A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(11)

“Who did you think it was?” asked Reine-Marie, more amused than annoyed.

She’d been sitting beside Ruth every afternoon for almost two months, going through the documents in the blanket box, as Olivier had asked. Most afternoons, like this one, Clara and Myrna also came over and helped, though it never felt like a chore.

The four women sat around the fireplace, sipping cafés au lait and Scotch, eating chocolatines and examining the mass of papers Olivier and Gabri had pulled from the walls of the bistro twenty years earlier, while renovating.

Reine-Marie and Ruth, and Rosa, her duck, shared the sofa, while Clara and Myrna took armchairs across from each other.

Clara was taking a break from her self-portrait, though privately Reine-Marie wondered if when Clara said she was painting herself, she didn’t mean it literally. Each afternoon Clara showed up with food in her hair and dabs of paint on her face. Today it was a shade of bright orange and marinara sauce.

Across from Clara sat her best friend, Myrna, who ran the New and Used Bookstore next door to the bistro. She’d wedged herself into the large chair, enjoying every word of her reading and every bite of her chocolatine.

A hundred years ago, when the papers were first shoved into the walls as insulation against the biting Québec winter, the women of the village would have gathered for a sewing bee.

This was the modern equivalent. A reading bee.

At least, Clara, Myrna, and Reine-Marie were reading. Reine-Marie had no idea what Ruth was doing.

The old poet had spent the previous day and this one staring at a single sheet of paper. Ignoring the rest of the documents. Ignoring her friends. Ignoring the Scotch gleaming in the cut glass in front of her. That was most alarming.

“What are you looking at?” Reine-Marie persisted.

Now both Clara and Myrna lowered the pages they’d been studying to study Ruth. Even Rosa looked at the elderly woman quizzically. Though Reine-Marie had come to understand that ducks rarely looked anything but.

Reine-Marie had fallen into a relaxed routine of sorting through the township’s archives in the morning, then heading to the bistro in the afternoon.

On weekends, Armand would join her, sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs, nursing a beer and going over his own papers.

Though the pine blanket box looked a little like a treasure chest and had yielded many fascinating things, none could remotely be considered treasure, not even by an archivist who saw gold where others saw insulation.

When Ruth had started this project, the leaves outside had been bright amber and red and yellow. Now Christmas had come and gone and the trees were heavy with snow. A thick layer lay on the village so that the only way to get from one place to another was via trenches dug out by Billy Williams.

It was now early January. A peaceful time of the year, when the cheery lights and wreaths were still up, but there was no longer the pressure of the season. Their fridges and freezers were full of shortbread and fruitcake and turkey casseroles. Their own form of insulation against the winter.

Sitting in front of the bistro fire, looking from the snow outside to the stack of old documents, Reine-Marie felt a deep peace and contentment, marred only by the look she sometimes caught on Armand’s face.

His first term as commander was just days away now. She knew the changes he’d implemented were controversial, even revolutionary.

Against all logic, and advice, he’d kept on the most senior and corrupt professor, Serge Leduc. He’d gone to Gaspé and tracked down the quisling Michel Brébeuf. He’d brought in sweeping changes to the curriculum, and gone through each and every application for admission, changing many of the dots from green to red, and vice versa.

He’d instituted a policy of allowing the community access to the magnificent facilities at the new academy, as well as an obligation for the students and staff to volunteer as coaches, as drivers. As visitors to the lonely and readers for the blind. As Big Sisters and Big Brothers. They would deliver meals where needed, and dig out driveways after blizzards. They would be at the disposal of the mayor of Saint-Alphonse in times of need. The mayor and the new commander would work together.

The mayor had met these suggestions with a marked lack of enthusiasm, bordering on disdain.

The community had, after all, greeted the arrival of the S?reté Academy a few years earlier with unalloyed delight, helping them find an appropriate site on the outskirts of Saint-Alphonse.

The mayor and the council had worked closely with Serge Leduc. Right up until the moment the mayor had received the notice that the academy would not be moving to the edge of town after all. Instead, it would be appropriating land right in the center. The plot Serge Leduc knew was reserved for their much-longed-for recreation center.

The mayor could barely believe it.

It was an act of betrayal not easily forgiven, and never forgotten. And the mayor, not being a stupid man, wasn’t going to be fooled again.

The community didn’t want anything to do with the academy, the deceitful bastards. The professors didn’t want anything to do with the community, the great unwashed.

In that they were in agreement.

“All the more reason to reach out, don’t you think?” Gamache had said to Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his former second-in-command and now his son-in-law, as they’d sat together one evening at the Gamaches’ home in Three Pines.

“I think you go out of your way to find mountains to climb,” said Beauvoir, who was reading a book on a particularly disastrous Everest ascent.