“Never better,” he gasped. His face was red from exertion and the bitter cold. Dropping the cable on the stoop, he entered the schoolhouse, followed a moment later by Agent Nichol. Her face was no longer pallid. Now it was blotched, white and red. She looked like the Canadian flag.
Thérèse exhaled, unaware until that moment just how concerned she’d really been.
“Do I smell chocolate?” Gamache asked, through frozen lips. Henri had run over to greet him and the Chief was on one knee, hugging the shepherd. For warmth as much as affection, Thérèse suspected. And Henri was happy to give him both.
Space was made by the woodstove for the newcomers.
Thérèse poured them mugs of hot chocolate, and after Gamache and Nichol had stripped off their outerwear, the five sat silently around the woodstove. For the first couple of minutes Gamache and Nichol shuddered with cold. Their hands shook and every now and then they spasmed as the bitter winter, like a wraith, left their body.
Then the little schoolhouse grew quiet, except for the odd squeal of a chair leg on the wooden floor, the crackle of the fire, and Henri’s groans as he stretched out at Gamache’s feet.
Armand Gamache felt he could nod off. His socks were now dry and slightly crispy, the mug of hot chocolate warmed his hands, and the heat from the stove enveloped him. Despite the urgency of their situation, he felt his lids grow heavy.
Oh, for just a few minutes, a few moments, of rest.
But there was work to be done.
Putting down his mug, he leaned forward, hands clasped together. He looked at the circle huddled around the woodstove in the tiny one-room schoolhouse. The five of them. Quints. Thérèse, Jérôme, Gilles, Armand, and Nichol.
And Nichol, he thought again. Hanging off the end. The outlier.
“What’s next?” he asked.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Next?” asked Jérôme.
He never expected it to get this far. Looking across the room at the bank of blank monitors, he knew what had to happen.
Beneath the thick sweater he felt a trickle of perspiration, as though his round body was weeping. If Three Pines was their foxhole, he was about to raise his head. Armand had given them a weapon, but it was a pointy stick against a machine gun.
He walked away from the warmth of the fire and felt the chill again as he approached the far reaches of the room. Two old, battered computers sat side-by-side, one on the teacher’s desk, the other on the table they’d dragged over. Above them, glued to the wall, was the cheerful alphabet, illustrated with bumblebees and butterflies and ducks and roses. And below that, musical notes.
He hummed it slowly, following the notes.
“Why’re you singing that?” asked Gamache.
Jérôme started a little. He hadn’t realized Armand was with him and he hadn’t realized he was humming.
“It’s that.” Jérôme pointed to the notes. “Do-re-mi is the top line, and then this song is beneath it.”
He hummed some more and then, to his surprise, Armand started quietly, slowly, singing.
“What do you do with a drunken sailor…”
Jérôme examined his friend. Gamache was staring at the music and smiling. Then he turned to Jérôme.
“… early in the morrrr … ning.”
Jérôme smiled in genuine amusement and felt some of his terror detach and drift away on the back of the musical notes and the silly words from his serious friend.
“An old sea shanty,” Gamache explained, and returned to look at the notes on the wall. “I’d forgotten that Miss Jane Neal was the teacher here, before the school was closed and she retired.”
“You knew her?”
Gamache remembered kneeling in the bright autumn leaves and closing those blue eyes. It was years ago now. Felt like a lifetime.
“I caught her killer.”
Gamache gazed again at the wall, with the alphabet and music.
“Way, hey, and up she rises…” he whispered. It felt somehow comforting to be in this room where Miss Jane Neal had done what she loved, for children she adored.
“We need to get the cable in here,” said Jérôme, and for the next few minutes, while Gilles drilled a hole in the wall to snake the cable through, Jérôme and Nichol crawled under the desks and sorted out the wires and boxes.
Gamache watched all this, marveling that they’d begun the day thirty-five thousand kilometers from any communication satellite and now they were just centimeters from that connection.
