The Long Way Home (22 page)

“They’re stairs, I think,” said Armand.

“No, I don’t mean the zigzag, I mean beside it.” Clara spoke urgently, as though it would disappear at any moment.

“It’s a stone,” said Jean-Guy.

Clara peered closer.

*   *   *

“The hares were made of stone.”

The two men stared into each other’s eyes.

“It’s a sculpture garden,” said Constable Stuart. “They probably were stone.”

“No.”

Alphonse spoke softly, almost regretfully. And Constable Stuart understood then that this man hadn’t been searching for dry land. He’d been searching for company. One person. Who’d believe him.

“I saw the old one move. I saw his heart beat. And I saw him turn to stone.”

*   *   *

“It’s a circle of stones,” said Armand, also leaning in.

Their eyes were adjusting to Peter’s wild colors, until what had appeared to be chaos became a design.

“But the website doesn’t show a stone circle, by the stairs,” said Clara.

*   *   *

“And then they turned back into rabbits,” said Alphonse. “They came alive again.”

His eyes shone, not with fear, but with wonderment. The astonishment of an elderly man, closer to death than life.

“Did you ever go back?” Stuart asked.

“Every night. I go back every night. But I don’t take my rifle anymore.”

Alphonse smiled. Constable Stuart smiled.

*   *   *

When the others left to get dressed, Gamache stayed behind.

“Do you mind?” he asked Clara, and she shook her head.

“Make some more coffee,” she waved toward the old electric perk. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

While the coffee perked, Gamache carried a chair over, to face the wall of paintings. He sat and stared.

“Oh, God,” came the familiar voice. “Am I walking in on something I shouldn’t know about?”

Gamache stood up. Myrna was in the doorway holding a loaf of what he could smell was fresh banana bread.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She waved her hand up and down to indicate both his attire and his very presence.

He looked down and realized he was still in his dressing gown and slippers. He pulled the gown more securely around him.

“Did you and Clara have a slumber party?” Myrna asked, putting the warm loaf on the kitchen counter.

“This is Clara’s house?” he asked, apparently bewildered. “Damn. Not again.”

Myrna laughed and, walking to the counter, she cut and buttered thick slices of the loaf while Gamache poured coffees.

“What’s up?” Myrna asked.

He brought her up to speed on the Garden of Cosmic Speculation.

She peppered him with questions, all of which started with why and none of which he could answer.

“That’s better,” said Clara, returning to the kitchen and pouring herself a coffee. All three took their seats and stared at the latest paintings as though waiting for the show to begin.

If the works Peter painted in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation looked like his head had exploded onto the paper, these later ones looked like his guts had exploded.

“Something happened to Peter in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation,” said Gamache. He found he liked saying the name and pledged to say it every morning while in his own garden, speculating. “He left and came back to Canada. And painted these.”

“How do we know these weren’t painted in the garden too?” asked Myrna, indicating with her banana bread the three canvases nailed to the wall.

“Because Peter gave those three”—Gamache pointed with his slice to the paintings on the table—“to Bean in the winter. When he’d returned from Dumfries. He only mailed these bigger ones later.”

“Ergo, he painted them on his return to Canada,” said Clara.

“Ergo?” asked Myrna.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to use it,” said Clara.

“Not now that I hear how it really sounds.”

They fell silent, staring at the works.

“Do you think they’re landscapes too?” Myrna finally asked.

“I do,” said Armand, though he sounded not completely convinced. It didn’t look like any landscape he’d ever seen. Besides the flying lips, nothing really even looked like anything.

“Clara,” said Gamache slowly, elongating her name. Buying time to sort his thoughts. “What did you say you do with your failed paintings?”

“I keep them and bring them out when I’m between projects.”

Gamache nodded slowly. “And what do you do with them?”

“I told you before,” said Clara, confused by the question. “I look at them.”

Gamache said nothing and Clara wondered what he was getting at, and then her eyes widened. She’d remembered what she did with her old paintings.

