A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12) - Louise Penny Page 0,128
disk to her husband.
“Girls?” asked Huifen.
“Our granddaughters,” said Reine-Marie. “Florence and Zora.”
“Zorro?” asked Jacques, an earnest expression on his face.
But a stern look from Gamache wiped it away.
“Zora,” he corrected. “She’s named after my grandmother.”
“Not really your grandmother, though,” said Gélinas. “Wasn’t she one of the DPs after the Second World War?”
Gamache looked at him. The message, once again, was clear. Paul Gélinas had done his homework. And the home he’d worked on belonged to Gamache.
“DPs?” asked Nathaniel.
“Displaced persons,” said Myrna. “Those without a home or family. Many of them from the concentration camps. Liberated but with no place to go.”
“My father sponsored Zora to come to Canada,” Armand explained.
He knew he might as well tell them. After all, it wasn’t a secret. And it wasn’t going to remain private for long. Gélinas would see to that.
“She came to live with us,” said Gamache, turning on the receiver and the DVD. “We became her family.”
“And she became yours,” said Gélinas. “After your parents died.”
Gamache turned around and faced Gélinas. “Oui.”
“Zora,” said Reine-Marie with fondness. “The name means ‘the dawn.’ The beginning of light.”
“And she was,” said Armand. “Now, are we sure we want to watch Mary Poppins? We also have Cinderella and The Little Mermaid.”
“I’ve never seen Mary Poppins,” said Amelia. “Have you?”
The other cadets shook their heads.
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” said Myrna. “You’ve never seen Mary Poppins?”
“That’s something quite atrocious,” said Clara. “Okay, Armand. Turn it on.”
“Count me out,” said Olivier, getting up. “That nanny gives me the creeps.”
As the establishing shot of 1910 London appeared, Olivier disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, Armand arrived to make more coffee. He found Olivier in one of the armchairs by the fireplace. The small television was on and he wore headphones.
“What’re you watching?”
Olivier almost leapt out of his skin.
He shoved the headphones off his ears. “Jeez, Armand. You almost killed me.”
“Sorry. What’s on?”
He stood behind Olivier’s chair and watched a very young Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in a bar.
“The Deer Hunter.”
“You’re kidding,” said Armand. “Mary Poppins scares you, but The Deer Hunter is okay?”
Olivier smiled. “Talking about Clairton reminded me how great this movie is.”
“Why?”
“Well, I think it’s the bond—”
“No, I mean, why Clairton?”
“It’s the town the main characters come from. There, that’s it.”
He waved at the screen as a shot of a steel town in Pennsylvania came on.
“I’ll leave you to it.”
Olivier watched Armand walk back into the living room and the world of Mary Poppins, where the father was singing “The Life I Lead.”
On his screen, Robert De Niro was threatening a barroom brawl with a Green Beret.
* * *
Jean-Guy’s wipers were taking the sleet off the windshield as fast as they could.
He liked driving. It was a chance to listen to music and think. And at the moment he was thinking about those fingerprints, and the blatant contradiction in what his father-in-law had said.
The prints were his. But he had never touched the gun.
The key to the crime was in the prints.
Did he mean Amelia Choquet?
Despite Annie’s protests, and his own gut feeling, Jean-Guy retained a fragment of doubt. Could the Goth Girl be Gamache’s daughter? She didn’t look at all like either Annie or her brother, Daniel. But maybe she did, and he was simply distracted by all the accoutrements. The tattoos and piercings disguising who and what she really was.
Could Amelia, who perhaps not coincidently shared a name with Gamache’s mother, be the result of a momentary lapse twenty years earlier?
But if he knew who she was, why did Gamache admit her to the academy?
Maybe he didn’t know Amelia existed until he saw the application, saw the birth mother, saw the birth date. Saw the name. And put it all together.
And then he’d want to see the girl.
And after the crime, he’d want to protect her. The daughter he never knew he had.
Did Gamache think she killed Serge Leduc? And was he shielding her, intentionally muddying the investigation by admitting the prints were his, when they weren’t?
Misdirection. Another whale.
All truth with malice in it.
The wipers swished the slush, clearing the windshield. And despite the mess, Jean-Guy felt he was seeing clearer. Getting closer.
Suppose he took a different tack? Suppose Gamache was telling the truth. The prints were his, even though he’d never touched the gun.
How could that be?
Swish, swish, swish.
Jean-Guy was almost there, he could feel the answer just ahead, in the darkness.
Swish, swish— He slowed the car and pulled off into a service station. And there he sat in the idling vehicle, the sleet