“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.
FOURTEEN
Clara took her morning toast and coffee into Peter’s studio. Crumbs fell to the concrete floor as she ate her breakfast while sitting on the stool in front of his unfinished painting.
She knew Peter would have howled, as though the crumbs were acid and the floor his skin.
Clara was perhaps not as careful as she should have been. As she could have been. Perhaps it was a mostly unconscious desire to wound Peter in his most private of parts. To hurt him, as he was hurting her. This was the only private part she still had access to. Peter should really have considered himself lucky.
Or maybe her messiness meant nothing. Though, as a blob of strawberry jam hit the floor, she doubted it.
Outside it was cloudy, muggy. Rain threatened, and would likely pour down before lunch. Even with its windows looking onto the Rivière Bella Bella, the studio was close and gloomy.
But she sat there, taking in the canvas on the easel. It was very Peter. Very detailed, precise, controlled. Technically brilliant. It made the best of all the rules.
This was no dog’s breakfast.
Unlike Bean’s creations. With a smile Clara remembered the wild splashes of conflicting, of contrasting, of clashing colors. Vivid colors from a vivid, unrestrained imagination.
The last bite of toast stopped partway to her mouth. Another glob of jam slid closer and closer to the crumbly edge and the great leap downward.
But Clara didn’t notice. She was staring, openmouthed, at Peter’s painting.
And then the jam dropped.
* * *
Myrna Landers stood at the window of her loft, looking between the panes. The glass was so old it had imperfections, distortions, but she’d gotten used to seeing the world that way, and made allowances.
This morning she stood in her pajamas with a mug of coffee and watched the village wake up. It was a common sight. Unremarkable. Except to someone coming from a certain chaos and turmoil. Then it was remarkable.
She watched her neighbors walk their dogs on the village green. She watched them chatting, exchanging pleasantries.
Then her gaze traveled up the dirt road out of Three Pines and stopped at the boundary, at the bench overlooking the village. There she saw Armand sitting, as he did every morning, holding the book in his hands. Even from this distance, she could see it was a very small book. Every morning he sat there with it, and read. Then closed it, and just stared.
Myrna Landers wondered what he was reading. She wondered what he was thinking.
He came to her once a week for therapy, but had never once mentioned this book. And she hadn’t asked, preferring him to offer. And he would. When the time was right.
Still, there was plenty to talk about. The injuries of the past. The ones seen and unseen. The bruises on his mind and body and soul. They were healing, slowly. But the wounds that seemed to hurt him the most weren’t even his own.
“Jean-Guy’s life isn’t your responsibility, Armand,” she’d said. Over and over. And he’d leave, nodding and thanking her. And understanding.
And then the next session, Armand would admit the fear was back.
“Suppose he drinks again? Or uses?” he’d ask.
“Suppose he does?” she’d ask back and hold those worried eyes. “He and Annie have to work it out themselves. He’s in rehab and has his own therapist. He’s doing what he has to do. Let it go. Concentrate on your own side of the street.”
And she could see that it made sense to Gamache. But she also knew they’d have this same conversation again. Over and over. Because his fears weren’t about sense. They didn’t live in his head.
But she could see progress. One day he’d get there. And once there, he’d find peace.
And this was the place to do it, Myrna knew, as she watched the large man on the edge of the village open the little book, put on his reading glasses, and begin again.
They’d all come here to begin again.
* * *
Armand Gamache looked down at the book and read. Not long, not much. But he found even these few words every day comforting. Then, as he did each morning, he closed the book, removed his reading glasses, and looked at the village. Then he lifted his eyes to the misty forest and mountains beyond.
There was a world out there. A world filled with beauty and love and goodness. And cruelty and killers, and vile acts contemplated and being committed at this very moment.
Peter had left and been gobbled up by that world.
And it was coming closer. Coming here. Nibbling at the edges of the village.
He felt his skin tingle, and the sudden, overwhelming need to get up. To go. To do something. To stop it. It was like an out-of-body experience, so powerful was the urge to act.
He gripped the edge of the bench, closed his eyes, and did as Myrna had taught him.
Deep breath. In. And out.
“And don’t just breathe,” he heard her calm, melodic voice. “Inhale. Take in the smells. Listen to the sounds. The real world. Not the one you’re conjuring.”
He breathed in, and smelled the pine forest, smelled the damp earth. Felt the cool, fresh morning air on his cheeks. He heard, far off, the excited yapping of a puppy. And he followed that back. The puppy led him through the howls and shrieks and alarms in his head.
