The Long Way Home(9)

Reine-Marie now wondered how newcomers would view her and Armand. The middle-aged couple in the white clapboard house.

Would they be the slightly loopy villagers who made bouquets of weeds? Who sat on their porch with their day-old La Presse newspaper? Perhaps they’d only be known as Henri’s parents.

Would newcomers to Three Pines ever know that she’d once been a senior librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec?

Would it matter?

And Armand?

What life would a new villager think he’d left behind? A career in journalism perhaps, writing for the intellectual and almost indecipherable daily Le Devoir. Would they think he’d passed his days wearing a pilled cardigan and writing long op-ed pieces on politics?

The more astute might guess that he’d been a professor at the Université de Montréal. The kindly one who was passionate about history and geography and what happened when the two collided.

Would someone new to Three Pines ever suspect that the man tossing the ball to the shepherd, or sipping Scotch in the bistro, had once been the most celebrated cop in Québec? In Canada? Would they guess, could they guess, that the large man doing the sun salutation each morning had once hunted murderers for a living?

Reine-Marie hoped not.

She dared to think that that was behind them. Those lives now lived only in memory. They roamed the mountains that surrounded the village, but had no place here. Had no place now. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, had done his job. It was someone else’s turn.

But her heart tightened as Reine-Marie remembered the door to the sitting room closing. And clicking.

The moth still fluttered around the light, butting and bumping against the bulb. Was it warmth it wanted, Reine-Marie wondered, was it light the moth sought?

Does it hurt? Reine-Marie wondered. The singeing of the wings, the little legs, like threads, landing on the white-hot glass, then pushing away. Does it hurt that the light doesn’t give the moth what it so desperately desires?

She got up and turned the porch light off, and after a few moments the beating of the wings stopped and Reine-Marie returned to her peaceful seat.

It was quiet now, and dark. Except for the buttery light from the sitting room window. As the silence grew, Reine-Marie wondered if she’d done the moth a favor. Had she saved its life, but taken away its purpose?

And then the beating started again. Flitting, desperate. Tiny, delicate, insistent. The moth had moved down the porch. Now it was beating against the window of the room where Armand and Jean-Guy sat.

It had found its light. It would never give up. It couldn’t.

Reine-Marie got up, watched by her daughter, and turned the porch light back on. It was in the moth’s nature to do what it was doing. And Reine-Marie could not stop it, no matter how much she might want to.

* * *

“How’s Annie?” Gamache asked. “She looks happy.”

Armand smiled as he thought of his daughter, and remembered dancing with her on the village green at her wedding to Jean-Guy.

“Are you asking if she’s pregnant?”

“Of course not,” snapped the Chief. “How could you think such a thing?” He picked up the paperweight on the coffee table, put it down, then picked up a book and fiddled with it as though he’d never held one before. “That’s none of my business.” He hiked himself up in the chair. “Do you think I think only a pregnancy would make her happy? What sort of man do you think I am? What sort of father?” He glared at the younger man across from him.

Jean-Guy simply stared back, watching the uncharacteristic bluster.

“It’s all right to ask.”

“Is she?” asked Gamache, leaning forward.

“No. She had a glass of wine at dinner. Didn’t you notice? Some detective.”

“Not anymore, I’m not.” He caught Jean-Guy’s eyes and they both smiled. “I really wasn’t asking, you know,” said Gamache truthfully. “I just want her to be happy. And you too.”

“I am, patron.”

The two men looked at each other, searching for wounds only they could see. Searching for signs of healing only they would know were genuine.

“And you, sir? Are you happy?”

“I am.”

Beauvoir didn’t need to probe. Having spent his career listening to lies, he recognized the truth when he heard it.

“And how’s Isabelle doing?” asked Gamache.

“Acting Chief Inspector Lacoste?” asked Beauvoir with a smile. His protégée had taken over as head of homicide for the Sûreté, a job everyone had once assumed would be his on the Chief’s retirement. Though Jean-Guy knew it wasn’t accurate to describe what had happened as a retirement. That made it sound predictable. No one could have predicted the events that had caused the head of homicide to quit the Sûreté and buy a home in a village so small and obscure it didn’t appear on any map.