Page 76 of The Grey Wolf
Now he really needed to get a message to her.
All’s well. Arrived safely, he wrote and hit send. Not expecting it to, and it did not. There was no service there. Or at least it was intermittent.
“Can you get anything?” He raised his phone to Jean-Guy and the pilot, who shook their heads.
“Nothing,” said Jean-Guy. “I just tried texting Annie.”
“Can you send a message from the plane?”
“No,” said the pilot. “I can set off the emergency beacon, but that probably won’t get far enough, and if it does…”
Armand could imagine the reaction back in Montréal if they picked up an emergency beacon, normally sent by a plane that had crashed. It would trigger an unnecessary search and rescue. It would also trigger a panic. If he hadn’t already.
“Probably don’t do that.”
He took a few steps away from the others, and staring out at the vast, grey lake and the dense evergreen forest beyond, he held the phone above his head and walked around the long dock, in hopes the message he wrote might catch a single bar and fly off home.
“You expecting a call from the higher power, Chief Inspector?” came a voice behind him. “I’m afraid even the Almighty struggles with the internet here.”
“Though He does like a good calling,” came another voice, followed by a small chuckle.
The two monks Armand had seen standing on the rocks were now walking out of the mist and down the long wharf toward them, their hands shoved up their drooping sleeves. Their black robes flapping in the gusts of wind.
Neither man was the Abbot.
“Where are they?” Reine-Marie demanded.
She was in the study at home. It was quiet. The children, and Ruth, were having naps, though the poet and her duck were morepassed out than asleep. The others were in the kitchen preparing dinner.
Reine-Marie stared out the window. The storm had blown itself out, and the early-evening sky was tinged with a pretty pink. Tomorrow promised to be a lovely day.
Reine-Marie stared at the sky with loathing. The storm hadn’t ended soon enough. And tomorrow held…
I love you. I’m sorry.
Reine-Marie hadn’t heard from Armand since that terrifying text.
She’d tried calling. Texting. She’d tried Jean-Guy’s phone. Nothing. And now she was on the line with Isabelle Lacoste. Trying to keep her mounting hysteria just below outright panic.
Reine-Marie looked at the closed door and wondered when she had to tell the others.
Armand and Jean-Guy were on a flight, through a storm. And were missing. And sorry.
“We’re trying to contact the pilot,” said Isabelle, struggling to keep her own alarm under control. “And the monastery. No answer yet, but we’ll keep trying.”
Until Reine-Marie called, she’d had no idea the Chief and Beauvoir were missing. She’d checked her messages a few times, but when there was nothing, she hadn’t been worried.
“There’s almost no signal up there,” Isabelle said.
“I know that,” snapped Reine-Marie, then took a breath, a beat. “I’m sorry. It just, his last message…”
She’d forwarded it to Isabelle, who looked at it again and felt her own heart contract.
I love you. I’m sorry.
She hated, hated, hated to admit that it was the sort of message a person who knows they’re about to die would send. Coupled with the silence, it was ominous.
“I’ll send searchers to the lake.”
