A Fatal Grace

‘I love you,’ she croaked, but the words were stolen by the wind and scattered far from old ears.

Em held up Kaye as the three stumbled further onto the lake. Mother had stopped shivering or trembling and even her crying had stopped until there was just the howling of the storm.

They were near the end now. Em could no longer feel her feet or hands. The only consolation was that she wouldn’t have to endure the pins and needles agony of feeling them thaw. The wind blew and through its keening she could hear something else. Across the lake there came the strains of a single violin.

Em opened her eyes, but all she could see was white.

Ice here.

Armand Gamache stood on the bank. The barbarian wind raced out of the mountains, across the lake, past the three women, past the buried curling rink and the spot where CC had died, gathering strength and pain and terror and finally hitting him in the face. He gasped for breath and clutched Em’s letter, the white paper invisible against the white snow behind and in front and all around him. He was enveloped in white, as were they.

He took a step forward, yearning to race onto the lake after them. Every part of who he was demanded he save them, but he stopped, sobbing with the effort. In her letter Émilie had begged him to let them die, like the fabled Inuit elders who walked onto an ice flow and drifted to their deaths.

They’d murdered CC, of course. He’d known that since the day before. He suspected he might have known it for much longer. All along he’d known it was impossible no one saw the murder. Kaye could not have been sitting beside CC and not seen her killer.

And then there was the murder itself. It was far too complicated. The niacin, the melted snow, the tilted chair, the jumper cables. And finally the electrocution perfectly timed for when Mother cleared the house, and all eyes and ears were on her.

And then to clear up the cables afterwards.

No one person could have done it without being seen

The bitter niacin was in the tea Mother served at the Boxing Day breakfast. Em had spread the anti-freeze when she’d delivered the chairs to the site. She’d sat in the chair herself, to keep CC away from it.

Kaye was pivotal. Gamache had assumed whoever had electrocuted CC had attached the cables to the chair first, then hovered around Billy’s truck waiting for the right moment to attach them to the generator. But Em’s letter said otherwise. They’d attached the cables to Billy’s generator and then Kaye had waited for a signal from Em that Mother was about to clear the house. When it came, she’d gone to the empty chair, leaned on one corner to knock it off kilter, and attached the cables. From that moment on it had electricity coursing through it.

By then the niacin was working and CC had removed her gloves.

Mother was winding up to ‘clear the house’. All eyes were on her.

The rock was thrown, moving like thunder down the ice, the stands cheering, everyone on their feet, and CC got up. She went forward, stepped in the puddle, put her bare hands on the back of the metal chair and that was it.

They’d taken risks, of course. Kaye had to detach the cord and throw it clear, a bright orange cord lying where no cord should be. But they’d gambled that everyone would be so focused on CC they could gather it up again. Em did so, and threw it in the back of Billy’s truck. She’d almost gotten caught when Billy ran toward her to start the truck and clear the back for CC. She’d covered up by saying she’d had the same idea and was going to clean a spot in his pickup for CC and the resuscitation team.

The only thing Gamache had been missing was a motive. But Em and Mother had provided that.

Crie.

They had to save El’s granddaughter from the monster who was her mother. They’d heard Crie sing, and they’d heard CC crush and humiliate her. And they’d seen the girl themselves.

Crie was clearly dying, suffocating beneath layers of fat and fear and silence. She’d withdrawn into her own world so far she could barely get out any more. CC was murdering her daughter.

Now he watched as the middle dot, the smallest of them, sank to the ground. The others stumbled and tried to pull her up. To go on a little longer. Gamache felt his knees quaking and he longed to collapse onto the snow, to bury his horror in his hands. To look away as the Three Graces died.

Instead he stood erect, the snow insinuating itself down his collar and up his sleeves, plastering against his face and into his unblinking eyes. He forced himself to watch as first one then the other sank to her knees. He stayed with them, a prayer on his cracked lips, repeated over and over.

But another thought insinuated itself.

Gamache looked down at the letter crushed in his hand, then back at the black sprawls on the snow. He was frozen for a moment, stunned.