A Great Reckoning (27 page)

“Professor Charpentier collects maps,” Armand explained. “I thought he could help. Well, he thought he could help.”

So far, on the drive down, Hugo Charpentier had said nothing about the map, or anything else. They'd driven in silence, which was fine with Armand. He had things to think about.

“It's over here,” said Reine-Marie, walking to the stained-glass window. “How could we not have seen it before?”

“You weren't meant to,” said Charpentier. “Look at his face.”

Two of the soldiers were in profile, heading forward. But the one young man was staring straight out. At them.

“That's what you're meant to see.” Charpentier waved one of his sticks at the boy. “His expression is so striking, it wipes everything else off, well, the map.”

“You think the map was hidden on purpose?” asked Myrna.

“Misdirection,” said Huifen, who'd been reading about just that in her tactics textbook. By one H. E. Charpentier.

“There was a purpose,” said Charpentier. “But was it to hide the map? I don't see why anyone would put it there, then direct everyone's attention away from it.”

“Why not just leave it out, you mean?” asked Reine-Marie.

“Or make it obvious,” said Myrna.

“Maybe it's not important. A detail,” said Clara. “Like the buttons and the mud and the gun in the holster. There just to add accuracy.”

“Accuracy? A map with a snowman?” asked Ruth. “Who do you think the Canadian Expeditionary Force was fighting? Frosty the Hun?”

Gamache brought out the original, and Charpentier took it from him without asking. Comparing it to the glass one.

It was the same map.

Other copies were scattered on the pews, as were plates with the remains of roast beef, arugula and Camembert on baguette. Chicken, pesto and sliced apple on Sarah's fresh-baked, soft multigrain. And various beers and soft drinks.

When they'd first moved to Three Pines and noticed that villagers sometimes took picnics into the chapel, both Armand and Reine-Marie had been surprised. Perhaps even, he admitted, disapproving.

But after a couple of months, Reine-Marie had asked, “Who made the rule that people shouldn't eat or drink in a church?”

So they'd tried it. At first it felt awkward, wrong. As though God would be offended if people took a meal in his house. Until they realized that the sacrilege wasn't eating and talking and laughing in the chapel. It was leaving it empty.

“How did you come to see it?” Commander Gamache asked Amelia.

“How did you miss it?” she asked.

Clara was about to snap at her when she stopped, realizing it was actually a fair question. How had they missed it? Were they really so riveted on the soldier's face that everything else faded into the background, as the young professor suggested?

And, more perplexing, was it intentional misdirection?

“I was looking at her.” Amelia waved toward Ruth. “She was going on and on about something—”

“The true nature of man and his place in the universe,” said Ruth to Charpentier. She seemed to admire his two canes to her one. “Basically, the meaning of life.”

“Of course,” said the young man.

“—so my attention drifted,” explained Amelia, “to the window behind her. That's when I saw it.”

“Can we go somewhere else?” Jacques asked, getting up from the pew. “My ass hurts.”

“I have a pain in my ass too,” said Myrna, looking at her houseguest.

“Let's go,” said Clara. “I'm tired, and Leo here will need to go out.”

The little lion was asleep on her lap, while Henri and Gracie slept on the floor beneath Reine-Marie's pew.

Once outside, Amelia heard the two women pleading in the darkness, “Pee. Poop.”

She stood on the road, waiting. Her back to the chapel. To the window.

“Pee. Poop.”

When asked how she came to see the map, she hadn't been completely truthful. While everyone else was drawn to the soldier boy's face, she'd been repelled by it.

His terror.

But mostly what gave her the creeps, and made her turn away, was the look of forgiveness on his young face.

And so, unlike the others, she'd been free to, forced to, stare at other parts of the window.

That's when she'd seen the map.

Finally, his business done, Leo was picked up by Clara, who handed a small, warm bag to Amelia.

“Let's go home.”

*   *   *

Once home, Armand showed Hugo Charpentier to his room on the main floor, and the shower, while he himself changed and Reine-Marie put the kettle on and rustled up some dinner.

Twenty minutes later, Charpentier came out in his dressing gown, smelling of fresh soap and rubbing his dull brown hair.

Gamache was in the living room, in front of the fire. Their dinner of poached salmon and asparagus on foldout tables in front of them.

“Waiting for me?” Charpentier asked. “Where's Madame Gamache?”

“I asked her to join us, but she's taken a tray to the bedroom. She wanted to leave us alone to talk.”

“We have that much to talk about?”

“I think we do. Don't you? Wine?”

“Please,
patron
.”

There weren't many whom Hugo Charpentier called
patron
, but Monsieur Gamache was one.

He poured them each a glass of white.

“Why are those students here?” Charpentier asked.

Armand Gamache had been waiting for just that question.

“They were the four who were closest to Professor Leduc. Cadets Cloutier and Laurin are in their final year and have been his protégés for almost three years now.”

“You think they've been infected,” said Charpentier. “Too close, for too long, to the plague that was Leduc.”

Gamache didn't disagree.

“The other two are freshmen. Leduc's newest protégés.”

“Why did he choose them?”

“I don't know. We might never know.”

“Oh, I think we suspect, don't you? Cadet Smythe is Anglo and gay and too eager to please. A disastrous combination in the hands of someone like Leduc. And the other? The Goth? Cadet Choquet? You only have to look at her to see the wounds. A man like Leduc crawls in through hurts like that.”

The tactician studied Gamache.

“Now the question, Commander, is whether you brought them here for their own good or to protect the rest of the student body? Did you bring possible victims to your village, or the killer?”

“Recently, at one of the soirées, I gave them the exercise of investigating that map,” said Gamache, choosing not to answer the question directly. “To hone their investigative skills. This morning, I told them that a copy of it was found in Leduc's bedside table, and that what had started as a simple assignment was now part of the murder investigation.”

