Bury Your Dead

Yes, thought Elizabeth, going back to reading, best not to underestimate the English.

“I was also remembering 1966.”

Elizabeth lowered her paper.

“What do you mean?”

“But you remember, Elizabeth. You were there. I was telling Tom about it just a week or so ago.”

Elizabeth looked over at their minister, so young and vibrant. Laughing with Porter, charming the prickly old man. He hadn’t even been born in 1966 but she remembered it as though it was yesterday.

The thugs arriving. The Quebec flag waving. The insults. Maudits Anglais. Tetes Carre and worse. The singing outside the Literary and Historical Society. Gens du Pays. The separatist anthem, with such achingly beautiful words, hurled as an insult at the building and to the frightened Anglos inside.

Then the attack, the separatists racing through the doors and up the sweeping staircase, into the library itself. Into the very heart of the Lit and His. Then the smoke, the books on fire. She’d run, trying to stop them, trying to put out the fires, pleading with them to stop. In her perfect French, appealing to them. Porter and Mr. Blake and Winnie and others, trying to stop it. The smoke, the shouting, the breaking glass.

She’d looked over and seen Porter breaking the fine leaded glass windows, windows that had been in place for centuries, now shattered. And she saw him tossing books out, at random. Handfuls, armfuls. And Mr. Blake joining him. While the separatists burned the books, the Anglos threw them out the windows, their covers splaying as though trying to take flight.

Winnie, Porter, Ken, Mr. Blake and others, saving their history before saving themselves.

Yes. She did remember.

Armand Gamache got home just in time for Henri’s dinner then they went for a walk. The streets of Quebec were dark, but they were also clogged with revelers celebrating Carnaval. Rue St-Jean had been closed and filled with entertainment. Choirs, jugglers, fiddlers.

Man and dog wove in and out of the crowds, stopping now and then to appreciate the music, or to people watch. It was one of Henri’s favorite things, after the Chuck-it. And bananas. And dinner time. Lots of people stopped and made a fuss of the young shepherd with the unnaturally large ears. Gamache, beside him, might as well have been a lamppost.

Henri lapped up the attention, then they went home where the Chief Inspector glanced at the clock. Past five. He made a call.

“Oui allo?”

“Inspector Langlois?”

“Ah, Chief Inspector, I was just about to call you with an update.”

“Any news?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. You know what these things are like. If we don’t find someone immediately then it becomes a slog. This is a slog. I’m just over at Augustin Renaud’s home.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t want to come, would you? It’s not far from where you are.”

“I’d love to see it.”

“Bring your reading glasses and a sandwich. And a couple of beers.”

“That bad?”

“Unbelievable. I don’t know how people live like this.”

Gamache got the address, played with Henri for a few minutes, wrote a note for Emile, then left. On the way he stopped at Paillard, the marvelous bakery on rue St-Jean, and at a depanneur for beer then headed up rue Ste-Ursule, pausing to check the address he’d been given, unconvinced he had it right.

But no. There it was. 9? rue Ste-Ursule. He shook his head. 9?.

It would figure that Augustin Renaud would live there. He lived a marginal life, why not in a fractional home? Gamache walked down the short tunnel and into a small courtyard. Knocking, he waited a moment then entered.

He’d been in homes of every description in his thirty years of investigating crime. Hovels, glass and marble trophy homes, caves even. He’d seen hideous conditions, and uncovered hideous things and yet he was constantly surprised by how people lived.

But Augustin Renaud’s home was exactly as Armand Gamache had imagined it would be. Small, cluttered, papers, journals, books piled everywhere. It was certainly a fire hazard, and yet the Chief had to admit he felt more at home here than in the glass and marble wonders.

“Anybody here?” he called.

“Through here. In the living room. Or maybe it’s the dining room. Hard to say.”

Gamache followed the trail cleared, like snow, through the paper and found Inspector Langlois bent over a desk reading. He looked up and smiled.

“Champlain. Every single scrap of paper’s about Champlain. I didn’t think this much had been written about the man.”

Gamache picked up a magazine from the top of a stack, an old National Geographic detailing the first explorations of what is now New England. There was a reference to Champlain, whose name was on Lake Champlain in Vermont.

“My people are going through it all slowly,” said Langlois. “But I estimate it will take forever.”

“Would you like some help?”