Ice Lake (56 page)

Lucy Gabriel was standing by the highway, keeping an eye out for Camille’s car. She had stepped out when she saw her friend coming, but was taken aback by the smashed window. Camille had covered it with a plastic sheet and so had to open the door to talk to her.

“What happened?” Lucy asked.

“Long story. Are you getting in?”

“Nope. Keep going down the road until you see a monk. He’ll direct you.”

Lucy disappeared into the trees on foot.

Camille drove on, and eventually a monk stood on the highway pointing to the parking lot of the monastery. She drove down and waited for the man to join her. He didn’t say anything, but helped her unpack
the car and guided the woman and her daughter to the ninth floor of the empty western wing.

Lucy came along quite awhile later, as though she’d been keeping watch, to confirm that Camille hadn’t been followed, and the two women hugged. They wept for Charlie and Andy.

“Cinq-Mars is coming this afternoon.”

“He is?”

“We’ll have to tell him everything.”

“We will,” Camille agreed. “Oh God, Lucy! You lost Andy. I’ve lost Charlie!”

“Baby.” They held one another again, and only the monk’s return helped them pull themselves together.

“Does he talk?” Camille asked about Brother Tom.

“Not a peep. We communicate though, in our own way. Come on, Camille, pick a room. You might as well make yourself at home.”

Camille put her things away in the simple room identical to Lucy’s across the hall. Carole insisted on her own room and chose one two doors down. The little girl was permitted to unpack her own bag, and Lucy and Camille left her alone. Camille filled the little drawers in her room with her underthings and stacked her pants and blouses on the desk. She hung one dress on a small rack intended for a monk’s robes. With Lucy’s help she made the bed with the sheets and blankets brought in by Brother Tom, then Camille flopped down for a bed test.

“It ain’t much, but it’s home.” Lucy tried to smile, but tears quickly sprang to her eyes instead. This time, Camille comforted her. “I guess if Cinq-Mars can’t help us,” Lucy said, dabbing her eyes, “he can always toss us in jail.”

“Cheery thought.”

“It keeps me going.” She stuffed a Kleenex into the tight front pocket of her jeans.

“What do you do for fun around here?” Camille
called back over her shoulder as Lucy tagged along. They were off to check on Carole.

“Arm-wrestle Brother Tom. Yesterday I raced him down the hall after giving him a thirty-yard head start. I try to get him to talk, unsuccessfully so far. And I thought up a new game, where I give him a pat on the ass when he least expects it.”

“You don’t. Lucy! Poor Brother Tom!”

Camille was dragged away by Carole, who had taken it into her head that she wanted a bath. “I’m a guppy,” she called back to Lucy.

Her mother turned on the bathtub taps. The seven-year-old seemed amazed that the bathtub was in a room all by itself, with no toilet and no sink. While they waited for the slowly pouring water, Lucy showed them the washroom.

“No urinals,” Camille noted.

“Monks in robes, they’d rather sit, I guess,” Lucy explained, and the women’s laughter echoed off the tile walls and marble floor.

“Anyway, right now, only the fourth stall has paper, so that’s the one we use.”

“Gotcha.” Camille tested the water in the bath while Carole got out of her clothes.

“Brother Tom will bring you banana bread and chocolate milk after your bath, Carole!” Lucy said. She wanted to protect the child from the sorrow she was feeling. It was all so horrible. Charlie, dead. Harry, dead. What was going on? How could they escape? She desperately needed to talk to Cinq-Mars. She desperately needed to trust him.

“I’m going to have a bath of my own,” Camille decided. “There’s more than one tub, right?”

“Dozens,” Lucy confirmed. “Four on each floor.”

Lucy returned to her room and stood looking out overthelake. She had done the right thing, she
believed, bringing Camille here. She didn’t want to lose another friend.

Mathers drove the police issue, their guests in the rear seat. They’d headed out to the ice-bridge with Cinq-Mars urging him to use a heavy foot. On the ice, though, he demanded that Mathers stop.

The officer braked the car slowly.

In the back, Detective McGibbon, seated directly behind Cinq-Mars, asked, “What’re we stopping here for?”

Mathers was looked intently at his partner, as though he had the same question on his mind, only he knew better than to ask.

“I’ve made this,” Cinq-Mars declared.

“What do you mean?” Recchi asked.

“I just have to figure it out.” He was hardly noticing the men with him. In his own world, Cinq-Mars stepped out of the car and walked a hundred feet across the ice and snow.

“What the fuck is going on?” Recchi demanded to know.

Mathers said, “You guys stay here, all right?” He climbed out from behind the driver’s seat.

“Is he nuts?” Recchi pestered him.

“Yeah,” Mathers said, before he closed the door. “He’s crazy.” He watched his partner stop and crouch down, then place his head in his hands. Mathers waited a minute, observing him, before he walked up behind him. When he got close, he moved to one side, and saw that Cinq-Mars was trying to wipe away a tear. “Emile?” he asked quietly.

The man was embarrassed and tried to turn his head away. When he felt that he had done all he could to dry his eyes, he stood. “My dad’s dying,” he explained. “It’s any day now. Maybe any hour.”

“I know, Emile. I’m sorry about that. You want to take some time?”

Cinq-Mars shook his head. “God! What—is—it?”

After that outburst, Mathers was afraid to speak again.

Then Cinq-Mars said, “It wasn’t Painchaud’s house, Bill, it was Camille’s!”

With his hands in his pockets, Mathers shrugged. “What was?”

“The clue I saw but missed.” Mathers seemed confused, and Cinq-Mars shook his hands at him. “Her driveway. I’m sure, I’m positive, was full of cop cars. But there’s no garage and her car was nowhere around.”

“So?”

Cinq-Mars was taking large breaths, as though he was winded by an acceleration to his thinking. “So, where was her car?”

