floor beside them, stirred, and then, with reassuring pats from Armand and Reine-Marie, they went back to sleep.
“I needed to go to the Sûreté Academy yesterday afternoon, to a meeting,” Armand whispered. “I told them not to do anything until I arrived. Then the storm hit and the phones went out, and I was worried that they’d proceed without me. But with the blizzard being so big, I knew nothing could happen. They were snowed in too.”
And he could relax. Knowing for the next number of hours, as the blizzard howled, the world was on hold. Frozen in place.
In the hectic, often frantic pace of life, there was something deeply peaceful about not being able to do anything. No Internet, no phone, no TV. No lights.
Life became simple, primal: Heat. Water. Food. Companionship.
Armand crawled out of bed, feeling the chill immediately as the warmth of the duvet slid off and the cold took hold.
Stepping over the other mattress on the kitchen floor, he fed more split logs into the fire.
Before returning to the warm bed, Armand stared out the mullioned windows into the darkness. Then bent and tucked the duvet around Reine-Marie.
As he did that, a voice, sharp and unexpected, came to him out of the darkness.
* * *
The evening before, those who weren’t snowed in dug out those who were, clearing paths from homes to the road.
Gabri and Olivier had been invited over to the Gamaches’ after they’d finished but had declined.
“Want to keep the bistro open,” Olivier explained.
“And we have unexpected guests at the B&B,” Gabri shouted into the battering wind. “Can’t get their cars out to drive home.”
“Can’t find their cars.” Olivier used his shovel to point to the burial mounds around the village green.
“Do you think we can get kids to do it? Convince them that it’s a game?” Gabri yelled into Olivier’s tuque. “Whoever digs a car out first wins a prize?”
“The prize would have to be a brain,” said Olivier.
A path had been shoveled to Ruth’s home, and Reine-Marie had knocked, but the old woman had refused to open the door.
“Come to our place for dinner,” Reine-Marie shouted through it. “Bring Rosa. We have plenty of food.”
“And drink?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t want to leave.”
“Ruth, please. You shouldn’t be alone. Come over. We have scotch.”
“I don’t know. The last bottle I had tasted strange.”
Reine-Marie could hear the fear in her voice. An old woman leaving her home to venture into a blizzard. Every survival instinct screamed no. While Ruth Zardo was not well endowed with survival instincts, she still had managed to claw her way into her eighties.
And not by walking into snowstorms.
One by one over the course of the early evening, they’d gone over to Ruth’s, clearing the fresh snow ahead of them. And one by one they’d been rebuffed.
“Okay, enough of this,” said Armand, getting up.
He grabbed a Hudson Bay blanket before heading to the door.
“What’re you going to do?” asked Reine-Marie.
“I’m going to get Ruth here, if I have to break down her door.”
“You’re going to kidnap her?” asked Myrna.
“Isn’t that against the law?” asked Reine-Marie.
“It is,” said Lucien, who had no ear for sarcasm. “Who’s this Ruth? Why’s she so important?”
“She’s a person,” said Armand, his parka and boots now on.
“But is she really?” Myrna mouthed to Reine-Marie.
“You do know if you kidnap her, no one will pay the ransom,” said Reine-Marie. “And we’ll be stuck with her.”
“Ruth’s not so bad,” said Myrna. “It’s the duck that worries me.”
“Duck?” asked Lucien.
“I’ll go with you, sir,” said Benedict.
“You don’t think I can take her on my own?” asked Armand with some amusement.
“Her, yes,” said Benedict. “But the duck?”
Armand looked at him for a moment, then laughed. Unlike Lucien, Benedict had slipped easily into the stream of conversation. Understanding what was banter and what was important.
Benedict got his boots, parka, tuque, and mitts on, and Gamache opened the door. Only to step back in surprise.
Ruth was standing there, covered in snow. Her heavy winter coat bulging and squirming.
“I hear there’s scotch,” she said, walking past them as though they were the guests and she the owner of the place.
As she walked, she dropped tuque, mitts, coat on the floor. And left puddles from her huge boots.
“Who’re they?” Ruth used Rosa to indicate Lucien and Benedict.
Reine-Marie introduced them. “They’re not drinking scotch,” she said, rightly assuming that was all Ruth really wanted to know.
A buffet of bread, cheese, cold chicken, roast beef, and pastries had been set out on the dining table at the far