The Long Way Home(44)

Gamache looked at them. Tilting his head this way and that.

Clara was right. They were a mess. And he realized he hadn’t quite believed they would be.

He’d hoped that the paintings would at least show promise. But he’d actually expected they’d be better than that. Unconventional, yes. Unexpected. Even slightly difficult to fathom. Like a Jackson Pollock. All wild color. Blobs and drips and lines of what looked like spilled paint. Accidents on canvas.

But those coalesced into a form, a feeling.

Gamache leaned slightly to the left. To the right. To the center.

No.

These were just messes.

Sitting on the floor like that, Peter’s paintings literally looked like a dog’s breakfast. If the dog had no sense of taste. And then had thrown up.

Whatever Rosa might drop on the paintings wouldn’t do any damage, thought Gamache.

Clara was across the kitchen and had taken the elastics off the smaller paintings and placed them on the table, anchoring each corner with salt and pepper shakers and mugs.

“So,” she said as the others joined her, “according to Marianna, these are Peter’s earlier works.”

They stared.

These works were no better. In fact, they were, if such a thing was possible, even worse than what lay on the floor.

“Are we sure Peter did them?” Gamache asked. It was extremely difficult to believe the same artist who’d painted the bland, tasteful, precise works in the studio was responsible for these.

Clara was looking doubtful herself. Leaning in, she examined the lower right corner.

“There’s no signature.” She was gnawing the side of her mouth. “He normally signs his works.”

“Yeah, well, he normally takes six months to do a painting,” said Ruth. “He normally doesn’t show any of his works until they’re perfect. He normally uses shades of cream and gray.”

Clara looked at Ruth in astonishment. Perhaps her head wasn’t quite as far up her ass as Clara had assumed.

“Do you think they’re Peter’s?” she asked Ruth.

“They’re his,” said Ruth decisively. “Not because they look like his but because no one in their right mind would take credit for these if they hadn’t painted them.”

“Why didn’t he sign them?” Jean-Guy asked.

“Would you?” Ruth asked.

They went back to studying the three paintings on the table.

Now and then one of them, as though repelled by these three, broke away and went over to the paintings on the floor.

Then, as though repelled again, they returned to the table.

“Well,” said Gabri, after consideration. “I have to say, they stink.”

The paintings were garish, splashes and clashes of color. Reds and purples, yellows and oranges. Fighting with each other. Dashed on the paper and canvas. It was as though Peter had taken a club to every rule he’d learned. Hacking away at them. Breaking them like a pi?ata. And out of those shattered certainties paint had poured. Gobs and gobs of brilliant paint. All the colors he’d sniffed at, sneered at, mocked with his clever artist friends. All the colors he’d withheld and Clara had used. They poured out. Like blood. Like guts.

They hit the paper and this was the result.

“What does this say about Peter?” Gamache asked.

“Do we really need to look in that cave?” Myrna whispered to him.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted. “But is there any difference between these”—he pointed to the ones on the table—“and those?” He gestured toward the floor. “Do you see an improvement? An evolution?”

Clara shook her head. “They look like an exercise in art school. You see here?”

She pointed to a checkerboard pattern in one of the paintings on the table. They leaned in and nodded.

“Every high school art student does something like that, to learn about perspective.”

Gamache’s brows came together in consideration. Why would one of the most successful artists in Canada paint these? And include an exercise kids are taught in school?

“Is this even art?” Jean-Guy asked.

It was another good question.

When Beauvoir had first met these people, and this village, he knew little about art and what he knew was more than he found useful. But after many years of exposure to the art world, he’d become interested. Sort of.

What mostly interested him wasn’t the art, but the environment. The infighting. The casual cruelty. The hypocrisy. The ugly business of selling beautiful creations.

And how that ugliness sometimes grew into crime. And how the crime sometimes festered into murder. Sometimes.

Jean-Guy liked Peter Morrow. A part of him understood Peter Morrow. The part Beauvoir admitted to very few.

The fearful part. The empty part. The selfish part. The insecure part.

The cowardly part of Jean-Guy Beauvoir understood Peter Morrow.

But while Beauvoir had fought hard to face that part of himself, Peter had simply run from it. Increasing the chasm, the tear.

Fear didn’t make the hole bigger, Beauvoir had learned. But cowardice did.

Still, Jean-Guy Beauvoir liked Peter Morrow, and was worried that something horrible had happened to the man. But at least no one would kill for these pictures. Except perhaps Peter. He might kill to suppress them.