NINE
Clara and Myrna caught the morning train out of Montréal’s Central Station.
Clara listened to the sound of the wheels and felt the comforting, familiar movement. She leaned back, her head lolling on the rest, and stared out the window at the forests and fields and isolated farms.
This was a journey she’d made many times. First on her own, to art college in Toronto. A great adventure. Then with Peter to art shows in Toronto. Always his, never hers. Prestigious juried shows his work had been selected for. She’d sat beside him, holding his hand. Excited for him.
Today the train felt both familiar and foreign. Peter wasn’t there.
In the reflection of the window she noticed Myrna staring at her. Clara turned to face her friend.
“What is it?”
“Do you want Peter back?”
It was the question Myrna had been wanting to ask for a while, but the time had never seemed right. But now it did.
“I don’t know.”
It wasn’t that Clara couldn’t answer that question, but that she had too many answers.
Waking up alone in bed, she wanted him back.
In her studio, painting, she didn’t.
With her friends in the bistro, or over dinner with them, she didn’t miss him at all.
But eating alone, at the pine table? In bed at night? She still sometimes spoke to him. Told him about her day and pretended he was there. Pretended he cared.
And then she turned out the light, and rolled over. And missed him even more.
Did she want him back?
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “I asked him to leave because he stopped caring for me, stopped supporting me. Not because I’d stopped caring for him.”
Myrna nodded. She knew this. They’d talked about it through the past year. Their close friendship had grown closer and more intimate as Clara opened up.
All the stuff stuffed down, all the stuff that women were not supposed to feel, and never, ever show, Clara had showed Myrna.
The neediness, the fear, the rage. The terrible, aching loneliness.
“Suppose I’m never kissed on the lips again?” Clara had asked one afternoon in midwinter, as they ate lunch in front of the fire.
Myrna knew that fear too. She knew all of Clara’s fears because she shared them. And admitted them to Clara.
And over the course of the year, as the days grew longer, their friendship deepened. As the night receded, the fear had also receded. And the loneliness of both women had ebbed away.
Do you want Peter back?
Myrna had asked Clara the question she was afraid to ask herself.
In the window, imposed over the endless forest, Myrna could see her ghostly self.
“Suppose something’s happened to him?” Clara spoke to the back of the seat in front of her. “It would be my fault.”
“No,” said Myrna. “You asked him to leave. What he did after that was his choice.”
“But if he stayed in Three Pines he’d be fine.”
“Unless he had an appointment in Samarra.”
“Samarra?” Clara turned to look at her friend. “What’re you talking about?”
“Somerset Maugham,” said Myrna.
“Are you having a stroke?” Clara asked.
“Maugham used the old fable in a story,” Myrna explained. “I spend my days reading, remember. I know all these obscure things. I’m lucky I don’t work in Sarah’s bakery.”
Clara laughed. “I just want to find him, to know he’s all right. And then I can get on with my life.”
“With or without him?”
“I think I’ll know when I see him.”
Myrna tapped Clara’s hand lightly. “We’ll find him.”
Once in Toronto they checked into the Royal York hotel. Myrna had a shower and when she came out she found Clara on her laptop.
“I’ve marked the major art galleries on the map,” said Clara over her shoulder, nodding to the map open on the bed. “We can do them tomorrow.”
Myrna rubbed her wet hair and sat on the bed, studying the map with its Xs and circles.
“I thought we should start with Peter’s brother and sister,” said Clara. “Thomas’s office is just up Yonge Street. We have an appointment at four. Marianna is meeting us for a drink in the hotel bar at five thirty.”
“You’ve been busy,” said Myrna. She got up to look at the page Clara was reading on her laptop. “What’s so interesting?”
And then she stopped.
At the top of the page were the words “W. Somerset Maugham.”
“A servant goes into the marketplace in Baghdad,” Clara read off the screen, her back to her friend. “There he bumps into an old woman. When she turns around, he recognizes her as Death.”
“Clara,” said Myrna. “I didn’t—”
“Death glares at him and the servant, frightened, runs away. He goes straight to his master and explains that he met Death in the market and that he needs to get away, to save himself. The master gives him a horse and the servant takes off, riding as fast as he can for Samarra, where he knows Death won’t find him.”
“I don’t know why I mentioned—”
Clara made a subtle movement with her hand, and Myrna fell silent.
“Later that day the master is in the marketplace and he too meets Death,” Clara continued reading. “He asks her why she frightened his servant and Death explains that she hadn’t meant to scare him. She was just surprised.”
Clara turned around and stared at Myrna. “You finish the story. You know it.”
“I should never have said—”
“Please,” said Clara.
Finally Myrna, in a soft voice, spoke.
