A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15)(40)

It was now racing along the bottom of the sandbags.

“They’ll hold,” she said. “There’s a long way to go before the river reaches us.”

“Oui.”

Though they both knew that the problem wasn’t necessarily the height of the river but the force of it. The danger wasn’t that the water would cascade over the wall but that it would knock it down.

They’d built it two bags thick. So it shouldn’t.

But then, the Bella Bella should never have gotten this high.

A lot of things were happening that shouldn’t.

Just ask Homer Godin, who was living the great “should not be happening.”

Reine-Marie lifted her eyes and through the sleet saw the lights of St. Thomas’s Church on the hill. Where volunteers were making sure the children were sleeping soundly and not afraid. They were setting up more cots and organizing food, fresh water, generators, and composting toilets. Should the worst happen.

Then she shifted her gaze to the woods.

“Where is she, Armand?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she—”

“I don’t know.”

“But you suspect. Have you spoken to the husband?”

“This afternoon. He’s a piece of work. S?reté’s been called to their home more than once. Alcoholic. Maybe drugs.”

“Abusive?”

“Oui.”

A buildup of trouble that had broken its banks, thought Reine-Marie. And the young woman was taken at the flood.

“She’s pregnant?”

“Oui.”

“How could someone—”

But there was no use finishing the question. And there was no answer.

They continued to pace. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Still the question rankled.

How could someone…?

“Can you make him tell you?” Reine-Marie shouted above the torrent.

“Short of putting a gun to his head or beating it out of him, no.”

In her silence, he knew what she was feeling, if not thinking.

Maybe, just this once …

Maybe in some cases it was justified. Maybe torture. Maybe beatings. Maybe even murder was justified. Sometimes.

“Situational ethics?” he asked.

“Don’t be smug,” Reine-Marie said. “We all have them. Even me. Even you.”

She was right, of course.

It was the asp at the breast of any decent cop. Any military leader. Any politician.

Any mother or father.

Any human.

Maybe. Just this once …



* * *



“I’d take Ruth,” said Olivier.

“Thank you,” said the old poet.

“Because she’s a witch and would float?” asked Clara.

“Of course,” said Olivier. “We could cling to her.”

“I’d rather drown,” said Gabri.

They turned to Billy.

“I think you’d know what I’d take,” he said.

“Your tractor?” asked Myrna.



* * *



“So that’s how you’re doing it,” Lysette Cloutier muttered as she stared at the IP address. “You shit.”

Over the fifteen years she’d worked in accounting for the S?reté, Lysette had rarely used foul language. And rarely had she heard it.

But in homicide she’d heard, and discovered within herself, a whole new vocabulary. It was, she thought, a form of verbal violence to counter the horrific things they saw every day.

Instead of lashing out physically, they lashed out verbally.

And yet, she thought as she put more commands into her laptop, she’d rarely heard Chief Inspector Gamache swear. She tried to think if she’d ever heard him.

Maybe that’s why he was in charge. What was it he’d said to that Cameron? The population had a right to expect that people with a gun and a badge would also have self-control.

Maybe he had greater control over himself than most.

But what was he controlling? And what would happen if it ever broke free?



* * *



Bob Cameron sat in his car. The sleet had stopped. The skies were clearing. The temperature dropping.

His windshield was frosting over, but he could still see stars, the Milky Way. And that single light in the house.

In the bedroom.

Was Tracey lying on the bed, on top of that comforter with its bright pink and green flowers that Vivienne’s mother had left her in her will?

Was he drinking himself stupid?

Stupider.

Was that even a word?

Or was he packing? Planning to run away.

Cameron hoped so. That’s what he’d been waiting for. Hoping for.

Expecting.

Come on. Come on, you shit. Get in that truck of yours and just try it.

Cameron had been reassigned from the effort to find Vivienne Godin to setting up emergency shelters. Sent home to rest, he’d come here instead.

Tracey was a weak man, Cameron knew. The sort who’d try to run.

And then what would I do?

But he knew the answer to that. He’d pull Tracey over. Tell him to get out of the vehicle.

And he’d do what he should have done weeks ago.