A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12) - Louise Penny Page 0,19

you got there? Is it a treasure map?”

“No, but there is a mystery about it.” He handed it to Jean-Guy. “See if you can figure out what’s strange about it.”

“I’m assuming you know the answer. Is this a test? If I solve it, the job’s mine?”

“The job is hardly a prize,” Gamache pointed out, and left Jean-Guy to study the worn and torn and dirty old thing. “And it’s yours now, like it or not.”

A while later, Jean-Guy joined Armand and Reine-Marie in the living room, only to find another worn, torn and dirty old thing on the sofa.

“Well, numbnuts, I hear Clouseau has finally asked you to be his second-in-command,” said Ruth. “I always knew you were a born number two.”

“Madame Zardo,” said Jean-Guy, making her sound like a Victorian medium. “As a matter of fact he has asked, and I’ve accepted.”

He sat beside her on the sofa and Rosa waddled onto his lap.

“Did you figure it out?” asked Gamache. “What’s strange about the map?”

“This. Three pines,” said Jean-Guy, circling his finger over the illustrated trees. “Three Pines. The village isn’t on any official map, but it’s here.”

He’d put his finger on it. And once seen, something else became obvious. All the roads, the paths, the walking trails led there. They might pass through other communities, but they ended at the three pines.

Armand nodded. Jean-Guy, with his sharp mind, had seen through the clutter to what was most extraordinary about it.

It wasn’t a map of Three Pines, but a map to it.

“How strange,” whispered Reine-Marie.

“What’s really strange isn’t that it’s on this map,” said Jean-Guy. “But that the village doesn’t appear on any other. Not even the official ones of Québec. Why is that? Why did it disappear?”

“Damnatio memoriae,” said Reine-Marie.

“Pardon?” said her son-in-law.

“It’s a phrase I came across only once,” she explained. “While going through some old documents. It was so extraordinary I remembered it, which is, of course, ironic.”

They looked at her, missing the irony.

“Damnatio memoriae means ‘banished from memory,’” she said. “Not simply forgotten, but banished.”

The four of them looked down at the first, and last, map to show their little community, before it vanished, before it was banished.

CHAPTER 6

Amelia Choquet folded her arms across her chest and leaned back at her desk. She was careful to make sure the sleeves of her uniform rode up, exposing her tattoos, and as she did she played with the stud in her tongue, shoving it up and down. Up and down. In an unmistakable display of boredom.

Then she slumped down and observed. It was what she did best. Never participating, but always watching. Closely.

At the moment she was watching the man at the front of the classroom. He was large, though not fat. More burly, she supposed. Substantial. And old enough to be her father, though her own father was even older than this man.

The professor wore a jacket and tie and flannels. He was neat, without being prissy.

He looked clean.

His voice as he spoke to the first-year students wasn’t at all lecturing, unlike many of the other professors. He was talking to them, and his attitude seemed to be that they were free to take in what he was saying, or not. It was their choice.

She clicked the stud against her teeth and the girl in front turned and shot her an annoyed look.

Amelia sneered and smiled and the girl went back to scribbling notes, apparently taking down what the professor was saying verbatim.

So far they were a week into the term and Amelia had only taken down a handful of sentences in her brand-new notebook. Though, to be honest, she was still surprised to be there at all.

She’d shown up at the Sûreté Academy the first day expecting to be turned away. Told that some mistake had been made and she didn’t belong there. Once through the door, she then expected to be ordered to remove her piercings. Not just the one through her tongue, but the ones in her nose, through her lip, her eyebrow, her cheek, all over her ears like a caterpillar. Had they known about the others, the ones they couldn’t see, she’d definitely be told to get rid of them too.

She was expecting to receive, in the weeks before the academy started, warning that dyed hair and body art would not be tolerated.

But all she’d received was a reading list and a box.

When the letter and box arrived, Amelia had locked the door to her bedroom in the rooming house where