A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15) - Louise Penny Page 0,41
flood wiping out our entire lives is that it’d take that monstrosity with it.”
* * *
Armand and Reine-Marie walked over the stone bridge. And back again. Over and back. Pausing every couple of minutes to switch on the powerful flashlight and check the level of the Rivière Bella Bella.
Then continue on.
Like guards on a lonely frontier.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Armand could barely hear his own thoughts for the sound of the water rushing below and the ice pellets hitting his coat.
What he thought about, as he walked back and forth, back and forth, was Vivienne. Out there somewhere. And Vivienne’s father. And Annie.
He tried to keep their daughter out of it, knowing how dangerous it was to personalize investigations. But perhaps his resistance was lowered by the cold, by the competing stresses, by incipient exhaustion, but he couldn’t seem to stop putting himself in Monsieur Godin’s place.
Suppose Annie were missing? And everyone he turned to for help, while nice, didn’t actually help? If he pleaded with them, begged them, and all they did was smile and offer soup?
It would be a nightmare. He’d be mad with worry.
Pausing again at the top of the bridge, he took Reine-Marie’s hand. Suddenly feeling the need for comfort.
The water in the beams of light was frothing, foaming. Like something rabid. It scudded along the lip of the shoreline. Rising faster than they’d expected. The jam, just a little way downriver, out of Three Pines, must be getting worse.
And then.
Armand heard a low hum, almost a moan, from Reine-Marie. As they watched, the Bella Bella broke up and over her banks.
It was now racing along the bottom of the sandbags.
“They’ll hold,” she said. “There’s a long way to go before the river reaches us.”
“Oui.”
Though they both knew that the problem wasn’t necessarily the height of the river but the force of it. The danger wasn’t that the water would cascade over the wall but that it would knock it down.
They’d built it two bags thick. So it shouldn’t.
But then, the Bella Bella should never have gotten this high.
A lot of things were happening that shouldn’t.
Just ask Homer Godin, who was living the great “should not be happening.”
Reine-Marie lifted her eyes and through the sleet saw the lights of St. Thomas’s Church on the hill. Where volunteers were making sure the children were sleeping soundly and not afraid. They were setting up more cots and organizing food, fresh water, generators, and composting toilets. Should the worst happen.
Then she shifted her gaze to the woods.
“Where is she, Armand?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she—”
“I don’t know.”
“But you suspect. Have you spoken to the husband?”
“This afternoon. He’s a piece of work. Sûreté’s been called to their home more than once. Alcoholic. Maybe drugs.”
“Abusive?”
“Oui.”
A buildup of trouble that had broken its banks, thought Reine-Marie. And the young woman was taken at the flood.
“She’s pregnant?”
“Oui.”
“How could someone—”
But there was no use finishing the question. And there was no answer.
They continued to pace. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Still the question rankled.
How could someone…?
“Can you make him tell you?” Reine-Marie shouted above the torrent.
“Short of putting a gun to his head or beating it out of him, no.”
In her silence, he knew what she was feeling, if not thinking.
Maybe, just this once …
Maybe in some cases it was justified. Maybe torture. Maybe beatings. Maybe even murder was justified. Sometimes.
“Situational ethics?” he asked.
“Don’t be smug,” Reine-Marie said. “We all have them. Even me. Even you.”
She was right, of course.
It was the asp at the breast of any decent cop. Any military leader. Any politician.
Any mother or father.
Any human.
Maybe. Just this once …
* * *
“I’d take Ruth,” said Olivier.
“Thank you,” said the old poet.
“Because she’s a witch and would float?” asked Clara.
“Of course,” said Olivier. “We could cling to her.”
“I’d rather drown,” said Gabri.
They turned to Billy.
“I think you’d know what I’d take,” he said.
“Your tractor?” asked Myrna.
* * *
“So that’s how you’re doing it,” Lysette Cloutier muttered as she stared at the IP address. “You shit.”
Over the fifteen years she’d worked in accounting for the Sûreté, Lysette had rarely used foul language. And rarely had she heard it.
But in homicide she’d heard, and discovered within herself, a whole new vocabulary. It was, she thought, a form of verbal violence to counter the horrific things they saw every day.
Instead of lashing out physically, they lashed out verbally.
And yet, she thought as she put more commands into her laptop, she’d rarely heard Chief Inspector Gamache swear. She tried to think if she’d ever heard him.