Page 2 of The Grey Wolf
Finally, it stopped.
“Wrong number?” she asked.
He looked at her. “Non.Wrong person.”
Who must have, he thought, called by mistake. Easily done. He’d done it himself.
Yes. It was only that. A mistake. This call was not intended for him.
Reine-Marie raised her brows but left it at that.
And then he smiled at her. And as he did, the furrows deepened. And she was reminded that while some of the lines down his face were certainly caused by pain and sorrow, stress and grief, by far the deepest impressions were made by just this. Smiling. Like lines on a map, these chartered the longitude and latitude, the journey of a man who had found happiness.
Though there was the deep scar at his temple, which cut across the other lines.
Silence once again descended on the garden. After a tense fewmoments, they raised their sections of the weekend paper and went back to reading.
Three Pines was not on any map and was only ever found by people who had lost their way. They’d crest the hill and stop, looking in wonderment across the top of the forest, to the Green Mountains of Vermont beyond the borders of Québec. Then, dropping their eyes, they would see something even more unexpected.
There, in the middle of nowhere, fieldstone and clapboard homes and rose-brick shops circled a village green. People would be out walking their dogs, or working in their gardens, or sitting on the bench on the green. Chatting. In at least one case, to herself.
In the center, three immense pine trees towered skyward. Like a beacon. A signal.
A sign.
You are home and you are safe.
Those who chose to stay—and not everyone did, though all were welcome—soon realized that the village was not impervious to the passage of time, or tragedy, any more than any community.
It was a haven, not a hiding place.
What Three Pines offered was comfort in an ever-changing world. It offered a place at the table, it offered company and acceptance. And croissants.
It offered a hand to hold.
Three Pines was where the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec and his librarian wife had chosen to live. To make a home. Not to escape from the horrors of the world, but to heal from them.
But the world had found them, that Sunday morning. As the Gamaches sat peacefully in their back garden. The ringing, ringing, ringing had begun again. And again Armand ignored it.
The peal now mixed in, perversely, with the ringing of the church bell.
St. Thomas’s was calling the faithful.
And something else entirely was calling Armand Gamache.
“Answer the fucking phone!” A handful of compost, or dirt, or… was lobbed over the fence.
And still the phone rang. Then abruptly stopped mid-ring. Making the sudden silence almost as jarring as the sound.
When, a few minutes later, it rang for the third time, Reine-Marie lowered the weekend paper completely and looked first at the phone, then at her husband.
“For God’s sake, Armand, who is it? Is it work?” Though she knew it could not be. He’d have answered.
After a brief hesitation, he held the phone up for her to see. There was no name, but she recognized the first few digits. A government number. Federal, not provincial. Though she had no idea whose number it was, it was clear that her husband knew who was calling. And calling. Knew who he was ignoring.
“Do you want me to answer?”
“Non.” He drew the phone to him, as though to protect her from it. He felt the vibration against his chest and moved it away.
