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“Huh,” said Olivier, who’d wandered away and was looking at the pile of other things in the attic. He reached out, but Beauvoir, still on the phone, stopped him.
“What is it?” Gamache asked.
“The elephant.”
Sure enough, there was a largish brass elephant among the items behind the painting. It was about eight inches tall and ten inches long.
“What about it?” asked Gamache, joining him.
“Well, we’re missing one exactly like this.”
“You’re missing an elephant?” asked Amelia, peering around the painting, where she was dusting for prints.
“We had a guest at the B&B, and when she checked out, the elephant was gone too. It was in her room.”
“Sounds like an old Marx Brothers routine,” said Amelia.
They looked at her. How someone her age, and with her background, knew so many things was mystifying. Even Beauvoir had no idea who the Marx Brothers were, except that one of them had something to do with Communism.
“Was it wearing pajamas?” she asked, baffling Beauvoir even more.
“Is it your elephant?” Gamache asked. It was, he had to admit, a question he’d never asked in a murder investigation before. Actually, had never asked, period.
Olivier bent down but didn’t touch. “It sure looks like it, but this one has engraving on it, ours didn’t. But man, it sure looks like it. Gabri would know.”
“Can you get me the guest’s name and when they were here?” Gamache asked.
“Easily.”
From the other side of the painting they heard very soft singing. “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African explorer…”
“But how can it be ours?” asked Olivier.
“How can any of this be?” Billy asked.
“Hooray, hooray, hooray,” sang Amelia.
CHAPTER 20
The investigators were gathered in the Old Train Station. The photograph of Ruth, taken when she’d won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, glared down at them.
Jean-Guy had contacted a conservator at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montréal, who’d be arriving first thing in the morning. The painting was now safely locked away in the Incident Room along with the other items from the attic. Except the grimoire. Reine-Marie still had that.
Crime scene tape had been placed across the hole in Myrna’s wall. When asked why, since no crime had actually been committed, neither Gamache nor Beauvoir explained fully, preferring to say it was a precaution.
The autopsy report on Patricia Godin hadn’t yet arrived, but the investigators were assured it would before morning, and analysis of the Stone letter was under way at the Sûreté labs.
That too would arrive the next day.
“Come over to our place for dinner,” Gamache said to Amelia. “But first, check into the B&B. There’s a young man staying there, Sam Arsenault. I want you to get to know him. You have any marijuana on you?”
“Me? Marijuana?”
It was now legal in Canada. Gamache understood the hypocrisy of him enjoying a scotch after work but discouraging his agents from relaxing with a joint. Which he did.
“Yes, you.”
He’d consider himself lucky if all she had was a joint, though in joining homicide she’d pledged to be clean.
