The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel (23 page)

“The gun is huge,” Chief Inspector Lacoste said. “Massive. Whoever built it would’ve needed help clearing the land and bringing in the pieces, and then assembling it. Can you remember any activity in the forest?”

“
Non
,” he said, shaking his head.

She waited for more, but no more was offered. She would have to go in and get the information, pull it from him.

“If he was going to hire someone to clear the site, who would it have been back then?”

“Gilles Sandon did a lot of work in the woods,” said Monsieur Béliveau. “But he’s too young. And Billy Williams has a backhoe and is handy with a chain saw, but he’s had the municipal contract for forty years. Keeps him pretty busy.”

Lacoste had already spoken to both men. Neither knew Gerald Bull. Neither knew anything about the gun. Neither had been hired to clear the land or bring in strange machinery back in the mid to late 1980s.

“Most everyone around here has a chain saw and cuts wood for the winter. Most do odd jobs for cash.” He shook his head. “Not exactly skilled labor.”

“No.”

“How’s this supposed to help find who killed the Lepage boy?” asked Monsieur Béliveau.

Isabelle Lacoste picked up the photograph.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But that gun and Laurent’s death are connected. He was killed because he found it. I don’t suppose you remember anyone, a stranger, coming here in the last few years, asking about a gun in the woods?”

“
Non, madame
, no one came into my store asking for a Supergun.”

His morose and serious tone made his answer all the more ludicrous.

She put the photograph of Dr. Bull back into her pocket. They were doing the forensics, doing the interviews, collecting all the facts. But it wasn’t a fact that had killed Laurent. It was fear. Someone was so frightened of what the boy had found, by what the boy would do or say, that they had to kill him.

It took a certain type of person, and a certain type of secret, to kill a child. And a great, big, stinking, putrid emotion.

Chief Inspector Gamache had taught her that.

Yes, collect evidence, collect facts. Absolutely. The facts would convict him, but the feelings would find him.

*   *   *

Clara had put the shepherd’s pie and apple crisp in the fridge. They’d been her own comfort food, after Peter had gone. She’d followed the casseroles back to sanity. Thanks to the kindness of neighbors who kept baking them, and kept bringing them. And who’d kept her company.

And now it was Clara’s turn to return the comfort and the casseroles and the company.

“Where’s Al?” she asked. The large man was usually at home, fixing something or sorting baskets of produce.

“In the fields,” said Evie. “Harvesting.”

Clara looked out the kitchen window and saw Al Lepage, his gray ponytail falling down his broad back as he knelt in the squash patch.

Immobile. Staring down at the rich earth.

It seemed far too intimate a moment, and Clara turned back to Evie.

“How’re you doing?”

“It feels like my bones are dissolving,” said Evelyn. And Clara nodded. She knew that feeling.

Evie left the kitchen and Clara and the dog followed her. Clara thought they were going into the sitting room, but instead Evie lumbered up the stairs and stood at a closed door. Harvest had stayed at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at them, either too old to climb, or no longer motivated, without the reward of the boy to play with.

“Al won’t come in here,” she explained. “I have to keep the door closed. He doesn’t want to see anything to do with Laurent. But I come up, when he’s outside.”

She swung the door open and stepped inside. The bed was as Laurent had left it, unmade. And his clothes were scattered about, where he’d tossed them.

The two women sat side by side on Laurent’s bed.

The old farmhouse creaked and groaned, as though the whole home was in mourning, trying to settle around the gaping hole in its foundation.

“I’m afraid,” said Evie, at last.

“Tell me,” said Clara. She didn’t ask, “Of what?” Clara knew what she was afraid of. And she knew the only reason Evelyn had allowed her past the threshold wasn’t because of the casseroles she carried in her arms, but because of something else Clara carried. The hole in her own heart.

Clara knew.

“I’m afraid it won’t stop, and all my bones will disappear and one day I’ll just dissolve. I won’t be able to stand up anymore, or move.” She looked into Clara’s eyes. Clung to Clara’s eyes. “Mostly I’m afraid that it won’t matter. Because I have nowhere to go, and nothing to do. No need of bones.”

