Louise Penny - Bury Your Dead

Chaos is coming, old son, the Hermit had whispered to Olivier the last night of his life. Olivier had done his job well. The Hermit was well and truly terrified.

But while admitting to everything else, Olivier denied two things.

Killing the Hermit.

And making the word, Woo.

The court hadn’t believed him. Olivier had been found guilty and sentenced to prison. It was a case Chief Inspector Gamache had painstakingly, painfully, built against his friend. A case Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir had collaborated on and believed in.

And one the Chief now asked him to dismantle and put together again. Only this time seeing if the same evidence could exonerate Olivier and point to someone else.

Like the man in the cabin with him.

Gilbert looked up and smiled.

“Hello,” he said, closing the book and getting up slowly. Beauvoir had to remember this tall, slender man, with the white hair and searching eyes was in his late seventies.

Gilbert sat on the side of the bed and smiled reassuringly. “May I?” he asked Beauvoir before touching him. Beauvoir nodded. “I’ve spoken to Carole and told her you’d be spending the night,” Dr. Gilbert said, pulling down the duvet. “She said she’d call the B and B and let Gabri know. No need to worry.”

“Merci.”

Gilbert’s warm, sure hands were pressing against Beauvoir’s abdomen.

Beauvoir had been prodded countless times in the past two months, especially those first days. It seemed his new alarm clock. Every few hours he awoke, dazed from medication, to someone else shoving their cold hands against his stomach.

None felt like Gilbert. Beauvoir winced a few times, despite his pledge not to. The pain took him by surprise. As soon as he showed signs of discomfort Gilbert’s hands stopped, pausing to let Beauvoir catch his breath, then they moved on.

“You probably shouldn’t have taken the Ski-Doo out,” Gilbert smiled, replacing the bed sheets and duvet, “but I imagine you know that already. The bullet itself did some damage, but the longer-term effect is from a sort of shock wave the impact creates. Did your doctors explain that?”

Beauvoir shook his head.

“Perhaps they were too busy. The bullet went straight through your side. You probably lost quite a bit of blood.”

Beauvoir nodded, trying to keep the images at bay.

“It didn’t hit your internal organs,” Dr. Gilbert continued. “But the waves from the impact bruised the tissue. That’s what you’ll feel if you push yourself too hard, like this afternoon. But you’re healing well.”

“Merci,” said Beauvoir. It helped to understand.

And Beauvoir knew then the man was a saint. He’d been touched by any number of medical men and women. All healers, all well intentioned, some kind, some rough. All made it clear they wanted him to live, but none had made him feel that his life was precious, was worth saving, was worth something.

Vincent Gilbert did. His healing went beyond the flesh, beyond the blood. Beyond the bones.

Gilbert patted the covers and made to get up, but hesitated. He picked up a small bottle of pills on the bedside table. “I found these in your pocket.”

Beauvoir reached out but Gilbert closed them in his hand and searched Beauvoir’s face. There was a long pause. Finally Gilbert relented and opened his fist. “Be careful with these.”

Beauvoir took the bottle and shook out a pill.

“Perhaps half,” said Dr. Gilbert, reaching for it.

Beauvoir watched Dr. Gilbert skillfully snap a small OxyContin in two.

“I keep them just in case,” Beauvoir said, swallowing the tiny half pill as Gilbert handed him clean pajamas.

“In case you do something foolish?” asked Gilbert with a smile. “You might need another bottle.”

“Har har,” said Beauvoir. But already he could feel the warmth spreading and the pain dulling and any sting there might have been in Gilbert’s comment drifted away.

As he dressed, Beauvoir watched the doctor in the kitchen spooning soup into two bowls and cutting fresh baked bread.

“Les Canadiens are playing tonight, aren’t they?” Gilbert returned with the food and made Beauvoir comfortable sitting up in bed. “Want to watch?”

“Please.”

Within moments they were eating soup, baguette and watching Les Canadiens slaughter New York.

“Too salty,” snapped Gilbert. “I told Carole not to put so much salt in the food.”

“Tastes fine to me.”

“Then you have no taste. Raised on poutine and burgers.”

Beauvoir looked at Dr. Gilbert expecting to see a smile. Instead his handsome face was sour, angry. Entitled, petulant, petty.

The asshole was back. Or, more likely, had been there all along in deceptively easy company with the saint.

SEVEN

Armand Gamache rose quietly in the night, putting on his bedside lamp and dressing warmly. Henri watched all this with his tail swishing and the tennis ball in his mouth. They tiptoed down the narrow, winding wood stairs that seemed carved into the center of the old home. Émile had put him on the top floor, in what had been the master bedroom. It was a magnificent loft space with wood beams and dormer windows out each side of the roof. Émile had explained that he no longer felt comfortable on the steep, narrow stairs, worn by hundreds of years of feet, and did Armand mind?

Gamache didn’t, except that it proved what he already knew. His mentor was slowing down.

Now he and Henri descended two floors to the living room where the woodstove still burned and radiated heat. There he put on a single light, slipped into his warmest coat, hat, scarf and mitts and went out, not forgetting to take the most crucial item. The Chuck-it for Henri. Henri was in love with the Chuck-it. As was Gamache.

They walked through the deserted streets of old Québec, up St-Stanislas, past the Literary and Historical Society where they paused. Twenty-four hours ago Augustin Renaud lay hidden in the basement. Murdered. Had the telephone cable not been severed while digging the shallow grave the basement would have been cemented over and Augustin Renaud would have joined the countless other corpses hidden in and around Québec. It wasn’t all that long ago archeologists discovered skeletons actually inside the stone walls surrounding the city. The bodies of American soldiers captured after a raid in 1803. The authorities had quickly said the men were already dead when walled up, but privately Gamache wondered. After all, why put bodies into a wall unless it was a grotesque punishment, or to conceal a crime? Since Québec was built on bones and irony, the invading soldiers had become part of the city defenses.

Augustin Renaud had almost gone the way of the soldiers and become a permanent part of Québec, encased in concrete beneath the Literary and Historical Society, helping prop up the venerable Anglophone institution. Indeed, Renaud’s life was a mother lode of irony. Like the time he’d dug for Champlain on live television only to break through into the basement of a Chinese restaurant. Since Champlain had spent much of his life trying to find China it seemed, well, ironic. Or the time Renaud had opened a sealed coffin, once again convinced it was Champlain, only to have the pressurized contents explode into the atmosphere in a plumb of missionary fervor. The Jesuit inside, turned to dust, was sent to the heavens, immortal. Though not the sort of immortality he’d prayed for or expected. The priest tumbled back to earth in raindrops, to join the food chain and end up in the breast milk of the native women he’d tried to wipe out.

Renaud himself had narrowly escaped a similar fate, coming within hours of forming the foundation of the Literary and Historical Society.