“What’s it to us?” asked Huifen. “We might not have been there, but we’re all working together.”
“No, we’re not,” said Nathaniel. “You left me on the side of the road. You got in the car and were about to drive away.”
“No, I wasn’t,” said Jacques. “I just turned it on to get heat and to hurry you up.”
“I wasn’t slow, I was still looking for Roof Trusses and you gave up, you lazy shit.”
“You little piece of crap—” Jacques leaned toward Nathaniel, who jerked away. But Huifen stopped Jacques with a hand to his arm.
Amelia noticed the subtle gesture and not for the first time wondered at the power this small woman held over the large man. And, not for the first time, wondered just how much influence she did have over Jacques.
Huifen could stop him from doing something, but could she also get him to act?
“You’re just afraid to admit you were wrong,” said Amelia.
“I’m not afraid. Of anything.” Jacques glared at Amelia. “How many times do I have to prove it?”
“Oh, you’re afraid now,” Huifen said quietly. “And you were afraid then. We all were.”
The laughter, the warmth of the bistro disappeared as the four young people stared at each other.
And then with a bang they were brought back to the bistro, as the front door slammed shut.
Commander Gamache and Deputy Commissioner Gélinas had just arrived, the door blowing closed behind them.
They stomped their feet, brushed wet snow off their coats, and slapped their hats against their legs. It was a singular Québec jig learned in the womb.
The snow had turned back to sleet as night fell and now it was pelting against the bistro windows and piling up on the mullions.
Gamache took off his wet coat and, after hanging it on a peg by the door, he looked around, rubbing his hands together for warmth and taking in the fires crackling away in stone hearths at either end of the beamed room. The bistro was surprisingly full for such a dreadful night. But some of the regulars were missing.
He’d left Reine-Marie, Clara, Myrna, Ruth, and Gabri at his home in front of the roaring fire in the living room, sipping red wine and going through the boxes and boxes of items found in the basement of the Royal Canadian Legion.
“Look.” Clara had picked up a picture. “There’s my place in the background.”
She showed them the photo of two young men in puttees tied from their knees to their ankles. Their uniforms were too tight and their grins, Clara knew, way too big.
They stood on the village green and between them was a farm woman in her Sunday best, awkward and bashful and full of pride, her robust sons on either side of her, their arms around her soft shoulders.
“Look at the pines,” said Gabri. “They’re the same size as the boys.”
They’d walked right by those same trees on their way to the Gamaches’ home. They now towered over the village, strong and straight and still growing.
“I thought the trees had been here for centuries,” said Myrna. “Like Ruth.”
“They have,” said Ruth. “Three pines of some sort have always been on the village green.”
She spoke with such authority that Myrna began to wonder if Ruth really was a few centuries old. Rooted and pickled. Like an old turnip.
“Maybe the originals died,” said Clara. “Is either of the boys in this photograph also in the stained-glass window?”
Clara passed the picture around.
“Hard to tell,” said Myrna. “They aren’t the main boy, but the other two are in profile.”
“Is there a name?” Gabri asked.
Ruth turned the picture over.
“Joe and Norm Valois,” she read.
The friends looked at her, their encyclopedia of loss.
Ruth nodded. “And there was a third Valois on the wall. Pierre. Probably another brother.”
“Oh, dear God,” sighed Reine-Marie, and looked away from the picture, unable to meet the eyes of Madame Valois.
“I wonder if Pierre was taking the picture,” said Gabri. “Or maybe it was their father.”
Clara took the photograph back. Was Pierre the younger son, or the oldest? Had he joined up later, to be with his brothers? Or was he already there? Did they find each other before they died? Most of the boys joined the same regiment, often the same unit. And ended up in the same battles.
Ypres, Vimy, Flanders, the Somme, Passchendaele. All familiar names now, but unknown to the three in the photo.
Clara stared and stared at the picture, with the young men and the young trees and her house, unchanged, in the background.
Had they grown up in her home? Had the telegram been delivered there? Had they fluttered out of their mother’s hand, to the flagstone floor, one after the other? Piling up. A storm of grief.
We regret to inform you …
Is that why her cottage always felt so soothing? It was used to offering comfort to the inconsolable.
Clara put the photograph on the sofa beside her and went back to the job at hand, searching through the boxes, looking for the boys in the window.
Photograph after photograph showed fields of mud where French and Belgian villages had been bombed to oblivion. Disappeared, until they were a divot in the landscape.
“Can we help?” Armand had asked when they’d changed out of their office clothes before heading to the bistro.
He’d spoken to Reine-Marie, but she was silent, staring into a shoe box on her lap. He leaned over and saw what was in there.
Telegrams.
“Look at this,” said Gabri, breaking the silence. He held a compass and was turning it this way and that. “I never did learn how to read one of these things.”
“A lost boy if there ever was one,” said Myrna, and Ruth snorted in amusement, or because she had an olive lodged in her nostril again.
“You should take up orienteering,” said Gamache as Gabri handed him the compass.
“I’m quite happy with my orientation, thank you,” said Gabri.
The glass was shattered, but as Armand turned it, the needle still found true north.
“When you stop playing with that, Clouseau, go see to your young people,” said Ruth. “They’re over at the bistro. They want to speak to you.”
“Shall we?” Gamache asked Gélinas, who nodded.
“A quiet Scotch by the fire sounds good.”
After arriving at the bistro, Gamache gestured to Olivier for two Scotches, then he and Gélinas wound their way through the tables toward the cadets. Once at the table, the cadets rose and Commander Gamache waved them to sit back down.
“Ruth said you’d like to speak to me,” Gamache said, smoothing his hair, disheveled from his tuque, and sitting down. “Is something wrong?”
The four young people looked upset. Two of them pale, two of them flushed.
“We were just arguing,” said Huifen. “Nothing new.”
“About what?” asked Gélinas, taking a seat.
“These two found Roof Trusses, or Notre-Dame-de-Doleur, or whatever it’s called,” said Huifen. “We gave up.”
“Hardly matters,” said Jacques. “There’s nothing there but snow. And maple syrup.”
“Sap,” said Nathaniel. “And there was something there.”
“What did you find?” asked Gamache, after thanking Olivier for the Scotches.
“The cemetery.” Nathaniel’s voice was eager now and his eyes bright.
“It was overgrown,” said Amelia. “But still there.”
“And?” asked Gamache.
Nathaniel shook his head. “No Antony Turcotte.”
“No Turcotte at all,” said Amelia.
Gamache sat back, surprised. Considering.
“Didn’t the toponymie man say Turcotte had been buried there?”
“Yes. It was even in the Canadian Encyclopedia.”
Gamache leaned forward again and, putting his elbows on the table, he folded his hands together and rested his chin on them. And stared out at the darkness, the snowflakes furious in the bistro light.
“Could the gravestone have fallen over or been buried?” he asked.
“It’s possible,” Amelia admitted. “But it’s not a big cemetery and most of the stones were fairly easy to find. We can go back tomorrow and take a closer look.”