And then she’d have sat down and wept.

*   *   *

“No, I didn’t go to Jane’s,” said Ruth. “I was too ashamed. I needed to be by myself.”

“So you stayed here?” Jean-Guy asked. “You drew the curtains and locked the door and stayed in your home.”

“At first.”

“And then?”

“My God,” said Monsieur Béliveau to Ruth. “He must’ve seen.”

“Seen what?” Jean-Guy demanded.

*   *   *

Gamache’s eyes moved on, swiftly now. Up the hill. Past the old schoolhouse.

And then his gaze stopped. And Armand Gamache started walking. Then running.

*   *   *

“The church,” said Beauvoir. “You went to St. Thomas’s. That’s what Fleming saw.”

He ran out of Ruth’s home. Gamache was already at the bottom of the wide wooden stairs. He took them two at a time. Beauvoir got there just as Gamache yanked open the large door to the small church.

“Where do you find milk?” Gamache asked, turning around only briefly to speak to Beauvoir.

“A church,” said Jean-Guy. “The milk in the play isn’t literal.”

“It’s a metaphor. For kindness and healing.”

Gamache was scanning the rows of wooden pews, the simple altar, the unadorned walls. More a chapel than a church.

“And forgiveness,” said Beauvoir. “You don’t find it in a hardware store, but you might find it here. Ruth came to St. Thomas’s after betraying Al Lepage. To pray for forgiveness. Looking for milk.”

“John Fleming was a churchgoing man. Enjoying his relationship with a God he mocked and taunted,” said Gamache. “He either followed her or had come here himself, for a moment of gloating, knowing what he’d done to her.”

They heard movement behind them as Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau arrived.

“Where did you sit?” Gamache asked her.

“Over there,” she pointed. “By the boys.”

“The boys,” the soldiers of the Great War, who lived forever in the stained-glass window. They marched through mud and chaos. This was no civilian monument to the glories of war. They were young and they were far from home and they were afraid.

But one young man had turned so that he was looking directly at the congregation. And on his face, alongside the terror, was something else.

Forgiveness.

Beneath the window were written the names of the dead from Three Pines. The boys who would never return to the old railway station, to the parents who waited.

And under their names the words “They Were Our Sons.”

Ruth had sat in the light pouring through their bodies. And wept.

And when she left? Someone came out of the shadows.

Gamache dropped to his knees and pushed the pew to one side. Beauvoir joined him and together they started prying up the wide wooden floorboards.

And there, in a long metal tube, they found what they were looking for. The plans for Armageddon hidden in the chapel of St. Thomas. The doubter.

Gamache looked at his watch. It was six o’clock.

Chapter 41

CHAPTER 41