Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(92)

“Unpublished,” said Myrna. “I found it in one of her notebooks when I was…”

Again, they stared.

“You were what?” asked Clara. “Snooping?”

“Worse,” admitted Myrna. “I go over Wednesday mornings and clean her house.”

That brought whoops of laughter, which eventually died down in the face of Myrna’s face. Which was bashful and uncomfortable.

“Wait a minute,” said Clara. “You’re telling the truth? You go over there every week—”

“Actually, every second week.”

“And clean?”

“She’s an elderly woman on her own and needs the help,” said Myrna. “That’ll be us one day.”

“Yeah, and you know what?” said Clara. “Ruth’ll still be alive. She’s indestructible. I know. I’ve tried. She’ll bury us all.”

“But it’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?” asked Reine-Marie. “Even for one as nimble as you, ma belle. How did you get from those beautiful lines of poetry to Prohibition?”

“I asked her about the poem. What it meant to her. This was a couple of years ago—”

“You’ve been doing it for that long?” asked Clara, both astonished and annoyed that her friend hadn’t told her. Then something occurred to her. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You must’ve done something awful in this life, or a past one, to have to put on that hair shirt.”

“No, not penance. I think I might be a saint.” She peered, dewy-eyed, into the distance, a beatific look on her face. “Saint Myrna—”

“Among the éclairs,” said Clara.

“I’d go to that church,” said Reine-Marie.

“You were saying?” Isabelle brought the conversation back to earth. Though she agreed with Reine-Marie.

“Strangely enough, that’s what Ruth and I talked about. Church. She told me she’d sit in St. Thomas’s as a child, and pray to be normal. Pray to fit in.”

“Sometimes the magic works…” said Clara.

Armand remembered Ruth’s admission the evening before.

About the ice. The cousin.

The guilt of an old inheritance.

“The church warden sort of adopted her and told her all about the history of the place,” said Myrna.

“Which is how she knew about Prohibition,” said Isabelle. “I actually assumed she was one of the rum runners.”

Myrna laughed.

“I’d love to find out more,” said Reine-Marie. “For the archives. Not exactly the first church along the border used for that. Churches were a favorite among the bootleggers.”

“A safe place, I guess,” said Clara. “Who’d raid God’s house?”

“We think of those days with a sort of charm,” said Reine-Marie. “Speakeasies and Keystone Kops. But they were brutal. Fortunes were made. But only by the most vicious. Prohibition might not have created the Mob, but it led to their rise and their power.”

Gamache listened and knew she was right. The drug smuggling today had, as its godparents, the bootleggers nearly a hundred years ago. The syndicates, the systems, the psyches were created back then.

“You’ve researched St. Thomas’s,” he said. “But you’ve found nothing to support what Ruth says?”

“I doubt the church kept records of crates of booze in and out of the basement,” said Reine-Marie.

“True.” He lapsed into silence.

Thinking about bottles. And bats. In and out of the basement.

*

Beauvoir walked over to the shining wooden bar and, taking a seat, he caught Olivier’s attention.

“Any chance of that casserole the chief ordered?”

“I’ll check in the kitchen. Anton’s in charge of that.”

“The dishwasher?”

“That’s the one.”

This did not bode well, but Jean-Guy was so hungry, he didn’t care if the casserole was made of old dishrags and the gunk in the sink drain.

“Can I get a hot chocolate while I wait?”

“Bien s?r,” said Olivier, and went into the kitchen.

Beauvoir surveyed the bistro. It was packed and, of course, all the conversation was about one subject. The discovery of Katie Evans’s body just hours earlier.

He scanned the room for the dead woman’s husband and friends, but they’d obviously taken refuge in the B&B.

Jean-Guy found an armchair in a quiet corner and settled in.

A couple minutes later the hot chocolate, with freshly whipped cream piled on top, and a bright pink maraschino cherry on top of that, was placed on the wooden table in front of him.

“I thought I was bringing this for a child,” said the voice that accompanied the hand, and Beauvoir looked up.

Anton stood there, in a blue apron with thin white stripes.

“The casserole’s just coming out of the oven. I can take it over in about five minutes.”

“I’ll be here.” Beauvoir took the cherry off the whipped cream. “With my cocktail. Let me know when it’s ready and I can help carry.”

“Thanks.” Anton hesitated. Then looked at the hot chocolate. “Nothing stronger?”