The Brutal Telling

She was fierce because she was afraid. Of everything.

The rest of the world saw a strong, noble lioness. He looked at his daughter and saw Bert Lahr, though he’d never tell her that. Or her husband.

“Can we talk?” Annie asked her father, ignoring Beauvoir. Gamache nodded and handed the dish towel to David. They walked down the hall and into the warm living room where books were ranged on shelves in orderly rows, and stacked under tables and beside the sofa in not-so-orderly piles. Le Devoir and the New York Times were on the coffee table and a gentle fire burned in the grate. Not the roaring flames of a bitter winter fire, but a soft almost liquid flame of early autumn.

They talked for a few minutes about Daniel, living in Paris with his wife and daughter, and another daughter due before the end of the month. They talked about her husband David and his hockey team, about to start up for another winter season.

Mostly Gamache listened. He wasn’t sure if Annie had something specific to say, or just wanted to talk. Henri jogged into the room and plunked his head on Annie’s lap. She kneaded his ears, to his grunts and moans. Eventually he lay down by the fire.

Just then the phone rang. Gamache ignored it.

“It’s the one in your office, I think,” said Annie. She could see it on the old wooden desk with the computer and the notebook, in the room that was filled with books, and smelled of sandalwood and rosewater and had three chairs.

She and Daniel would sit in their wooden swivel chairs and spin each other around until they were almost sick, while their father sat in his armchair, steady. And read. Or sometimes just stared.

“I think so too.”

The phone rang again. It was a sound they knew well. Somehow different from other phones. It was the ringing that announced a death.

Annie looked uncomfortable.

“It’ll wait,” he said quietly. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

“Should I get that?” Jean Guy looked in. He smiled at Annie but his eyes went swiftly to the Chief Inspector.

“Please. I’ll be there in a moment.”

He turned back to his daughter, but by then David had joined them and Annie had once again put on her public face. It wasn’t so different from her private one. Just, perhaps, a bit less vulnerable. And her father wondered briefly, as David sat down and took her hand, why she needed her public face in front of her husband.

“There’s been a murder, sir,” whispered Inspector Beauvoir. He stood just inside the room.

“Oui,” said Gamache, watching his daughter.

“Go on, Papa.” She waved her hand at him, not to dismiss him, but to free him of the need to stay with her.

“I will, eventually. Would you like to go for a walk?”

“It’s pelting down outside,” said David with a laugh. Gamache genuinely loved his son-in-law, but sometimes he could be oblivious. Annie also laughed.

“Really, Papa, not even Henri would go out in this.”

Henri leaped up and ran to get his ball. The fatal words, “Henri” and “out,” had been combined unleashing an undeniable force.

“Well,” said Gamache as the German shepherd bounded back into the room. “I have to go to work.”

He gave Annie and David a significant look, then glanced over at Henri. His meaning even David couldn’t miss.

“Christ,” whispered David good-humoredly, and getting off the comfortable sofa he and Annie went to find Henri’s leash.

By the time Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir arrived in Three Pines the local force had cordoned off the bistro, and villagers milled about under umbrellas and stared at the old brick building. The scene of so many meals and drinks and celebrations. Now a crime scene.

As Beauvoir drove down the slight slope into the village Gamache asked him to pull over.

“What is it?” the Inspector asked.

“I just want to look.”

The two men sat in the warm car, watching the village through the lazy arc of the wipers. In front of them was the village green with its pond and bench, its beds of roses and hydrangea, late flowering phlox and hollyhocks. And at the end of the common, anchoring it and the village, stood the three tall pines.

Gamache’s gaze wandered to the buildings that hugged the village green. There were weathered white clapboard cottages, with wide porches and wicker chairs. There were tiny fieldstone houses built centuries ago by the first settlers, who’d cleared the land and yanked the stones from the earth. But most of the homes around the village green were made of rose-hued brick, built by United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. Three Pines sat just kilometers from the Vermont border and while relations now with the States were friendly and affectionate, they weren’t back then. The people who created the village had been desperate for sanctuary, hiding from a war they didn’t believe in.