The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

It was eleven o’clock.

Putting a shawl around her shoulders, and slipping on rubber boots, she clumped around the edge of the village green and knocked on the door. Then she let herself in.

“Clara?”

“In here.”

Myrna found her in her studio, sitting in front of the unfinished canvas. Peter Morrow stared back, ghostly. Half-finished. A demi-man in an unfinished life.

Clara was wearing sweats and held a paintbrush in her mouth, like a female FDR. Her hair stuck out at odd angles from running her hands through it.

“Pizza for dinner?” asked Myrna, picking a mushroom out of Clara’s hair.

“Yes. Reine-Marie invited me over but I wasn’t really in the mood.”

Myrna looked at the easel and knew why. Clara had been obsessing over the portrait again. And Peter, now gone, was still managing to undermine his wife’s art.

“Do you want to talk?” Myrna asked, drawing up a stool.

Clara put down the brush and ran her hands through her graying hair so vigorously that bits of pepperoni and crumbs fell out.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” said Clara, waving at the portrait. “It’s as though I’ve never painted in my life. Oh, God, suppose I can’t?”

She looked at Myrna in a panic.

“You will,” Myrna assured her. “Maybe you’re just doing the wrong portrait. Maybe it’s too soon to paint Peter.”

Peter seemed to be watching them. A slight smile on his handsome face. Myrna wondered if Clara knew how very well she’d already captured the man. Myrna had cared for Peter very much, but she also knew he could be a real piece of work. This piece, in fact. And Myrna also wondered if Clara had been adding to the portrait, or taking away. Had she been making him less and less substantial?

She turned away and listened as Clara talked about what had happened. To Peter. It was a story Myrna knew well. She’d been there.

But still she listened, and she’d listen again. And again.

And with every telling Clara was letting go of a bit of the unbearable pain. The guilt she felt. The sorrow. It was as though Clara was pulling herself out of the ocean, dripping in grief, but no longer drowning.

Clara blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

“Did you have fun at the Gamaches’?” she asked. “What time is it anyway? Why’re you in pajamas?”

“It’s half past eleven,” said Myrna. “Can we go into the kitchen?”

Away from the goddamned painting, thought Myrna.

“Tea?” Clara asked.

“Beer?” Myrna countered, and pulled a couple out of the fridge.

“What’s wrong?” Clara asked.

“You know I joined the Estrie Players,” said Myrna.

“You’re not going to ask me again to go and paint sets,” said Clara. When Myrna didn’t answer, Clara put her beer down and reached out for her friend’s hand.

“What is it?”

“The play we’re doing. She Sat Down and Wept—”

“The musical?”

But Myrna didn’t smile. “Antoinette took the playwright’s name off the script. She wanted to keep it a secret.”

Clara nodded. “You and Gabri were all excited, thinking it must be by Michel Tremblay or Leonard Cohen maybe.”

“Gabri was hoping it was by Wayne Gretzky.”

“He’s a hockey player,” said Clara.

“Well, you know Gabri,” said Myrna. “Anyway, Antoinette said she did it to attract attention, interest. To get people talking.”

“Why did she really do it?” asked Clara, seeing where this was going.

“Turns out the playwright is famous,” said Myrna. “But not in the way you’d hope. It’s John Fleming.”

Clara shook her head. The name meant nothing. And yet, there was a small niggling, more a gnawing really.

Myrna waited.

Clara looked off, trying to place the name. The man. John Fleming.

“Is it someone we’ve met?” she asked, and Myrna shook her head. “But we know him?”

Myrna nodded.

And then Clara had it. Headlines. Television images of jostling photographers, trying to get a picture of the little man in the neat suit, being led into court.

How different real monsters were from the film kind.

John Fleming was famous indeed.

*

Ruth closed the last page of the script and laid a blue-veined hand on the stack of paper.

Then, making up her mind, she lit the logs in the hearth and held the script over it until her thin skin sizzled. But she couldn’t do it.

“Stay here,” she commanded Rosa, who watched from her flannel nest.

Finding a small shovel, Ruth went outside, and sinking to her knees she hacked at the earth. Cutting away at the grass. Digging deeper, fighting the ground for every inch, as though it knew her intention and was resisting. But Ruth didn’t give up. If she could have dug down to the bedrock, she would have. Finally she was deep enough for her purpose.