Page 180 of The Grey Wolf
He looked around. “Brother Constantine.”
“The other monk who holds the recipe?” asked Dussault.
“Yes.”
“We need to find him,” said Lacoste. She turned to Sébastien. “Can you take me to him?”
The monks were looking at her as though she were either a saint or the devil, and they couldn’t figure out which. What they did know was that before this woman had crossed their threshold, all of them were alive.
Lacoste followed Frère Sébastien into the monastery.
“I wanted to ask you something alone. Are you sure Frère Robert didn’t tell you anything?”
“I’m sure. All he’d say was that something awful was about to happen. Brother Constantine’s cell is over here.”
“First, let’s check out Robert’s room.”
“Right. It’s this way.” At the closed door, Sébastien hesitated. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“No.”
Up until that moment the Québécois monk seemed to have managed a level of denial. But that was now gone.
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“I don’t know. It can’t be one of us.”
One of us, thought Lacoste. There were few more dangerous phrases. Partly because it held truth. There were teams, tribes, families, companies. Friends.Us.But it was rarely just a description of a group. There was, about it, a distinction. “Us” implied there was a “Them.”
And “Us” was better than “Them.”
“Let’s just for a moment say it was one of you. Who would you think?”
Sébastien seemed dumbfounded by the question. But he had an agile mind and had accepted the obvious. One of “Us” had killed Brother Robert.
“Let me think.”
“While you do that, I need to look at his cell.”
It turned out to be roughly the shape of a beehive. The lower floor was circular and fairly large, though spartan. There was a woodstove, a crude table with a single stool. The floor was slate, and there was a ladder leading to a cone-shaped loft with a mattress stuffed with straw.
Or had been.
It was now empty, the stuffing everywhere. Books had been splayed and thrown about. The table and stool were upended.
“Don’t touch,” she cautioned Sébastien, who’d instinctively reached out to pick a Bible off the stone floor. “We need to find Brother Constantine.”
At the door she suddenly turned back and, walking over to the woodstove, she hovered her hand over it. It was cold.
Brother Constantine’s cell was empty.
“Where else could he be?”
“The infirmary.”
“Is he a doctor?”
