The Nature of the Beast
“Nothing so far,” Reine-Marie said, then looking around she noticed her husband wasn’t with her. He was standing at the spot where Laurent had landed, looking at the ground. Then he turned and looked back up the hill.
“Find anything?” asked Olivier.
“No,” said Gabri, getting closer to the woods. “Just grass and mud.” He lifted his boots and there was a sucking sound as the ground reluctantly released him.
Armand had returned to the road and walked in the opposite direction of the hill. Reine-Marie, along with Gabri and Olivier, joined him.
“No stick?” Gamache asked.
They shook their heads.
“Maybe Al and Evie picked it up,” said Olivier.
But they doubted it. It was all Laurent’s parents could do to pick themselves up.
“Maybe he lost it,” said Gabri.
But they knew the only way Laurent would lose it was if he lost his hand. It was more than just a stick to Laurent.
* * *
Al Lepage came out of the barn when he heard their car drive up. He was back in his work clothes and was wiping his large hands.
“Armand.”
“Al.” The men shook hands and Reine-Marie gave him a quick embrace.
“Is Evie at home? I have a casserole.”
Al pointed to the house, and when Reine-Marie left he turned to Gamache.
“Is this a social call?”
“No, not really.”
They’d dropped Gabri and Olivier back in Three Pines and then driven to the farm. And now Armand contemplated the older man in front of him. Al Lepage looked like a paper bag that had been crumpled up before being thrown away. But for the first time, Armand really studied his face and noted not the beard or the leathered skin, but the blue, blue eyes, shaped like almonds. Laurent’s eyes. And his nose. Thin and slightly too long for the face. Laurent’s nose.
“I have a question for you.”
Al indicated a trough. The two men sat side by side.
“Do you have Laurent’s stick?”
Al looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “His stick?”
“He always had it with him but we couldn’t find it. We just wondered if you might have it.”
It seemed an eternity before Al answered. Armand quietly prayed that he’d say, Yes, yes I do. And then Armand and Reine-Marie could go home, and start the long process of remembering the boy alive and letting go of the boy dead.
“No.”
The large man didn’t meet Armand’s eyes, couldn’t. He stared straight ahead, his almond eyes hard with the effort of not going soft. But his lips trembled and his chin dimpled.
“It would be nice to have it back,” he managed to say.
“We’ll try to get it for you.”
“I made it for his birthday.”
“Oui.”
“Worked on it every night after he went to bed. He wanted an iPhone.”
“No he didn’t,” said Armand.
“He’s nine.”
Gamache nodded.
“Nine,” whispered Al Lepage.
And both men stared off, in opposite directions. Laurent’s father viewing a world where nine-year-old boys died in accidents. Gamache seeing a world where even worse things happened.
“It must be there,” Al said at last. “Where we found him. Or the cops picked it up.”
“No. We looked. And the police didn’t find it either. If it isn’t here at home, and it isn’t where Laurent was found, then we have to find it.”
“Why?”
Gamache didn’t hesitate. He knew there was never a good time for this.
“It could mean that Laurent might’ve been killed somewhere else, and put in that ditch.”
Al’s mouth formed the beginning of a word. Why, perhaps. Or, what. But it died there. And Gamache saw Laurent’s father pack up his home, take all his possessions, and move. To that other world. Where nine-year-old boys were killed. A world where nine-year-old boys were murdered.
Armand Gamache was the moving man, the ferryman, who took him there.
And once across there was no going back.
* * *
“A stick, patron?” Jean-Guy Beauvoir’s voice had grown shrill on the phone.
“Oui,” said Gamache. He stood in his living room and looked out the window, past their front porch to the village green.
He could see Clara and Myrna sitting on the bench chatting with Monsieur Béliveau.
“You want me to go to Chief Inspector Lacoste and say we have to reopen the investigation into Laurent Lepage’s death—an investigation we only did as a personal favor to you—because a stick is missing?”