The Long Way Home

*

Myrna spread a thick layer of brilliant gold marmalade on her English muffin. Then she dipped her knife into the raspberry jam and added it to the mix. Her own invention. Marmberry. It looked grotesque, but then great food so often did. Never mind what the chefs tell you, she thought, as she took a bite. All the best comfort food looked like someone had dropped the plate.

She smiled down at her own failed “color wheel,” and thought of Bean, and the paintings. That was what her English muffin looked like. The palette Bean had used to create those brilliant, and not in a good way, pictures.

What had Ruth called Clara’s first efforts? A dog’s breakfast.

“The dog’s breakfast.” Myrna raised the muffin in salute, and took a bite.

But her chewing slowed, slowed until it stopped. She stared into space.

Her thoughts, tentative at first, sped up. Finally racing along, racing toward a completely unexpected conclusion.

But it wasn’t possible. Was it?

She swallowed.

*

Perhaps the only good thing about the torment he experienced, thought Gamache, taking a deep breath of the sweet morning air, was that once it was gone he emerged into this.

He smiled at the sight of the stone and clapboard and brick cottages, radiating in circles from the village green.

And when the hell stopped, when he finally banished his demons, would heaven stop too?

Would he love this place less because he needed it less?

Again he looked at Three Pines, the little village lost in the valley, and felt the familiar lifting of his heart. But would it lift if there was no load?

Was the final fear that, in losing his fears, he would also lose his joy?

He’d been so worried about Jean-Guy and his addictions, what about his own? He wasn’t addicted to pain, to panic, but he might be addicted to the bliss of having them stop.

The mind, he knew, really was its own place. Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Gamache was pretty sure that’s what Peter Morrow had done. He’d turned heaven into hell. And as a result, he’d been kicked out. Paradise Lost.

But Peter Morrow wasn’t Lucifer, the fallen angel. He was just a troubled man who lived in his head, not realizing that Paradise was only ever found in the heart. Unfortunately for Peter, feelings lived there too. And they were almost always messy. Peter Morrow did not like messes.

Armand laughed as he remembered the conversation from the night before.

It was how Clara had described her first attempt at a painting. No, not a mess, it was something else. A dog’s breakfast. Ruth had called it that and Clara had agreed. Ruth tried to capture feelings in her poetry. Clara tried with color and subject to give form to feelings.

It was messy. Unruly. Risky. Scary. So much could go wrong. Failure was always close at hand. But so was brilliance.

Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter’s landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.

How shattering it must have been, then, to have played it safe all his life and been expelled anyway. From home. From his career.

What would a person do when the tried-and-true was no longer true?

Gamache’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the landscape before him. And listened. Not to the dogs this time. Not the birds or even the oaks and maples and murmuring pines. Now he listened to snippets of conversation, floating up from his memory. Remembering in more detail the conversation from the night before. Putting together a sentence here, a gesture there. A dab, a dot, a brush stroke of words. Until a picture formed.

He stood up, still staring into the distance. Waiting for the final elements. And then he had it.

As he stuffed the book back into his pocket and started down the hill, he saw Myrna leave her bookstore, still in her dressing gown, and practically run across the village green.

They were headed, he knew, for the same place.

Clara’s home.

*

“Where are you?” Myrna called.

“In here.”

Clara got off the stool and went to the studio door and saw Myrna standing like an Easter Island monument, if they’d been carved out of flannel. Myrna often dropped by, but rarely this early and normally she got dressed. Rarely did Myrna bother announcing herself. And Clara had rarely heard this tone in her voice.

Panic? No, not panic.

“Clara?”

Another voice, but the same tone, had arrived.

It was Armand and the tone was excitement.

“I think I know what Peter’s been doing,” he said.

“So do I,” said Myrna.

“So do I,” said Clara. “But I have to make a call.”

“Oui,” said Gamache as he and Myrna followed Clara to the telephone in the living room.

A few minutes later she hung up and, turning to them, she nodded.

They were right. A huge piece of the puzzle had appeared, or at least soon would.





FIFTEEN