The Long Way Home(107)

“No. I just feel safe, holding them.”

She brushed the metal pencil holder with her finger, like a rosary. And held on to her sketch pad like a bible.

A wave battered the window and they pulled back. But the Plexiglas held. They sat in silence then. The sort of strained silence mariners for centuries would recognize, as they rode out a storm.

Gamache looked at Clara, in profile, as she watched the waves batter the shore. Leaping onto the rocks. Wearing them down. Wearing them smooth.

Her eyes were both calm and concentrated. Taking in every detail. Of the physical and the metaphysical world.

“It was particularly cruel, wasn’t it?” she said, still staring at the shore. “Using art to kill.”

“I’ve seen worse,” he said.

Now it was Clara’s turn to look at his face in profile. She believed him.

“I mean, to use something you love against you,” she said.

“I knew what you meant,” he said.

The Loup de Mer lurched and shuddered, and both were tossed forward, just managing to stop themselves from falling off the bench completely.

“Coward,” said Clara.

“Pardon?”

“Norman. He’s a coward. He didn’t have to see it. Didn’t have to face what he’d done. He could just smear the asbestos in, mail it off, and get on with his own life. Cowardly.”

“Most murder is,” said Gamache. “It’s done by weak people, or strong people in a moment of weakness. But it’s almost never a courageous thing to do.”

“Almost never?”

Gamache remained silent.

She brought a cough lozenge out of her pocket and put it on the bench between them.

“Is there anyone you’d kill, if you didn’t have to see it?” she asked. “If you could just press down on this”—she pointed to the cough drop—“and they’d die. Would you?”

Gamache stared at the small white square.

“Would you?” he asked, looking up again.

“Oh, all sorts of people, every day. Myrna this morning, when she took too long in the bathtub—”

“You have a bathtub?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Clara said, and hurried on, leaving a slightly perplexed Gamache to ponder bathtubs. “Ruth. Art critics. Olivier when he gives me too small a croissant. Ruth. Gallery owners who pay more attention to another artist.”

“Ruth.”

“Her too,” said Clara.

“Would you have been tempted to press the lozenge on Peter?”

“Kill him? There were times I wanted him to be gone,” she said. “Not just away from Three Pines, but gone completely. So that I could stop thinking about him. Stop hoping, and maybe even stop hating him. Or loving him. If he was gone, I could. Maybe.”

“You didn’t really want him dead,” said Gamache. “You wanted the pain to stop.”

She looked down at the pastille on the bench.

“There’ve been times I’ve wished him dead. I’ve wanted it, and dreaded it. It would be a terrible end to our life together. But it would at least be an end.”

She looked around at the deck, slick with water from the river. At the metal hull of the ship. At the heaving waves and the desolate shore beyond.

So different from the solid, gentle village. From their home. And their studios and their garden, with the two chairs, and the rings, intertwined.

She’d fought to think of it as “her” home now. To call it “my” home, in conversation. But it wasn’t. It was their home. Infused with them.

She missed him so much she thought her insides would cave in.

And she had to know. How he felt.

She was pretty sure she already had the answer. His silence said it all. Surely his absence should be enough. But it wasn’t. She needed to hear it from his own mouth.

Had he stopped loving her? Had he left her, and Three Pines, and made a home somewhere else?

The f*cker wasn’t going to get off that easy. He had to face her.

Dear, beloved Peter. They had to face each other. And tell each other the truth. And then, she could go home.

Gamache got up and walked carefully to the window. He stood looking out for a long while, gripping the frames for support against the lunges and heaves of the ship.

“Can you join me?”

“I’m not sure I can,” she said, and timed her jump between waves.

He held her steady, his large hand on her back, practically pinning her to the window.

“See that cove?”

“Yes.”

“Those are the Graves.”

She braced herself and looked across to a bay that should have been sheltered, but was in fact a churning mess of eddies, of whirlpools. It was a different movement altogether from the relentless waves. They came straight at them. But the movement in the cove was as though some creature was writhing and swirling just below the surface.

“Rocks under the water,” Gamache explained, though she hadn’t asked. “They create that effect. Any vessel caught in them hasn’t a chance.”

Clara felt her skin grow cold, from the inside out. Felt it crawl. Felt it try to crawl away. From the killing eddies, from the bleak shore.

“Is that what sank the Empress of Ireland?” she asked.