Dead Cold (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2)(94)

‘You go too far, madame. Don’t mistake dramatics for a conscience. I know you feel badly about what happened and I agree, something should have been done. But I also know what happened outside the church wasn’t isolated. The tragedy of Crie’s life is that’s all she’s known. It became like the snow outside.’ They both looked out the window. ‘The insults piling up until Crie disappeared under them.’

‘I should have done something.’

They were both silent for a moment, émilie looking outside and Gamache looking at her.

‘Blizzard coming tomorrow, I hear,’ said Em. ‘There’s a storm warning out.’

‘How much’s expected?’ This was news to him.

‘The weather channel said we might get thirty centimeters. Have you ever been caught in a snowstorm?’ she asked.

‘Once, driving to the Abitibi region. It was dark and the roads were empty. I got disoriented.’ He saw again the swarm of snow in his headlights, the world narrowing to that brilliant funnel. ‘I made a wrong turn and ended up in a cul de sac. The road kept narrowing. It was my own fault, of course.’ He leaned forward and whispered, ‘I was stubborn. Shh.’ He looked around.

émilie smiled. ‘It’ll be our little secret. Besides, I’m sure no one would believe it. What happened?’

‘The track got narrower and narrower.’ He demonstrated with his hands, guiding them to a point until he looked like a man at prayer. ‘It was nearly impossible to make out the road any more. By then it was really a path, and then,’ he turned his hands over, palm up, ‘nothing. All that was left was forest and snow. The drifts were up to the car doors. I couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go back.’

‘What did you do?’

He hesitated, not sure which answer to give. All the answers that sprang to mind were true, but there were levels to the truth. He knew what he was about to ask her and decided she was owed the same respect.

‘I prayed.’

She looked at this large man, confident, used to command, and nodded. ‘What did you pray?’ She wasn’t letting him off the hook.

‘Just before this happened Inspector Beauvoir and I had been on a case in a small fishing village called Baie des Moutons, on the Lower North Shore.’

‘The land God gave to Cain,’ she said unexpectedly. Gamache was familiar with the quote, but he hadn’t run across many others who were. In the 1600s when the explorer Jacques Cartier first set eyes on that desolate outcropping of rocks at the mouth of the St Lawrence River, he’d written in his diary, This must be the land God gave to Cain.

‘Perhaps I’m attracted to the damned.’ Gamache smiled. ‘Maybe that’s why I hunt killers, like Cain. The area’s barren and desolate; practically nothing grows, but to me it’s almost unbearably beautiful, if you know where to look. Out here it’s easy. Beauty is all around. The rivers, the mountains, the villages, especially Three Pines. But in Mutton Bay it’s not so obvious. You have to go looking for it. It’s in the lichen on the rocks and the tiny purple flowers, almost invisible, you have to get on your knees to see. It’s in the spring flowers of the bakeapples.’

‘Did you find your murderer?’

‘I did.’

But his inflection told her there was more. She waited, but when nothing more came she decided to ask.

‘And what else did you find?’

‘God,’ he said simply. ‘In a diner.’

‘What was he eating?’

The question was so unexpected Gamache hesitated then laughed.

‘Lemon meringue pie.’

‘And how do you know He was God?’

The interview wasn’t going as he’d imagined.

‘I don’t,’ he admitted. ‘He might have been just a fisherman. He was certainly dressed like one. But he looked across the room at me with such tenderness, such love, I was staggered.’ He was tempted to break eye contact, to stare at the warm wooden surface where his hands now rested. But Armand Gamache didn’t look down. He looked directly at her.

‘What did God do?’ émilie asked, her voice hushed.

‘He finished his pie then turned to the wall. He seemed to be rubbing it for a while, then he turned back to me with the most radiant smile I’d ever seen. I was filled with joy.’

‘I imagine you’re often filled with joy.’

‘I’m a happy man, madame. I’m very lucky and I know it.’

‘C’est ?a.’ She nodded. ‘It’s the knowing of it. I only became really happy after my family was killed. Horrible to say.’

‘I believe I understand,’ said Gamache.

‘Their deaths changed me. At some point I was standing in my living room unable to move forward or back. Frozen. That’s why I asked about the snowstorm. That’s what it had felt like, for months and months. As though I was lost in a whiteout. Everything was confused and howling. I couldn’t go on. I was going to die. I didn’t know how, but I knew I couldn’t support the loss any longer. I’d staggered to a stop. Like you in that snowstorm. Lost, disoriented, at a dead end. Mine, of course, was figurative. My cul de sac was in my own living room. Lost in the most familiar, the most comforting of places.’

‘What happened?’