The Long Way Home

Clara looked at Gamache. Over the years she’d heard many things in his voice. Tenderness, wonder, rage, disappointment. Warning. But never bitterness. Until now.

“Anyway,” he said, as though what he’d just told her was trivial, “I found this book on my father’s bedside table. The bookmark exactly where he left it. I took it and put it in a box with other things.”

Treasures from childhood. Old keys to old homes he no longer lived in. Pennants from races won. A particularly fine chestnut. A piece of wood someone assured him was from Jean Béliveau’s hockey stick. Relics from the saints of childhood. Talismans.

He’d been given the crucifix his father always wore, and had been wearing when he died. They’d wanted to bury him with it, but his grandmother had retrieved it, Armand didn’t know how and never asked.

She’d given it to him when his first child, Daniel, had been born.

He’d cherished it. And given it, in turn, to Daniel when Florence was born.

But this book he’d kept. Just for himself. Safe in the box. Sealed in the box.

Always there but never touched. The box was brought out and looked at sometimes, but never opened.

Until he and Reine-Marie had moved to Three Pines.

Until he’d stopped hunting killers. He’d done his duty by the souls of the dead and the souls of the damned. And he could, at long last, rest in peace in the little village in the valley.

Only then was it safe to open the box.

Or so he’d thought.

Out of it came the scent of the book, and the scent of his father. Musky, masculine. Embedded in the pages of the book. Like a ghost.

“There is a balm in Gilead,” he’d read that first morning, in their garden. “To make the wounded whole.”

He’d been overwhelmed then. With relief. That maybe now he could put down the burden.

Armand Gamache had long suspected that far from being one of the passengers on the bewitched canoe, he was one of the voyageurs. Forever paddling, never stopping. Taking the souls of the wicked away. Endlessly.

“There’s power enough in Heaven,” he’d read. “To cure a sin-sick soul.”

The words he needed to hear. It was as though his father had spoken to him. Taken him in his strong arms, and held him, and told him it would be all right.

He could stop.

Every morning after that he sat on the bench overlooking the village, and he had a small, private visit with his father.

“But you never read beyond the bookmark,” said Clara. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to go beyond it. I don’t want to leave him behind.”

He inhaled the maritime air. And closing his eyes, he tilted his head slightly back.

Something else had come out of that sealed box. Something so unexpected it had taken Gamache a long time to even recognize it. And admit it.

Gamache shifted his gaze to the pastille now wedged between two slats by the rolling of the ship.

“I read the report on my parents’ death.” He spoke to the white lozenge. “And the boy who’d survived. He was a minor. His name had been expunged.”

Clara couldn’t think of anything to say, so she said nothing.

“He only had his learner’s permit. Driving illegally. Drunk. He was less than ten years older than me. He’d be in his mid-sixties now. Probably still alive.”

Gamache put out his finger. It hovered over the cough drop until the slightest heave of the boat would have driven the pastille into his finger.

But the boat didn’t heave. It didn’t ho. The waves seemed to calm for a moment.

Gamache looked over the side. To the shore.

They’d cleared the Graves and were plowing through the waters, ever closer to the end of the journey.

He brought his hand back, to the book. And there it rested.

“Patron.”

Beauvoir wove across the unsteady floor like a cowboy just off a long trail ride. Myrna was behind him, lurching from bench to bench.

Gamache put the book back in his jacket just as Beauvoir arrived.

“The principal got back to us. He tried calling you, but you didn’t pick up.”

“The phone’s in my pocket,” said Gamache. “I didn’t hear it.”

“You asked where the asbestos in Massey’s studio was all found.”

“Yes. And?”

“They’ve sealed the room and are doing more tests but so far the asbestos seems concentrated in only one place.”

“The storeroom?” asked Gamache. “Where Massey probably kept No Man’s paintings.”

“No. It was at the back of the studio, on one of the paintings.”

Clara drew her brows together in concentration and some confusion. “But there was only one painting back there.” She paled. “I didn’t see it, but you did,” she said to Myrna.

Gamache felt his heart take a sudden leap, as though hit from behind. Reine-Marie had also seen that painting. Had stood close enough to appreciate it. To breathe it in.