THIRTEEN
“Anyone else hungry?” Myrna asked. “Who has the time?”
She couldn’t read her watch in the dark. The sun had set as they’d listened to Armand. So absorbed were they that they hadn’t noticed the darkness. Or their hunger. But now they did.
“Almost ten,” said Beauvoir, whose watch illuminated. “Will Olivier and Gabri still be serving?”
By now they were making their way out of Clara’s back garden, toward the bistro. It was a pleasant evening and they could see late diners lingering over dessert and coffee on the terrasse.
“Quid pro quo,” said Clara. “We’ll feed them information and they’ll feed us food.”
Quid pro quo was a specialty of Olivier’s Bistro.
They took a table inside, tucked into a corner. Far from the other diners. Gabri and Olivier were able to join them, happy to be off their feet.
Ruth joined them, limping in with Rosa from the bookstore.
“Can I close it now?” she demanded.
Myrna turned her head and whispered to Clara, “Jesus, I’d forgotten about her.”
“Who knew she’d even open the bookstore,” said Clara under her breath, “never mind not burn it down.”
“We just got back,” Myrna looked Ruth in the eye and lied. “Thank you for looking after the store.”
“Rosa did most of the business.”
“‘The’ business or ‘her’ business?” Gabri asked.
Myrna and Clara exchanged worried glances. It was a good question and an important distinction.
“A few people came in,” said Ruth, ignoring the question. “Bought books and guides to Paris. I quadrupled the price. What’s for dinner?”
She picked up Jean-Guy’s drink out of habit, then realizing it was just a Coke she quickly snatched up Myrna’s Scotch just before Myrna got to it.
“It’s good to have you back,” Ruth said.
“Are you talking to me or the drink?” Myrna asked, and once again Ruth looked at her as though for the first time.
“The drink, of course.”
They ordered dinner, then Gamache looked at Clara.
“Your turn.”
And so, as they shared an assortment of starters, Clara told them about their meeting with Thomas Morrow and dinner with Marianna and Bean.
“Is Bean a boy or a girl?” Jean-Guy asked. “It must be obvious by now.”
He’d met the Morrow family a few years earlier and had been struck, once again, by how crazy the English had become. Insular and inbred, he suspected. He decided he should count their fingers from now on. He looked at Ruth and wondered how many toes she had. Then he wondered if cloven hooves even had toes.
“Still can’t tell,” admitted Clara. “But Bean seems happy, though clearly the artistic gene didn’t pass to him. Or her.”
“Why d’you say that?” Gabri asked, dipping char-grilled calamari into a delicate garlic aioli.
“Peter taught Bean the color wheel. Bean did a few paintings and put them up on the bedroom walls. They were pretty awful.”
“Most masterpieces are, at first,” said Ruth. “Yours look like a dog’s breakfast. That’s a compliment.”
Clara laughed. Ruth was right, on both counts. It was a compliment. And her paintings started off a real mess. The worse her paintings looked at first, the better they seemed to turn out.
“You too?” she asked Ruth. “How do your poems start out?”
“They start as a lump in the throat,” she said.
“Isn’t that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?” Olivier asked.
“Once,” Ruth admitted. “Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up.”
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat?” Gamache asked Ruth. The elderly woman held his eyes for a moment before dropping them to her drink.
Clara was quiet, thinking. She finally nodded.
“For me too. The first go-round is all emotion just shot onto the canvas. Like a cannon.”
“Peter’s paintings look perfect right from the start,” said Olivier. “They never have to be rescued.”
“Rescued?” Gamache asked. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s something Peter told me,” said Olivier. “He was proud that he never had to rescue a canvas because he’d screwed it up.”
“And ‘rescuing’ a painting means fixing it?” Gamache asked.
“It’s an artist’s expression,” said Clara. “Kinda technical. If you put too many layers of paint on a canvas, the pores get all clogged and the paint doesn’t hold. It gets all gloppy, the paint starts to slip off. The painting’s ruined. Mostly happens when you overwork it. Like cooking something too long. You can’t then uncook it.”
“So it’s not the subject of the painting that’s wrong,” said Myrna. “It’s just a physical thing. The canvas gets saturated.”
“Right, though the two mostly go together. You almost never overwork a canvas you’re happy with. It happens when you’re in trouble. Trying to save it. Going over and over it, trying to capture something that’s really difficult. Turning a dog’s breakfast into something meaningful. That’s when the canvas can get clogged.”
“But it’s sometimes possible to rescue it?” asked Reine-Marie.
“Sometimes. I’ve had to do it. Most of the time they’re too far gone. It’s really awful, because the canvas gives up just as I’m really close. Almost got it. Sometimes when I’ve just gotten it, put the last dab on. Then suddenly the paint shifts, starts to slip. Won’t hold and everything’s lost. Heartbreaking. It’s like you’re writing a book and you edit and edit, and you finally get it, and just as you write ‘The End’ all the words disappear.”