And Clara knew then that as great as her own grief was, nothing could compare to this hollow woman and her hollow home.

There wasn’t just a wound where Laurent had once been. This was a vacuum, into which everything tumbled. A great gaping black hole that sucked all the light, all the matter, all that mattered, into it.

Clara, who knew grief, was suddenly frightened herself. By the magnitude of this woman’s loss.

They sat on Laurent’s bed in silence, except for the moaning house.

It was a boy’s room. Filled with rocks, that might be pieces of meteors, and bits of white that might be plastic, or might be bones from saber-toothed tigers or dinosaurs. There were pieces of porcelain, that might be from an ancient Abenaki encampment. Had the old tribe enjoyed high tea.

The walls were covered with posters of Harry Potter and King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Up until that moment Clara had been shocked by Laurent’s death and appalled that it was murder. But she hadn’t really thought of him as a person. She’d only known Laurent as the strange, annoying little boy who made up stories and demanded attention.

And so Clara had averted her eyes whenever he burst in erupting with another fantastic tale.

But now she sat on his Buzz Lightyear bedspread. And saw his shoes, flung off in different directions. And socks, balled up and tossed to the floor. And books, loads of books. Who read anymore? What child, what little boy read? But Laurent’s room was filled with books. And drawings. And wonder. And a grief so thick she could barely breathe.

This was the real Laurent, and he was lost forever.

Clara stood up and walked to the bookcase, and gripped it, her back turned to Evie so that Laurent’s mother wouldn’t be subjected to Clara’s own suddenly overwhelming sorrow.

She was face-to-face with Babar and Tintin and the Little Prince. Leaning against the books was a series of small framed drawings of a nimble lamb. Pen and ink on white paper. The lamb was dancing. What was the word? Gamboling, she thought. Nine frames were lined up, leaned up against the books. The later ones were more sophisticated, with some watercolor added. All of the same lamb in a field. And in the distance, a ewe and a ram, watching. Guarding. On the back of each was written, Laurent, aged 1. Laurent, aged 2, and so on. The first lamb, the simplest, had just “My Son” written on the back and a heart.

Clara looked at Evie. She had no idea this woman had such skill. While his father was the singer in the family, Laurent’s mother was the artist. But there would be no more lambs. Laurent Lepage had stopped aging.

“Tell me about him.” Clara walked back to the bed and sat beside Evie.

And she did. Abruptly, in staccato sentences at first. Until in dibs and dabs and longer strokes, a portrait appeared. Of an unexpected baby, who became an unexpected little boy. Who always did and said the unexpected.

“Al adored him from the moment he was conceived,” Evelyn said. “He’d sit in front of me and play his guitar, and sing. His own songs, mostly. He’s the creative one.”

Clara remembered Al sitting on that chair at the funeral. The guitar on his lap. Silent. No songs left. Clara wondered if, like her art, his music was now gone forever. That great pleasure consumed by grief.

“He didn’t do it, you know.”

“Pardon?” said Clara.

“I’ve heard the gossip, we’ve seen how people look at us. They want to say something nice, but they’re afraid we did it. Do people really think that?”

Clara knew that grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, each Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have been, should have been, a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.

Clara wasn’t sure how she’d have managed if the grief of losing Peter was accompanied not by shepherd’s pie and apple crisp, but by accusations. Not by kindness but by finger-pointing. Not by company and embraces and patience, but by whispers and turned backs.

Al Lepage, the most social of men, the most jovial, had spent most of his time since the tragedy kneeling in a field. And no one had gone to get him.

“They don’t know what they’re saying,” said Clara. “They don’t realize the harm they’re doing. People are afraid and they’re grabbing at whatever they can no matter how ridiculous.”

“We thought they were friends.”

“You have friends. Lots of them. And we’re defending you,” said Clara.

It was true. But it was possible they could have done a better job. And Clara realized, with some shock, that part of her wondered if the gossip wasn’t perhaps, maybe, just a little … true.

“Well, they have something else to talk about now,” said Clara.

“What do you mean?”

She hasn’t heard, thought Clara. These two really were isolated. It was like a moat had been carved around them.

