The Long Way Home

“How do we know these weren’t painted in the garden too?” asked Myrna, indicating with her banana bread the three canvases nailed to the wall.

“Because Peter gave those three”—Gamache pointed with his slice to the paintings on the table—“to Bean in the winter. When he’d returned from Dumfries. He only mailed these bigger ones later.”

“Ergo, he painted them on his return to Canada,” said Clara.

“Ergo?” asked Myrna.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to use it,” said Clara.

“Not now that I hear how it really sounds.”

They fell silent, staring at the works.

“Do you think they’re landscapes too?” Myrna finally asked.

“I do,” said Armand, though he sounded not completely convinced. It didn’t look like any landscape he’d ever seen. Besides the flying lips, nothing really even looked like anything.

“Clara,” said Gamache slowly, elongating her name. Buying time to sort his thoughts. “What did you say you do with your failed paintings?”

“I keep them and bring them out when I’m between projects.”

Gamache nodded slowly. “And what do you do with them?”

“I told you before,” said Clara, confused by the question. “I look at them.”

Gamache said nothing and Clara wondered what he was getting at, and then her eyes widened. She’d remembered what she did with her old paintings.

She got to her feet and, pulling the nails out of the wall, she took down Peter’s lip painting.

“The only reason we put these paintings up this way around,” she said as Myrna and Armand went to help, “is because it’s how Bean had them on the bedroom wall. But suppose Bean was wrong? There’s no signature to tell which way is up.”

She nailed it back into place. Upside down. And all three stepped back. To examine it.

Not upside down at all, but finally the right way around.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Myrna.

The slashes of vivid color had become a wide and turbulent river. The bold red lips had become waves. What had appeared to be trees now became cliff faces.

The three of them stood in front of what Peter had really created. The smiles weren’t smiles at all. There was nothing giddy, nothing joyous about this picture. Peter had painted a vast and endless river of sorrow.

“I know this place,” said Gamache.





TWENTY-ONE


“Armand.” Reine-Marie appeared in Clara’s kitchen with a sheet of paper. “Constable Stuart wrote back.”

She looked perplexed and handed him the email she’d printed out.

He took it and in turn pointed her to the wall of paintings. She walked over as he read, his brows drawing together as he got further and further into the message.

He handed the paper to Clara and joined Reine-Marie at the wall of paintings.

“All right?” he asked, noticing her pale face.

“Oui. Peter finally figures out how to paint emotions, and he paints this.” She paused. “Poor one.”

“Come with me,” he said.

They left the sad painting on the wall and returned to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on the pine table.

Clara finished reading and passed the page on to Myrna.

“You don’t believe it, do you?” asked Reine-Marie, looking from Clara to Armand and nodding toward the letter now in Myrna’s hands.

“One impossible thing before breakfast?” Armand asked.

He placed his hand, splayed, in the center of one of the paintings on the table. And turned it.

Only then did they see what Peter had done.

He hadn’t created something with these paintings. He’d captured something. A moment in a garden at dusk.

What had looked like a circle of stones in the painting when it was the other way around was indeed a circle of stones. Tall, solid, gray.

But now they saw something else. Long, strong slashes of color off the top of the stones.

Rabbit ears.

“Peter would never have believed such a thing,” said Clara. But in her heart she knew she had to stop saying that. If they had a hope of finding out what had happened to him, she had to accept that the man she’d known was indeed gone.

Down the rabbit hole. Where impossible things happened.

Where hares turned to rune stones.

Where giddy smiles turned into vast sorrow. And back again. Depending on your perspective.

When she’d started the search there’d been an element of guilt. Of responsibility. She’d wanted to find him, she wanted him to be safe. But she hadn’t been sure she wanted him back.

But the more they discovered about Peter now, the more desperate she was to meet this man. To get to know him. And have him meet her, for the first time.

Clara realized she was falling in love. She’d always loved Peter, but this was something else. Some deeper vein.

“It doesn’t matter what we believe,” said Myrna, joining them to stare at the picture. “What matters is what Peter believed he saw.”

They looked from the table over to the paintings on the wall.

One was now quite clear. The waves of red lips. Frowning. Moaning. Sighing.