“Oh shit,” said Myrna and Ruth together, while on Jean-Guy’s lap Rosa muttered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“But sometimes you can pull the painting back?” asked Reine-Marie. “You can save it?”
Clara looked over at Ruth, who was picking a piece of asparagus out of her teeth.
“I had to save her,” she said.
“You’re kidding,” said Gabri. “You had a choice, and you saved her?”
“I mean the painting,” said Clara. “The one I did of Ruth.”
“The little one?” asked Reine-Marie. “The one that got all that attention?”
Clara nodded. If the huge painting The Three Graces was a shout, then the tiny one of Ruth was a quiet beckon. Easily missed and easily dismissed.
Most people walked right past the small canvas. Many who paused were repulsed by the expression on the old woman’s face. Rage radiated from the frame where the old woman glared, bitter, seething at a world that was ignoring her. All the gabbing, chatting, laughing people in the gallery walked right past, leaving her alone on the wall.
Her thin, veined hand clutched at the ragged blue shawl at her neck.
She despised them.
But for the very few who did linger, they saw more than rage. They saw an ache. A plea. For someone to stop. To keep her company, if only for a few moments.
And those who heeded that plea were rewarded. They saw this wasn’t just some embittered old woman.
Clara had painted the poet as Mary. The mother of God. Elderly. Alone. All miracles faded and forgotten.
And those who stood before her a very long time, who kept her company, were rewarded further. The final offering. The last miracle.
Only they saw what Clara had really painted.
Only they saw the rescue.
There, in her eyes, was a dot. A gleam. The elderly woman was just beginning to see something. There, in the distance. Beyond the giddy cocktail crowd.
Hope.
Clara had captured, with a single dot, the moment despair turned to hope.
It was luminous.
“You saved it?” asked Reine-Marie.
“I think it was mutual,” said Clara, and looked at Ruth, who was now taking a bit of bread from Jean-Guy’s plate and feeding it to Rosa. “That painting made my career.”
No one said it, but all were thinking that had Clara painted Peter in that instant she might have captured the moment hope turned to despair.
Clara told them about their visits just that morning to the prominent art galleries in Toronto. No one had remembered seeing Peter.
Armand Gamache watched her closely as she spoke. Taking everything in. Her words, her tone, her subtle movements.
Just as Clara put together the elements of a painting, as Ruth the elements of a poem, Gamache pieced together the elements of a case.
And like a painting or a poem, at the heart of his cases there was a strong emotion.
“So no luck?” asked Olivier. “No trace of Peter?”
“Actually, we did finally manage to find someone who not only saw him, but spent time with him,” said Clara. And she told them about their visit to the art college.
“Why would he go back to your old college?” asked Gabri. “Has he done it before?”
“No, neither Peter nor I ever went back,” said Clara.
“Then why do you think he went back this past winter?” asked Gamache, ignoring his grilled shrimp with mango salsa. “What did he want?”
“I don’t really know what Peter wanted. Do you?” she asked Myrna.
“I think he wanted to recapture the feelings he had when he was there as a student,” said Myrna slowly. “Professor Massey said they talked a lot about Peter’s time there. The students, the professors. I suspect he wanted to be reminded of when he was young, vigorous, admired. When the world was his.”
“Nostalgia,” said Gabri.
Myrna nodded. “And maybe something slightly more than that. He might have wanted to recapture some magic.”
Clara smiled. “I don’t think Peter was into magic.”
“No, he wouldn’t have called it that,” Myrna agreed. “But it would come to the same thing. Art college was a magical time for him, so in his distress he was drawn back to the place where good things happened. In case he could find it again.”
“He wanted to be rescued,” said Ruth.
She’d moved Gamache’s dinner in front of her and was finishing off the last grilled shrimp.
“Too many layers of life,” she continued. “His world was slipping away. He wanted to be rescued.”
“And he went to the college for that?” asked Olivier.
“He went to Professor Massey for that,” said Myrna, nodding. Only slightly annoyed that demented Ruth should see what had eluded her. “To be reassured he was still vigorous, talented. A star.”
Reine-Marie looked around the quiet bistro. Out the mullioned windows to the now-empty tables on the terrasse. To the ring of homes, with soft light in the darkness.
Rescued.
She caught Armand’s eye and saw again that look. Of someone saved.
For his part, Gamache took a piece of baguette and chewed it as he thought.
What did Peter want? He surely wanted something, and was quite desperate for it, to travel so far and so fast. Paris, Florence, Venice, Scotland. Toronto. Quebec City.
His journey had the smell of desperation, of both the hunt and the hunted. A one-man game of hide and seek.
“Your professor mentioned a Salon des Refusés,” he said. “What was that?”