She got to her feet and, pulling the nails out of the wall, she took down Peter’s lip painting.

“The only reason we put these paintings up this way around,” she said as Myrna and Armand went to help, “is because it’s how Bean had them on the bedroom wall. But suppose Bean was wrong? There’s no signature to tell which way is up.”

She nailed it back into place. Upside down. And all three stepped back. To examine it.

Not upside down at all, but finally the right way around.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Myrna.

The slashes of vivid color had become a wide and turbulent river. The bold red lips had become waves. What had appeared to be trees now became cliff faces.

The three of them stood in front of what Peter had really created. The smiles weren’t smiles at all. There was nothing giddy, nothing joyous about this picture. Peter had painted a vast and endless river of sorrow.

“I know this place,” said Gamache.

TWENTY-ONE

“Armand.” Reine-Marie appeared in Clara’s kitchen with a sheet of paper. “Constable Stuart wrote back.”

She looked perplexed and handed him the email she’d printed out.

He took it and in turn pointed her to the wall of paintings. She walked over as he read, his brows drawing together as he got further and further into the message.

He handed the paper to Clara and joined Reine-Marie at the wall of paintings.

“All right?” he asked, noticing her pale face.

“
Oui
. Peter finally figures out how to paint emotions, and he paints this.” She paused. “Poor one.”

“Come with me,” he said.

They left the sad painting on the wall and returned to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on the pine table.

Clara finished reading and passed the page on to Myrna.

“You don’t believe it, do you?” asked Reine-Marie, looking from Clara to Armand and nodding toward the letter now in Myrna’s hands.

“One impossible thing before breakfast?” Armand asked.

He placed his hand, splayed, in the center of one of the paintings on the table. And turned it.

Only then did they see what Peter had done.

He hadn’t created something with these paintings. He’d captured something. A moment in a garden at dusk.

What had looked like a circle of stones in the painting when it was the other way around was indeed a circle of stones. Tall, solid, gray.

But now they saw something else. Long, strong slashes of color off the top of the stones.

Rabbit ears.

“Peter would never have believed such a thing,” said Clara. But in her heart she knew she had to stop saying that. If they had a hope of finding out what had happened to him, she had to accept that the man she’d known was indeed gone.

Down the rabbit hole. Where impossible things happened.

Where hares turned to rune stones.

Where giddy smiles turned into vast sorrow. And back again. Depending on your perspective.

When she’d started the search there’d been an element of guilt. Of responsibility. She’d wanted to find him, she wanted him to be safe. But she hadn’t been sure she wanted him back.

But the more they discovered about Peter now, the more desperate she was to meet this man. To get to know him. And have him meet her, for the first time.

Clara realized she was falling in love. She’d always loved Peter, but this was something else. Some deeper vein.

“It doesn’t matter what we believe,” said Myrna, joining them to stare at the picture. “What matters is what Peter believed he saw.”

They looked from the table over to the paintings on the wall.

One was now quite clear. The waves of red lips. Frowning. Moaning. Sighing.

They’d turned the other two paintings around as well, but those had yet to give up their secrets.

“Should we go to Dumfries?” Clara asked. “See for ourselves? Talk to this Alphonse?”

“
Non
,” said Armand. “Whatever happened there is in the past. Both Peter and time have moved on. We’re going there.”

He pointed to the river of sighs.

To a place Gamache knew well. It was in Québec but not of Québec. This area was unique in the world, having been created hundreds of millions of years earlier, by a catastrophe. A cosmic catastrophe.

*   *   *

Gamache, Jean-Guy, and Reine-Marie stood at the large map of Québec tacked up on their sitting room wall.

How often, Beauvoir wondered, had they stood in front of this very map when it had been in the Gamaches’ Montréal home, plotting the best way to get to a crime scene? A body. A murder.

He hoped that wasn’t what they’d find at the end of this journey too.

But the silence from Peter was ominous, and the sooner they could get there the better. And at least now they knew where “there” was.

