A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12) - Louise Penny Page 0,75

multigrain. And various beers and soft drinks.

When they’d first moved to Three Pines and noticed that villagers sometimes took picnics into the chapel, both Armand and Reine-Marie had been surprised. Perhaps even, he admitted, disapproving.

But after a couple of months, Reine-Marie had asked, “Who made the rule that people shouldn’t eat or drink in a church?”

So they’d tried it. At first it felt awkward, wrong. As though God would be offended if people took a meal in his house. Until they realized that the sacrilege wasn’t eating and talking and laughing in the chapel. It was leaving it empty.

“How did you come to see it?” Commander Gamache asked Amelia.

“How did you miss it?” she asked.

Clara was about to snap at her when she stopped, realizing it was actually a fair question. How had they missed it? Were they really so riveted on the soldier’s face that everything else faded into the background, as the young professor suggested?

And, more perplexing, was it intentional misdirection?

“I was looking at her.” Amelia waved toward Ruth. “She was going on and on about something—”

“The true nature of man and his place in the universe,” said Ruth to Charpentier. She seemed to admire his two canes to her one. “Basically, the meaning of life.”

“Of course,” said the young man.

“—so my attention drifted,” explained Amelia, “to the window behind her. That’s when I saw it.”

“Can we go somewhere else?” Jacques asked, getting up from the pew. “My ass hurts.”

“I have a pain in my ass too,” said Myrna, looking at her houseguest.

“Let’s go,” said Clara. “I’m tired, and Leo here will need to go out.”

The little lion was asleep on her lap, while Henri and Gracie slept on the floor beneath Reine-Marie’s pew.

Once outside, Amelia heard the two women pleading in the darkness, “Pee. Poop.”

She stood on the road, waiting. Her back to the chapel. To the window.

“Pee. Poop.”

When asked how she came to see the map, she hadn’t been completely truthful. While everyone else was drawn to the soldier boy’s face, she’d been repelled by it.

His terror.

But mostly what gave her the creeps, and made her turn away, was the look of forgiveness on his young face.

And so, unlike the others, she’d been free to, forced to, stare at other parts of the window.

That’s when she’d seen the map.

Finally, his business done, Leo was picked up by Clara, who handed a small, warm bag to Amelia.

“Let’s go home.”

* * *

Once home, Armand showed Hugo Charpentier to his room on the main floor, and the shower, while he himself changed and Reine-Marie put the kettle on and rustled up some dinner.

Twenty minutes later, Charpentier came out in his dressing gown, smelling of fresh soap and rubbing his dull brown hair.

Gamache was in the living room, in front of the fire. Their dinner of poached salmon and asparagus on foldout tables in front of them.

“Waiting for me?” Charpentier asked. “Where’s Madame Gamache?”

“I asked her to join us, but she’s taken a tray to the bedroom. She wanted to leave us alone to talk.”

“We have that much to talk about?”

“I think we do. Don’t you? Wine?”

“Please, patron.”

There weren’t many whom Hugo Charpentier called patron, but Monsieur Gamache was one.

He poured them each a glass of white.

“Why are those students here?” Charpentier asked.

Armand Gamache had been waiting for just that question.

“They were the four who were closest to Professor Leduc. Cadets Cloutier and Laurin are in their final year and have been his protégés for almost three years now.”

“You think they’ve been infected,” said Charpentier. “Too close, for too long, to the plague that was Leduc.”

Gamache didn’t disagree.

“The other two are freshmen. Leduc’s newest protégés.”

“Why did he choose them?”

“I don’t know. We might never know.”

“Oh, I think we suspect, don’t you? Cadet Smythe is Anglo and gay and too eager to please. A disastrous combination in the hands of someone like Leduc. And the other? The Goth? Cadet Choquet? You only have to look at her to see the wounds. A man like Leduc crawls in through hurts like that.”

The tactician studied Gamache.

“Now the question, Commander, is whether you brought them here for their own good or to protect the rest of the student body? Did you bring possible victims to your village, or the killer?”

“Recently, at one of the soirées, I gave them the exercise of investigating that map,” said Gamache, choosing not to answer the question directly. “To hone their investigative skills. This morning, I told them that a copy of it was found in Leduc’s bedside table,