The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #5)

The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #5) Page 35

Day after day he’d gone into work like that. Weeks, months. A year. Until he’d finally admitted to Dominique how he felt. They’d gone away for a weekend, their first in years, and talked.

While she wasn’t having panic attacks, she was feeling something else. A growing emptiness. A sense of futility. Each morning she woke up and had to convince herself that what she did mattered. Advertising.

It was a harder and harder sell.

Then Dominique had remembered something long buried and forgotten. A dream since childhood. To live in the country and have horses.

She’d wanted to run an inn. To welcome people, to mother them. They had no children of their own, and she had a powerful need to nurture. So they’d left Montreal, left the demands of jobs too stressful, of lives too callow. They’d come to Three Pines, with their bags of money, to heal first themselves. Then others.

They’d certainly healed this wound of a house.

“We saw an ad for this place in the Gazette one Saturday, drove down and bought it,” said Dominique.

“You make it sound simple,” said Gamache.

“It was, really, once we decided what we wanted.”

And looking at her, Gamache could believe it. She knew something powerful, something most people never learned. That people made their own fortune.

It made her formidable.

“And you, madame?” Gamache turned to Carole Gilbert.

“Oh, I’ve been retired for a while.”

“In Quebec City, I understand.”

“That’s correct. I quit work and moved there after my husband died.”

“Désolé.”

“No need to be. It was many years ago. But when Marc and Dominique invited me here I thought it sounded like fun.”

“You were a nurse? That will come in handy in a spa.”

“I hope not,” she laughed. “Not planning on hurting people, are you?” she asked Dominique. “God help anyone who asks for my help.”

They strolled once more into the living room and the Chief Inspector stopped by the floor-to-ceiling windows, then turned into the room.

“Thank you for the tour. And the tea. But I do have some questions for you.”

“About the murder in the bistro,” said Marc, and stepped slightly closer to his wife. “It seems so out of character for this village, to have a murder.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said Gamache, and wondered if anyone had told them the history of their own home. Probably wasn’t in the real estate agent’s description.

“Well, to begin with, have you seen any strangers around?”

“Everyone’s a stranger,” said Carole. “We know most of the villagers by now, at least to nod to, but this weekend the place is filled with people we’ve never seen.”

“This man would be hard to miss; he’d have looked like a tramp, a vagrant.”

“No, I haven’t seen anyone like that,” said Marc. “Mama, have you?”

“Nobody.”

“Where were you all on Saturday night and early Sunday morning?”

“Marc, I think you went to bed first. He usually does. Dominique and I watched the Téléjournal on Radio-Canada then went up.”

“About eleven, wouldn’t you think?” Dominique asked.

“Did any of you get up in the night?”

“I did,” said Carole. “Briefly. To use the washroom.”

“Why’re you asking us this?” Dominique asked. “The murder happened down in the bistro. It has nothing to do with us.”

Gamache turned around and pointed out the window. “That’s why I’m asking.”

They looked. Down in the village a few cars were being packed up. People were hugging, reluctant children were being called off the village green. A young woman was walking briskly up rue du Moulin, in their direction.

“You’re the only place in Three Pines with a view over the whole village, and the only place with a direct view into the bistro. If the murderer turned on the lights, you’d have seen.”

“Our bedrooms are at the back,” Dominique pointed out. Gamache had already noted this in the tour.

“True. But I was hoping one of you might suffer from insomnia.”

“Sorry, Chief Inspector. We sleep like the dead here.”

Gamache didn’t mention that the dead in the old Hadley house had never rested well.

The doorbell rang just then and the Gilberts started slightly, not expecting anyone. But Gamache was. He’d noted Agent Lacoste’s progress round the village green and up rue du Moulin.