A Great Reckoning Read online

  * * *

  Jean-Guy and Isabelle got out of the car. The snow, which had been melting during the day, was now freezing again as the sun and the temperature dropped.

  “The sap’ll be running,” said Jean-Guy, knocking his gloves together in the chill. He turned to look back up the hill, where a car’s headlights had appeared, shining like eyes.

  “A good year for maple syrup,” said Isabelle. “We’re taking the kids to a cabane à sucre this weekend.”

  Jean-Guy felt a moment of utter joy, like a breath on his face. Next year, he and Annie would be taking their child to a maple sugar shack for the annual sugaring-off celebration. They’d get in a horse-drawn sleigh and go deep into the woods, to a log cabin. There they’d listen to fiddle music and watch people dance, and eat eggs and bacon and baked beans and sweet, sticky tire d’érable, the boiled maple sap poured over spring snow and turned into toffee. Then rolled onto a twig, like a lollipop.

  Just as he’d done as a child. It was a tradition, part of their patrimoine. And one they would pass on to their child. His and Annie’s son or daughter.

  He glanced toward the bistro and saw the cadets, someone else’s sons and daughters, staring at them.

  And he felt an overwhelming need to protect them.

  “He’s here,” said Isabelle, and Jean-Guy turned to see that the car had pulled up right behind theirs.

  Deputy Commissioner Gélinas and Armand Gamache got out. Gélinas was walking toward them, his feet crunching on the refrozen ice and snow, but Gamache had paused to tilt his head back and look into the night sky.

  And then he lowered his eyes and looked straight at Jean-Guy.

  And in an instant, Jean-Guy understood how Chief Inspector Gamache must have felt for all those years when he was head of homicide. Commanding young agents.

  And losing some of those agents, until the loss had become too great. Until his heart had finally broken into too many pieces to be cobbled together again. When that had happened, he’d come here. To find peace.

  But Monsieur Gamache had traded in his peace for the cadets’ safety. He’d left here to go clean up the academy, so that the next generation of young agents might survive long enough to brush gray hair from their faces. And to one day retire, to find their own peace and enjoy their own grandchildren.

  Jean-Guy Beauvoir watched Armand Gamache approach, and had the overwhelming need to protect him.

  He immediately dropped his eyes, staring at his feet until he could control his emotions.

  Hormones, he thought. Damned pregnancy.

  * * *

  Gamache and Gélinas had made small talk in the car on the drive down, until it had petered out and both men had been left to the company of their own thoughts.

  Paul Gélinas had no idea what was going through Gamache’s head, but he himself was preoccupied with what he’d found. And what it meant. And how it could be pertinent, and useful.

  Gélinas had spent the afternoon researching the backgrounds of Michel Brébeuf and Armand Gamache. It was like archeology. There was digging and there was dirt. And there were broken things.

  He’d thought Brébeuf and Gamache had first met in the academy, as roommates, but he soon found out he was wrong. Their friendship went back to the streets of Montréal as children. They’d been neighbors. Attended the same kindergarten, played on the same teams, double-dated and went to dances together. Bummed around Europe for six months before joining the academy. Together.

  The only time they were really apart was when Armand Gamache went to Cambridge to read history. That’s where he’d picked up his English. While Brébeuf stayed behind and went to Laval University in Quebec City.

  They’d been each other’s best man at their weddings, and stood up for each other at christenings.

  Michel Brébeuf had excelled in the Sûreté, rising quickly through the ranks to the position of Superintendent. Poised to become the next Chief Superintendent.

  Armand Gamache had quickly achieved Chief Inspector in homicide, and built that department into one of the finest in the nation.

  And then he’d stalled. And seen his best friend’s rise continue.

  There had been no hint, though, of envy. They’d remained close friends outside of work, and collaborative colleagues at work.

  Their lives had been lived side by side. Until the two roads, the personal and the professional, collided. And went downhill. Fast.

