Page 17 of Miss Wolcott’s Ghost

“Oui, patron!”

Gamache approached Monsieur Takacs. “Merci, Chef.”

The pale man took Gamache’s hand. “If you need help finding another body…”

“We won’t come to you.” Gamache smiled. Then the smile faded and the head of homicide turned away to the job at hand.

The body at their feet.

Inspectors Beauvoir and Lacoste, along with members of the forensic team, stood on either side of the Chief Inspector and looked down.

The body was badly decomposed. It was impossible to tell if it was a man or woman, though the clothing was a man’s tweed suit, in an old-fashioned cut. Judged only by that, it would seem the body had been there for decades. And yet clearly it had not.

Weeks, perhaps months, but no longer.

The clothing struck the Chief as odd. But it was just one of several oddities.

“Might be a natural death,” said Lacoste, kneeling.

“Heart attack?” asked Beauvoir. “Came here to visit a relative and died from the exertion of getting through the woods?”

His own heart was still pounding.

“I doubt he was visiting a loved one.” Gamache pointed at the tombstone.

The name on it was too worn to read, but the date of death was clear.

May 29, 1914.

“Whoever’s buried here died more than a hundred years ago,” said Gamache.

“The remains of a soldier killed in the First World War?” Lacoste asked.

More than sixty thousand Canadians had died in the Great War. A lost generation. This grave might be one. Though how a young soldier found his way from the horrors of Vimy or Flanders or Passchendaele to rest in this peaceful forest was hard to explain. Most were buried where they fell, or in mass graves. Or were blown to smithereens.

Very few made it home.

“Non,” said Gamache. “The war didn’t start until two months later. Whoever is buried here didn’t die in the war.”

Why had the person at their feet come all this way, to the grave of someone long dead? Only to lose their own life here, in Lost Nation.

And why had someone called him at three in the morning to tell him about the body but nothing else? Not how to find it. Not who it was.

Not who they were.

“Do you notice something else strange?” asked Gamache.

Lacoste was carefully going through the corpse’s clothes, searching for a wallet. A phone. A ring. Something that would tell them who this was. There were tags on the clothing, but nothing else.

Now she and Beauvoir looked around. Then back at the grave.

“The plants,” said Lacoste.

Gamache nodded. He’d had a chance to walk around the cemetery while he waited. There was a sameness about the other graves. They all had legible names, mostly Anglo, and the dates of death were much earlier than this one.

The most recent burial before this 1914 grave was in the 1800s.

They were all overgrown, with a tangle of weeds and grass. The same weeds. The same grass.