Gisèle Paquet

Gisèle Paquet is 52 and has been an inspector for the producers' federation for nineteen years. She was born in Trois-Rivières, the daughter of a maple syrup producer and a primary school teacher, and grew up among sap buckets and school notebooks. She studied agronomy in Québec, returned to the region and traded life on the farm for checking on life on the farm. She speaks of barrels the way others speak of children, and takes offense when her work is doubted.

She lives in a wooden house painted pale yellow, with a porch covered in snow eight months a year, a kitchen with checkered linoleum and a wood stove she lights at five in the morning. On the table, a crocheted cloth and a jug of milk. On the wall, her agronomy diploma, a cooperative calendar and a photograph of her father with sap buckets on his shoulders.

She has gray hair in a low bun, fair freckled skin and red-framed glasses that contrast with the rest of her serious face. She wears an orange reflective vest over a plaid wool coat and carries an aluminum clipboard under her arm, which she has repaired twice herself. Serious and proud, she weighs every word and gives the impression of timing the conversation.

About the shortfall, her account is concrete: she climbed the stack in row twelve to read the seals on top, and a barrel wobbled under her foot. Syrup doesn't wobble, she repeats, syrup weighs three hundred kilos, and that was water. She recalls that there are sixteen thousand barrels from four hundred producers, the savings of an entire region, and that every seal has a number. A liter of it, she says, is worth more than a liter of oil, and no one asks where a barrel came from, because it has no serial number.

Gisèle crosses her arms when the detective asks how she could have let months of theft slip by, and answers that she checks the seals once a year, as the regulations require. It may be the indignation of an official who did her duty. It may be the rigidity of someone clinging to the regulations so as not to look elsewhere. The detective will have to decide which.