He placed the yellow slip of paper on the table beside the basket of baguette.
Sorry to bother you, but I need your help with something. Myrna Landers
Her phone number followed. Gamache had chosen to ignore the number, partly as an excuse to get away from headquarters, but mostly because Myrna had never asked for help before. Whatever it was might not be serious, but it was important to her. And she was important to him.
He ate the borscht while she considered her words.
“This really is probably nothing,” she started, then met his eyes and stopped. “I’m worried,” Myrna admitted.
Gamache put down his spoon and focused completely on his friend.
Myrna looked out the window and he followed her gaze. There, between the mullions, he saw Three Pines. In every way. Three huge pines dominated the little village. For the first time he realized that they acted as a windbreak, taking the brunt of the billowing snow.
But still, a thick layer blanketed everything. Not the filthy snow of the city. Here it was almost pure white, broken only by footpaths and the trails of cross-country skis and snowshoes.
A few adults skated on the rink, pushing shovels ahead of them, clearing the ice while impatient children waited. No two homes around the village green were the same, and Gamache knew each and every one of them. Inside and out. From interrogations and from parties.
“I had a friend visit last week,” Myrna explained. “She was supposed to come back yesterday and stay through Christmas. She called the night before to say she’d be here in time for lunch, but she never showed.”
Myrna’s voice was calm. Precise. A perfect witness, as Gamache had come to realize. Nothing superfluous. No interpretation. Just what had happened.
But her hand holding the spoon shook slightly, so that borscht splashed tiny red beads onto the wood table. And her eyes held a plea. Not for help. They were begging him for reassurance. To tell her she was overreacting, worrying for nothing.
“About twenty-four hours then,” said Isabelle Lacoste. She’d put down her sandwich and was paying complete attention.
“That’s not much, right?” said Myrna.
“With adults we don’t generally start to worry for two days,” said Gamache. “In fact, an official dossier isn’t opened until someone’s been missing for forty-eight hours.” His tone held a “but,” and Myrna waited. “But if someone I cared about had disappeared, I wouldn’t wait forty-eight hours before going looking. You did the right thing.”
“It might be nothing.”
“Yes,” said the Chief. And while he didn’t say the words she longed to hear, his very presence was reassuring. “You called her, of course.”
“I waited until about four yesterday afternoon, then called her home. She doesn’t have a cell phone. I just got the answering machine. I called”—Myrna paused—“a lot. Probably once an hour.”
“Until?”
Myrna looked at the clock. “The last time was eleven thirty this morning.”
“She lives alone?” Gamache asked. His voice had shifted, from serious conversation into inquiry. This was now work.
Myrna nodded.
“How old is she?”
“Seventy-seven.”
There was a longer pause as the Chief Inspector and Lacoste took that in. The implication was obvious.
“I called the hospitals, both French and English, last night,” said Myrna, rightly interpreting their train of thought. “And again this morning. Nothing.”
“She was driving out here?” Gamache confirmed. “Not taking the bus, and not being driven by someone else?”
Myrna nodded. “She has her own car.”
She was watching him closely now, trying to interpret the look in his deep brown eyes.
“She’d have been alone?”
She nodded again. “What’re you thinking?”
But he didn’t answer. Instead he reached in his breast pocket for a small notebook and pen. “What’s the make and model of your friend’s car?”
Lacoste also brought out a pad and pen.
“I don’t know. It’s a small car. Orangy color.” Seeing that neither wrote that down, Myrna asked, “Does that help?”
“I don’t suppose you know the license plate number?” asked Lacoste, without much hope. Still, it needed to be asked.
Myrna shook her head.
Lacoste brought out her cell phone.
“They don’t work here, you know,” said Myrna. “The mountains.”
Lacoste did know that, but had forgotten that there remained pockets of Québec where phones were still attached to the walls. She got up.