“Where else would it be?”
Emile Comeau nodded. It was a relief to see his friend so interested. When Armand and Reine-Marie had arrived a week before it took Emile a day to adjust to the changes in Gamache. And not just the beard, and the scars, but he seemed weighed down, leaden and laden by the recent past. Now, Gamache was still thinking of the past, but at least it was someone else’s, not his own. “Did you get to the letters?”
“I did, and have some to send back,” Gamache retrieved the parcel of correspondence. Hesitating for a moment, he made up his mind and took one out. “I’d like you to read this.”
Emile sipped his wine and read, then began laughing. He handed the letter back to Gamache.
“That Ruth clearly has a crush on you.”
“If I had pigtails she’d be pulling them,” smiled Gamache. “But I think you might know her.
Gamache quoted.
“That Ruth?” asked Emile. “Ruth Zardo? The poet?” And then he finished the astonishing poem, the work now taught in schools across Quebec.
The two men were quiet for a moment, staring into the mumbling fire, lost in their own thoughts of love and loss, of damage done beyond repair.
“I thought she was dead,” said Emile at last, spreading pate on the chewy bread.
Gamache laughed. “Gabri introduced her to Reine-Marie as something they found when they dug up the basement.”
Emile reached for the letter again. “Who’s this Gabri? A friend?”
Gamache hesitated. “Yes. He lives in that little village I told you about. Three Pines.”
“You’ve been there a few times, I remember. Investigating some murders. I tried to find the village on a map once. Just south of Montreal you said, by the border with Vermont?”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” Emile continued. “I must have been blind, because I couldn’t see it.”
Gamache nodded. “Somehow the mapmakers missed Three Pines.”
“Then how do people find it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it suddenly appears.”
Gamache laughed. “The best
Emile read through them while Gamache sipped his wine and ate cheese and baguette, relaxing in the room as familiar and comfortable as his own.
“All from that Gabri man,” said Emile at last, patting the small pile of letters beside him. “How often does he write?”
“Every day.”
“Every day? Is he obsessed with you? A threat?” Emile leaned forward, his eyes suddenly keen, all humor gone.
“No, not at all. He’s a friend.”
“It was a case I investigated last autumn, over the Labor Day weekend. A body was found in Olivier’s bistro in Three Pines. The victim had been hit once on the back of the head, killed.”
“Once?”
His mentor had immediately picked up on the significance of that. A single, catastrophic blow. It was extremely rare. A person, if hit once, was almost certainly hit often, the murderer in a rage. He’d rain blow after blow on his victim. Almost never did they find just one blow, hard enough to kill. It meant someone was filled with enough rage to power a terrible blow, but enough control to stop there. It was a frightening combination.
“The victim had no identification, but we finally found a cabin hidden in the woods, where he lived and where he’d been murdered. Emile, you should have seen what was in there.”
Emile Comeau had a vivid imagination, fed by decades of grisly discoveries. He waited for Gamache to describe the terrible cabin.
“It was filled with treasure.”
“Treasure?”
“I know,” smiled Gamache, seeing Emile’s face. “We weren’t expecting it either. It was unbelievable. Antiques and artifacts. Priceless.”
He had his mentor’s full attention. Emile sat forward, his lean hands holding each other, relaxed and alert. Once a hunter of killers, always that, and he could smell blood. Everything Gamache knew about homicide he’d learned from this man. And more besides.