He held on to the sound. To the scents. As Myrna had taught him.
“Follow anything you can,” she’d advised. “Back to reality. Back from the edge.”
And he did.
Deep breath in. The cut grass, the sweet hay by the side of the road. Deep breath out.
And finally, when the alarms were dulled and his heart stopped pounding, pounding, he thought he could hear the forest itself. The leaves not rustling, but murmuring to him. Telling him he’d made it. Home. He was safe.
Gamache let go of the hard edge of the wooden bench and slid back, until he felt himself come to rest, against the wood. Against the words.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
He opened his eyes, and the village lay before him.
And once again he was saved. He was surprised by joy.
But what would happen if he left? And went back into that world he, better than most, knew was not just his imagination?
* * *
Myrna Landers turned slowly from the window.
Each morning she saw Armand read. And then she watched him put down the mysterious book and stare into space.
And each morning she saw the demons approach, and swarm and surround him until they found their way in. Through his head, through his thoughts. And from there they gripped his heart. She saw the terror possess him. And she saw him fight it off.
Each morning she got up, made a coffee, and stood looking through the pane. Only turning away when he was safely through his own.
* * *
Clara put down her coffee before she dropped it. She put the last bite of toast in her mout
h, before she dropped it too.
And she stared at Peter’s painting. Letting her mind leap from image to image. From thought to thought. Until it came to the same conclusion her instincts had hit a few minutes earlier.
It wasn’t possible. She must have taken a leap in the wrong direction. Connected things that should not be put together. She sat back down on the stool and stared at the easel.
Had Peter been trying to tell them something?
* * *
Myrna spread a thick layer of brilliant gold marmalade on her English muffin. Then she dipped her knife into the raspberry jam and added it to the mix. Her own invention. Marmberry. It looked grotesque, but then great food so often did. Never mind what the chefs tell you, she thought, as she took a bite. All the best comfort food looked like someone had dropped the plate.
She smiled down at her own failed “color wheel,” and thought of Bean, and the paintings. That was what her English muffin looked like. The palette Bean had used to create those brilliant, and not in a good way, pictures.
What had Ruth called Clara’s first efforts? A dog’s breakfast.
“The dog’s breakfast.” Myrna raised the muffin in salute, and took a bite.
But her chewing slowed, slowed until it stopped. She stared into space.
Her thoughts, tentative at first, sped up. Finally racing along, racing toward a completely unexpected conclusion.
But it wasn’t possible. Was it?
She swallowed.
* * *
Perhaps the only good thing about the torment he experienced, thought Gamache, taking a deep breath of the sweet morning air, was that once it was gone he emerged into this.
He smiled at the sight of the stone and clapboard and brick cottages, radiating in circles from the village green.
And when the hell stopped, when he finally banished his demons, would heaven stop too?
Would he love this place less because he needed it less?
Again he looked at Three Pines, the little village lost in the valley, and felt the familiar lifting of his heart. But would it lift if there was no load?
Was the final fear that, in losing his fears, he would also lose his joy?
He’d been so worried about Jean-Guy and his addictions, what about his own? He wasn’t addicted to pain, to panic, but he might be addicted to the bliss of having them stop.
The mind, he knew, really was its own place. Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
Gamache was pretty sure that’s what Peter Morrow had done. He’d turned heaven into hell. And as a result, he’d been kicked out. Paradise Lost.
But Peter Morrow wasn’t Lucifer, the fallen angel. He was just a troubled man who lived in his head, not realizing that Paradise was only ever found in the heart. Unfortunately for Peter, feelings lived there too. And they were almost always messy. Peter Morrow did not like messes.
Armand laughed as he remembered the conversation from the night before.
It was how Clara had described her first attempt at a painting. No, not a mess, it was something else. A dog’s breakfast. Ruth had called it that and Clara had agreed. Ruth tried to capture feelings in her poetry. Clara tried with color and subject to give form to feelings.
It was messy. Unruly. Risky. Scary. So much could go wrong. Failure was always close at hand. But so was brilliance.
Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter’s landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.
How shattering it must have been, then, to have played it safe all his life and been expelled anyway. From home. From his career.
What would a person do when the tried-and-true was no longer true?
Gamache’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the landscape before him. And listened. Not to the dogs this time. Not the birds or even the oaks and maples and murmuring pines. Now he listened to snippets of conversation, floating up from his memory. Remembering in more detail the conversation from the night before. Putting together a sentence here, a gesture there. A dab, a dot, a brush stroke of words. Until a picture formed.
