Cruelest Month

Gamache picked up the books on Madeleine’s bedside table. English and French. Biographies, a history of Europe after World War Two, and a work of literary fiction by a well-known Canadian. An eclectic taste.

Then he shoved his long arm between box-spring and mattress, sweeping it up and down. In his experience, if people were going to have books, or magazines, that embarrassed them, this was where they were hidden.

The next hiding place was less for ‘hiding’ and more for simple privacy. The drawer in the bedside table. Opening it up he found a book there.

Now why didn’t she keep it with the rest? Was it a secret? It looked harmless enough.

Picking it up he looked at the cover photo of a smiling elderly woman in tweeds and long, exuberant necklaces. In one eloquent hand she held a cocktail. Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks, the cover said. He flipped it open and read at random. Then he sat on the side of the bed and read more.

Five minutes later he was still reading and smiling. At times laughing out loud. He looked around guiltily, then closed the book and slipped it into his pocket.

After a few minutes he’d completed his search, ending up at the dresser by the door. Madeleine kept a few framed photographs there. He picked one up and saw Hazel with another woman. She was slim with very short dark hair and gleaming brown eyes. Doe eyes, made larger by the haircut. Her smile was full and without artifice or agenda. Hazel was also relaxed and smiling.

They looked natural together. Hazel calm and content and the other woman radiant.

At last Armand Gamache had met Madeleine Favreau.

* * *

‘Sad house,’ said Beauvoir, looking in the rearview mirror. ‘Was it ever happy, do you think?’

‘I think it was a very happy house once,’ said Gamache.

Beauvoir told the chief about his conversation with Sophie. Gamache listened then looked out the window, seeing only the odd light in the distance. Night fell as they bumped back to Montreal.

‘What was your impression?’ Gamache asked.

‘I think Madeleine Favreau squeezed Sophie out of her own home. Not on purpose, maybe, but I think there wasn’t enough room for her. There’s barely room in there to move and the addition of Madeleine was too much. Something had to give.’

‘Something had to go,’ said Gamache.

‘Sophie.’

Gamache nodded into the darkness and thought about a love so all-consuming it ate up and spat out Hazel’s own daughter. How would that daughter feel?

‘What did you find?’ Beauvoir asked.

Gamache described the room.

‘But no ephedra?’

‘None. Not in her room, not in the bathroom.’

‘What do you think?’

Gamache picked up his cell phone and dialed. ‘I think Madeleine didn’t take the ephedra herself. She was given the dose.’

‘Enough to kill.’

‘Enough to murder.’

   SIXTEEN

‘Hi, Dad.’ Daniel’s harried voice came through the phone. ‘Where’s her bunny? We can’t sit on the plane for seven hours without the bunny. And the gar.’

‘When’re you heading to the airport?’ Gamache asked, looking at the time on the Volvo console.

Five twenty.

‘We should’ve left half an hour ago. Florence’s gar is missing.’

This made perfect sense to the Chief Inspector. Florence’s other grandfather, Papa Grégoire, had given her a yellow pacifier which she loved. Papa Grégoire had said in passing that Florence sucked on it the way he used to suck on cigars. Florence heard and it became her ‘gar’. Her most precious possession. No gar, no flight.

Gamache wished he’d thought of hiding it.

‘What, honey?’ Daniel’s voice, off the mouthpiece, called. ‘Oh, great. Dad, we found them. Gotta go. Love you.’

‘I love you too, Daniel.’

The line went dead.

‘Want me to drive to the airport?’ Beauvoir asked.

Gamache looked at the time again. Their flight to Paris was at seven thirty. Two hours.

‘No, it’s all right. Too late. Merci.’

Beauvoir was glad he asked, and even happier the chief had said no. A small blossom of satisfaction opened in his chest. Daniel was gone. The chief was all his again.

*

Despond not, though times be bale,

And baleful be,

Though winds blow stout –

Odile stared at the bags of organic cereal on the shelves, for inspiration. ‘Though winds blow stout,’ she repeated, stuck. She had to find something that rhymed with ‘gale’.

‘Pale? Pail? Shale? Though winds blow stout like a great big whale?’ said Odile, hopefully. But no, it was close, but not quite right.

All day in the store that she and Gilles ran in St-Rémy she’d been inspired to write. It had flooded out of her so that now the counter was awash with her works, scribbled on the backs of receipts and empty brown paper bags. Most, she felt sure, were good enough to be published. She’d type them up and send them off to the Hog Breeder’s Digest. They almost always accepted her poems, often without change. The muse wasn’t always so generous, but today Odile found her heart lighter than it had been in months.