  Armand Gamache had gotten whiffs of something wrong within the Sûreté. There were always scandals, of course. Misuses of power. But they’d been swiftly dealt with in the past by the senior officers, including Brébeuf.

  But this was different. So huge as to be almost invisible, the scale impossible to comprehend.

  At first Gamache gave little credence to the rumors. They’d come through back channels. People who had reason to smear the Sûreté.

  But something stuck, and he started to quietly investigate.

  It started in the northern territories. Among the Cree and the Inuit. Remote areas that were almost impossible to penetrate. And for good reason, Gamache knew.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t get purchase on the rumors.

  Until one day he’d met a Cree elder on a bench outside the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. Her community had spent months raising enough money to send her down south, to speak to the leaders. To tell them about the beatings and murders. The missing. So desperate was their need, they’d finally risked trusting the white authorities.

  But no one would listen. No one would even let her past the front door.

  And so she’d sat down. Exhausted, hungry, out of money and hope.

  Until she was joined on the bench by the large man with the kind eyes. Who asked if she needed help.

  She told him everything. Everything. Not knowing who he was, but having no choice. He was the last house, the last ear, the final hope.

  He’d listened. And he’d believed her.

  And so began a battle that lasted years and that landed at the door of the very person Gamache trusted the most.

  Michel Brébeuf.

  The rot went even deeper than that and ended in catastrophe. But not the great scale of disaster it would have been had Armand Gamache not stopped it.

  Brébeuf had been banished and Gamache had resigned, losing his job and almost losing his life.

  And it wasn’t over yet, Gélinas knew.

  The Sûreté had been cleaned out, but there remained the academy. The training ground for cruelty and corruption.

  The corrosion within the Sûreté and subsequent events were well known to the general public. The media had covered it to the point of their own brutality.

  What interested Gélinas now was what was unknown. The men’s personal lives.

  He’d dug and he’d dug that afternoon. Until he struck dirt.

  For all his professional venality, Michel Brébeuf’s personal life appeared conventional. He’d married. Had three children. Joined service clubs.

  Brébeuf was a model husband and father and grandfather. But his home life had shattered when the degree of his professional deceit became known. His wife had left him, and there was a rift with his children that had yet to be healed.

  But the dirt the RCMP officer sought and found came from a different source.

  Not Brébeuf. But Gamache.

  Gélinas had found it when he’d dug deep enough into Armand Gamache’s personal life and found a few lines in a long-dormant document. The words had uncurled and re-formed. And walked off the page. Into the present.

  Into the waiting hands of the man charged with ensuring a fair investigation.

  * * *

  “A shrewdness of apes,” Myrna read from the reference book, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, before looking up to see Armand and the others arrive.

  Reine-Marie got up to greet her husband.

  “We’re playing a game,” she explained. “Naming groups of animals.”

  “We started off
trying to come up with a collective name for a group of Sûreté cadets,” said Myrna, gesturing toward the students.

  “I’m thinking it’s a gloom of cadets,” said Ruth.

  Paul Gélinas rubbed his forehead and grinned. It was his first time in the bistro and he seemed a little stunned as he took in the beams and stone hearths and wide plank floors. And the old woman with the duck.

  Then his eyes fell on the cadets.

  Amelia Choquet was unmissable, unmistakable.

  And while Gélinas stared at her, she was also staring. Past him. Her mouth open wide enough for him to see the stud through her tongue.

  He turned to see who had so enthralled the Goth Girl.

  It was Isabelle Lacoste. Amelia Choquet’s polar opposite.

  “But then it evolved into animal groups,” Myrna was saying.

  “A sleuth of bears,” said Gélinas, returning to the conversation. “That sort of thing?”

  “Exactly,” said Clara. “Good for you. You’re on my team.”

  “There’re teams?” asked Gabri, leaning away from Ruth.

  “Who are you?” Ruth squinted at Gélinas.

  Gamache introduced Deputy Commissioner Gélinas, of the RCMP.

  “Bonjour,” he said, offering his hand to Ruth.

