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He wondered how long it would be before little Honoré or even Idola . . .
“So, speak,” said Ruth.
“I meant you speak, I listen. How well do you know Abigail Robinson?”
The question surprised Ruth, and that wasn’t easy to do.
“I see you’ve decided to start with a stupid question. Perhaps to set the bar low. What in the world makes you think I know her? I’ve never met her. We didn’t talk last night. Or ever. Have you been harvesting my weeds?”
“And Debbie Schneider?” he asked.
“The woman who was killed.” Ruth paused. She never took death, especially violent death, lightly. Perhaps she found it sobering, he thought, being one insult away from it herself.
Her rheumy eyes caught the reflection of the fire, and he saw, as he always did, intelligence burning bright.
“No. I didn’t speak with her either. I spent most of the night talking with Stephen.”
“Did you see anything that, given what happened, makes you wonder?”
Armand knew that while she claimed to be oblivious to others, it was an act. Ruth Zardo was keenly aware of others. Their presence and their feelings.
Whether she cared how people felt was another matter. But little escaped her. And most was rendered into poetry.
Long dead and buried in another town
My mother isn’t finished with me yet.
Yes, he thought, as he watched her think, it took a special gift to write about the personal, and yet touch a near universal experience. He knew that his own parents, long dead and buried in another town, informed a lot of who he was and what he did.
He thought that was probably true of most people.
“I noticed the tension between that Robinson woman and the Asshole Saint,” said Ruth. “What were they talking about?”
“It was an exchange of insults.”
“Damn. And I missed it. Were they good?”
“Well, she likened him to Ewen Cameron.”
Ruth’s face hardened. “How did Dr. Gilbert take that?”
“He shrugged it off. Said it was a predictable insult. Anyone who wants to try to undermine a McGill medical grad throws Cameron at them. What is it?”
“Nothing. I knew a local woman, a few years older than me, who was apparently one of his subjects. Just rumor.” She paused. “He was a monster, of course.”
“Yes.”
Armand felt inside his pocket and, bringing out what looked like a campaign button, he placed it on Ruth’s scotch table.
“What’s that?” she demanded, staring at it.
“It’s being sold at Professor Robinson’s events, to raise money for her campaign.”
Before the shots had been fired and the gym had descended into near pandemonium, he’d considered buying one of the buttons from the concession, to show to Ruth. But he couldn’t bring himself to give any money, however small, to that cause.
He’d found two of them on the floor among the other articles dropped in the rush to get out. They’d been gone over for prints and DNA. And then he’d taken them.
He watched as she picked it up. Looked at it. Then at him.