“Clever. It gave you an excuse to bring them here, and gave them something apparently important to do.”

“Well, it wasn't completely without value.”

“What do you mean?”

“A copy
was
found in Leduc's bedside table.”

Hugo Charpentier stared. It was difficult to surprise a man who specialized in seeing all possibilities at once, but this did.

“How did it get there?”

Gamache shook his head.

“Whose was it?” Charpentier asked. “One of the students'? Had to have been. But which one?”

“Amelia Choquet's map is missing.”

Charpentier nodded, his head bobbing up and down like a toy on a dashboard.

“The bedside table,” he finally said.

“
Oui
,” agreed Gamache. “That struck me too. The map was put away, but not hidden.”

“The killer wasn't looking for it,” said Charpentier. “So it was of no consequence to him, only to Leduc.”

“But why would Leduc care about this?”

They both looked down at the map. It had taken on a slight rose hue in the fading firelight.

“There is another possibility,” said Gamache.

“That it was placed there by the killer to implicate one of the cadets,” said Charpentier. “Choquet's is missing? Then she's the next victim. He'd make it look like suicide. A troubled, vulnerable freshman who killed a professor, then took her own life once the investigation closed in.”

Gamache showed no surprise at this scenario. It had occurred to him too.

That's what he'd had to think about, in those few minutes alone in Leduc's room with the body.

What the map meant. And where it might lead them. And what to do about it.

The only answer was to spirit the four cadets away to someplace safe. Quickly. Quietly. Before the murderer could implement the next phase of his plan.

“Of course, maybe her map was a random choice by the killer,” said Charpentier, thinking out loud. “It's possible hers was the most easily taken. He just needed someone's. It wouldn't matter to the killer. He wanted a scapegoat. A cadet tethered to the body. Her suicide would close the case. Unless, of course—”

“Yes, I know.”

The other thing Gamache had thought about, in those long minutes with the dead man.

“Unless she killed him.”

“Or one of the other three did,” said Charpentier. “After all, they'd know she had the map. Who better to place it there, to implicate her, than one of the others? And you brought them all down here. Together.”

“I have at least placed them in separate billets,” said Gamache.

Charpentier nodded. “A wise precaution. Makes a pillow over the face in the middle of the night more difficult.”

The professor picked up the map. “We can surmise why it was in the bedside table of a dead man. To point suspicion at one of the cadets.” He looked at it closely. “But why are you in a stained-glass window?”

Charpentier waited, as though the snowman, or cow, or one of the pines might tell him.

And then Charpentier smiled and handed it to Gamache. “I think I know.”

“It told you?”

“In a way. May I have some tisane? It helps me sleep.”

As Gamache walked to the kitchen to put on the kettle, Charpentier called after him. “Chamomile, if you have it.”

“We do.”

There was the sound of water running into the kettle, then quiet. Into the silence Charpentier placed a question.

“You say you gave them the assignment at one of your soirées? But I thought you said the senior cadets were Leduc's people.”

“They are,” came the answer from the kitchen. “He had them appear to attach themselves to me so they could report back.” Gamache leaned out of the kitchen door and his face broke into a smile. “I'm smarter than I look.”

“Thank God for that,” said Charpentier.

Gamache walked back in with their tisanes and a jar of local lavender honey.

Charpentier placed the spoon in the tea and looked up into the intelligent eyes.

“You were going to tell me why the map was in the boy's satchel,” said Gamache.

“
Oui
. It's because maps are magic.”

If he didn't have the Commander's full attention before, he did now. Gamache lowered his tea to the table and stared.

“Magic?”

“Yes. They've become so mundane we've forgotten that. They transport us from one place to another. They illuminate our universe. The first maps were of the heavens, you know. What the ancients could see. Where their gods lived. All cultures mapped the stars. But then they lowered their sights. To the world around them.”

“Why?”

“Ahhh, monsieur,” nodded Charpentier with approval and growing excitement. “Exactly. Why. And how? It seems easy, now, but can you imagine the first person who figured out how to represent something three-dimensional in two dimensions? How do you draw distance and time? And why go through the trouble? It's not like they didn't have enough to do. So why did they create maps?”

“Necessity,” said Gamache.

“Yes, but what drove that necessity?”

Gamache thought about it.

“Survival?”

“Exactly. Maps gave them control over their surroundings, for the first time ever. It showed how to get from one place to another. It sounds simple now, but thousands of years ago it would have been an incredible feat of imagination and imagery. All maps are drawn as though looking down. From a bird's point of view. From their god's point of view. Imagine being the first person to think of that. To be able to wrap their minds around a perspective they'd never seen. And then draw it. Incredible. And think of the advantage.”

Gamache had never in his life thought of these things, but now he understood how a master tactician would revere maps. As a tactical tool, they were revolutionary and second to none. They would give whoever possessed them an insurmountable advantage.

They would be magic.

“It meant they could plan, they could strategize,” said Charpentier. “They could see into the future. Where they were going. And what they'd find. The tribe, the nation, the enterprise with the most accurate maps won.”

“Is that how you became a tactician?”

“It started with maps, yes. I was an awkward child,” he said, as though that might be in doubt. “I found the world chaotic. Unsettling. But there was order in maps. And beauty. I love maps.”

It did not seem an exaggeration. He looked down at the paper on the coffee table with affection. A newfound friend.

“Even the word is interesting. Map. It comes from
mappa mundi
.
Mappa
is Latin for napkin.
Mundi
is world, of course. Isn't that wonderful? A napkin, with their world on it. The mundane and the magnificent. Map.”

He said the word as though it was indeed magic. And in the young man's drenched face, Gamache saw the world opening up for an unhappy boy.

Map.