The Black Wolf: A Novel By Louise Penny - 9

Shona Dorion looked around the dingy room in the dingy office building, in the dingiest quartier of Montréal. Real estate agents had rebranded it Vieux-Montréal, the more honest among them adding “adjacent,” in an effort to align the neighborhood with the charm of the cobblestoned Old Montréal next door. And increase property values. But with a view of a cement plant on the shores of the St. Lawrence River on one side and railway tracks on the other, it was a hopeless cause.

Shona liked hopeless causes. As, clearly, did the rest of the dingy people in the room.

Now that the end-of-day briefing was over, and next-day assignments were handed out, Shona bent over her phone. Its face was cracked, but it still worked. Most of the time. She tapped out a message.

I have something. Meet me tomorrow for breakfast. The Ritz.

She hit send and waited.

“Shona, can you join me please?” The boss was hanging half out of her office.

“ Oui, d’accord. ” She slipped her phone into her pocket.

“I read your story on our work.”

Shona had, unusually, given it to the head of the organization to read over before posting it on her site. She was anxious to get on the woman’s good side. This sort of obsequious behavior went against the grain, unless there was a higher purpose.

Action Québec Bleu was formed to study and promote water security. Though that was not the higher purpose Shona Dorion had in mind.

“It’s wonderful, very powerful. Though there is an error in the second paragraph. Our funding was dropped by the provincial government, not the federal. We never did get money from the feds.”

“Damn, I’m sorry. A stupid mistake. I knew that. Merci. I’ll make the change, Margaux.”

Back at her desk she checked the reply.

8 a.m. The Ritz.

Outside the filthy windows she could see the streetlights had come on. Another day was ending.

Armand sat on the bench on the village green and stared at the message he’d just received and replied to.

The Ritz.

That was amusing, but what was making him smile was Shona’s profile shot. Most people had their face, or that of their child, or pet, or a pretty scene. But not this young journalist. Hers was a raised middle finger.

“You’re in my place.”

Ruth began to sit, and had Armand not moved, she and Rosa would have ended up on his lap.

Ruth pulled her moth-eaten sweater tight around her, while Rosa was magnificent in her cashmere coat, probably meant for spoiled cats or dogs. Shockingly few clothes were designed for ducks. Though ducks did end up in quite a few garments.

“I just heard that Honoré and Idola are heading back to the city after dinner. What did you do to drive them away?”

Though she was absolutely right, he had no intention of telling her about the guests coming for Sunday lunch, and the need for Annie and the children not to be there.

He’d told Reine-Marie about their guests, of course. She already knew about Evelyn Tardiff, but Evelyn was a friend. The man convicted of plotting mass murder was not.

“Are you mad?” had been her reply. “Marcus Lauzon?” she repeated, just to make sure she’d heard right. When he braced and nodded, she added, “I’ll set an extra place in case you run into Satan and invite him too.”

Though he’d pretty much already done that.

Armand had then gone over to Monsieur Béliveau’s General Store to pick up the chicken and vegetables they always ordered for Sunday lunch. On the way back he paused to sit on the bench and ponder. A few minutes later he was joined by the mad poet and her equally mad, though more stylish, duck.

Instead of answering her question about what he’d done to drive away his daughter and grandchildren, he stared at Ruth. For so long she grew uncomfortable.

“Are you having a stroke? For God’s sake, don’t fall on me.”

Still, she looked concerned, so intense were his eyes, so unyielding his stare.

“Armand?”

The phrase “drive away” had reminded him of the inconvenient fact that he was barred from driving, even short distances, until his hearing returned. He opened his mouth, but before committing himself, he looked once more at his phone, and the text that had come in from Shona Dorion. Not the words, but the image. The raised finger. Then he committed himself.

“I need to get into Montréal tomorrow morning, for a breakfast meeting.”

“So?”

“Will you drive me?”

Now it was her turn to stare. “Are you mad?”

It was not the first time that day he’d been asked that question. Or even the third. And perhaps not the last. And, as with the other times, it was a legitimate question. So legitimate, Armand wondered if perhaps he had lost his mind.

Maybe the cicadas had finally drilled so deep into his brain his marbles had rolled out.

“Mad?” He looked into her wizened face. “Maybe.”

“Then yes, absolutely. Sane people bore me. You normally bore me, but I find you suddenly interesting.”

For some reason, this pleased Armand.

