SIX
“The first thing we need to know is why Peter left.”
Gamache and Beauvoir sat on one side of the pine table in Clara’s kitchen, and Clara and Myrna were across from them. Gamache’s large hands were folded together on the table. Beside him, Jean-Guy had his notepad out and a pen at the ready. They’d unconsciously slipped right back into their old roles and habits, from more than a decade investigating together.
Beauvoir had also brought his laptop and connected to the Internet over the phone line, in case they needed to look anything up. The laborious musical tones for each number it dialed filled the kitchen. And then the shriek, as though the Internet was a creature and connecting to it hurt.
Beauvoir shot Gamache a cautionary glance. Don’t, for God’s sake, not again.
Gamache grinned. Each time they used dial-up in Three Pines—the only way to connect since no other signal reached this hidden village—the Chief would remind Jean-Guy that once even dial-up had seemed a miracle. Not a nuisance.
“I remember…” the Chief began, and Beauvoir’s eyes widened. Then Gamache caught the younger man’s eyes and smiled.
But when the Chief turned to Clara, his face was serious.
She took a deep breath, and took the plunge.
It had begun. The search for Peter had started.
“You know why,” Clara said. “I kicked him out.”
“Oui,” agreed Gamache. “But why did you do that?”
“Things hadn’t been good between us for a while. As you know, Peter’s career sort of plateaued, while mine…”
“… took off,” said Myrna.
Clara nodded. “I knew Peter was struggling with that. I’d thought he’d get over his jealousy eventually and be happy for me, like I’d been happy for his success. And he tried to be. He pretended to be. But I could tell he wasn’t. Instead of getting better it was getting worse.”
Gamache listened. Peter Morrow had long been the more prominent artist in the family. Indeed, one of the most prominent artists in Québec. In Canada. His income was modest, but it was enough for them to live on. He supported the family.
He painted very slowly in excruciating detail, while Clara seemed to slap together a work daily. Whether or not it was art was open for debate.
Where Peter’s creations were beautiful studies in composition, there was nothing studied about what his wife produced in her studio.
Clara’s works were exuberant. Vital, alive, often funny, often just plain baffling. Her Warrior Uteruses, her series of rubber boots, her whore televisions.
Even Gamache, who loved art, had difficulty fathoming much of it. But he recognized joy when he saw it, and Clara’s creations were filled with it. The pure joy of creation. Of striving. Of striding forward. Searching. Exploring. Pushing.
And then, the breakthrough. The Three Graces.
One day Clara had decided to try something different, yet again. A painting this time, and her subject would be three elderly neighbors. Friends.
Beatrice, Kaye, and Emilie. Emilie, who had saved Henri. Emilie who had owned the Gamaches’ home.
The Three Graces. Clara had invited them into her home to paint them.
“May I?” Gamache asked, and gestured toward her studio.
Clara got up. “Of course.”
They all walked across the kitchen and into her studio. It smelled of overripe bananas and paint and the strangely evocative and attractive scent of turpentine.
Clara turned the lights on and the room came alive with faces. People looked at them from the walls and easels. One of the canvases was draped in a sheet, like a child’s idea of a ghost. She’d covered her latest work.
Gamache made his way past it and straight across the studio, trying not to be distracted by the other works that seemed to be watching him.
He stopped at the large canvas on the far wall.
“Everything changed with this, didn’t it?” he said.
Clara nodded, also staring at it. “For better, and for worse. It was Peter’s idea, you know. Not the subject matter, but he kept at me to stop doing installations and to try painting. Like him. So I did.”
The four of them stared at the three elderly women on the wall.
“I decided to paint them,” said Clara.
“Oui,” said Gamache. That much was obvious.
“No,” Clara said, smiling. “My plan was to actually paint them. Put paint right on them. They’d be nude. Beatrice was going to be green. The heart chakra. Kaye was going to be blue. The throat chakra. She talked a lot.”
“A blue streak,” confirmed Myrna.
“And Emilie would be violet,” said Clara. “The crown chakra. Oneness with God.”
Beauvoir made a slight squeal, as though he’d just connected to the Internet. Gamache ignored him, though he could sense the rolling eyes.
Clara turned to Beauvoir. “I know. Nuts. But they were willing to try it.”
“And did you paint them?” Beauvoir asked.
“Well, I would have, but I realized I didn’t have enough violet, and I couldn’t really leave Emilie half finished. I was going to send them home, when Emilie suggested just doing their portrait. I wasn’t very enthusiastic. I’d never done portraits.”
“Why not?” Gamache asked.
Clara thought about that. “I guess because it seemed so old-fashioned. Not avant-garde. Not creative.”
“So you’d paint the person, but not their portrait?” asked Beauvoir.
“Exactly. Pretty creative, no?”
“That’s one word for it,” he said, and then mumbled something that sounded like “merde.”