“The gun,” she began, watching Evie, who was looking blank.

Beyond Evelyn, out the window of Laurent’s bedroom, Clara saw a familiar car drive up and park beside her own. Behind it came two Sûreté squad cars. On seeing the look on Clara’s face, Evie turned, then rose stiffly to her feet.

“The police.” She looked at Clara. “Why? What was it you were saying about a gun?”

CHAPTER 20

“Al?” said Evie, approaching the large man planted in the field. “The police are here.”

Al Lepage remained kneeling on the ground but straightened up. And then he very slowly hauled himself upright. He turned and stared at his wife as though not quite understanding what she was saying.

Evie put out her hand and he took it in his massive hand. And she led him back to the house.

“Al,” said Clara as he passed, but while he looked at her, he said nothing.

Clara wasn’t sure what to do. It seemed invasive, and perhaps even ghoulish, to stay. She didn’t want to appear to be simply curious, collecting gossip. But to leave felt like running away, abandoning them.

She decided to stay. Laurent’s parents had been left on their own far too often and far too long.

“Monsieur, madame,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask to search your home again.”

She glanced at Clara and gave the tiniest of nods of acknowledgment.

“Why?” asked Evie. “Has something happened? Is this about the gun?”

“Gun?” said Al. His slack face tightened up, and his eyes came back into something like focus. “What gun?”

“I was just telling Evelyn,” said Clara. “But I didn’t get to the details. I don’t think Al knows.”

The two Sûreté officers looked at Laurent’s father, wondering, of course, whether that was true.

“I don’t understand,” said Al.

If he did know about the Supergun, thought Beauvoir, he was doing a pretty good imitation of someone who was completely ignorant.

“The thing that was hidden under the netting,” said Lacoste. “In the woods. Where Laurent died. It’s a gun.”

“A cannon, really,” said Beauvoir, studying them. “A missile launcher. It’s called a Supergun.”

“Laurent was telling the truth,” said his father, staring at Lacoste, his eyes pleading for something, though she didn’t know what.

Forgiveness? For ignorance? For her, and her news, to go away.

“I didn’t believe him. I laughed at him.”

“We both did,” said Evie.

“No, you wanted to go and see, in case it was real.”

“But then he told us about the monster,” Evie reminded him. “There was no way to believe that.”

“Christ,” said Al. It sounded more like a plea, a prayer, than a curse. “Oh no.” Lepage shut his eyes and hung his head, shaking it slightly. “I can’t believe it.”

“You’re not the only ones who didn’t believe him,” said Lacoste. “None of us did.”

While she spoke kindly, Chief Inspector Lacoste never lost sight of the fact that she might be speaking to Laurent’s killer.

“May we search your house?” Inspector Beauvoir asked.

Both Evie and Al nodded and followed them inside.

The agents who came with them began the search on the main floor, while Lacoste and Beauvoir went upstairs to the bedrooms.

While Lacoste searched Al and Evie’s room, Jean-Guy went through Laurent’s, opening every drawer, looking behind the posters tacked to the walls. He got on his hands and knees and looked under the bed, under the mattress, under the pillow, under the rug. He searched the closet and the pockets of Laurent’s clothing. Anywhere and everywhere a clever child could hide something. But there was nothing.

Laurent might be inquisitive, creative, but he was not by nature secretive. In fact, he seemed to want to tell everyone everything.

Nothing was hidden.

On the bedside table was a collection of rocks, with quartz and fool’s gold running through them. And a book, splayed open.

Le chandail de Hockey
, by Roch Carrier. One of Jean-Guy’s favorite stories growing up. About a Québécois boy, a rabid Canadiens fan, who’s sent a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater by mistake, and has to wear it.

Jean-Guy picked up the book and saw that Laurent was nearing the end of the short story. He replaced the book exactly as he’d found it, his hand lingering on the familiar illustration on the cover.

“Find something?” asked Lacoste.

“Nothing.”

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

Isabelle picked up one of the tiny lamb drawings, reading what was written carefully on the back. My Son. And then a heart. She replaced it. This was a job that had to be done, but it never stopped feeling like a violation.