  She gave him the finger, turning it sideways. “And one for the horse you rode in on, Renfrew.”

  “Don’t get too close,” Gabri whispered to him. “If she bites you, you’ll go mad.”

  Gélinas withdrew his hand.

  “The only one I know is a murder of crows,” said Lacoste.

  “You made that up,” said Beauvoir. “Why would crows be called that?”

  “Funny you should ask,” said Myrna.

  She flipped through the reference book and read out loud, “A murder of crows is believed to come from a folk tale, where crows will gather to decide the capital fate of another crow.”

  “C’est ridicule,” said Beauvoir.

  But his eyes slid across the crowded bistro to the gathering of cadets.

  “A crowd of faults,” Ruth said with certainty. “That’s what they are.”

  Gamache made a guttural sound, somewhere between amusement and astonishment.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Bonjour,” said Lacoste, when she arrived at the cadets’ table.

  All four stood up. She introduced herself to those who hadn’t yet met her.

  “I’m Chief Inspector Lacoste. I’m leading the investigation into the murder of Serge Leduc.”

  For Amelia, it was like watching a play. A replay.

  There was the head of homicide, petite, contained, in slacks and sweater and silk scarf, with three large men standing respectfully behind her.

  “This is Deputy Commissioner Gélinas, of the RCMP,” said Lacoste, and Gélinas nodded to the cadets. “And you know Commander Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir.”

  Four senior officers. Four cadets. Like before-and-after shots.

  Olivier had dragged another table over, and they sat, the investigators fanned at one end and the cadets at the other. Regarding each other.

  “What did you find out about the map?” Commander Gamache asked.

  “Nothing,” said Jacques.

  “That’s not true,” said Nathaniel. “We found out a lot.”

  “Just none of it very useful.” This time no one contradicted him.

  They described what they’d found out about the mapmaker, Antony Turcotte. As they spoke, they looked down at a copy of the map he’d made, sitting not far from the wall where it had been hidden for almost a hundred years.

  It still had the red stain from the strawberry jelly. And a dusting of icing sugar. So that it looked like a drop of blood on snow.

  “You’ve done well,” said Lacoste, and meant it. “You found out who made it and confirmed it was probably an early orienteering map.”

  “Maybe to train his son, knowing the war was coming,” said Beauvoir, and wondered how a father could do that. How would a father feel, seeing the war on the horizon?

  What would I do? Jean-Guy wondered.

  And he knew what he’d do. He’d either hide his child, or prepare him.

  Jean-Guy looked down at the map and realized it wasn’t a map at all. At least, not of land. It mapped a man’s love of his child.

  “But there’s a problem,” said Huifen.

  “There always is,” said Commander Gamache.

  “There’s no record of him ever owning this place. Or any place.”

  “Maybe he rented,” said Beauvoir.

  “Maybe,” said Jacques. “But we couldn’t find Antony Turcotte anywhere. In any of the records.”

  “There’s a mention in The Canadian Encyclopedia,” said Amelia, her voice eager for the first time since Gamache had known her. She handed the photocopied sheet to Lacoste.

  “Merci,” said Lacoste, and examined it before passing it along to the others. “According to this, Monsieur Turcotte eventually moved to a village called Roof Trusses and was buried there.”

  “Roof Trusses?” the other officers said together.

  * * *

  “What did they say?” demanded Ruth.

  “I must’ve misheard,” said Gabri. “It sounded like Roof Trusses.”

  “Oh yes, I know it,” said Ruth. “Just down the road a few kilometers.”

  “Of course,” said Gabri. “Not far from Asphalt Shingles.”

  “Ignore him,” said Olivier. “He just likes saying asphalt.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.” Clara turned to Myrna and Reine-Marie, both of whom shook their heads.

  “That’s because only old Anglos still call it Roof Trusses,” said Ruth. “The Commission de toponymie changed its name a long time ago to Notre-Dame-de-Doleur.”

  “Our Lady of Pain?” asked Myrna. “Are you kidding? Who calls a village that?”

