The Long Way Home

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.

“I decided to paint them,” said Clara.

“Oui,” said Gamache. That much was obvious.

“No,” Clara said, smiling. “My plan was to actually paint them. Put paint right on them. They’d be nude. Beatrice was going to be green. The heart chakra. Kaye was going to be blue. The throat chakra. She talked a lot.”

“A blue streak,” confirmed Myrna.

“And Emilie would be violet,” said Clara. “The crown chakra. Oneness with God.”

Beauvoir made a slight squeal, as though he’d just connected to the Internet. Gamache ignored him, though he could sense the rolling eyes.

Clara turned to Beauvoir. “I know. Nuts. But they were willing to try it.”

“And did you paint them?” Beauvoir asked.

“Well, I would have, but I realized I didn’t have enough violet, and I couldn’t really leave Emilie half finished. I was going to send them home, when Emilie suggested just doing their portrait. I wasn’t very enthusiastic. I’d never done portraits.”

“Why not?” Gamache asked.

Clara thought about that. “I guess because it seemed so old-fashioned. Not avant-garde. Not creative.”

“So you’d paint the person, but not their portrait?” asked Beauvoir.

“Exactly. Pretty creative, no?”

“That’s one word for it,” he said, and then mumbled something that sounded like “merde.”

Gamache turned back to the canvas. He’d met all three women, but Clara’s painting of them always stunned him. They were old. Worn. Lined. Creviced. Their clothes were comfortable, sensible. Taken in parts there was nothing remotely remarkable about them in this painting.

But the whole? What Clara had captured? It was breathtaking.

Emilie, Beatrice, and Kaye reached out to each other. Not grasping. These women weren’t drowning. They weren’t clinging to each other.

All three were laughing, with open-faced pleasure in each other’s company.

In her first portrait Clara had captured intimacy.

“It had been a mistake, then?” asked Beauvoir, pointing to the painting.

“Well, that’s one word for it,” said Clara.

“And what did Peter say when he saw it?” asked Gamache.

“He said it was very good, but that I might have to work on perspective.”

Gamache felt a spike of anger. This was a form of murder. Peter Morrow had tried to kill not his wife, but her creation. He’d clearly recognized a work of genius and had tried to ruin it.

“Do you think he knew then what was going to happen?” Beauvoir asked.

“I don’t think anyone could have known what would happen,” said Clara. “I sure didn’t.”

“But I think he suspected,” said Myrna. “I think he looked at The Three Graces and saw the Visigoths on the seventh hill. He knew his world was about to change.”

“Why wasn’t he happy for Clara?” Gamache asked Myrna.

“Have you ever been jealous?”

Gamache thought about that. He’d been passed over for promotions. In his youth girls he’d had crushes on had turned him down, only to date one of his friends. Which somehow made it worse for his young heart. But the closest he’d come to consuming, corroding jealousy was seeing other kids with their parents.

He’d hated them for that. And, God help him, he’d hated his parents. For not being there. For leaving him behind.

“It’s like drinking acid,” said Myrna, “and expecting the other person to die.”

Gamache nodded.

Is that how Peter had felt, looking at this painting? Had Peter taken his first gulp of acid? Had he felt his insides curdle when he saw The Three Graces?

Gamache knew Peter Morrow well and had no doubt even now that he loved Clara with all his heart. And that must have made it worse. To love the woman but hate and fear what she’d created. Peter didn’t want Clara to die, but he’d almost certainly wanted her paintings to die. And he’d do what he could to kill them. With a quiet word, an insinuation, a suggestion.

“May I?” Gamache pointed out the door of the studio to the closed door across the hall.

“Yes.” Clara led the way.