The Chief’s finger traced a line from Three Pines, near the Vermont border, up to Autoroute 20. Along to Quebec City, then over the bridge, skirting the city, and up again.

Up, up along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. Traveling northeast.

To their destination in the Charlevoix region.

“Is that the best route?”

As the men discussed various options, Reine-Marie stared at the dot on the map. How often had she stood in front of this very map, staring at a dot? Imagining Armand inside it. Willing him safe, willing him home.

The dot had a name. Baie-Saint-Paul.

Saint Paul. Another one who’d seen something unlikely on the road. And whose life had changed.

“We’re on the road to Damascus,” said Armand with a smile. “Or Charlevoix anyway.”

It was an area so beautiful, so unique, it had attracted visitors for centuries. At least one American president had had a summer home there. But what Charlevoix mostly attracted were artists, Québec artists, Canadian artists. Artists from around the world.

And now it had attracted Peter Morrow.

*   *   *

“How long will you be gone?” Reine-Marie asked a few minutes later, as she helped Armand pack a suitcase.

He paused, his hand full of socks. “Hard to say. It’ll take the better part of the day to drive there, and then we need to find out where he’s staying.”

“If he’s still there,” she said, placing shirts in the suitcase. After considering, she added one more.

Through the sitting room window, Gamache could see Jean-Guy loading two suitcases into the Volvo. Perplexed, Gamache slipped the small book into the pocket of his satchel and they went outside.

As he walked down the path, Gamache saw Clara and Myrna standing by the car. Clara had Peter’s rolled-up canvases in her hand, and Myrna had a map.

“You’re here to see us off?” asked Gamache, but he already knew that wasn’t true. Clara shook her head and looked toward their suitcases, already in the Volvo.

“You’re coming with us?” Gamache asked.

“No,” said Clara. “You’re coming with us.”

It was said with a smile, but the distinction was clear.

“I see,” said Armand.

“Good.” Clara watched him closely. “I’m not kidding, Armand. I’m going to find Peter. You can come if you’d like, but if you do, you have to agree that I make the final decisions. I don’t want this to turn into a power struggle.”

“Believe me, Clara, I have no wish for power.” He paused and became so still that Clara also stilled. “I’m not bringing any art supplies.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not an artist.”

“And I’m not an investigator,” she said, grasping his meaning.

“You don’t know what you’ll find,” he said.

“No, I don’t. But I need to be the one looking.”

“And what will you do when we get there?” he asked.

“I’ll find out where Peter’s staying.”

“And suppose he isn’t still there?”

“Are you treating me like a child, Armand?”

“No. I’m treating you like a responsible adult, but one who’s trying to do something she’s unprepared for. Not trained for. I can’t paint a very good picture. You can’t conduct a very good investigation. This is your life, yes. But it’s what we’ve done for a living.” He paused and leaned so close to her no one else could hear. “I’m very good at it. I will find Peter.”

And she replied, so close that he felt the warm words in his ear, “You might know how to investigate, but I know Peter.”

“You knew Peter.” Gamache saw the words slap her. “You think he’s the same man, and he’s not. If you don’t accept that, you’ll go off course. Fast.”

She stepped back. “I know he’s not the same man.” She stared at him. “Peter’s changed. He’s following his heart now. That’s my territory. I can find him, Armand. I’ll know.”

Gamache and Jean-Guy simply stared at her and she felt herself getting angry. Angry at them for not understanding, and angry at herself for not being able to explain it. And angry at the fact that it sounded so fucking lame.

“You like Peter,” she finally said. “But I love him. Laugh if you want, but it makes a difference. I’ll be able to find him.”

“If love was compass enough,” said Armand quietly, “there would be no missing children.”

Clara felt the breath leave her body. There was nothing she could say to that. It was so monumentally true. And yet, and yet, Clara knew she needed to go. And not follow Gamache, but be in the lead.

She could find Peter.

“I would never laugh at you,” Armand was saying, though he seemed so remote. “And I would never, ever mock the power of love. But it can also distort. Slip over into desperation and delusion.”