“How long were you gone?”
“About half an hour. I didn’t dawdle.”
He saw again the tree limbs snapping back and felt them slapping him, smelled the pine needles, and heard the crashing through the woods, like an army, running. Racing. He’d thought it was just his own noise, magnified by fear and the night. But maybe not.
“You saw and heard nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“What time was that?” Gamache asked.
“About two I guess, maybe two thirty.”
Gamache laced his fingers together. “What did you do once you realized what had happened?”
The rest of the story came out quickly, in a rush. Once he’d realized the Hermit was dead, another idea had come to Olivier. A way the Hermit might help. He’d put the body in the wheelbarrow and taken him through the woods to the old Hadley house.
“It took a while, but I finally got him there. I’d planned to leave him on the porch, but when I tried the door it was unlocked, so I laid him in the front hall.”
He made it sound gentle, but he knew it wasn’t. It was a brutal, ugly, vindictive act. A violation of a body, a violation of a friendship, a violation of the Gilberts. And finally, it was a betrayal of Gabri and their lives in Three Pines.
It was so quiet in the room he could almost believe himself alone. He looked up and there was Gamache, watching him.
“I’m sorry,” said Olivier. He scolded himself, desperate not to be the gay guy who cried. But he knew his actions had taken him far beyond cliché, or caricature.
And then Armand Gamache did the most extraordinary thing. He leaned forward so that his large, certain hands were almost touching Olivier’s, as though it was all right to be that close to someone so vile, and he spoke in a calm, deep voice.
“If you didn’t kill the man, who else could have? I need your help.”
In that one sentence Gamache had placed himself next to Olivier. He might still be on the outer reaches of the world, but at least he wasn’t alone.
Gamache believed him.
Clara stood outside Peter’s closed studio door. She almost never knocked, almost never disturbed him. Unless it was an emergency. Those were hard to come by in Three Pines and were generally Ruth-shaped and difficult to avoid.
Clara had walked around the garden a few times, then come inside and walked around the living room, and then the kitchen in ever decreasing circles until finally she found herself here. She loved Myrna, she trusted Gamache, she adored Gabri and Olivier and many other friends. But it was Peter she needed.
She knocked. There was a pause, then the door opened.