The light that was draining from the sky seemed to be absorbed into the homes and businesses around the village green. Amber light appeared in windows, spilling onto lawns and gardens. It was twilight. A near-magical time in Three Pines, the transition from day to night. As the torch was passed.

Myrna waved to them as she made her way over to Clara’s. She was carrying a book and a bottle.

The bistro was lit up and filling up.

Ruth and Rosa sat on this bench every day, at dawn and dusk, as though the very day depended on them seeing it safely in and out.

“What time do you need to be there?”

“Eight o’clock.” He paused, waiting for the protest, though he knew that Ruth, and therefore Rosa, rose early. With the light. But Ruth just waited, while Rosa nodded. Though ducks often did.

“Breakfast is at the Ritz,” he added. “Please, join us.”

That was a vital part of his half-baked plan.

“Too fucking right I will. Can Rosa come?”

He looked at the soignée duck. Why not. “Of course.”

He got up, and they followed him into the home, into the kitchen. Into the liquor cabinet.

Armand watched Ruth pour a vat of “scotch” from a bottle they kept specially for her. One that contained only tea. Which he suspected she knew.

Getting her to drive was a good idea, he repeated as he poured himself a stiff drink. This was the right decision. This was not crazy at all.

The elderly poet joining their breakfast would serve many purposes, including convincing anyone watching that this could not possibly be a serious meeting. Not with a duck in attendance.

It was social. Nothing more. And barely that …

Yes, he thought as he put an ice cube into his drink, it was the right decision.

Ruth tipped her glass, which they both knew was a vase, toward him and winked. Narrowing his eyes, Armand walked over to the sideboard and sniffed the bottle he and Reine-Marie had rigged. Then he gave a single snort of laughter.

There was indeed scotch in it. Ruth had switched it back.

He sniffed his drink. It was tea.

She caught his eye and raised her brows. She would have raised a finger, but she needed both hands to grip the vat.

Eight a.m. The Ritz. When he produced for the young journalist the older version of herself, he might even go up in Shona’s eyes.

God knew it was impossible to get lower.

“What else have you got in there, Ms. Poppins?” Isabelle asked.

After many years conducting investigations in the most remote parts of Québec, the senior Sûreté officer considered herself mighty adept at camping. But now Isabelle realized she was a rank amateur next to the biologist.

“A lamppost, of course,” said Vivienne, smiling. “And a golden retriever. A flat-screen TV and this.” She pulled out a collapsible pot and opened it with the same flick and flare Fred Astaire had used to open countless top hats.

Isabelle heard a “ta-da,” though no one spoke. Then, looking closer, she gasped and thought maybe she had a small crush on Vivienne LaPierre, who was now holding up a grill in one hand and a cold pack with a large filet of marinating salmon in the other.

This beat her dehydrated beef stew, which, by her own admission, looked like something the golden retriever might throw up.

A few minutes later the two women were sitting by the campfire, drinking fine red wine and eating grilled Atlantic salmon and tiny baby potatoes.

And studying the map on her laptop, annotated by a murder victim.

“So what did Charles mean by these?” Isabelle asked.

She used her fork, speared with a potato dripping butter, to indicate the series of numbers and symbols the dead biologist had written on only this lake.

Vivienne shook her head. They’d both hoped that, once there, the sequence might make more sense. Some sense. But still they were baffled.

The fire was crackling and throwing nice heat, warming their fronts, though their backs, like the dark side of the moon, were chilled. Isabelle ran over to the tent and brought back their sleeping bags, handing one to Vivienne.

“ Merci. ”

Now wrapped up warmly, Isabelle poured them each another tumbler of wine while Vivienne placed another piece of driftwood on the fire and looked out across the still lake. Above them the sky was strewn with stars. Great swaths of them, their light millions of years old.

Both women were solemn now. Isabelle had never actually met Charles. Had only seen him across the crowded café when he’d had the rendezvous with Gamache at Open Da Night.

And she’d seen, a few minutes later, Armand’s torn and bloody jacket placed over the young man’s broken body as he lay in the middle of the road.

Vivienne knew even less about Charles Langlois. Had never seen him, not even a photo. All she knew was what she’d been told. He’d been a drug addict in recovery, a biologist, who’d stumbled onto a conspiracy and been murdered. But over the course of the day, she’d begun to feel a closeness to him. He could have been one of her students.

What she did know, had been told, was that he was a lost young man who’d found himself, found a passion, found a direction and purpose. And was killed when he’d found something else. And now they were trying to retrace his steps.