“Death said, I was simply surprised to see him in the market. Because I have an appointment with him tonight. In Samarra.”
* * *
“Did you get Peter’s photograph?” Gamache asked Lacoste.
“Oui. And I’ve sent it to Quebec City,” she said. “They’re looking into it. I’ve also sent it out across the S?reté du Québec network and to police in Paris, Florence, and Venice. I’ve asked them to track his movements. It’s been almost a year, so I’m not expecting much, but I have to try.”
Gamache smiled. Many had thought him mad, or hopped up on painkillers, when he’d appointed an inspector in her early thirties as his successor to lead the famed homicide division. But he’d prevailed. And had never, ever doubted his choice of Isabelle Lacoste.
“Good.”
He was about to ring off when he remembered, “Oh, and Dumfries. Could you check that out too, please?”
“Right. I forgot.”
He hung up and tapped the phone a few times with his finger. Then he went over to his computer and dialed into the Internet.
Once connected, he went to Google and typed in “Dumfries.”
* * *
“Well, that wasn’t very helpful,” said Myrna. “Is he always like that?”
They’d descended the TD Bank Tower and were standing in the lobby. Myrna was taking a moment to admire the Mies van der Rohe design. The light and height. A contrast to the closed-off, closed-in, squalid little scene they’d left on the 52nd floor.
Thomas Morrow was elegant, tall, gracious. He appeared, in many ways, an animated version of the building itself. Except there was nothing open and bright about him.
The office tower was more than it initially appeared. Thomas Morrow was less.
“Worse,” said Clara. “I think you being there made him nicer than he normally is.”
“You’re joking,” said Myrna. Their shoes rapped on the marble floor. The clock above the long marble security desk said four thirty-five. Thomas Morrow had made his sister-in-law wait twenty minutes and then had given them ten minutes of his time before moving on to more pressing issues than a missing brother.
“I’m sure Peter’s fine,” Morrow had said, a smile on his face that only managed to look condescending. “You know him. He’s gone off to paint and lost track of the time.”
Myrna said nothing, she simply observed Thomas Morrow. He was in his early sixties, she guessed. He sat with his legs splayed open, inviting the women to stare at his crotch. His suit was beautifully cut and his tie was silk. His back was to the view, which meant his visitors saw him against the backdrop of the huge black towers around him and the glittering great lake beyond.
He was like a monarch, surrounding himself with the symbols of power, hoping to disguise his own weakness.
Clara kept her temper. “I’m sure you’re right, but I’m really just interested in knowing if you saw him when he was here.”
Thomas shook his head. “But I wouldn’t expect him to get in touch. No art on my walls.”
He pointed with some pride to the bank of photographs. Not of family or friends, but of business triumphs. Golfing trophies. Famous people he’d met.
Strangers.
“He was probably going to shows and checking out galleries,” said Thomas Morrow. “Have you asked the galleries?”
“That’s a good idea,” said Clara with a tight smile. “Thank you.”
Morrow got up and walked to the door. “I’m glad I could help.”
And that was that.
“We could’ve done that over the phone,” said Myrna as they walked out into the blast furnace of the Toronto summer. The heat shimmered off the buildings and bounced off concrete and drilled into the pavement, which gave off the scent of melting asphalt in the heavy, humid air.
Myrna found it strangely calming. Her mother’s and grandmother’s comfort smells were cut grass and fresh baking and the subtle scent of line-dried sheets. For Myrna’s generation the smells that calmed were manufactured. Melting asphalt meant summer. VapoRub meant winter, and being cared for. There were Tang and gas fumes and long-gone photocopy ink.
All comforted her, for reasons that beggared understanding, because they had nothing to do with understanding.
After years in Three Pines, her comfort scents were evolving. She still loved the smell of VapoRub, but now she also appreciated the delicate scent of worms after a rain.
“I wanted to be able to watch him,” said Clara as they waited at a corner with a crowd of other perspiring people for the light to turn. “To see if he was lying, or holding something back.”
“And was he? Do you think he saw Peter, or spoke to him?”
“I don’t think so.”
Myrna thought about it. “Why did he say that about his walls?”
She could see the imposing fa?ade of the Royal York up ahead. A massive anachronism at the foot of the modern city. And she could almost taste the beer she’d soon be drinking.
“Who knows why the Morrows say anything,” said Clara, pausing just outside the door of the old hotel. The doorman, perspiring in his uniform, had one hand on the handle, ready to yank it open.
“I guess it was a swipe at Peter,” said Myrna. “Saying he was more interested in art than in his brother.”
“And he’d have been right,” said Clara.
“Let’s get a beer,” said Myrna, and headed straight for the bar.