Mathers continued to stare at him, without comprehension.

“But I need it all, Bill. I need it all and it’s coming. I tell you. I’ve prepared myself for this. I’m sorry if I don’t know how to handle it.”

“Émile—”

“Stettler wrote
lips lips lips.
He was concerned about lips, something about lips. Then Charlie has his lips sewn shut. You know I don’t believe in coincidence. Coincidence is the biggest fraud going. Everything in life is interwoven, everything’s connected. So Stettler knew about a problem with lips, something that confused him, upset him probably, so much so that a very secretive man wrote the words down and underlined them three times. As if he was trying to get his brain to figure it out. I know what that’s like.”

Cinq-Mars bent over at the waist, as if the adrenaline pumping through his system contorted him. “Stettler had some concern that he probably didn’t
understand about lips.” He returned to an upright stance again. “And he bobs to the surface in Camille Choquette’s fishing hut. Charlie is killed and he has his lips sewn shut, and his telephone is an open line to Camille’s house. That’s no coincidence. Two bodies, both connected to some place where Camille sleeps. Fishing
line,
telephone
line
—it all connects.”

“All right,” Mathers said, “I see where you’re going. But we also have to deal with the small matter of proof.”

“Yes, yes,” Cinq-Mars agreed, impatiently. He had one hand in a pocket and the other he shook in midair, waist-high. “Let’s just say you’ve killed someone and you run outside and you find out you’ve locked your keys in the car. What do you do? Call a locksmith? An automobile club? Do you go looking for a coathanger to jimmy the lock? No! Bill! We’ve already seen the shards of glass. You smash the damn window and get the hell out of there. But after
that
—”

Mathers had it now. “After that you don’t park your car in the driveway, with the window out. It’s Camille. We haven’t even interviewed her yet, but we know now it’s Camille. For some reason she wanted her boyfriend dead.”

“Same reason that she wanted Andy dead,” Cinq-Mars said. “They carried information. In her business, that’s a deadly disease.”

“Do we pick her up?”

Cinq-Mars nodded. “Let’s go to her house. See if she can produce that car.”

Camille undressed in private and donned her ankle-length bathrobe for the trek back down the hall. She organized her bathing items, her soaps and shampoo, cleansers and hairbrushes, and put them all in a pink toilet kit. Then she took Charlie Painchaud’s pistol out of her bag and put that in the kit as well.

She checked her bath. The hot was too hot, and she added a little cold to the mix, stirring the water with one hand until she got the temperature right. Then she stood and locked the door.

Camille Choquette examined the pistol. She examined it as a woman in a particular mood might explore a dildo. She had one more tangle to unravel, and this would be the best way. The only way. Cinq-Mars was coming. Lucy was going to talk to him. She didn’t know what Charlie had told him, but whatever it was, he was no longer alive to say it again. Lucy was a problem. Lucy connected her to the dead patients in the States. The dead patients in the States included two, one in New York and one in Paramus, New Jersey, whose lives she had taken and whose lips she had sewn. She had smothered Wendell in New York. She had slit the throat of the motel clerk in Paramus, then sewn the wound shut while he bled and died.

All night long, Camille had tossed and turned, knowing that she had made a mistake, that she should never have sewn Charlie’s lips. She just couldn’t help it at the time. She had wanted to do it so much. And now she had to kill the one person who could connect her to New York and New Jersey. One more death. She felt the weight of the gun in her hand and felt the urgency grow inside her. She wanted to do this. She wanted Lucy dead more than she had ever realized.

Camille turned off the taps, opened the door, and left the room. She moved down the hall with her right hand tucked inside her bathrobe, hearing her child splashing happily. That would be her next problem. Carole. She didn’t want to think about that. She carried the gun under her left breast. She did not bother to knock but walked straight into Lucy’s room, surprising her.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Camille said.

“That was quick.”

“The water’s too hot. I’m letting it cool.”

Lucy smiled slightly. “I was thinking about Harry Hillier.” She came away from the window and sat on her bed, curling her legs under her. “I don’t understand it.” She pulled a blanket over her lap to protect against the chill and damp.

Camille seated herself on a chair that had been pulled close to the window. She kept her arms crossed.

“I talked to him,” Lucy admitted.

Camille was surprised. “Harry? How come?”

“I found out that he was working for us after all, even though he didn’t know we existed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I went to his office—”

“You, what?” Camille suddenly realized that if she kept Lucy talking she could learn a lot.

“Yeah, I went to his office to find out what he was doing, if anything, on our project. The data had to go through him, right? He’s the only great scientist we have. Was he with the bad guys, or was he being duped, like the rest of us? Get this. Harry was suspicious. He didn’t say anything, but he was beginning to figure out that the data had had to come from humans, not rodents, as he’d been told. I could tell from the file that he was working it out.”

They heard a sound in the corridor, which startled Camille.

“Relax, it’s only Brother Tom.”

The two women waited while the monk ponderously made his way to the room. He greeted them with a smile and put down a tray with the offerings that Lucy had predicted, including a fourth cup, one for himself. He poured the hot chocolate from a white enamel pitcher, served them each a cup, and seated himself in the small chair at the edge of the desk. “This is like summer camp,” Camille chuckled.

Lucy filled Brother Tom in.“I was just telling
Camille about our foray over to Hillier-Largent. Anyway, I shook Harry up a little. I told him that I knew what he’d done, and that I knew whose side he was on. He probably didn’t know what I was talking about, he probably didn’t know there
were
sides. But I mentioned the file by its code name,
Darkling Star.
I remember you told me that name. But I figured if Harry was worried that he might be implicated in
Darkling Star,
he might cause a fuss around Hillier-Largent, or over at BioLogika. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s why somebody blew him up.”