A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12) - Louise Penny Page 0,119
held his steady gaze while conversation flowed around and past them.
“Do you know how it ends?” she asked quietly
“This?” he whispered, nodding toward Gélinas.
“No, the poem, you moron.”
He grimaced and thought for a moment.
“It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover,” he said haltingly, struggling to remember. “And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds—”
“And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.” Ruth finished the poem. “That’s how it ends.”
There was a long pause while they locked eyes.
“I know what I’m doing,” said Armand.
“And I know an epitaph when I hear it.”
“You said that the cadets are a crowd of faults. You think so?”
“Don’t know about them,” said Ruth. “But I know for sure you are. Bacon?”
Gamache took the platter, which was empty. She was demanding, not offering.
“I have a question for you, Ruth,” said Reine-Marie from down the table. “I can’t find anything in the archives from the First World War. Any idea what happened to all that material? There must have been a lot.”
“Why does everyone think I know everything?”
“We don’t,” said Gabri.
“Well, I knew about Roof Trusses. No one else here did.”
“What do you know about it?” asked Paul Gélinas.
But Ruth was ignoring him, except to mumble something that sounded like “shithead.” So Myrna jumped into the cavernous silence that had opened up.
“The reason you can’t find it is that it isn’t called Roof Trusses anymore. The name was changed some time ago.”
“To what?”
“Notre-Dame-de-Douleur,” said Gabri.
“Our Lady of Pain?” asked Gélinas.
Armand sat back in his chair. “Or it could be Our Lady of Grief.”
“It’s not there anymore,” said Ruth. “It died.”
“Can’t think the name helped,” said Gabri.
“Can you show us on a map?” asked Gamache.
“Have you not been listening, Miss Marple?” asked Ruth. “It’s not on a map. It’s gone.”
“Thank you for clarifying that,” said Armand, with exaggerated courtesy. “I did just manage to grasp it. But can you show us where the village once was?”
“I suppose.”
“Can we get back to the archives?” asked Reine-Marie. “Any idea where all the material on the Great War might’ve gone?”
“Do you know,” said Myrna slowly, “I do have an idea. Didn’t the historical society put on a special retrospective at the Legion in Saint-Rémy a few years back?”
“That’s right,” said Clara. “In 2014, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the start of the war.”
“So where’s all that material now?” asked Olivier.
“Damnatio memoriae,” said Reine-Marie.
Like Three Pines. Like Roof Trusses and Notre-Dame-de-Douleur, the war to end all wars had been banished from memory.
* * *
Armand and Reine-Marie walked Ruth home after dinner. Olivier and Gabri offered, but the Gamaches felt the need for fresh air, and distance from Paul Gélinas. They both hoped he’d be asleep by the time they returned.
The cadet Nathaniel was sitting on the sofa in Ruth’s living room, reading. He sprang up as though kicked in the derriere when he heard them come in.
“Sir,” he said.
“No need to call me sir,” said Ruth. “Sit.”
Nathaniel sat.
“No, I meant them.” She pointed to Armand and Reine-Marie, who also sat smartly.
Reine-Marie turned to Nathaniel. “What’re you reading?”
“A book I found on the table.”
He showed it to them.
“We have that same book,” said Armand.
“Exactly the same book,” said Reine-Marie. “That’s ours.”
“Oh.”
“Come here,” commanded Ruth from the kitchen.
And they did.
She’d found a worn old map of the area and spread it out on her white plastic table. A notebook with her crablike scribbling was open, as it always was, beside a curdling cup of tea.
Armand recognized the cup. It was theirs.
Ruth believed in precycling. An evolution on recycling. She made use of things before people threw them out.
“We’re looking up Roof Trusses,” Armand said to Nathaniel, who was studying the map with excruciating earnestness.
“But we already tried,” said the cadet, looking up. “It’s not there, remember?”
“Why didn’t you ask me?” demanded Ruth.
“Wh— ah— um.”
“The future of the Sûreté?” Ruth asked Armand.
“He didn’t ask you, Ruth,” said Reine-Marie kindly, with patience, “because he thinks you’re a crazy old woman.”
“I do not,” said Nathaniel, turning very red, then very white.
Ruth stood there, duck feathers on her pilled sweater, with Rosa muttering obscenities in her flannel nest beside the stove.
And Ruth laughed. Reaching out her hand to Reine-Marie to steady herself.
Nathaniel took a small step behind the Commander. Now she looked like a crazy old woman.
“Well, I suppose you’re right,” Ruth said, finally getting some control over herself. “But I’m happy. Are you?”
The young man, practically peeking out from behind Gamache, colored.
“Are you happy, Ruth?” asked Reine-Marie, touching her thin arm.