A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(25)

“You don’t get gray hair without having messed up a few times,” he said. “You know?”

He held her eyes, and for the second time that day she saw intelligence there.

He was, she told herself, just another large, white, middle-aged man. She’d had her fill of them. Literally.

“Have you figured out what the academy motto means?” he asked.

“Velut arbor aevo. ‘As a tree with the passage of time.’ It means you have to put down roots.”

She was wrong, she knew. The motto might mean that, at a superficial level, but there was more to it. And more to this man.

She’d noticed something else in his gaze. A shrewdness, as though he knew her better than she knew herself. As though he saw something in her, something she didn’t think he altogether liked.

*

“Well, that was interesting,” said Reine-Marie after they’d cleaned up and could finally collapse into the seats by the fire. “Did you happen to notice a slight tension?”

It was asked with wide-eyed innocence, as though she could be wrong.

“Maybe just a little,” said her husband, joining her on the sofa.

“Want some?” asked Beauvoir. He’d gone down into the kitchens and grabbed a tray of sandwiches, which he held with one hand while eating with the other.

Now he offered the tray to Armand and Reine-Marie, who each took one.

“I don’t like it,” said Beauvoir, sitting in the Barcelona chair, which he now claimed as his own.

“What?” asked Reine-Marie.

“This whole thing,” said Beauvoir. “Socializing with cadets.”

“The lower orders?” asked Reine-Marie. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

“Well, maybe a little,” he admitted. “What’s with that Goth girl? How did she get in? She doesn’t seem to even want to be here. Some of the cadets might be a little soft, but at least they’re eager. She’s just…”

He looked for the right word, then turned to his father-in-law.

“No, not evil,” said Beauvoir, before Gamache could.

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Then how would you describe her?” Beauvoir asked.

“Adrift,” said Gamache. Then he paused. “No, not adrift. Drowning.”

“Troubled, certainly,” said Reine-Marie. “Why did you admit her, Armand? When last I heard, she’d been rejected.”

“What?” Beauvoir struggled to sit forward on the chair. “She’d been rejected and you changed that? Why?”

“I went over the application for every first-year cadet,” said Armand. “They’re all here because I saw something in them.”

“And what did you see in her?” Reine-Marie asked, getting in before Beauvoir could ask the same question, though not, she knew, with the same tone.

“A last chance,” he said. “A lifeline.”

There was a knock on the door and he got up.

“This isn’t a reform school,” Beauvoir called after him. “The S?reté Academy isn’t a charity.”

At the door Gamache turned, his hand on the knob. “Who said the lifeline was for her?”

Armand opened the door and came face-to-face with Michel Brébeuf.

Reine-Marie stood up and walked to her husband’s side.

“Armand,” said Brébeuf, then turning to her, “Reine-Marie.”

“Michel,” she said, her voice curt but courteous. She could smell the Scotch on his breath but he didn’t seem drunk.

“I’m sorry I showed up uninvited to your party.” He gave her an embarrassed, almost boyish, smile. “I didn’t mean to. I came in a day early because of the storm and wanted to drop by to let you know I was here. I walked right in on the party. I came back to apologize.”

“I’m a little tired,” Reine-Marie said to Armand. “I think I’ll go to bed. Michel.”

She nodded toward him, and he smiled.

As Reine-Marie left the room, Jean-Guy caught a look pass between the Gamaches.

She was angry, livid, at this further incursion into their private space, their private time. Jean-Guy had rarely seen his mother-in-law angry. Armand knew it too and acknowledged it with a quick squeeze of her hand before she walked into the bedroom and closed the door. Firmly.

“You know Jean-Guy Beauvoir, of course,” said Armand, and the two shook hands.

“Yes, Inspector. How are you?”

“Fine,” said Beauvoir. “As are you, obviously.”

Superintendent Brébeuf had also been Beauvoir’s boss, but so far up the ladder that they rarely met. And now here they were, as though equals. As though nothing had happened.

They were all playing the game. The charade.

One word. Sounds like hypocrisy.

But Beauvoir also knew there was more to it than that. Yes, the Gamaches were pretending to be civil. But there was history there. Not just of hurt, but of deep affection.

Would the affection win? Should it? Was such a thing even possible? Beauvoir wondered.

Jean-Guy watched as Gamache invited Brébeuf in. The former superintendent stood in front of the fire and waited for Armand to invite him to sit.

It was a long, ripe moment.