A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(69)

Huifen tried to suppress a smile, while Amelia and Nathaniel looked at Jacques with interest. The golden boy not just tarnished, but dead.

Hugo Charpentier turned to the Commander.

Gamache held his gaze, knowing exactly what the tactician was thinking.

Four cadets. Not in the academy, but in this small chapel, miles away. It would not be an exaggeration to say they were hidden away, though they themselves might not realize it.

“Professor Charpentier collects maps,” Armand explained. “I thought he could help. Well, he thought he could help.”

So far, on the drive down, Hugo Charpentier had said nothing about the map, or anything else. They’d driven in silence, which was fine with Armand. He had things to think about.

“It’s over here,” said Reine-Marie, walking to the stained-glass window. “How could we not have seen it before?”

“You weren’t meant to,” said Charpentier. “Look at his face.”

Two of the soldiers were in profile, heading forward. But the one young man was staring straight out. At them.

“That’s what you’re meant to see.” Charpentier waved one of his sticks at the boy. “His expression is so striking, it wipes everything else off, well, the map.”

“You think the map was hidden on purpose?” asked Myrna.

“Misdirection,” said Huifen, who’d been reading about just that in her tactics textbook. By one H. E. Charpentier.

“There was a purpose,” said Charpentier. “But was it to hide the map? I don’t see why anyone would put it there, then direct everyone’s attention away from it.”

“Why not just leave it out, you mean?” asked Reine-Marie.

“Or make it obvious,” said Myrna.

“Maybe it’s not important. A detail,” said Clara. “Like the buttons and the mud and the gun in the holster. There just to add accuracy.”

“Accuracy? A map with a snowman?” asked Ruth. “Who do you think the Canadian Expeditionary Force was fighting? Frosty the Hun?”

Gamache brought out the original, and Charpentier took it from him without asking. Comparing it to the glass one.

It was the same map.

Other copies were scattered on the pews, as were plates with the remains of roast beef, arugula and Camembert on baguette. Chicken, pesto and sliced apple on Sarah’s fresh-baked, soft multigrain. And various beers and soft drinks.

When they’d first moved to Three Pines and noticed that villagers sometimes took picnics into the chapel, both Armand and Reine-Marie had been surprised. Perhaps even, he admitted, disapproving.

But after a couple of months, Reine-Marie had asked, “Who made the rule that people shouldn’t eat or drink in a church?”

So they’d tried it. At first it felt awkward, wrong. As though God would be offended if people took a meal in his house. Until they realized that the sacrilege wasn’t eating and talking and laughing in the chapel. It was leaving it empty.

“How did you come to see it?” Commander Gamache asked Amelia.

“How did you miss it?” she asked.

Clara was about to snap at her when she stopped, realizing it was actually a fair question. How had they missed it? Were they really so riveted on the soldier’s face that everything else faded into the background, as the young professor suggested?

And, more perplexing, was it intentional misdirection?

“I was looking at her.” Amelia waved toward Ruth. “She was going on and on about something—”

“The true nature of man and his place in the universe,” said Ruth to Charpentier. She seemed to admire his two canes to her one. “Basically, the meaning of life.”

“Of course,” said the young man.

“—so my attention drifted,” explained Amelia, “to the window behind her. That’s when I saw it.”

“Can we go somewhere else?” Jacques asked, getting up from the pew. “My ass hurts.”

“I have a pain in my ass too,” said Myrna, looking at her houseguest.

“Let’s go,” said Clara. “I’m tired, and Leo here will need to go out.”

The little lion was asleep on her lap, while Henri and Gracie slept on the floor beneath Reine-Marie’s pew.

Once outside, Amelia heard the two women pleading in the darkness, “Pee. Poop.”

She stood on the road, waiting. Her back to the chapel. To the window.

“Pee. Poop.”

When asked how she came to see the map, she hadn’t been completely truthful. While everyone else was drawn to the soldier boy’s face, she’d been repelled by it.

His terror.

But mostly what gave her the creeps, and made her turn away, was the look of forgiveness on his young face.

And so, unlike the others, she’d been free to, forced to, stare at other parts of the window.

That’s when she’d seen the map.

Finally, his business done, Leo was picked up by Clara, who handed a small, warm bag to Amelia.

“Let’s go home.”

*

Once home, Armand showed Hugo Charpentier to his room on the main floor, and the shower, while he himself changed and Reine-Marie put the kettle on and rustled up some dinner.

Twenty minutes later, Charpentier came out in his dressing gown, smelling of fresh soap and rubbing his dull brown hair.