How the Light Gets In

“Would you like to drive?” Gamache asked, offering her the keys.

“With pleasure.”

She drove through the Ville-Marie Tunnel, then up onto the Champlain Bridge. Gamache was silent, looking at the half-frozen St. Lawrence River far below. The traffic slowed almost to a stop once they approached the very top of the span. Lacoste, who was not at all afraid of heights, felt queasy. It was one thing to drive over the bridge, another thing to be stopped within feet of the low rail. And the long plunge.

She could see, far below, sheets of ice butting against each other in the cold current. Slush, like sludge, moved slowly under the bridge.

Beside her, Chief Inspector Gamache inhaled sharply, then exhaled and fidgeted. She remembered that he was afraid of heights. Lacoste noticed his hands were balled into fists, which he was tightening, then releasing. Tightening. Releasing.

“About Inspector Beauvoir,” she heard herself say. It felt a bit like jumping from the bridge.

He looked as though she’d slapped him. Which was, she realized, her goal. To slap him. Break the squirreling in his head.

She couldn’t, of course, physically hit Chief Inspector Gamache. But she could emotionally. And she had.

“Yes?” He looked at her but neither his voice nor his expression was encouraging.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

The car ahead moved a few feet, then put on its brakes. They were almost at the top of the span. The highest point.

“No.”

He’d slapped her back. And she felt the sting.

They sat in uncomfortable silence for a minute or so. But Lacoste noticed the Chief was no longer flexing his fists. Now he just stared out the window. And she wondered if she might have hit him too hard.

Then his face changed and Lacoste realized he was no longer looking at the dark waters of the St. Lawrence, but to the side of the bridge. They’d crested and could now see what the delay was. Police cars and an ambulance were blocking the far right lane, just where the bridge connected with the south shore.

A covered body, strapped to a wire basket, was being hauled up the embankment. Lacoste crossed herself, through force of habit and not out of any faith that it would make a difference to the dead or the living.

Gamache did not cross himself. Instead he stared.

The death had occurred on the south shore of Montréal. It wasn’t their territory, and not their body. The Sûreté du Québec was responsible for policing all of Québec, except those cities with their own forces. It still left them plenty of territory, and plenty of bodies. But not this one.

Besides, both Gamache and Lacoste knew that the poor soul was probably a suicide. Driven to despair as the Christmas holidays neared.

Gamache wondered, as they passed the body swaddled in blankets like a newborn, how bad life would have to be before the cold, gray waters seemed better.

And then they were past, and the traffic opened up, and soon they were speeding along the autoroute, away from the bridge. Away from the body. Away from Sûreté headquarters. Toward the village of Three Pines.

FOUR

The small bell above the door tinkled as Gamache entered the bookstore. He knocked his boots against the doorjamb, hoping to get some of the snow off.

It’d been snowing slightly in Montréal when they’d left, just flurries, but the snow had intensified as they’d climbed higher into the mountains south of the city. He heard a muffled thumping as Isabelle Lacoste knocked her boots and followed him inside.

Had the Chief Inspector been blindfolded he could have described the familiar shop. The walls were lined with bookcases filled with hardcovers and paperbacks. With fiction and biography, science and science fiction. Mysteries and religion. Poetry and cookbooks. It was a room filled with thoughts and feeling and creation and desires. New and used.

Threadbare Oriental rugs were scattered on the wood floor, giving it the feel of a well-used library in an old country home.

A cheerful wreath was tacked on the door into Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore, and a Christmas tree stood in a corner. Gifts were piled underneath and there was the slight sweet scent of balsam.

A black cast-iron woodstove sat in the center of the room, with a kettle simmering on top of it and an armchair on either side.

It hadn’t changed since the day Gamache had first entered Myrna’s bookstore years before. Right down to the unfashionable floral slipcovers on the sofa and easy chairs in the bay window. Books were piled next to one of the sagging seats and back copies of The New Yorker and National Geographic were scattered on the coffee table.

It was, Gamache felt, how a sigh might look.