A Better Man
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #15
- Год: 2019
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781466873711
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «A Better Man». Краткое содержание книги:
It's Gamache's first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Floodwaters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil, a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter.
As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter of his own, he finds himself developing a profound, and perhaps unwise, empathy for her distraught father.
Increasingly hounded by the question, how would you feel..., he resumes the search.
As the rivers rise, and the social media onslaught against Gamache becomes crueler, a body is discovered. And in the tumult, mistakes are made.
In the next novel in this constantly surprising series that deepens and darkens as it evolves (The New York Times Book Review), Gamache must face a horrific possibility, and a burning question.
What would you do if your child's killer walked free?
As he got in, he said, “His name’s Fred.”
CHAPTER TEN
The patrol car slid down the road, but the agent managed to guide it to where they’d left their vehicles. She dropped them off and continued down the hill. Opening the windows to air out her once-pristine vehicle. That now smelled of old wet dog, and mud, and donkeys.
“What do we do now, patron?” asked Cameron as they stood in the rain outside their cars.
“You return to your station. You’ll be needed for flood control or evacuations. We’re heading back to Montréal.”
Once in the car, Agent Cloutier asked, “What about Vivienne? What do I tell Homer?”
“I’ll call him once we’re out of the mountains and have communications.”
Rain was hitting the windshield. The clouds were low, mingling with the mist clinging to the forest.
“Can I stay on it, though? Keep looking for her?”
“You’ll do as you’re ordered, Agent Cloutier,” said Gamache. “As will I.”
He turned toward the woods, where the Bella Bella, invisible, was rushing toward the valley. And the village.
Ruth stood at the top of the fieldstone bridge and watched the activity around her.
The whole village was out, filling sandbags. It was something they did most springs, but until now it had been a precaution, that had morphed into a tradition, that had become a party. A celebration. To mark the end of a long winter.
The spring runoff often coincided with the running of the maple sap.
They’d fill sandbags and hold a sugaring-off party, with baked beans and crêpes and cauldrons boiling down the sap into syrup. A fiddler played as children, and Gabri, stood around the pots waiting to pour the sweet liquid onto snow, where it turned into a sort of soft caramel called tire d’erable.
While mothers and fathers, friends and neighbors filled sandbags to build walls along the Bella Bella, children, and Gabri, used twigs to roll the tire, then ate the maple candy and watched horses return from the forest bearing buckets brimming with more sap.
It was a festive end to winter. After all, the river had never broken her banks. There’d never been reason to worry.
But today was different. The fiddler was holding a shovel. The kids were safely in St. Thomas’s Church, their evacuation center. There was no tire. Only tired and sodden villagers.
Ruth stood in the rain, almost sleet, and watched as they bowed, then straightened, then bowed again, filling the sandbags in what looked like a pagan ritual.
But if this was a ritual, it was to an angry, vindictive deity.
I just sit where I’m put, composed / of stone and wishful thinking, Ruth muttered one of her own poems as she watched her neighbors and friends bow and lift. Bend and shovel. That the deity who kills for pleasure / will also heal.
Villagers, under Ruth’s direction, had formed two lines and were passing the bags along, then piling them one on top of the other. Building a wall on either side of the Bella Bella.
The old poet turned from surveying her dripping and dirty neighbors and looked upstream.
She tried not to let her face reflect her feelings. Gnawing her cheek to stop the fear from showing, she looked at the Bella Bella. Until recently it had been beige with froth, but now it was almost black. As the churning became more and more violent. Dredging up muck and sediment and God knew what else from the river bottom. Things left undisturbed for decades, centuries perhaps, were now roiling to the surface. Rotten. Decayed.
Ruth watched as the bloated river swept great chunks of ice and tree limbs down the mountain. Crashing toward them. Jamming, then breaking apart.
But eventually, she knew, the jam would be too dense. The debris too solid. It would hold. And then…?
Until this day, the villagers had considered the Bella Bella a friendly, gentle presence. It would never hurt them.
Now it was as though someone they thought they knew well, someone they loved and trusted, had turned on them. The only thing more shocking would be if the three huge pine trees in the center of the village broke free and began to attack them.
Gabri and Olivier were handing out hot drinks. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and soup. Monsieur Béliveau, the grocer, and Sarah the baker, were taking around trays of sandwiches. Brie and thick slices of maple-cured ham, and arugula on baguettes and croissants, and pain ménage.
Though the most popular proved to be the ones Reine-Marie had made before she took a place in the line, filling sandbags.
“God,” said Clara, taking a huge bite. “These are delicious.”
Her gloves were wet through, and her large hands trembled in the cold.
“What do you have?” asked Myrna as she swallowed a huge bite of baguette.
“Peanut butter and honey on Wonder Bread,” said Clara, barely intelligible through the thick peanut butter.
“Oh, jeez,” said Myrna, breaking from the line and turning to look for Sarah the baker. “I’m going to get one of those.”
“Here,” said Billy Williams. “Take mine.”
Though he was famished, he offered her half his sandwich.
Myrna smiled and shook her head. “It’s okay. I’ll get my own. But thanks.”
Billy looked after her, then down at his damp sandwich. And understood that he had nothing that Myrna wanted.
She was unattainable, and he worried he’d love her for the rest of his life.
Gabri walked over to the bridge and offered Ruth a coffee. “I put a shot of brandy in it.”
“That’s okay,” shouted the old poet over the sound of the river. She reached for a steaming mug. “I’ll take the soup.”
Gabri paled. It was, he knew, a sign of the End of Days. Ruth refusing booze.
He looked down and saw that the river was not just angry, there was a madness about it. As though all the indignities visited on all the waterways in the New World, by generations of settlers, were coming to the surface.
The waters were rising up, not in protest but in revenge.
He could barely hear himself think for the howling.
It was, he thought as he walked off the bridge, the sound a soul might make as it approached hell.
Gamache’s mind was racing. Had they thought to open the spillways for the dams across the province?
Hospitals needed to be put on alert. Other provinces contacted and asked for possible assistance. The water-filtration plants needed to be protected. Hydro crews needed to be ready to restore power. Military reserves and first responders called out. Emergency measures put in place.
A sudden catastrophic event, natural or otherwise, brought with it turmoil. Places so pastoral and pretty one minute became war zones the next.
A populace unused to these sudden emergencies needed to be rallied and directed. And kept calm.
It was vital to take control.
Gamache tried to stop his mind from going there. And his hand from reaching for his phone to call Emergency Management. Call his successor at the Sûreté. Call the Premier Ministre. And tell them what to do.
Instead he took a deep breath and forced himself to sit back in the passenger seat.
This was no longer his job. No longer his responsibility. They knew what they were doing. They did not need him.
Still, he felt like a swimmer treading water offshore. Watching some terrible event unfold on the mainland and being unable to stop it. Or even help.
Once out of the mountains, his phone had gone wild with emails. Texts. Phone messages.
He tried Reine-Marie first and finally got through to Olivier in the bistro, who called Reine-Marie in.
“We’re all right, Armand. Sandbagging, of course. But there’s no panic.”