They were, it seemed, camping on the same site he’d chosen. Sitting around the very same campfire, on stones he’d rolled into place. Were looking out at the same view. At the same ancient light in the sky. So what had he seen that they could not?

Vivienne looked at the map again, then out across the lake. The moon had risen, its silver light reflected in the dark water. “It’s beautiful. But really? It’s like every other remote lake I’ve visited. There’s nothing unusual about this place. Not that I can see.”

Silence again enveloped them. Except for the far-off bark of a coyote, and the howl, even farther away, of a wolf.

“I wonder if it’s what we can’t see,” Vivienne said at last.

“I can understand why you and the Chief are friends,” said Isabelle, with a laugh. “He can also say some pretty vague things. Turns out they’re just train of thought, but they can sure sound odd.”

“Did I sound odd? I didn’t mean to, and I wasn’t being vague.” She’d turned to look at Isabelle. “I’m serious. Maybe that’s what’s different about this lake, and why we haven’t found it yet. Because what Charles found isn’t on the shores of the lake, it’s in it.”

Isabelle had a sudden vision of a submarine. Surely not. Then her thoughts, lubricated by wine, slid over to the Chief Inspector telling her that as a unilingual Francophone about to go to university in England, he’d watched reruns of the old TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , to learn some English.

“You’d be surprised,” he’d said in all earnestness, “how little use ‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ ‘There’s a monster from outer space, Admiral,’ and ‘Fire all missiles’ are at Cambridge.”

“Or anywhere, I hope.”

“ Il y a un monstre ,” she now muttered and got such a strange look from Vivienne that she put down her tumbler, suspecting the wine was doing her no favors.

In vino babbling …

“What do you mean by in the water?” Isabelle asked, drawing herself up and trying to look completely sober.

“The elevated pH.”

“Could that be what he wrote? A chemical sequence?”

Vivienne returned to the photo of Charles’s map on the laptop while Isabelle held her breath. This could be the breakthrough they were looking for.

But Vivienne was shaking her head. “ Désolée. It’s not that. I’d have recognized that. Still, he must’ve thought we’d understand.”

“Or at least another biologist would.” Isabelle hated to say it, but it was the truth, and honestly the main reason, the only reason, Gamache had asked Dr. LaPierre to come along.

Vivienne knew it too. And knew she was failing in her assignment.

Come on, come on, Charles. What’re you saying?

The unidentified sequence of numbers and symbols was on the map for a reason. The map was hidden for a reason. In case …

Vivienne looked behind her. The light from their fire did not extend into the forest, so she could not actually see the base of the tree where Isabelle had found the rock.

The young man had probably sat exactly where she was.

Had he reached out and picked up the flat stone, maybe intending to skip it over the water?

She imagined him sitting there, looking down at the river rock. And then something had changed his mind. Instead of tossing it into the lake, he’d placed it at the base of the tree. Carefully. Deliberately.

Vivienne had been to the Arctic many times. Had seen the stone cairns erected over the graves of explorers who’d ignored the advice of the Inuit. And died. With the last of their strength, the dying men had scratched names on the stones. Dates. To let people know they’d been there. Had once lived. And perhaps as a warning to those who followed.

“Can I see the stone again?”

Isabelle dug it out of her knapsack.

Vivienne rubbed the hard dirty surface through the protective plastic baggie.

“Careful,” said Isabelle, reaching out to take it back. But the deed was done.

Vivienne shook her head. Nothing.

Still, the rock itself was odd. It should not have been that far from the shore. She looked up at Isabelle.

“What?” asked Isabelle. “What’re you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” said Vivienne, getting up with a groan and walking away from the lake, away from the warmth and light of the fire. Into the darkness. “Of the cairns in the Arctic. What doomed explorers left behind. I’m thinking what Charles wanted us to find wasn’t the rock but—” Now she had her flashlight app on and was kneeling by the base of the tree. “This.”

She leaned away and pointed.

There, cut into the bark at the base of the tree, hidden under some rotting leaves was etched a very small arrow and beside it an even smaller cl .

“Oh, my God,” whispered Isabelle. She raised her stare from the tree into Vivienne’s eyes. Her own wide with wonder. “You found it.”

Vivienne reached out. Some mothering instinct wanted to caress the letters, as though to comfort. But Isabelle stopped her.

“The arrow’s pointing into the woods.” Isabelle’s own phone was out, flashlight on. She was snapping photos as she spoke. “He wants us to go into the woods. That’s where he hid it.”

