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The buzz in Gamache’s ears had built to a roar. He knew it was just a matter of time, perhaps moments, before he blacked out. Suffocated. He could feel the tip of the gun pressed hard against his temple and wondered what would come first. The bullet or the strangling.

His legs were growing weak. But still he didn’t struggle, though every instinct was kicking in. He knew if he grabbed at the arm around his throat, the gun would probably go off. Triggering the one thing he was desperate to avoid. More killing.

He could feel his legs going out from under him, and his vision blurring as his brain began to shut down.

He heard from far, far away a shout: “Do it!”

Do what, Gamache wondered. Shoot. Or …

“Lower your weapons,” shouted Dagenais. “He’s right. No one wins if you start shooting.”

The senior agent still hesitated. Clearly, while Dagenais’s man, he also had his own agenda. And that was to survive. And not be arrested.

Finally, he loosened his grip. Not to save Dagenais, but to save himself.

Gamache fell to his knees, gasping. His hand to his throat. His vision swam and he slumped against a desk. He heard voices but could no longer make out the words. Then hands grabbed him and dragged him to his feet.

“You all right?” Chernin asked, staring into his eyes.

“Their weapons,” he croaked. “Get their weapons.”

“We have them.”

“More. There’ll be more. On them or in their desks.”

“We have them all,” said Agent Beauvoir.

Gamache fell back against the desk. He’d clearly blacked out for a minute or so, while Chernin and Beauvoir had taken control. Propping himself up, he saw Beauvoir practically festooned with firearms.

“Well done,” rasped Gamache.

“Merci,” said Jean-Guy Beauvoir. “Patron.”

CHAPTER 9

The party for Harriet Landers was in full swing on the village green.

Multicolored lanterns had been strung and a bonfire lit. There was music and dancing and a table full of food, where Henri and Fred and Gracie and all manner of other creatures, including children, lay, looking up every time one of the revelers took a brie burger or a honey-lime chicken kabob. Or a butter tart. There was a table for alcoholic and nonalcoholic punches, and a long metal feed trough of ice with beer and wine and soft drinks in impossible shades of purple and orange.

Many of the younger children were dozing off in sleeping bags, gummy bears stuck to their hands, and faces, and hair.

“Relatives?” Gabri asked Clara, who had mustard and chocolate down her sweater.

“Apprentices.”

Those not sleeping were chasing each other around and around the outer ring of the village green, ignored by parents who tried to pretend their progeny weren’t one jelly bean away from Lord of the Flies.

Three Pines smelled of charred hot dogs and sugar from the marshmallows that had melted off sticks and plunged, sizzling, into the bonfire.

While the younger people danced to keep themselves warm in the cool late-spring evening, the older ones sat in lawn chairs drawn up to the blaze.

“I remember my own graduation party,” said Robert Mongeau, the minister at St. Thomas’s.

“From divinity school?” asked Reine-Marie.

“No, I didn’t graduate from that until just a few years ago,” he said, with a laugh. “Late to the cloth. It was from Harvard Business School.”

“Really?” said Armand.