Page 14

It had been a profoundly satisfying moment when the two men had, through the crowd, locked eyes.

And then it was over.

Or not.

“We need to speak to him,” said Gamache, his face grim as Lacoste handed him a napkin.

“Lauzon? Why?” she asked, watching as Armand absently brushed icing sugar off his sweater. “He just keeps denying everything.”

“Still, we need to try. And—”

“Dear God, I’m begging you,” said Jean-Guy, handing Isabelle a napkin and indicating a smear of chocolate from her glazed doughnut on her cheek. “Don’t say it.”

“—we need to go back to this lake. The last one Charles visited. See why he was there.”

“Easy for you, your doctor forbids you to fly.” Jean-Guy turned to Isabelle. “I guess he means you.”

Beauvoir would rather sit with Ruth in her rat’s nest of a living room, listening to her recite her own poetry—

You were a moth

brushing against my cheek

in the dark

I killed you

not knowing

you were only a moth,

with no sting.

—than get back into another float plane, after what had happened last time.

“There aren’t any settlements on the lake,” said Armand. “No industry, nothing. As far as we can tell, it’s pristine. So what was Charles’s interest in it? Why did he return there several times, including just days before he was killed?”

He tapped the map and stared at the body of water. He wished he could sit on the shore and stare across the lake to the untouched forests. He’d take off his boots, roll up his slacks, and dangle his bare feet in the fresh cold water, and try to figure out what Charles Langlois saw in that peaceful setting that might have cost him his life.

Instead, he looked at Isabelle, who nodded.

“D’accord, patron,” she said.

She was looking forward to going, though she would never tell Jean-Guy that. To land on some remote body of water, like a dragonfly. To see something as yet unspoiled. She wished she could take her children. To show them what the world had been like. Should still be like. If not for the plague that was humanity.

“It’s getting cold down here,” said Gamache. “Let’s go.”

It had, in fact, never been warm in the church basement, but now the cold had crept into his bones, magnified by uncertainty and fear.

They had a problem.

“Where to?” asked Isabelle as they followed the Chief out of St. Thomas’s.

While he didn’t hear her question, Jean-Guy did. “Guess.”

The three investigators sat in armchairs by the large open fire of the bistro, feeling the chill slide off them. They hadn’t realized how cold they were until they came into the warmth.

Though the mist had long since burned off, revealing a bright blue sky, there was indeed a nip, even a bite, in the air.