The Nature of the Beast

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

He called home and spoke to Annie. They discussed buying a home, someplace with a backyard, close to schools and a park. And then they just chatted about their day. He lay on the familiar bed in the B and B and knew she was lying on their bed, her feet up.

He could hear sleep in her voice and, reluctantly, he wished her bonne nuit, and hung up.

A time to be born, and a time to die.

His hand lingered on the receiver, and he thought about Laurent. And the Lepages. And what it must be like to have a child and then lose that child.

Putting on his dressing gown, he went downstairs and plugged his laptop into the phone lines.

He was still there when the lights went out at the bistro. He was still there when Olivier and Gabri arrived back. He was still there when every other home in Three Pines went dark, and every other person was asleep.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir was there, his face bathed in the light from his laptop, until he found what he was looking for. Only then did he lean back, stiff and weary, to stare at the name his search had run to ground.

He placed a phone call, left a message, and then climbed the stairs and crawled under the eiderdown. And slept. Curled around the little stuffed lion he took with him whenever he knew he’d be away from home.

A time of war, and a time of peace.

*   *   *

“Bed and Breakfast,” the singsong voice answered the phone.

“Bonjour. My name’s Rosenblatt. Michael Rosenblatt.”

“Is it about a reservation?”

“No, you called me. Something about missiles.”

Rosenblatt heard laughter down the line.

“I’m sorry,” said the man. “You must have the wrong number. This is a bed and breakfast. No missiles here. Not even a missus.”

That much Michael Rosenblatt had figured out.

“Désolé,” he said. “I must’ve taken the number down wrong.”

He hung up and checked the number, shook his head and went back to preparing his breakfast. The call that morning from his former department at McGill University had been garbled. Something about a message left at the department the night before, and old missiles.

When the phone rang half an hour later, he picked it up and heard an unfamiliar voice.

“Is this Professor Rosenblatt?” the man asked in English with a Québécois accent.

“Yes.”

“My name’s Jean-Guy Beauvoir. I’m an inspector with the Sûreté du Québec. McGill University gave me your home number. I hope you don’t mind.”

“The Sûreté?” he asked.

“Yes.” Beauvoir decided not to tell him he was with homicide. The professor already sounded rattled. And elderly. He didn’t want another death on his hands.

“Are you the one who left the message at McGill?” Rosenblatt asked. “I tried to call you back but the man who answered said it was a bed and breakfast.”

Beauvoir apologized.

He sounds nice, Rosenblatt thought. Disarming.

But the professor emeritus knew what that meant. The most dangerous people he knew were disarming. He immediately put up his defenses.

“My cell phone won’t work where I am,” Inspector Beauvoir said. “So I had to leave the main number. I’m at a B and B, investigating a crime. We’ve come across something in the woods. Something we can’t explain.”

“Really?” Rosenblatt felt his curiosity swarming over his defenses. “What?”

“It seems to be a big gun.”

His curiosity skidded to a halt.

“I don’t deal with guns,” said Rosenblatt. “My field is, was, physics.”

“Yes, I know. I read your paper on climate change and trajectory.”

The professor leaned forward at his kitchen table.

“Really.”

Beauvoir chose not to tell him that “stared at” might have been a better description than “read.” Still, his Internet search the night before had yielded Rosenblatt’s name, and this article, and Beauvoir had understood enough to know that this was a man who specialized in great big guns.

And he had one.

“I doubt I can help you,” said Professor Rosenblatt. “That paper was written twenty years ago. I’m retired. If it’s a gun you’ve found, you might want to get in touch with a gun club.”

He heard soft laughter down the line.

“I’m afraid I haven’t described it well,” Beauvoir said. “I don’t have the vocabulary, especially in English. Or in French, for that matter. I’m not talking about a shotgun or a handgun. This seems like a sort of missile launcher, but of a design I’ve never seen before. It’s in the middle of the forest, in the Eastern Townships.”