  “Pain,” said Reine-Marie. “Or maybe grief.”

  Our Lady of Grief.

  It was not much better.

  “Jesus,” said Gabri. “Can you imagine the tourist posters?”

  * * *

  “Roof Trusses?” asked Beauvoir. “Who calls a village that?”

  “Apparently Antony Turcotte,” said Huifen. “His one big mistake when mapping and naming the area.”

  She explained.

  “Have you been there?” Gamache asked.

  There was silence, none of the cadets wanting to be the one to speak.

  “The toponymie man said the village died out,” said Huifen.

  “Might still be worth a visit,” said Lacoste. “Just to see.”

  “See what?” asked Jacques, and was treated to one of her withering looks.

  “We don’t know, do we? Isn’t that the point of an investigation? To investigate.”

  Amelia was nodding as though hearing the wisdom of ages.

  “If Turcotte made this for his son”—Gamache touched the edges of the map—“that would mean the soldier’s name was also Turcotte.”

  “That’s another problem,” admitted Huifen. “None of the names on the memorial list is Turcotte.”

  “Maybe he survived,” said Nathaniel. After all this time staring at the young soldier, Nathaniel had grown to care. The boy would be dead now, of course. But maybe of old age, and in his bed.

  “Do you think so?” asked Amelia, speaking to Chief Inspector Lacoste.

  “Do you?” Lacoste asked her.

  Amelia shook her head, slowly. “Whoever he was, he didn’t come home.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “His face,” said Amelia. “No one with that expression would have survived.”

  “Maybe he never existed. He might be a composite of all the young men who were killed,” said Beauvoir.

  “The stained-glass version of the Unknown Soldier,” said Gamache, and considered. “Made to represent all the suffering. Perhaps. But he seems so real. So alive. I think he did exist. Briefly.”

  * * *

&n
bsp; “What’re they saying now?” demanded Ruth.

  “The stained-glass soldier,” said Reine-Maire. “They think his name might’ve been Turcotte.”

  Ruth shook her head. “Saint-Cyr, Soucy, Turner. No Turcotte on the wall.”

  * * *

  “He’s there somewhere,” said Gamache. “One of the names matches that boy.”

  Once again, Huifen pulled out her phone and displayed the photograph they’d taken of the list of names.

  They all leaned forward, reading. As though the lost boy might make himself known.

  * * *

  “He’s there somewhere,” said Ruth. “Maybe not Turcotte, but one of them. Etienne Adair, Teddy Adams, Marc Beaulieu…”

  * * *

  They Were Our Children, Jean-Guy thought.

  * * *

  “Bert Marshall, Denis Perron, Giddy Poirier…”

  * * *

  “We’re going to need to speak with each of you,” said Gélinas. “Alone. Beginning, I think, with you.”

  He turned to Amelia.

  * * *

  “Joe Valois, Norm Valois, Pierre Valois.”

  They listened to Ruth. It was one thing to read the names etched into the wood, and another to hear them out loud. The old poet’s voice like the tolling of a bell. As they searched for the one boy, among the dead.

  * * *

  “There’s a private room just through there,” said Gamache, getting to his feet with the others.

  “Merci,” said Gélinas. “But I don’t think we need you, Commander.”

  “I’m sorry?” said Gamache.

  “We can take it from here.”

  “I’m sure you can, but I’d like to be present when you interview the cadets.”

  The students, as well as Lacoste and Beauvoir, looked from Gamache to Gélinas as the two men faced each other. Each with a pleasant look hardening to his face.

  “I insist,” said Gamache.

  “On what grounds?”

  “In loco parentis,” said Gamache.

  * * *

  “What did he say?” asked Ruth.

  Around them the murmur of conversation continued, interrupted by the occasional burst of laughter.

  “I think he said he was crazy,” said Clara. “Loco.”

  “In parentheses,” said Gabri.

  “Why parentheses?” asked Ruth.

  “In loco parentis,” said Reine-Marie. “Standing in place of the parent.”