At last. At last.

“We’ll have to look tomorrow, right? Too dark tonight.” Vivienne was clearly hoping Isabelle would disagree and they could wander, drunk and lost, in the cold, dark forest.

“Yes,” said Isabelle, not without regret. “Tomorrow.”

Both women remained kneeling and staring into the woods. Then they walked slowly back to the campfire.

As they sat down on the warm rocks, Vivienne returned her gaze to the lake. A bat flapped overhead and disappeared into the darkness, and a loon called. It was hard to believe that not much farther north the disaster had occurred.

Wildfires had burned through millions of hectares of forest, sending plumes of ash into the atmosphere before falling to earth, coating American cities, large and small. Smothering them. The images had been apocalyptic. The events unimaginable. The fires unstoppable.

They’d broken out across Canada, all at once. As though nature had pulled a trigger.

And now there were fears the fires had heralded a new age. An annual calamity that would continue, in biblical fashion, until there was nothing left. No trees, no forest. No habitable cities. Just ash. A sort of nuclear bomb made of wood. And stupidity.

Vivienne stopped herself. The wine was making her maudlin. Surely she was overstating it. Besides, in a twist of fate, the worst of the ash had not actually landed on Canada. Such were the atmospheric conditions at the time.

A very bad thing for the United States but, it must be quietly admitted, a good thing for Canada. If you looked beyond the millions of acres of destroyed forest.

Vivienne turned around. If there was another disastrous season, this forest would be the next to go. These magnificent trees, which had been saplings when the Magna Carta was written, would go up in smoke to once again bury American cities.

How many times could that happen before too much damage was done? And what would be the American reaction if this became an annual catastrophe? How long before they tired of it and decided to do something about it? To defend themselves.

It was an unsettling thought. Not just the horrific destruction of millions of acres of vital forest, not just the environmental disaster, but how Americans might react to another onslaught. At least they’d know it was not done on purpose.

But was it? They’d been warned about climate change for decades. It was clear to any rational person that human activity was to blame. The fixes had been obvious and achievable. And yet governments and industry had—

“Huh. I’m an idiot.”

“What?” asked Isabelle.

“I know why the lake has elevated pH.”

“Why?”

“Potassium. I bet when I get the samples back from the lab they’ll show there’s potassium in the water. That will raise the pH, make it more alkaline.”

“I’m assuming you don’t mean that someone dumped a load of bananas into the lake.”

It took Vivienne a moment to figure out why Isabelle would have said something that ludicrous, then she smiled. “ Non. Follow me. Potassium is potash, and potash is—”

Isabelle realized she might be more than a little tipsy, which explained the banana comment, but now she was suddenly stone-cold sober. “Ash.”

“And ash comes from—”

“Forest fires.”

Vivienne shrugged off her sleeping bag, picked up the pot that had been used to boil the potatoes, and went to the lake while Isabelle, guessing what she was doing, broke up the smoldering logs with the tip of her boot.

Vivienne splashed water onto the embers, and there was a great hissing. The dying embers enraged.

A few more trips and the fire was out, though a plume of smoke drifted across the lake, then finally settled.

“Damn,” said Vivienne. “I forgot. I have s’mores in my knapsack.”

“Well, the golden retriever probably ate them.”

“Hope not, there’s chocolate.”

This absurd conversation functioned to lighten the mood, to stop the shrieking in their heads. Telling them they had to hurry. Had to follow Charles’s arrow. Had to find whatever he’d hidden. And they had to get the results of the water tests.

Had to, had to, had to. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

Vivienne reached for the dirty dishes, but Isabelle stopped her.

“You cooked. I’ll clean up.”

She took the dishes and pans to the lake. The last thing Isabelle did, though she was bone weary, was carry their food and garbage, now in a sturdy bag, into the woods, away from their campsite. And hoist it into a tree. If bears or wolves were attracted by the scent, they would not come knocking on their tent.

As she returned to the clearing, Isabelle could feel a slight breeze. There was a definite bite to it, and something else. Something she recognized.

She tried to dismiss it. After all, hadn’t the sky been red? And didn’t that mean it would be clear the next day? Not the rain or sleet or snow she could sense approaching.

But nature was changing, she thought as she crawled into her sleeping bag next to Vivienne, who was already asleep.

The world was becoming less predictable, the signs less readable. And why wouldn’t nature, at this point, lie to them? Turn on them?