The Long Way Home(14)

Clara smiled.

“I hope I’m useful,” he said.

“You already have been.”

“Who do you want to know about this?”

“Might as well tell everyone now,” she said. “What do we do first?”

“First? Let me think about that. We can probably find out a lot and not even leave home.” He hoped his relief at that wasn’t too obvious. He watched her closely. “You can stop it at any time, you know.”

“Merci, Armand. But if I’m ever going to get on with my life, I need to know why he didn’t come home. I’m not expecting to like the answer,” she assured him. She left and walked down the hill.

He sat back down and thought about a dying father’s prayer for a young son. Had his own father thought of him, at the moment of impact? At the moment he knew he was dying? Did he think of his young son, at home, waiting for headlights that would never, ever arrive?

Was he still waiting?

Armand Gamache did not want to have to be brave. Not anymore. Now all he wanted was to be at peace.

But, like Clara, he knew he could not have one without the other.





SIX

“The first thing we need to know is why Peter left.”

Gamache and Beauvoir sat on one side of the pine table in Clara’s kitchen, and Clara and Myrna were across from them. Gamache’s large hands were folded together on the table. Beside him, Jean-Guy had his notepad out and a pen at the ready. They’d unconsciously slipped right back into their old roles and habits, from more than a decade investigating together.

Beauvoir had also brought his laptop and connected to the Internet over the phone line, in case they needed to look anything up. The laborious musical tones for each number it dialed filled the kitchen. And then the shriek, as though the Internet was a creature and connecting to it hurt.

Beauvoir shot Gamache a cautionary glance. Don’t, for God’s sake, not again.

Gamache grinned. Each time they used dial-up in Three Pines—the only way to connect since no other signal reached this hidden village—the Chief would remind Jean-Guy that once even dial-up had seemed a miracle. Not a nuisance.

“I remember…” the Chief began, and Beauvoir’s eyes widened. Then Gamache caught the younger man’s eyes and smiled.

But when the Chief turned to Clara, his face was serious.

She took a deep breath, and took the plunge.

It had begun. The search for Peter had started.

“You know why,” Clara said. “I kicked him out.”

“Oui,” agreed Gamache. “But why did you do that?”

“Things hadn’t been good between us for a while. As you know, Peter’s career sort of plateaued, while mine…”

“… took off,” said Myrna.

Clara nodded. “I knew Peter was struggling with that. I’d thought he’d get over his jealousy eventually and be happy for me, like I’d been happy for his success. And he tried to be. He pretended to be. But I could tell he wasn’t. Instead of getting better it was getting worse.”

Gamache listened. Peter Morrow had long been the more prominent artist in the family. Indeed, one of the most prominent artists in Québec. In Canada. His income was modest, but it was enough for them to live on. He supported the family.

He painted very slowly in excruciating detail, while Clara seemed to slap together a work daily. Whether or not it was art was open for debate.

Where Peter’s creations were beautiful studies in composition, there was nothing studied about what his wife produced in her studio.

Clara’s works were exuberant. Vital, alive, often funny, often just plain baffling. Her Warrior Uteruses, her series of rubber boots, her whore televisions.

Even Gamache, who loved art, had difficulty fathoming much of it. But he recognized joy when he saw it, and Clara’s creations were filled with it. The pure joy of creation. Of striving. Of striding forward. Searching. Exploring. Pushing.

And then, the breakthrough. The Three Graces.

One day Clara had decided to try something different, yet again. A painting this time, and her subject would be three elderly neighbors. Friends.

Beatrice, Kaye, and Emilie. Emilie, who had saved Henri. Emilie who had owned the Gamaches’ home.

The Three Graces. Clara had invited them into her home to paint them.

“May I?” Gamache asked, and gestured toward her studio.

Clara got up. “Of course.”

They all walked across the kitchen and into her studio. It smelled of overripe bananas and paint and the strangely evocative and attractive scent of turpentine.

Clara turned the lights on and the room came alive with faces. People looked at them from the walls and easels. One of the canvases was draped in a sheet, like a child’s idea of a ghost. She’d covered her latest work.

Gamache made his way past it and straight across the studio, trying not to be distracted by the other works that seemed to be watching him.

He stopped at the large canvas on the far wall.

“Everything changed with this, didn’t it?” he said.

Clara nodded, also staring at it. “For better, and for worse. It was Peter’s idea, you know. Not the subject matter, but he kept at me to stop doing installations and to try painting. Like him. So I did.”

The four of them stared at the three elderly women on the wall.