Louise Penny - Bury Your Dead

“Unless Champlain had another big secret, this isn’t him.”

“What do you mean?” Gamache asked.

“It’s a woman.”

Something had changed. Jean-Guy Beauvoir could feel it. It was the way people looked at him. It was as though they’d seen him naked, as though they’d seen him in a position so vulnerable, so exposed it was all they could see now.

Not the man he really was. An edited man.

They’d seen the video, all of them. That much was obvious. He was the only one in Three Pines who hadn’t, he and maybe Ruth, who was barely out of the stone ages.

But while the people of Three Pines might know something about him, he knew something about them, something no one else knew. He knew who’d killed the Hermit.

It was late Friday afternoon. The sun had long since set and the bistro was clearing out, people heading home for dinner after a drink.

Beauvoir looked round. Clara, Peter and Myrna were sitting with Old Mundin and The Wife, who held a sleeping Charles. At another table Marc and Dominique Gilbert sipped beer while Marc’s mother, Carole, had a white wine. The Parras were there, Roar and Hanna. Their son Havoc was waiting tables.

Ruth sat alone and Gabri stood behind the bar.

The door opened and someone else blew in, batting snow off his hat and stomping his feet. Vincent Gilbert, the asshole saint, the doctor who’d been so tender with Beauvoir and so cruel with others.

“Am I late?” he asked.

“Late?” said Carole. “For what?”

“Well, I was invited. Weren’t you?”

Everyone turned to Beauvoir then to Clara and Myrna. Old and The Wife had been invited for drinks by the two women, as had the Parras. The Gilberts had come at Beauvoir’s invitation and Ruth was just part of the décor.

“Patron,” said Beauvoir, and Gabri locked the front door then closed the side entrances from the other shops.

“What’s all this about?” Roar Parra asked, looking perplexed but not alarmed. He was short and squat and powerful and Beauvoir was glad he wasn’t alarmed. Yet.

They stared at Beauvoir.

He’d quietly had a word with Gabri earlier and asked him to ask the other patrons to leave, discreetly, so that only these few remained. Outside snow was falling and beginning to blow about, visible in the glow from the homes. The cheery Christmas lights on the three pine trees on the village green bobbed in the wind. They’d be battling a small blizzard by the time they left.

Inside, it was snug and warm and though the wind and snow swirled against the windows it only increased their sense of security. Fires were lit in the hearths and while they could hear the wind outside the sturdy building never even shuddered.

Like the rest of Three Pines, and its residents, it took what was coming and remained standing. And now, together, they stared at him.

With just a touch of pity?

“OK, numb nuts, what’s all this about?” asked Ruth.

Armand Gamache sat in the library of the Literary and Historical Society marveling that a week ago he barely knew it, barely knew the people, and now he felt he knew them well.

The board had assembled one more time.

Tense, suspicious Porter Wilson at the head of the table, even if he wasn’t a natural leader. The real leader sat beside him and had all their lives, quietly running things, picking up pieces dropped and broken by Porter. Elizabeth MacWhirter, heir to the MacWhirter shipyard fortunes, a fortune long faded away until all that remained were appearances.

But appearances mattered, Gamache knew, especially to Elizabeth MacWhirter. Especially to the English community. And the truth was, they were at once stronger and weaker than they appeared.

The English community was certainly small, and diminishing, dying out. A fact lost on the Francophone majority who, despite every evidence, still saw the Anglos, if they saw them at all, as threats.

And why not, really? Many of the Anglos still saw themselves as wielding, and deserving, of power. A manifest destiny, a right conferred on them by birth and fate. By General Wolfe, two hundred years earlier on the field belonging to the farmer Abraham.

Like whites in South Africa or the Southern states who knew that things had changed, who even accepted the changes, but who couldn’t quite shake the certainty deeply, diplomatically, hidden, that they should still be in charge.

There was Winnie, the tiny librarian who loved the library and loved Elizabeth and loved her work among things and ideas no longer relevant.

Mr. Blake was there, in suit and tie. A benign older gentleman, whose home had shrunk from the entire city, to a house, and finally to this one magnificent room. And what, Gamache wondered, would someone do to defend their home?

Tom Hancock sat quietly, watching. Young, vital, wise, but not really one of them. An outsider. But that gave him clarity, he could see what was only visible from a distance.

And finally, Ken Haslam. Whose voice was either silent or shrieking.

No middle ground, a man of extremes, who either sat quietly in his chair or fought his way across a frozen river.

A man whose wife and daughter were buried in Québec but who was not considered a Québécois, as though even more could be expected.

They’d adjourned to the library once the coffin had been removed and the others had gone, leaving Émile, Gamache and the board.

Gamache looked at the board members, resting finally on Porter Wilson. Expecting an outburst, expecting a demand for information, tinged perhaps with a slight accusation of unfairness.

Instead they all simply looked at the Chief Inspector, politely. Something had changed, and Gamache knew what.

It was the damned video. They’d seen it, and he hadn’t. Not yet. They knew something he didn’t, something about himself. But he knew something they didn’t, something they wanted to know.

Well, they’d have to wait.

“You were out practicing this afternoon, I believe,” said Gamache to the Reverend Mr. Tom Hancock.

“We were,” he agreed, surprised by the topic.

“I saw you.” The Chief turned to Ken Haslam.

Haslam smiled and mouthed something Gamache couldn’t make out. There was a nodding of heads. The Chief turned to the others.

“What did Mr. Haslam just say?”

Now several faces blushed. He waited.

“Because,” he finally said, “I didn’t hear a word and I don’t think you did either.” He turned again to the upright, distinguished man. “Why do you whisper? In fact, I don’t think it can even be called a whisper.”

Gamache had spoken respectfully, quietly, without anger or accusation but wanting to know.

Haslam’s lips moved and again no one heard anything.

“He speaks—” began Tom Hancock before Gamache put up a hand and stopped him.

“I think it’s time Mr. Haslam spoke for himself, don’t you? And you, perhaps uniquely, know he can.”

Now it was the Reverend Mr. Hancock’s turn to blush. He looked at Gamache but said nothing.

Gamache leaned forward, toward Haslam. “I heard you out on the ice calling the strokes. No other crew could be heard, no other person. Just you.”

Ken Haslam looked frightened now. He opened his mouth, then shook his head, practically in tears.

“I can’t,” he said, his voice barely registering. “All my life I’ve been told to be quiet.”

“By whom?”

“Mother, Father, brothers. My teachers, everyone. Even my wife, God bless her, asked me to keep my voice down.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

The word was spoken clearly, too clearly. It wasn’t so much piercing as all enveloping, filling the space. It was a voice that carried, boomed, and drove all before it. No other voice could exist, but that one. An English voice, drowning out all others.