Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1)

A box.

Now Gamache stood at the foot of the tree contemplating the wooden structure twenty feet up. Nailed to the trunk was a series of wooden planks, rungs, their nails long since rusted and bleeding a deep orange into the wood. Gamache thought of his warm seat by the window in the Bistro. His amber Cinzano and pretzels. And the fireplace. And he started climbing. Hauling himself up one rung at a time he remembered something else, as one trembling hand reached up and strangled the next rung. He hated heights. How could he have forgotten? Or had he perhaps hoped this time would be different? As he clung to the slimy, creaky, narrow slats and looked up to the wooden platform a zillion feet above, he froze.

Had the noise come from ahead or behind? Clara wondered. It was like sirens in the city, the noise seems omnipresent. And now she heard it again. She turned and looked behind her. Back there the trees were mostly pines and held their dark needles, making the woods prickly and black. Ahead, into the red sunset, the woods were more mixed, with maples and cherry. Clara made instinctively for the light, not sure whether she should make a lot of noise, like in the spring to warn the bears, or be as quiet as possible. She supposed it depended on what she thought was with her in the woods. A bear, a deer, a hunter, or a ghost. She wished she had a box to consult. Or Peter. Yes, Peter was almost always better than a box.

Gamache willed his hands to move to the next rung. He remembered to breathe and even hummed a little song of his own devising. To ward away terror. He climbed toward the dark patch above him. Breathe, reach, step. Breathe, reach, step. Finally he made it and his head poked through the small square cut in the floor. It was as the book described. A blind. You’d have to be blind drunk to want to sit up there, thought Gamache. He hauled himself through the hole and to his feet, feeling a wave of relief, which was replaced a moment later by blinding terror. He dropped to his knees and scrambled to the tree trunk, hugging it to himself. The fragile box was perched twenty feet up the tree and hung out five feet into the air, hovering there with only a rickety old rail between Gamache and oblivion. Gamache dug his hands into the bark, feeling the wood pinch his palm, glad for the pain to concentrate on. His horrible fear, and the terrible betrayal, wasn’t that he’d trip and fall, or even that the wooden blind would tumble to the ground. It was that he’d throw himself over the edge. That was the horror of vertigo. He felt pulled to the edge and over as if an anchor was attached to his leg. Unaided, unthreatened, he would essentially kill himself. He could see it all happen and the horror of it took his breath away and for a moment he gripped the tree, closed his eyes, and fought to breathe deeply, regularly, from his solar plexus.

It worked. Slowly the terror ebbed, the certainty of flinging himself to his own death diminished. He opened his eyes. And there he saw it. What he’d come for. What he’d read about in the Bistro from the book he’d bought second-hand from Myrna. The Boys’ Big Book of Hunting. He’d read about blinds, the structures hunters built so they could see the deer coming, and shoot them. But that wasn’t what had called Gamache from the safety and warmth of the village. He’d come looking for something else mentioned in the book. And from where he sat he could see it in the middle distance.

But now he heard a sound. An almost certainly human sound. Dare he look down? Dare he let go of the trunk and crawl to the edge of the blind and look over? There it was again. A kind of hum. A familiar tune. What was it? Cautiously he released the tree and, sprawling on his stomach on the platform, he inched to the edge.

He saw the top of a familiar head. Actually he saw a mushroom of hair.

Clara had decided that she should go with the worst-case scenario, but then couldn’t decide which one was the worst. A bear, a hunter or a ghost? Thoughts of bear reminded her of Winnie the Pooh and the Heffalump. She started to hum. A tune Jane always hummed.

‘What do you do with a drunken sailor?’ Gamache called from above.

Below, Clara froze. Was that God? But surely God would know exactly what to do with a drunken sailor? Besides, Clara couldn’t believe God’s first words to her would be any question other than, ‘What on earth were you thinking?’

She looked up and saw a box. A talking box. Her knees went weak. So they did speak after all.

‘Clara? It’s Armand Gamache. I’m up in the blind.’ Even from this great height in the dusk he could see her confusion. Now he saw a huge smile on her face.

‘A blind? I’d forgotten that was there. May I come up?’ But she was already climbing the rungs like an immortal six-year-old. Gamache was both impressed and appalled. Another body, no matter how slim, could be just enough to bring down the entire structure.