Gamache turned back to the canvas. He’d met all three women, but Clara’s painting of them always stunned him. They were old. Worn. Lined. Creviced. Their clothes were comfortable, sensible. Taken in parts there was nothing remotely remarkable about them in this painting.
But the whole? What Clara had captured? It was breathtaking.
Emilie, Beatrice, and Kaye reached out to each other. Not grasping. These women weren’t drowning. They weren’t clinging to each other.
All three were laughing, with open-faced pleasure in each other’s company.
In her first portrait Clara had captured intimacy.
“It had been a mistake, then?” asked Beauvoir, pointing to the painting.
“Well, that’s one word for it,” said Clara.
“And what did Peter say when he saw it?” asked Gamache.
“He said it was very good, but that I might have to work on perspective.”
Gamache felt a spike of anger. This was a form of murder. Peter Morrow had tried to kill not his wife, but her creation. He’d clearly recognized a work of genius and had tried to ruin it.
“Do you think he knew then what was going to happen?” Beauvoir asked.
“I don’t think anyone could have known what would happen,” said Clara. “I sure didn’t.”
“But I think he suspected,” said Myrna. “I think he looked at The Three Graces and saw the Visigoths on the seventh hill. He knew his world was about to change.”
“Why wasn’t he happy for Clara?” Gamache asked Myrna.
“Have you ever been jealous?”
Gamache thought about that. He’d been passed over for promotions. In his youth girls he’d had crushes on had turned him down, only to date one of his friends. Which somehow made it worse for his young heart. But the closest he’d come to consuming, corroding jealousy was seeing other kids with their parents.
He’d hated them for that. And, God help him, he’d hated his parents. For not being there. For leaving him behind.
“It’s like drinking acid,” said Myrna, “and expecting the other person to die.”
Gamache nodded.
Is that how Peter had felt, looking at this painting? Had Peter taken his first gulp of acid? Had he felt his insides curdle when he saw The Three Graces?
Gamache knew Peter Morrow well and had no doubt even now that he loved Clara with all his heart. And that must have made it worse. To love the woman but hate and fear what she’d created. Peter didn’t want Clara to die, but he’d almost certainly wanted her paintings to die. And he’d do what he could to kill them. With a quiet word, an insinuation, a suggestion.
“May I?” Gamache pointed out the door of the studio to the closed door across the hall.
“Yes.” Clara led the way.
Peter’s studio was tidy, organized, calm. It felt serene, to Clara’s disorder. It smelled of paint, with a slight undertone of lemon. Pledge, thought Gamache. Or lemon meringue pie.
The walls were covered with studies for Peter’s careful, brilliantly executed creations. Early on in his career, Peter had discovered if he took a simple object and magnified it, it looked abstract.
And that’s what he painted. He loved the fact that something banal, often natural, like a twig or a leaf, could look abstract and unnatural when examined closely.
At first it had been exciting. Fresh and new, his paintings had taken the art world by storm. But after ten, twenty years of essentially the same thing, over and over …
Gamache looked at Peter’s works. They were spectacular. At first glance. And then they faded. They were, finally, examples of great draftsmanship. There was no mistaking a work by Peter Morrow, you could spot one a mile away. Admire it for a minute, then move on. There was a center, maybe even a message, but no soul.
Though the studio walls were covered with his works, the space felt cold and empty.
Gamache considered the canvas in front of him, and found himself still consumed by Clara’s painting. The actual image of The Three Graces might fade a little in memory, but how the work made him feel would not.
And that wasn’t even Clara’s best painting. Her works since had only grown in their power and depth. In all they evoked.
But these? Peter’s canvases made him feel nothing.
Peter’s career would have languished all by itself, eventually, independent of what happened to Clara. But her unexpected and spectacular ascent made his decline seem all the sharper.
What did flourish, though, what grew and grew, was his jealousy.
As Gamache followed Clara from the studio, he found his anger toward Peter had been replaced by a sort of pity. The poor sod hadn’t stood a chance.
“When did you know it was over?” he asked.
“The marriage?” Clara considered. “Probably a while before I actually faced it. It sorta grows in the gut. But I wasn’t sure. It seemed impossible that what I was feeling from Peter was real. And it was a confusing time, so much was happening. And Peter had always been so supportive.”
“When you were failing,” said Myrna quietly.
They were standing in the kitchen now. There were no paintings on the walls, but the windows acted as works of art, framing the view of Three Pines out the front, and the garden out the back.
Clara looked like she was going to take exception to what Myrna said, but then didn’t. Instead she nodded.
“Funny, I’m so used to defending Peter, I do it even now. But you’re right. He never understood my art. He tolerated it. What he couldn’t tolerate was my success.”
“That must’ve hurt,” said Beauvoir.
“It was shattering, inconceivable.”
“No, I meant it must have hurt him,” said Beauvoir.
Clara looked at him. “I guess.”
She looked at Beauvoir and knew he knew how that felt. To turn against people you’d loved. To see allies as threats and friends as enemies. To be eaten alive. From within.
