The Madness of Crowds

“I agree,” said Armand. “The idea is that there’s a tipping point. There certainly seems to have been for Professor Robinson and her campaign.”

“You think we’ve passed it, Armand?” she asked. “There’s no going back?”

“No, I’m not sure she’s gathered enough support yet. But I think she’s close, thanks to publicity around the shooting. And then there’s what happened last night.”

“Yes, about that. Any idea…?”

“Who did it?”

Armand talked openly with his wife about all his cases. Always had, always would. If he didn’t trust her, why had he married her? And she him.

“It’s so difficult. We need to work out whether Debbie Schneider was the intended victim, or if a mistake was made.”

“How do you do that? Oh, wait. Don’t you normally just ask Jean-Guy and Isabelle to do it?”

“While I sit around eating bonbons? Normally, yes. I’m not hopeful. I suspect they’re up there getting facials.” He smiled, then grew serious. “The thing about murder investigations is that the crime often begins long before the act. The killer starts down that path sometimes years earlier. Sometimes without even knowing it themselves.”

“But something started it off,” she said.

“Oui. There’s always a reason, even if reason doesn’t figure into it. It almost always starts with some emotion. A hurt feeling. A slight. An insult, a betrayal. It digs in like a hook, and festers. Dragging that person toward the cliff. It could take years, and for some it never goes that far. It becomes a low-level hum of anger all their lives. But for others…?” He raised his hands.

“If it’s that small, Armand, how do you find it?”

“We can’t. Not the original offense. Not often anyway. Instead we collect evidence. We collect facts. But we also, along the way, collect feelings. Try to pick up the trail of unhealthy emotions. Of perceptions that are just slightly off. Like mariners at sea. If their course is off by a tiny amount at the beginning, by the end they’re completely lost.”

The same, he knew, was true of murder investigations. A misstep early on, now, could leave them so far off course they would either fail to find the killer or, worse, arrest the wrong person.

Or, worse still, delay things so much there was another murder.

“You look for someone lost?” she asked.

He smiled. “I guess so. The problem with that is that we’re all lost at times.”

Reine-Marie nodded. She knew that everyone in Three Pines, from Clara to Myrna, from Gabri and Olivier to Ruth and even Rosa, had found the village because they’d lost their way.

Even she and Armand. They’d come to live here when they were most adrift.

She knew, though, as did Armand, that not everyone lost was fortunate enough to be found. Some came to the end of the world, and kept going. To the place where monsters and madness lived.

She looked at the documents spread at her feet and wondered what had happened in Enid Horton’s life to compel an elderly woman to draw monkeys on everything.

But she stopped herself. They weren’t on everything. Only certain documents. And it wasn’t an elderly woman who’d drawn them. Not all, anyway. She’d been a young woman, a young mother, when it had started.

As Reine-Marie had gone through the boxes, a picture had emerged of an absolutely normal woman of her generation. A woman who’d married young. Raised a family in the sixties and seventies. Who’d prepared Christmas and Thanksgiving meals, kept recipes and school report cards and gifts her children had made, that only a mother could find precious.

A woman who’d volunteered at the local hospital and had gone home, closed the door, and drawn monkeys on random letters and bills. Though Reine-Marie now wondered just how random they were.

“We also have to consider that the attack last night is connected to the shooting at the gymnasium,” Armand was saying.

“You mean someone at the party tried to finish the job?”

“Could be. But I don’t see how. The most likely accomplice was miles away in police custody. They’re interviewing him this morning. The connection might be more nebulous. The first attack might have given someone the idea for the second. Emboldened them.”

After he left, Reine-Marie decided to sort the papers, putting those with the odd drawings in one pile. Those without in another.

As she looked at the growing pile, Reine-Marie thought there might be one hundred monkeys after all.