The Long Way Home(56)

“The first Sunday in May?” Reine-Marie read out loud from the website. “But Peter had come back to Canada by then. He must’ve done the painting sometime in the early winter.”

“That means he must’ve trespassed,” said Clara. She tried to make it sound nonchalant. A simple statement of fact. But it was much more than that. For her.

The man she knew followed rules. He followed recipes, for God’s sake. He read instructions, paid his bills on time and had his teeth cleaned twice a year. He did as he was told and taught. It was not in his nature to trespass.

But Peter had changed. He was no longer the man she knew.

She’d sent him away, hoping he’d change. But now faced with more evidence that he had, she found herself suddenly afraid. That he’d not only changed, but changed course. Away from her.

To hide her upset, she went back to studying the website. At first she just stared, hoping no one would notice her distress, but after a few moments the images sunk in. They were like nothing she’d ever seen before.

The creators of the garden wanted to explore the laws of nature, the mysteries of the universe, and what happened when the two intersected.

Collided.

Was it like a nuclear bomb, wiping out all life? Or was it like the double helix. Creating life?

There were no answers in the garden, only questions. Speculation.

The Peter Clara knew was about certainties. But he’d gone halfway around the world to a place where questions were planted. And grew. Where uncertainty flourished.

And Clara began to feel a small seed of relief. It was the sort of place she would love to visit. The old Peter would have scoffed. He might have accompanied her, but grudgingly, and with snide asides.

But this Peter had gone to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on his own.

Perhaps, perhaps, he was changing course, but not away from her. He was moving closer. If not physically, then in every other way.

“Huh,” Reine-Marie grunted, reading. “It’s a garden but not in the conventional sense. It’s a mix of physics and nature,” she said, looking up from the screen. “A sort of crossroads.”

Peter had placed his easel at that crossroads, and created.

Clara longed to speak to him. To find out what he found. To hear how he felt. He’d finally turned the corner. Moved toward her. And then fallen off the face of the earth.

* * *

“It’s become quite a draw,” said Alphonse. “People come from all over to see it. Some call it mystical.”

He said it with a snort, but Constable Stuart was unconvinced. He’d heard what the cook had said. The warning. Not to tell his drunken tale again.

“What happened to you in the garden, Alphonse?”

* * *

Clara went back to Peter’s paintings. Not the one with the checkerboard snake, but the other two.

She didn’t know for sure, but she suspected they’d also been painted in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The palette was the same, the urgency the same.

Like the first one, these were explosions of color. Clashing, almost frantic. Unlikely, unattractive combinations of color. Peter seemed to have painted them with abandon, desperate to grab hold of something fleeting, to capture it.

“It looks as though his brain exploded onto the page,” said Jean-Guy, standing beside Gamache.

What had Peter seen, Clara wondered, in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation? What had he felt?

* * *

Alphonse looked behind him, toward the swinging door into the kitchen, then leaning his elbows on the counter, he lowered his voice.

“This is to go no further, understand?”

Constable Stuart lied, and nodded.

“It was sometime last fall. I went there in the early evening to shoot rabbits.”

And out came the story.

He paused after describing the first, failed attempt to kill the hare.

“I’d done it many times before, mind. Since I was a boy.”

“Had you been to the garden before?” Stuart asked.

Alphonse nodded. “Killed lots of rabbits there. But never seen one quite like this.”

“How was it different?”

Alphonse studied the constable. He no longer seemed like a waiter in a roadside diner. He was inches from Constable Stuart’s face, and he looked ancient. But not frail. He looked like a seaman who’d turned his face into the wind all his life. Navigating. Searching.

Until he’d found what he sought. Dry land.

“Shall I tell you?” he asked.

And Constable Stuart wondered, yet again, if he really wanted the answer.

He nodded.

“I watched as he stood on his hind legs, this hare. Straight up. Huge. Gray. He didn’t move. Even when I raised my rifle again. He just stood there. I could see his chest. I could see him breathing. I could see his heart beating. And then I noticed something behind him.”

“A movement? The owner?”

“No. Not a man. But another hare. Almost as big. Just standing there too. I’d been so taken with the one I hadn’t noticed the others.”

“Others?”

“Must’ve been twenty. All standing on their hind legs. Straight upright. In a perfect circle. Not moving.”

Constable Stuart felt himself grow very quiet. Very still. The old man’s eyes were on him, like searchlights.