The Long Way Home

“Why would Peter go all the way to Tabaquen?” asked Clara.

“To find the tenth muse,” Myrna reminded her. “To become a better painter. He didn’t know any of this stuff. All he knows is that he’s desperate and lost and Professor Norman was offering an easy way to get from his head to his heart. The quick fix. A muse for the modern man.”

The ship shuddered as it hit a particularly massive wave. The river leapt up and beat against the windows.

But while slowed for a moment, the Loup de Mer plowed ahead. Getting closer and closer to its destination. The Sorcerer. The source.





THIRTY-SEVEN


They spent the afternoon apart. Each trying to just ride out the storm.

Armand Gamache came upon Clara in the men’s cabin, the so-called Admiral’s Suite. She’d brought soup and bread down to Chartrand, who was still asleep on the narrow bunk. There wasn’t much soup left in the bowl, most of it having slopped out as Clara tried to carry it.

The gale was upon them now. Battering the ship. Pushing it and pulling it, so that the people inside were tossed this way and that, without warning.

“I was just coming to check on him myself. Is he okay?” Gamache whispered as he clung on to the door frame.

“Yes. Just really seasick.”

Clara put the bread on the bedside table, but held on to the soup. No use leaving the bowl, it would just end up on the floor. Or on Chartrand.

She got up, but not before feeling Chartrand’s forehead. It felt like a cod and looked like underwear. An improvement. She rested her large hand on his chest. Just for a moment.

They left him and fought their way back to the observation deck. The river was froth and foam. The deck was awash.

Clara had chosen a bench next to the window and Gamache sat beside her, as they had each morning in Three Pines. Like strangers waiting for a bus.

Clara had her sketchbook and pencil case on her lap, but kept them unopened.

“Were you planning to do a drawing?” Gamache asked.

“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.”