Bury Your Dead Read Online Free PDF

Hesitating for a moment, he made up his mind and took one out. “I’d like you to read this.”
    Émile sipped his wine and read, then began laughing. He handed the letter back to Gamache.
    “That Ruth clearly has a crush on you.”
    “If I had pigtails she’d be pulling them,” smiled Gamache. “But I think you might know her.
     
“Who hurt you, once,
so far beyond repair
that you would meet each overture
with curling lip?”
     
    Gamache quoted.
    “That Ruth?” asked Émile. “Ruth Zardo? The poet?” And then he finished the astonishing poem, the work now taught in schools across Québec.
     
“While we, who knew you well,
your friends, (the focus of your scorn)
could see your courage in the face of fear,
your wit, and thoughtfulness,
and will remember you
with something close to love.”
     
    The two men were quiet for a moment, staring into the mumbling fire, lost in their own thoughts of love and loss, of damage done beyond repair.
    “I thought she was dead,” said Émile at last, spreading pâté on the chewy bread.
    Gamache laughed. “Gabri introduced her to Reine-Marie as something they found when they dug up the basement.”
    Émile reached for the letter again. “Who’s this Gabri? A friend?”
    Gamache hesitated. “Yes. He lives in that little village I told you about. Three Pines.”
    “You’ve been there a few times, I remember. Investigating some murders. I tried to find the village on a map once. Just south of Montreal you said, by the border with Vermont?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well,” Émile continued. “I must have been blind, because I couldn’t see it.”
    Gamache nodded. “Somehow the mapmakers missed Three Pines.”
    “Then how do people find it?”
    “I don’t know. Perhaps it suddenly appears.”
    “I was blind but now I see?”
quoted Émile. “Only visible to a wretch like you?”
    Gamache laughed. “The best
café au lait
and croissants in Québec. I’m a happy wretch.” He got up again and put a stack of letters on the coffee table. “I also wanted to show you these.”
    Émile read through them while Gamache sipped his wine and ate cheese and baguette, relaxing in the room as familiar and comfortable as his own.
    “All from that Gabri man,” said Émile at last, patting the small pile of letters beside him. “How often does he write?”
    “Every day.”
    “Every day? Is he obsessed with you? A threat?” Émile leaned forward, his eyes suddenly keen, all humor gone.
    “No, not at all. He’s a friend.”
    “Why would Olivier move the body?”
Émile read from one of the letters.
“It doesn’t make sense. He didn’t do it, you know.
He says the same thing in each letter.” Émile picked up a few and scanned them. “What does he mean?”
    “It was a case I investigated last autumn, over the Labor Day weekend. A body was found in Olivier’s bistro in Three Pines. The victim had been hit once on the back of the head, killed.”
    “Once?”
    His mentor had immediately picked up on the significance of that. A single, catastrophic blow. It was extremely rare. A person, if hit once, was almost certainly hit often, the murderer in a rage. He’d rain blow after blow on his victim. Almost never did they find just one blow, hard enough to kill. It meant someone was filled with enough rage to power a terrible blow, but enough control to stop there. It was a frightening combination.
    “The victim had no identification, but we finally found a cabin hidden in the woods, where he lived and where he’d been murdered. Émile, you should have seen what was in there.”
    Émile Comeau had a vivid imagination, fed by decades of grisly discoveries. He waited for Gamache to describe the terrible cabin.
    “It was filled with treasure.”
    “Treasure?”
    “I know,” smiled Gamache, seeing Émile’s face. “We weren’t expecting it either. It was unbelievable. Antiques and artifacts. Priceless.”
    He had his mentor’s full attention. Émile sat forward,