How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #9) - Louise Penny Page 0,90
the wooden floor, the crackle of the fire, and Henri’s groans as he stretched out at Gamache’s feet.
Armand Gamache felt he could nod off. His socks were now dry and slightly crispy, the mug of hot chocolate warmed his hands, and the heat from the stove enveloped him. Despite the urgency of their situation, he felt his lids grow heavy.
Oh, for just a few minutes, a few moments, of rest.
But there was work to be done.
Putting down his mug, he leaned forward, hands clasped together. He looked at the circle huddled around the woodstove in the tiny one-room schoolhouse. The five of them. Quints. Thérèse, Jérôme, Gilles, Armand, and Nichol.
And Nichol, he thought again. Hanging off the end. The outlier.
“What’s next?” he asked.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Next?” asked Jérôme.
He never expected it to get this far. Looking across the room at the bank of blank monitors, he knew what had to happen.
Beneath the thick sweater he felt a trickle of perspiration, as though his round body was weeping. If Three Pines was their foxhole, he was about to raise his head. Armand had given them a weapon, but it was a pointy stick against a machine gun.
He walked away from the warmth of the fire and felt the chill again as he approached the far reaches of the room. Two old, battered computers sat side-by-side, one on the teacher’s desk, the other on the table they’d dragged over. Above them, glued to the wall, was the cheerful alphabet, illustrated with bumblebees and butterflies and ducks and roses. And below that, musical notes.
He hummed it slowly, following the notes.
“Why’re you singing that?” asked Gamache.
Jérôme started a little. He hadn’t realized Armand was with him and he hadn’t realized he was humming.
“It’s that.” Jérôme pointed to the notes. “Do-re-mi is the top line, and then this song is beneath it.”
He hummed some more and then, to his surprise, Armand started quietly, slowly, singing.
“What do you do with a drunken sailor…”
Jérôme examined his friend. Gamache was staring at the music and smiling. Then he turned to Jérôme.
“… early in the morrrr … ning.”
Jérôme smiled in genuine amusement and felt some of his terror detach and drift away on the back of the musical notes and the silly words from his serious friend.
“An old sea shanty,” Gamache explained, and returned to look at the notes on the wall. “I’d forgotten that Miss Jane Neal was the teacher here, before the school was closed and she retired.”
“You knew her?”
Gamache remembered kneeling in the bright autumn leaves and closing those blue eyes. It was years ago now. Felt like a lifetime.
“I caught her killer.”
Gamache gazed again at the wall, with the alphabet and music.
“Way, hey, and up she rises…” he whispered. It felt somehow comforting to be in this room where Miss Jane Neal had done what she loved, for children she adored.
“We need to get the cable in here,” said Jérôme, and for the next few minutes, while Gilles drilled a hole in the wall to snake the cable through, Jérôme and Nichol crawled under the desks and sorted out the wires and boxes.
Gamache watched all this, marveling that they’d begun the day thirty-five thousand kilometers from any communication satellite and now they were just centimeters from that connection.
“Did you make your connection?” Thérèse Brunel asked as she joined him. She nodded toward the young agent.
Her husband and Nichol were squeezed under the desk, trying not to elbow each other. At least, Dr. Brunel was trying not to—it looked as though Agent Nichol was doing her best to shove her bony elbows into him whenever she could.
“I’m afraid not,” Gamache whispered.
“But you both made it back, Chief Inspector. That’s something.”
Gamache grinned, though without amusement. “Some victory. I didn’t gun down one of my own agents in cold blood.”
“Well, we take our victories where we can get them,” she smiled. “I’m not sure Jérôme would’ve passed up the chance.”
By now the two under the desk were openly elbowing each other.
The hole in the schoolhouse wall was completed and Gilles shoved the cable through. Jérôme grabbed it and pulled.
“I’ll take it.”
Before Jérôme knew it, Nichol had grabbed the cable from him and was attaching it to the first of the metal boxes.
“Wait.” He yanked it back. “You can’t connect it.” He gripped the cable in both hands and tried to bring his sudden panic under control.
“Of course I can.” She almost swiped it from him and might have, had Superintendent Brunel not cut in.
“Agent Nichol,” she commanded. “Get out from there.”