It was cold and dark, dead leaves underfoot and overhead and swirling in the air in between. The women’s high spirits had been replaced by restlessness. A shadow crept over the jovial gathering. Even Myrna became subdued, her smiling, friendly face growing watchful.
The forest creaked. And shivered. The poplar leaves trembled in the wind.
Clara wanted to leave. This was not a happy place.
Lucy began to growl, a long, low song of warning. Her hackles rose and she slowly sunk to the ground, her muscles bunched as though ready to spring.
‘We must form a circle,’ said Myrna, trying to sound casual while actually looking around the gathering trying to figure out who she could outrun if it came to that. Or would she be the straggler? Damn that grounding casserole.
The circle, the tiniest, tightest known to math, was made, the women grasping hands. Myrna picked up the prayer stick from where Lucy had dropped it and thrust it into the ground, deep. Clara half expected the earth to howl.
‘I’ve brought these ribbons.’ Myrna opened her bag. Piled there were brightly colored ribbons, all intertwined. ‘We asked you all to bring something that was symbolic of Jane.’
From her pocket Myrna brought out a tiny book. She rummaged around in the bag until she found a crimson ribbon. First she tied the book to the ribbon, then she went to the prayer stick and spoke as she tied the ribbon on to it.
‘This is for you, Jane, to thank you for sharing your love of the written word with me. Bless you.’
Myrna stood at the prayer stick for a moment, huge head bowed, and then she stepped away, smiling for the first time since coming to this place.
One by one the women took a ribbon, tied an item to it, tied the ribbon to the stick and spoke a few words. Some were audible, some weren’t. Some were prayers, some were simple explanations. Hanna tied an old 78 record to the prayer stick, Ruth a faded photograph. Sarah tied a spoon and Nellie, a shoe. Clara reached into her head and pulled out a duck barrette. She tied that to a bright yellow ribbon and the ribbon to the now festooned prayer stick.
‘This is for helping me see more clearly,’ said Clara. ‘I love you, Jane.’ She looked up and spotted the blind, hovering above them in the near distance. Blind. How strange, thought Clara, blind, but now I see.
And Clara had an idea. An inspiration. ‘Thank you, Jane,’ she whispered, and felt the elderly arms around her for the first time in a week. Before moving off Clara pulled a banana out of her pocket, and tied it to the stick, for Lucy. But she had one more item to add. From her other pocket she drew a playing card. The Queen of Hearts. Tying it to the prayer stick Clara thought of Yolande, and the wonderful gift she’d been offered as a child, and either rejected or forgot. Clara stared at the pattern on the Queen of Hearts, memorising it. She knew the magic wasn’t in it staying the same, but in the changes.
By the end the prayer stick was brilliant with waving and weaving colored ribbons, dangling their gifts. The wind caught the objects and sent them dancing into the air around the prayer stick, clinking and clanging into each other, like a symphony.
The women looked around and saw their circle was no longer bound by fear, but was loose and open. And in the center, on the spot Jane Neal had last lived and died, a wealth of objects played, and sang the praises of a woman who was much loved.
Clara allowed her gaze, free now from fear, to follow the ribbons as they were caught in the wind. Her eye caught something at the end of one of the ribbons. Then she realised it wasn’t attached to a ribbon at all, but to the tree behind.
High up in one of the maple trees she saw an arrow.
Gamache was just getting into his car to drive back to Montreal when Clara Morrow shot out of the woods, running toward him down du Moulin as though chased by demons. For a wild moment Gamache wondered whether the ritual had inadvertently conjured something better left alone. And, in a way, it had. The women, and their ritual, had conjured an arrow, something someone must sorely wish had been left undisturbed.
Gamache immediately called Beauvoir in Montreal then followed Clara to the site. He hadn’t been there for almost a week and was impressed by how much it’d changed. The biggest changes were the trees. Where they’d been bright and bold with cheery color a week ago, now they were past their prime, with more leaves on the ground than in the branches. And that’s what had revealed the arrow. When he’d stood at this spot a week ago and looked up he would never, could never, have seen the arrow. It’d been hidden by layers of leaves. But no longer.
The other change was the stick in the ground with ribbons dancing around it. He supposed it had something to do with the ritual. Either that or Beauvoir had very quickly become very weird without his supervision. Gamache walked over to the prayer stick, impressed by its gaiety. He caught at some of the items to look at them, including an old photograph of a young woman, plump and short-sighted, standing next to a rugged, handsome lumberjack. They were holding hands and smiling. Behind them a slender young woman stood, looking straight into the camera. A face taken by bitterness.