A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15)(15)

“Cameron? I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

She thought. “He called her Madame Godin, but when he got angry, he called her Vivienne.”

“Oui. When you spoke with him this morning, did you mention she was pregnant?”

Cloutier went back over the conversation. “No.”

“I see.”

And yet, thought Gamache, Agent Cameron knew that Vivienne was going to have a baby.

Now, how was that?



* * *



As they got closer to the farmhouse, the wipers pushing the wet flakes off the windshield, Agent Cloutier did what she always did in times of extreme stress.

Two times four is eight.

Three times five is fifteen.

Her times tables. Laid out neatly, in rows and columns.

Five times four is …

Her meditation. Her happy place. No chaos could survive in the tightly packed numbers. Everything in its place. In its home. Safe. Predictable. Known. Every question had an answer.

Twenty.

Terrible things did not happen to the pregnant daughter of an old friend, in the times table.

Six times six is …

Only, Cloutier knew, something had happened. And it was up to them to find the answer.

… thirty-six.

Thirty-six hours Vivienne was now missing.





CHAPTER SIX


“What do you think?” Gabri asked Clara as they stood on the stone bridge and looked into the Rivière Bella Bella below.

He had to speak up, over the roar.

The water rushing beneath them, so clear and gentle in summer, was seething. Frothing with brown foam and great chunks of ice and tree limbs swept into it in the spring runoff.

All very natural. All very predictable.

But there was a problem.

There was too much of it. Too much water. Too much ice. Far too much forest swirling in the waters.

Gabri and Clara turned around and looked downriver.

“Damn,” muttered Clara, and then, raising her voice, she turned to Gabri. “A dam is forming. I think it’s time to start sandbagging.”

“Did someone say sandbagging?” asked Ruth as she joined them on the bridge.

She’d put a moth-eaten woolen scarf over her short white hair and tied it at her chin, so that she looked like an elderly Victorian gentleman with a toothache. And a duck.

“Now, Ruth.” Gabri spoke with exaggerated patience. “We’ve been through this before. When we call for volunteers to sandbag, we don’t mean to hit each other over the head with sand-filled socks.”

“Shit,” said Ruth.

“No,” said Gabri. “Not shit either, as we learned last spring.”

Clara had returned to the other side of the bridge and looked at her garden, which backed onto the Rivière Bella Bella. The river had risen rapidly in the last hour and was now just inches from the top.

“I’ve never seen it so high so early,” said Gabri, joining her.

“Are you talking about the river or Ruth?” asked Clara.

Gabri laughed, then regarded their neighbor more closely.

Ruth looked fairly sober, somber even. Though the duck looked bleary. But then, ducks often did.

“What do you think, Ruth?” Gabri asked, raising his voice so she could hear over the rushing waters and her natural inclination to not listen.

She was the oldest resident of Three Pines. But how old was a matter of some debate.

“We found her under a rock,” Gabri’s partner, Olivier, was fond of explaining. And she did appear more than a little fossilized.

She also happened to be the chief of the volunteer fire department. Not because she was a natural leader but because most villagers would rather run into a burning building or a river in full flood than face Ruth Zardo’s sharp tongue.

She tipped her head back and looked into the sky. It had stopped snowing but was still threatening moisture of some sort. Exactly what they did not need.

“I think we should order more sand,” she said, dropping her eyes to consider the river below. “I checked yesterday, and we have enough in the pile behind the old railway station for a normal flood, but this doesn’t look normal to me.”

If anyone had a knowledge of abnormal, it was Ruth.

“I’ve only seen it this high once before,” she said. “Yes, I guess it’s time.”

“For what?” asked Clara.

“Another hundred-year flood.”

“Oh, shit,” said Gabri. “Fuckity fuck fuck. Merde.” Then he paused. “What’s a hundred-year flood?”

“Surely the name is a giveaway,” said Clara.

They followed Ruth as she turned toward the bistro.

“A hundred-year flood happens every hundred years, right?” Gabri whispered to Clara.

“I’d have to say yes.”

“Then how could Ruth have seen one before?” He dropped his voice still further. “How old is she?”

“Not a clue. I’m still trying to figure out how old the duck is,” said Clara.

Just then Rosa, in Ruth’s arms a few paces ahead, turned her head 180 degrees. And glared at them.

“The Devil Duck,” whispered Gabri. “If her head spins all the way around, I’m running for the hills.”