“Did you talk to him about it?” asked Gamache.
“I tried, but he always denied it. Told me I was insecure, too sensitive. And I believed him.” She shook her head. “But then it became so obvious even I couldn’t deny it.”
“And when was that?” Gamache asked.
“I think you know. You were there. It was last year, when I had the solo show at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal.”
The pinnacle of her career. What every artist dreamed of happening. And on the surface, Peter had been pleased for his wife, accompanying her to the vernissage. A smile on his handsome face. And a stone in his heart.
That’s what the end so often looked like, Gamache knew. Not the smile, not even the stone, but the crevice in between.
“Let’s get some fresh air,” said Myrna, opening the back door into the garden. She joined them a few minutes later with a platter of sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea.
They sat in the shade of a grove of maples, their four Adirondack chairs like the points of a compass, Gamache realized.
The Chief leaned forward and chose a sandwich, then slid back in his chair.
“You asked Peter to leave shortly after your solo show opened last year,” he said, chasing the bite with a sip of iced tea.
“After an argument that lasted all day and night,” Clara said. “I was exhausted and finally fell asleep at about three in the morning. When I woke up Peter wasn’t in bed anymore.”
“He’d left?” asked Beauvoir. He’d already finished most of his baguette, filled with paté and chutney. The iced tea perspired on the arm of his chair.
“No. He was against the wall of our bedroom, his knees up to his chin. Staring. I thought he’d had a breakdown.”
“Had he?” asked Myrna.
“I guess, of sorts. Maybe more a breakthrough. He said it came to him in the middle of the night that he’d never been jealous of my art.”
Myrna snorted into her glass, sending tea onto her nose.
“I know,” said Clara. “I didn’t believe him either. And then we fought some more.” She sounded weary to the bone as she described it.
Gamache had been listening closely. “If he wasn’t jealous of your art, then what did he say was the problem?”
“Me, I was the problem,” said Clara. “He was jealous of me. Not that I painted friendship and love and hope, but that I felt them.”
“And he didn’t,” said Myrna. Clara nodded.
“He realized in the night that he’d been pretending all his life and that deep down there was nothing. Just a hole. Which was why his paintings had no substance.”
“Because he had no substance,” said Gamache.
Their little circle fell silent. Bees buzzed in and out of the roses and tall foxglove. Flies tried to drag crispy baguette shards off the empty plates. The Rivière Bella Bella bubbled by.
And they considered a man who had a hole where his core should have been.
“Is that why he left?” asked Myrna, finally.
“He left because I told him to. But…”
They waited.
Clara looked across the garden so that they could only see her in profile.
“I expected him back.” She smiled suddenly and looked at them. “I thought he’d miss me. I thought he’d be lonely and lost without me. And he’d realize what he had, with me. I thought he’d come home.”
“What did you say to him exactly?” asked Beauvoir. “The morning he left?”
His notebook had replaced the empty plate on the arm of the chair.
“I told him he had to go, but that he should come back in a year and we could see where we were each at.”
“Did you say a year exactly?”
Clara nodded.
“I’m sorry to keep going over this,” said Beauvoir, “but this is crucial. Did you set a date? You did say a year exactly?”
“Exactly.”
“And when was he supposed to come back?”
She told him and Beauvoir did a quick calculation.
“In your opinion, did Peter take that in?” Gamache asked. “His world was collapsing around him. Is it possible he was nodding and appearing to understand, but he was really in shock?”
Clara thought about that. “I suppose it’s possible, but we talked about having dinner together. We actually planned it. It wasn’t a passing comment.”
She fell silent. Remembering sitting in that very chair. The steaks ready. The salad made. The wine chilled.
The croissants in the paper bag on the kitchen counter.
Waiting.
“Where was he headed that day he left?” asked Gamache. “To Montréal? To his family?”
“I think that’s unlikely, don’t you?” said Clara, and Gamache, who’d met Peter’s family, had to agree. If Peter Morrow had a hole where his soul should be, his family had put it there.
“When he didn’t show up, did you get in touch with them?” asked Gamache.
“Not yet,” said Clara. “I’ve been saving that little treat.”
“Do you have any idea what Peter would’ve been doing in the past year?” Beauvoir asked.
“Painting probably. What else?”
Gamache nodded. What else? Without Clara, there was only one thing left in Peter Morrow’s life, and that was art.
“Where would he have gone?” Gamache asked.
“I wish I knew.”
“Was there some place Peter always dreamed of visiting?” he asked.
“Because of the kind of paintings he did, the location wasn’t important,” said Clara. “He could do them anywhere.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country.”
She turned to Gamache. “When I said that this morning, I wasn’t thinking of you, you know. I know you’re a brave man. I was thinking of Peter. I’ve prayed every day that he grows up. And becomes a brave man.”
Armand Gamache leaned back in his chair, the wooden slats warm against his shirt, and thought about that. And wondered where Peter had gone. And what he’d found.
And whether he’d had to be brave.