Bury Your Dead

“SC in Renaud’s journals. I’d taken it to mean an upcoming meeting with someone, maybe Serge Croix. A meeting he’d never make because he was murdered. But I was wrong. SC was the Société Champlain, and the meeting was for today at one. Why did he want to meet the Society?”

Émile stared, stricken, but said nothing.

Gamache turned and strode down the long corridor, his phone buzzing again and his heart pounding.

“Wait, Armand,” he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Émile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.

But not today. Gamache stopped.

“You’re right. Renaud wanted to meet with us,” said Émile, catching up to Gamache as he retrieved his parka from the coat check. “He said he’d found something. Something we wouldn’t like but he was willing to bury, if we gave him what he wanted.”

“And what was that?”

“He wanted to join the Société and have all the credibility that went with it. And when the coffin was found he wanted us to admit he’d been right all along.”

“That was all?”

“That’s it.”

“And did you give it to him?”

Émile shook his head. “We decided not to meet him. No one believed he’d actually found Champlain, and no one believed he’d found anything compromising. It was felt that having Augustin Renaud in the Société would cheapen it. He was blackballed.”

“An elderly man comes to you wanting acceptance, just acceptance, and you turn him away?”

“I’m not proud of it. That’s what we needed to discuss privately. I wanted them to tell you everything and said if they didn’t I would. I’m so sorry Armand. I made a mistake. It’s just that I knew it couldn’t matter to the investigation. No one believed Renaud. No one.”

“Someone did. They killed him.”

The meeting of the Société Champlain had been filled with elderly Québécois men. And what held them together as a club? Certainly their fascination with Champlain and the early colony, but did that explain a lifetime’s loyalty? Was it more than that?

Samuel de Champlain wasn’t simply one more explorer, he was the Father of Québec, and as such he’d become a symbol for the Québécois of greatness. And freedom. Of New Worlds and new countries.

Of sovereignty. Of separation from Canada.

Gamache remembered the extremes of the late 1960s. The bombs, the kidnappings, the murders. All done by young separatists. But the young separatists of the 1960s became elderly separatists, who joined societies and sat in genteel lounges and sipped aperitifs.

And plotted?

Samuel de Champlain was found and found to be a Protestant. What would the church make of that? What would the separatists make of that?

“How did you find the books?” Émile asked, dropping his eyes to the bag at Gamache’s side.

“It was his satchel. Why carry it just for a small map? There must have been something else in it. Then when we couldn’t find the books I realized he probably kept them with him. Augustin Renaud would have refused to let them out of his possession, even for a moment. He must have taken them to the Literary and Historical Society when he met his murderer. But they weren’t on his body. That meant the killer must have taken them. And done what?”

Émile’s eyes narrowed, his mind moving along the path Armand had laid out. Then he smiled. “The murderer couldn’t take them home with him. If they were found in his possession they’d incriminate him.”

Gamache watched his mentor.

“He could have destroyed them, I suppose,” Émile continued, thinking it through. “Thrown them into a fireplace, burned the books. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. So what did he do?”

The two men stared at each other in the crowded hall of the hotel. People swirled around them like a great river, some bundled against the cold, some in formal wear off to a cocktail party. Some in the colorful, traditional sashes of the Carnaval, les ceinture fléchée. All ignoring the two men, standing stock-still in the current.

“He hid them in the library,” said Émile, triumphantly. “Where else? Hide them among thousands of other old, leather, unread, unappreciated volumes. So simple.”

“I spent this morning looking and finally found them,” said Gamache.

The two men walked out of the Château, gasping as the cold hit their faces.

“You found the books, but what happened to Champlain?” Émile asked, blinking his eyes against the freezing cold. “What did James Douglas and Chiniquy do with him?”

“We’re about to find out.”

“The Lit and His?” Émile asked, as they turned left past the old stone buildings, past the trees with cannonballs still lodged in them, past the past they both loved. “But why didn’t the Chief Archeologist find Champlain when he looked a few days ago?”

“How do you know he didn’t?”

TWENTY–THREE