THIRTY
“There it is.” Thérèse Brunel pointed.
They’d driven into downtown Montreal and now the Superintendent was pointing at a building. Gamache slowed the car and immediately provoked honking. In Quebec it was almost a capital crime to slow down. He didn’t speed up, ignored the honking, and tried to see what she was pointing at. It was an art gallery. Heffel’s. And outside was a bronze sculpture. But the car had drifted past before he got a good look. He spent the next twenty minutes trying to find a parking spot.
“Can’t you just double-park?” asked Superintendent Brunel.
“If we want to be slaughtered, yes.”
She harrumphed, but didn’t disagree. Finally they parked and walked back along Sherbrooke Street until they were in front of Heffel’s Art Gallery, staring at a bronze sculpture Gamache had seen before but never stopped to look at.
His cell phone vibrated. “Pardon,” he said to the Superintendent, and answered it.
“It’s Clara. I’m wondering when you might be ready.”
“In just a few minutes. Are you all right?” She’d sounded shaky, upset.
“I’m just fine. Where can I meet you?”
“I’m on Sherbrooke, just outside Heffel’s Gallery.”
“I know it. I can be there in a few minutes. Is that okay?” She sounded keen, even anxious, to leave.
“Perfect. I’ll be here.”
He put the phone away and went back to the sculpture. Silently he walked around it while Thérèse Brunel watched, a look of some amusement on her face.
What he saw was an almost life-sized bronze of a frumpy middle-aged woman standing beside a horse, a dog at her side and a monkey on the horse’s back. When he arrived back at Superintendent Brunel he stopped.
“This is ‘woo’?”
“No, this is Emily Carr. It’s by Joe Fafard and is called Emily and Friends.”
Gamache smiled then and shook his head. Of course it was. Now he could see it. The woman, matronly, squat, ugly, had been one of Canada’s most remarkable artists. Gifted and visionary, she’d painted mostly in the early 1900s and was now long dead. But her art only grew in significance and influence.
He looked more closely at the bronze woman. She was younger here than the images he’d seen of her in grainy old black-and-white photos. They almost always showed a masculine woman, alone. In a forest. And not smiling, not happy.
This woman was happy. Perhaps it was the conceit of the sculptor.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Superintendent Brunel said. “Normally Emily Carr looks gruesome. I think it’s brilliant to show her happy, as she apparently only was around her animals. It was people she hated.”
“You said you’d found ‘woo.’ Where?”
He was disappointed and far from convinced Superintendent Brunel was right. How could a long dead painter from across the continent have anything to do with the case?
Thérèse Brunel walked up to the sculpture and placed one manicured hand on the monkey.
“This is Woo. Emily Carr’s constant companion.”
“Woo’s a monkey?”
“She adored all animals, but Woo above all.”
Gamache crossed his arms over his chest and stared. “It’s an interesting theory, but the ‘woo’ in the Hermit’s cabin could mean anything. What makes you think it’s Emily Carr’s monkey?”
“Because of this.”
She opened her handbag and handed him a glossy brochure. It was for a retrospective of the works of Emily Carr, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gamache looked at the photographs of Carr’s unmistakable paintings of the West Coast wilderness almost a century ago.
Her work was extraordinary. Rich greens and browns swirled together so that the forest seemed both frenzied and tranquil. It was a forest long gone. Logged, clear-cut, ruined. But still alive, thanks to the brush and brilliance of Emily Carr.
But that wasn’t what had made her famous.
Gamache flipped through the brochure until he found them. Her signature series. Depicting what haunted any Canadian soul who saw them.
The totem poles.
Sitting on the shores of a remote Haida fishing village in northern British Columbia. She’d painted them where the Haida had put them.