The Cruelest Month

It was as though he’d stepped back a hundred years. Except for the circle of chairs in the middle of the room. He counted them. Ten. Three had fallen over.



‘Careful, we haven’t quite finished,’ Lacoste advised as Gamache took a step toward the chairs.



‘What’s that?’ Beauvoir pointed to the rug and what looked like ice pellets.



‘Salt, we think. At first we thought it might be crystal meth or cocaine, but it’s just rock salt.’



‘Why put salt on a carpet?’ Beauvoir asked, not expecting an answer.



‘To cleanse the space, I think,’ was her unexpected reply. Lacoste seemed not to appreciate the oddity of her answer.



‘I beg your pardon?’ Gamache asked.



‘There was a séance, right?’



‘That’s what we’ve heard,’ agreed Gamache.



‘I don’t understand,’ said Beauvoir. ‘Salt?’



‘All will be revealed.’ Lacoste smiled. ‘There’re lots of ways of doing a séance but only one involves salt in a circle and four candles.’



She pointed to the candles on the rug inside the ring. Gamache hadn’t noticed them. One had also fallen over and as he leaned closer he thought he could see melted wax on the carpet.



‘They’re at the compass points,’ Lacoste continued. ‘North, south, east and west.’



‘I know what a compass point is,’ said Beauvoir. He didn’t like this at all.



‘You said there’s only one way to do a séance that involves candles and salt,’ said Gamache, his voice calm and his eyes sharp.



‘The Wicca way,’ said Lacoste. ‘Witchcraft.’



TWELVE



Madeleine Favreau had been scared to death. Killed by the old Hadley house, Clara knew with a certainty. And now Clara Morrow stood outside, accusing it. Lucy, on her leash, was swishing back and forth, anxious to leave this place. And so was Clara. But she felt she owed Madeleine this much. To face down the house. To let it know she knew.



Something had awoken last night. Something had found them huddled in their tight little circle, friends doing something foolish and silly and adolescent. Nothing more. No one should have died. And no one would have if they’d held the séance in any other place. No one had died at the bistro.



Something in this grotesque place had come to life, come down that hallway and into the cobwebbed old bedroom and taken Madeleine’s life.



Clara would remember it for the rest of her own life. The shrieks. They seemed all around. Then a thud. A candle sputtering out. Chairs falling over as people either leaped to help or leaped to leave. And then the flashlights clicking on and bouncing maniacally over the room, then stopping. Illuminating one thing. That face. Even in the bright and warm sunshine of the day Clara felt the dread tighten, like a cloak she couldn’t quite shrug off.



‘Don’t look,’ Clara had heard Hazel call, presumably to Sophie.



‘Non,’ Monsieur Béliveau yelled.



Madeleine’s eyes were wide and staring, as though the balls were straining to escape their sockets. Her mouth was open, lips tight, frozen in a scream. Her hands, when Clara grabbed them to offer comfort she knew was too late, were curled into talons. Clara looked up and saw a movement outside their circle. And heard something too.



Flapping.



‘Bonjour,’ Armand Gamache called as he left the house. Clara started and came back to the day. She recognized the large, elegant figure walking purposefully toward her.



‘Are you all right?’ he asked, seeing her distress.



‘Not really.’ She half smiled. ‘Better for seeing you.’



But she didn’t look better. In fact, tears started down her face and Gamache suspected they were far from the first. He stood quietly beside her, not trying to stop the tears, but allowing her her sorrow.



‘You were here last night.’ It was a statement, not a question. He’d read the report and seen her name. In fact, she was the first on his list to question. He valued her opinion and her eye for detail, for things visible and those not. He knew he should consider her a suspect, along with everyone else at the séance, but the truth was he didn’t. He considered her a precious witness.



Clara wiped the sleeve of her cloth coat over her face and across her nose. Armand Gamache, seeing the results, brought a cotton handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. She’d hoped the worst of the tears were over, but they seemed in full flood, like the Bella Bella. A run-off of grief.



Peter had been wonderful last night. Racing to the hospital, never once saying ‘I told you so’, though she’d said it often enough herself as she’d choked out the story to him.