their sores.

The wildest peal for years,

If Parson lost his senses

And people came to theirs,

And he and they together

knelt down with fervent prayers

For tamed and shabby tigers,

And dancing dogs and bears.

“Mother.”

Carole jumped, lost in her own thoughts and now found by her son. She got to her feet. He looked bleary, but showered and shaved. His voice was cold, distant. They stared at each other. Would they blink, sit down, pour coffee and talk about the weather? The headlines? The horses. Would they try to pretend the storm wasn’t all around them? And wasn’t of their own making.

Who had done worse? Carole by lying to her son for years, and telling him his father was dead? Or Marc by moving a dead man down to the bistro, and in one gesture ruining their chances of being accepted in the small community.

She’d marred his past, and he’d marred their future.

They were quite a team.