“Did you find what you were looking for?” asked Father Antoine.
He sounded friendlier now. Perhaps, Gamache thought, he suffered more from low blood sugar than ill temper or chronic disappointment in a God who had dropped him here, then forgotten about him.
“Sort of,” said Gamache. “I tried to look at the graves but there’s too much snow.”
“I’ll get a shovel.”
Father Antoine returned a few minutes later and Gamache cleared a path to the monument, then dug out the stone itself.
Marie-Virginie.
Marie-Hélène.
Marie-Josephine.
Marie-Marguerite.
And Marie-Constance. Her birthdate was there, just not yet her death. There was a presumption that she’d be buried with her siblings. In death as in life.
“Let me ask you this, mon père,” said Gamache.
“Oui?”
“Would it be possible to fake a funeral? And fake the registry?”
Father Antoine was taken aback by the question. “Fake it? Why?”
“I’m not sure why, but is it possible?”
The priest thought about that. “We don’t enter a death in the registry without seeing the death certificate. If that’s not accurate, then yes, I suppose the registry would be wrong too. But the funeral? That would be more difficult, non? I mean, we’d have to bury someone.”
“Could it be an empty casket?”
“Well, that’s not likely. The funeral home hardly ever delivers empty caskets for burial.”
Gamache smiled. “I suppose not. But they wouldn’t necessarily know who was in it. And if you didn’t know the parishioner, you could be fooled too.”
“Now you’re suggesting there was someone in the casket, but the wrong person?”
Father Antoine was looking skeptical. And well he should be, thought the Chief.
Still, so much of the Ouellet Quintuplets’ lives had been faked, why not their deaths too? But to what end? And which one might still be alive?
He shook his head. By far the most reasonable answer was the simplest. They were all dead. And the question he should be asking himself was not if they were dead, but if they were murdered.
He looked at the neighboring gravestones. To the left, more Ouellets. Isidore’s family. To the right, the Pineaults. Marie-Harriette’s family. All the Pineault boys’ names began with Marc. Gamache leaned closer and wasn’t surprised to see that all the girls’ names started with Marie.
His gaze was drawn back to Marie-Harriette.
Long dead and buried in another town, / my mother hasn’t finished with me yet.
Gamache wondered what the unfinished business was, between mother and daughters. Mama. Ma.
“Has anyone been by lately asking about the Quints?” Gamache asked as they walked single-file back down the narrow path he’d cleared.
“No. Most people have long ago forgotten them.”
“Have you been priest here long?”
“About twenty years. Long after the Quints had moved away.”
So this tired priest never even got the benefit of the miracle. Just the bodies.
“Did the girls ever come back for a visit?”
“No.”
“And yet they’re buried here.”
“Well, where else would they be buried? In the end, most people come home.”
Gamache thought it was probably true.
“The parents? Did you know them?”
“I knew Isidore. He lived a long time. Never remarried. Always hoped the girls would come back, to look after him in his old age.”
“But they never did.”
“Only for his funeral. And then to be buried themselves.”
The priest accepted the old keys from Gamache and they parted. But he had one more stop to make before returning to Montréal.
A few minutes later Chief Inspector Gamache pulled into a parking spot and turned the car off. He looked at the high walls, with the spikes and curls of barbed wire on top. Guards in their towers watched him, their rifles across their chests.
They needn’t have worried. The Chief had no intention of getting out, though he was tempted.
The church was just a few kilometers from the SHU, the penitentiary where Pierre Arnot now lived. Where Gamache had put him.
His intention, after he’d spoken to the priest and looked at the register, had been to drive straight back to Montréal. Instead, he found himself tempted here. Drawn here. By Pierre Arnot.
They were just a few hundred meters apart, and with Arnot were all the answers.
Gamache was more and more convinced that whatever was coming to a head, Arnot had started it. But Gamache also knew that Arnot would not stop it. That was up to Gamache and the others.