“Actually, I mentioned it,” said Clara. “I don’t think Professor Massey was all that happy to be reminded of it.”
“Why not?” asked Jean-Guy.
“Not the college’s finest moment,” said Clara with a laugh. “There is an annual end-of-year show. It’s juried, judged by the professors and prominent art dealers in Toronto. Only the best get in. One of the professors thought this was unfair, so he set up a parallel show.”
“The Salon des Refusés,” said Olivier.
Clara nodded. “A show for the rejected. It was modeled on a famous exhibition in Paris back in 1863, when a Manet painting was refused entry in the official Paris Salon. A Salon des Refusés was set up, and the rejected artists showed there. And not just Manet, but Whistler’s Symphony in White ended up in the Salon des Refusés.” She shook her head. “One of the great works of art.”
“You know a lot about it, ma belle,” said Gabri.
“I should. My works were front and center in the college’s Salon des Refusés. First I knew that they’d been rejected by the jury. There they were, in the parallel exhibition.”
“And Peter’s?” asked Gamache.
“Front and center in the legitimate show,” said Clara. “He’d done some spectacular paintings. My works were not exactly spectacular, I guess. I was experimenting.”
“Not yet rescued?” said Gabri.
“Beyond saving.”
“Avant-garde,” said Ruth. “Isn’t that the term? Ahead of your time. The rest just needed to catch up. You didn’t need rescuing. You weren’t lost. You were exploring. There’s a difference.”
Clara looked at Ruth’s rheumy, tired eyes. “Thank you. But still, it was humiliating. They fired the professor who set it up. He had strange ideas about art. Didn’t fit in. An odd duck.” She turned to Rosa. “Sorry.”
“What’d she say?” asked Ruth.
“She said you’re an old fuck,” said Gabri loudly.
Ruth gave a low, rumbling laugh. “She isn’t wrong there.” She turned to Clara and Clara leaned away from her. “But you’re wrong about the Salon. That’s where real artists want to be. With the rejects. You shouldn’t have been upset.”
“Tell that to my twenty-year-old self.”
“What would you rather be?” Ruth asked. “Successful in your twenties and forgotten in your fifties? Or the other way around?”
Like Peter, everyone thought. Including Clara.
“As we were leaving, Professor Massey mentioned Francis Bacon,” said Clara.
“The writer?” asked Reine-Marie.
“The painter,” Clara clarified. She explained the reference.
“Seems a cruel thing to say,” said Olivier.
“I don’t think he meant it that way,” said Clara. “Do you?”
Myrna shook her head. “He seems to care about Peter. I think he just wanted to prepare Clara…”
“For what, that Peter killed himself?” Ruth asked with a guffaw, then she looked around. “You don’t all think that, do you? That’s ridiculous. He has too high an opinion of himself. Loves himself too much. No, Peter might kill someone else, but never himself. In fact, I take that back. He’s much more likely to be the victim than the killer.”
“Ruth!” said Olivier.
“What? You all think it too. Who here hasn’t wanted to kill him, at least once? And we’re his friends.”
They protested perhaps a shade too passionately. Each outraged defense fueled by the memory of how good it would have felt to hit Peter with a frying pan. He could be so smug, so self-satisfied, so entitled, and yet so oblivious.
But he could also be loyal, and funny, and generous. And kind.
Which made his absence and silence so disconcerting.
“Look,” said Ruth. “It’s natural. I want to kill most of you most of the time.”
“You want to kill us?” asked Gabri, barely able to breathe for the unfairness of it. “You? Us?”
“Do you think he’s alive?” asked Clara, not able to word the question the other way.
Ruth stared at her, and they held their breaths.
“I think if I can win the Governor General’s award for poetry, and you can become a world-famous painter, and these two bumbling idiots can make a success of a bistro, and you”—her gesture took in Reine-Marie—“can love this lump of a man”—she turned to Gamache—“then miracles can happen.”
“But you think it would be a miracle?” asked Clara.
“I think you should leave well enough alone, child,” said Ruth quietly. “I’ve given you the best answer I can.”
They all knew the worst answer. And they all knew the most likely answer. That perhaps Three Pines had had more than its share of miracles.
Armand Gamache looked down at his plate. Empty. All the wonderful food gone. He was sure it must have been delicious, but he couldn’t remember eating a single bite.
After a dessert of raspberry and chocolate mousse they went home. Myrna up to her loft above the bookstore. Clara to her cottage. Gabri and Olivier checked that all was in order in the kitchen, then headed to their B and B. Beauvoir walked Ruth and Rosa home and then returned to the Gamaches’ house. They’d left the porch light on for him, and a light in the living room. But the rest of the home was dark and silent and peaceful.
After calling Annie, Jean-Guy lay in the darkness and thought about being rescued. While upstairs, Reine-Marie lay in the dark and thought about their peaceful life slipping away.