Louise Penny - Bury Your Dead

“I’ll wait,” she said. She could wait.

She remembered fragments of that day. Armand hadn’t been home. Isabelle Lacoste had contacted her and explained the Chief was working on a case and couldn’t even, in fact, speak with her. Not for a day.

She’d never gone twenty-four hours without hearing her husband’s voice. Not once, in more than thirty years together. Then, next morning, at just after noon a coworker at the Bibliotheque Nationale arrived at work, her face stricken.

A bulletin on Radio-Canada. A shootout. Officers of the Sûreté among the dead, including a senior homicide officer. The race to the hospital, not listening to the reports. Too afraid. The world had collapsed to this imperative. To get there. To get there. Get there. Seeing Annie in the emergency room, just arrived.

The radio said Dad—

I don’t want to hear it.

Comforting each other. Comforting Enid Beauvoir, Jean-Guy’s wife, in the waiting room. And others arriving she didn’t know. The grotesque pantomime, strangers comforting each other while secretly, desperately, shamefully praying the other will be the one with bad news.

A paramedic appearing through the swinging doors from the emergency room, looking at them, looking away. Blood on his uniform. Annie grabbing her hand.

Among the dead.

The doctor, taking them aside, away, separating them from the rest. And Reine-Marie, light-headed, steeling herself to hear the unbearable. And then those words.

He’s alive.

She didn’t really take in the rest. Chest wound. Head wound. Pneumothorax. A bleed.

He’s alive was all she needed to know. But there was another.

Jean-Guy? she’d asked. Jean-Guy Beauvoir?

The doctor hesitated.

You must, tell us, Annie said, far more insistent than Reine-Marie expected.

Shot in the abdomen. He’s in surgery now.

But he’ll be all right? Annie demanded.

We don’t know.

My father, you said a bleed, what does that mean?

From the head wound, a bleed into his head, the doctor had said. A stroke.

Reine-Marie didn’t care. He’s alive. And she repeated that to herself now as she had every hour of every day since. It didn’t matter what the damned video showed. He’s alive.

“I don’t know what could be on it,” Gamache was saying. And that was the truth. He’d forced himself to remember, for the inquiry, but mostly what he was left with were impressions, the chaos, the noise, the shouting and screams. And gunmen, everywhere. Far more than expected.

The rapid gunshots. Concrete, wood exploding from the bullets all around. Automatic weapons fire. The unfamiliar feel of his tactical vest. An assault weapon in his hands. The people in his sights. The report as he fired. Aiming to kill.

Scanning for gunmen, issuing orders. Keeping order even in the storm.

Seeing Jean-Guy fall. Seeing others fall.

He woke at night with those images, those sounds. And that voice.

“I’ll find you in time. Trust me.”

“I do. I believe you, sir.”

“I’ll be home tomorrow,” Gamache said to Reine-Marie.

“Be careful.”

That was also something she never said before. Before all this happened. She’d thought it, he knew, every time he left for work, but never said it. But now she said it.

“I will. I love you.” He hung up, pausing to gather himself. In his pocket he felt the bottle of pills. His hand went to it, closing over it.

He closed his eyes.

Then taking his empty hand from his pocket he started calling the officers who’d survived, and the families of those who hadn’t.

He talked to their mothers, their fathers, their wives and a husband. In the background he could hear a young child asking for milk. Over and over he called, and listened to their rage, their pain, that someone could release a video of this event. Not once did they blame him, though Armand Gamache knew they could.

“Are you all right?”

Gamache looked up as Émile Comeau lowered himself into the seat opposite.

“What’s happened?” Émile asked, seeing the look on Gamache’s face.

Gamache hesitated. For the first time in his life he was tempted to lie to this man who had lied to him.

“Why did you say the Société Champlain meets at one thirty when it clearly meets at one?”

Émile paused. Would he lie again? Gamache wondered. But instead the man shook his head.

“I’m sorry about that Armand. There were things we needed to discuss before you came. I thought it was better.”

“You lied to me,” said Gamache.

“It was just half an hour.”

“It was more than that, and you know it. You made a choice, chose a side.”

“A side? Are you saying the Champlain Society is on a different side than you?”

“I’m saying we all have loyalties. You’ve made yours clear.”

Émile stared. “I’m sorry, I should never have lied to you. It won’t happen again.”

“It already has,” said Gamache getting to his feet and putting down a hundred dollars for the water and the use of the quiet table by the fireplace. “What did Augustin Renaud say to you?”

Émile got to his feet too. “What do you mean?”

“SC in Renaud’s journals. I’d taken it to mean an upcoming meeting with someone, maybe Serge Croix. A meeting he’d never make because he was murdered. But I was wrong. SC was the Société Champlain, and the meeting was for today at one. Why did he want to meet the Society?”

Émile stared, stricken, but said nothing.

Gamache turned and strode down the long corridor, his phone buzzing again and his heart pounding.

“Wait, Armand,” he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Émile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.

But not today. Gamache stopped.

“You’re right. Renaud wanted to meet with us,” said Émile, catching up to Gamache as he retrieved his parka from the coat check. “He said he’d found something. Something we wouldn’t like but he was willing to bury, if we gave him what he wanted.”

“And what was that?”

“He wanted to join the Société and have all the credibility that went with it. And when the coffin was found he wanted us to admit he’d been right all along.”

“That was all?”

“That’s it.”

“And did you give it to him?”

Émile shook his head. “We decided not to meet him. No one believed he’d actually found Champlain, and no one believed he’d found anything compromising. It was felt that having Augustin Renaud in the Société would cheapen it. He was blackballed.”

“An elderly man comes to you wanting acceptance, just acceptance, and you turn him away?”

“I’m not proud of it. That’s what we needed to discuss privately. I wanted them to tell you everything and said if they didn’t I would. I’m so sorry Armand. I made a mistake. It’s just that I knew it couldn’t matter to the investigation. No one believed Renaud. No one.”

“Someone did. They killed him.”

The meeting of the Société Champlain had been filled with elderly Québécois men. And what held them together as a club? Certainly their fascination with Champlain and the early colony, but did that explain a lifetime’s loyalty? Was it more than that?

Samuel de Champlain wasn’t simply one more explorer, he was the Father of Québec, and as such he’d become a symbol for the Québécois of greatness. And freedom. Of New Worlds and new countries.

Of sovereignty. Of separation from Canada.