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“Who do you think?”
They crouched down and fell silent. The doorknob jiggled.
“There’s a slight flaw to this strategy,” whispered Reine-Marie, hiding behind Myrna, as was Clara.
“Hello?? Bonjour??” could be heard from the front hall. Then, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“You never lock your door,” said Myrna, standing up from where she’d been taking refuge behind the exuberant arrangement of autumn flowers and branches and weeds she’d cut down that morning and brought with her.
“There you are,” said Ruth. “I thought for a moment I’d have to make new friends.”
“Out of what?” asked Clara.
“What did she make us out of?” asked Reine-Marie.
“Stone and wishful thinking,” said Ruth, whose hearing was startlingly acute. “Your husband said I wasn’t invited to Sunday lunch. Been replaced by a mass murderer.”
“Sounds like a fair trade,” said Clara. Her smile froze when she looked out the window and realized the mad poet was, for once, telling the truth.
“What’s happened, Armand?” demanded Evelyn, when he’d hung up and rejoined her. “And what the hell is that man doing here?”
They were two separate questions, though Gamache knew they intersected. Somehow. The dead man and the luncheon guest.
The former political leader was walking down the path to the Gamache home, to join them for Sunday lunch. He was still in handcuffs, and Jean-Guy had a firm grip on his arm.
While Beauvoir did not think his prisoner would make a run for it, he knew that people did strange things. And this man’s actions in the past went far beyond predictable.
Armand chose to focus on the second of Evelyn’s questions. The one he was prepared for.
“I don’t think Marcus Lauzon is the Black Wolf.”
The look on Chief Inspector Tardiff’s face was exactly the same as Jeanne Caron’s had been the day before, when he’d dropped the same bomb on her.
“Of course he is. For fuck’s sake, it was proven in court, beyond any doubt.” Her voice was rising, so that others in the bistro, including the former monk turned server, turned to look. “And now you release him from prison? Have you lost your mind?”
She knew she should rein it in, but the shock had shaken her. What had this silent, still, still silent man found out?
Armand tilted his head to one side, his brows together. His expression puzzled.
“Désolé, Evelyn. I didn’t catch it all. But you seem angry.”
She was, in fact, incandescent. If her hair could have burst into flames, it would have.
“Why the fuck did you bring him down here? This is a huge mistake, Armand.”
Armand shrugged and shook his head. Not in boredom, not because he disagreed, but in apparent incomprehension.
“Oh, fuck it,” she muttered.
Turned out the lunch might not be as tedious as she’d thought.
As they left the bistro and made their way across the village green, Armand’s mind was not on Tardiff’s reaction to Lauzon, which was predictable, nor on the confrontation to come, but on the unexpected. The unpredicted.
The body in the bag.
How did Frederick Castonguay, who’d worked closely with their prisoner, their luncheon guest, the former Deputy Prime Minister, end up dead and buried beside that remote lake?
CHAPTER 12
