Jean-Guy was kneeling on the grass, trying to twist a thick rope through a hole in a piece of wood. He and his father-in-law were making a swing, to be hung from the branch of the oak tree at the far end of the garden.
Honoré was with them, beside his father on the grass. Every now and then, his grandfather would pick him up and bob him slightly, up and down, whispering to him.
“Really,” said Jean-Guy, “don’t feel you need to help.”
“I am helping,” said Armand. “Aren’t I?” he asked Honoré, who really didn’t care.
Gamache strolled around, whispering to his grandson.
“What’re you saying?” asked Jean-Guy. “Dear God, tell me it’s not Ruth’s poetry.”
“Non. A. A. Milne.”
“Winnie the Pooh?”
Reine-Marie, grand-maman, read Honoré to sleep with the stories of Christopher Robin, and Pooh, and Piglet, and the Hundred Acre Wood.
“Sort of. It’s a poem by A. A. Milne,” said Armand. He turned once again to the infant in his arms and whispered, “When We Were Very Young.”
Jean-Guy paused in his task of cramming the large rope through the too-small hole on one side of the seat, and watched.
“What’re you going to say on the witness stand?”
“About?”
“You know what about.”
The lavender had made him ask. Excessive calm. Contentment. It had made him either brave or foolhardy.
Beauvoir stood up, wiped his sleeve across his forehead and picked up his lemonade from the table. When Gamache didn’t answer, Beauvoir shot a quick glance back toward the house. His wife, Annie, and her mother, Reine-Marie, were sitting on the back porch with their own lemonades, talking.
Even though he knew they couldn’t hear them, he lowered his voice.
“The root cellar. The bat. What we discovered.”
Armand thought for a moment, then handed Honoré back to his father.
“I’ll tell them the truth,” he said.
“But you can’t. That’ll blow the whole thing. Not just the chance of a conviction in the murder of Katie Evans, but the entire operation of the past eight months. We’ve put everything into it. Everything.”
He saw Annie glance his way and realized he’d raised his voice slightly.
Modulating it again, he rasped, “If you tell the truth, they’ll know we know, and it’ll be over. We’re so close. It all hinges on that. All our work will be for nothing, if you tell the truth.”
Jean-Guy knew he didn’t have to tell Gamache that. He was the architect of the plan, after all.
Beauvoir felt Honoré’s tiny hand grasp his T-shirt, and make a fist. And he smelled the baby powder. And felt the soft, soft skin of his son. It was even more intoxicating than lavender.
And Jean-Guy knew why Armand had handed the child back to his father. So that the infant, his grandson, wouldn’t be tainted by the lie he’d just been forced to tell.
“It’ll be all right, Jean-Guy,” said Armand, holding his son-in-law’s gaze before his eyes shifted and softened, as they rested on Honoré. He leaned toward the child. “It isn’t really / Anywhere! / It’s somewhere else / Instead! Isn’t that right?”
“And now it is now,” came a voice over the garden fence just ahead of the head. Gray and lined, though the eyes were bright. “And the dark thing is here.”
“You’re not kidding,” said Beauvoir, then said to Honoré, “It’s a Heffalump.”
The two men and a baby looked at the old poet.
“More like Eeyore, don’t you think?” said Gamache. “With just a hint of Pooh.”
“Depending on how you spell it,” said Jean-Guy, and saw Ruth’s mouth twitch slightly into a smile.
She’d heard them talking, that much was clear. And now she stared, like some old witch in the Hundred Acre Wood who gathered secrets like honeypots.
Their apparent amusement was for Honoré’s sake. The truth was, this was the worst possible turn of events. Ruth was one of the few people who might put it all together. Who might be able to work out what they’d discovered in the church basement. It was, after all, something she’d said in that first interview after the murder that had started them down this path.
Fortunately, even if she guessed, she couldn’t possibly know why it was vital that it be kept a secret.
She looked from one to the other, then her eyes too came to rest on the child she called Ré-Ré. Ray-Ray.
To Jean-Guy’s apparent annoyance, but actual relief, the nickname was beginning to stick, and most people in Three Pines now called him Ray-Ray. Honoré being a bit formal. A bit much for