He stood up, still staring into the distance. Waiting for the final elements. And then he had it.
As he stuffed the book back into his pocket and started down the hill, he saw Myrna leave her bookstore, still in her dressing gown, and practically run across the village green.
They were headed, he knew, for the same place.
Clara’s home.
* * *
“Where are you?” Myrna called.
“In here.”
Clara got off the stool and went to the studio door and saw Myrna standing like an Easter Island monument, if they’d been carved out of flannel. Myrna often dropped by, but rarely this early and normally she got dressed. Rarely did Myrna bother announcing herself. And Clara had rarely heard this tone in her voice.
Panic? No, not panic.
“Clara?”
Another voice, but the same tone, had arrived.
It was Armand and the tone was excitement.
“I think I know what Peter’s been doing,” he said.
“So do I,” said Myrna.
“So do I,” said Clara. “But I have to make a call.”
“Oui,” said Gamache as he and Myrna followed Clara to the telephone in the living room.
A few minutes later she hung up and, turning to them, she nodded.
They were right. A huge piece of the puzzle had appeared, or at least soon would.
FIFTEEN
“It came to me just now when I looked at his latest work,” said Clara.
They’d moved into Peter’s studio, drawn there by the canvas on the easel.
“How’d you figure it out?” she asked Myrna.
“The color wheel.” Myrna described her vivid English muffin. Gamache, who hadn’t yet had breakfast, thought the marmberry sounded genius.
“You?” Myrna asked him.
“I was thinking of the dog’s breakfast,” he said, and described his different route to the same conclusion. “And how very difficult it must be to paint a feeling. A real mess at first.”
In front of them was the painting Peter had left behind. It was all in shades of white. Beautifully nuanced. It was almost impossible to distinguish the canvas from the paint. The medium from the method.
Someone would probably pay a lot of money for that. And one day, Gamache thought, it might be worth a lot of money. Like finding an artifact from a lost civilization. Or, more accurately, a dinosaur bone. Bleached and fossilized. Valuable only because it was extinct. The last of its kind.
Such a contrast to Myrna’s and Clara’s descriptions of Bean’s exuberant paintings.
They were a mess. A riot of clashing colors. Without technique. Having heard the rules, Bean had understood them, then ignored them. Choosing instead to move away from the conventions.
“When you looked at the paintings on Bean’s wall,” he asked his companions, “what did you feel?”
Clara smiled broadly, remembering. “Honestly? I thought they were awful.”
“You thought that,” Gamache persisted, “but what did you feel?”
“Amusement,” said Myrna.
“Were you laughing at them?” he asked, and Myrna considered.
“No,” she said slowly. “I think they made me happy.”
“Me too,” said Clara. “They were weird and fun and unexpected. I felt sorta buoyed up, you know?”
Myrna nodded.
“And this?” Gamache gestured toward the easel.
All three looked again at the bleached, tasteful canvas. It would go perfectly in someone’s penthouse, in the dining room. No danger of ruining the appetite.
Both women shook their heads. Nothing. It was like looking into a void.
“So Bean is the better painter after all,” said Gamache. “If only Bean had painted them.”
And that was the giant piece of the puzzle they’d all found at the same tim
e.
Bean hadn’t painted those silly pictures. Peter had.
They were a mess, because they were the beginning. Peter’s first chaotic steps toward brilliance.
* * *
“You need to describe the paintings for me, in more detail,” said Gamache.
They’d moved with their coffees into Clara’s garden, feeling the need for fresh air and color after the tasteful oppression of Peter’s studio.
Rain was still threatening but hadn’t yet arrived.
“What struck me first were the purples and pinks and oranges all squashed in together in that one over Bean’s desk,” said Myrna.
“And the one by the window?” asked Clara. “It was like someone had thrown buckets of paint at a wall, and the drips had somehow taken shape.”
“And those mountains in the one behind the door,” said Myrna. “The smiles.”
Clara smiled. “Amazing.”
Taking a pain au chocolat, she ripped a section off so that the gooey dark chocolate core was exposed and flakes of pastry fell to the table.
“I don’t want you to think they were great,” Clara said to Gamache, who’d put strawberry jam on a croissant and was reaching for the marmalade. “It’s not like we’re turning them into masterpieces in our minds now that we know a kid hadn’t painted them.”
“They’re still crap,” agreed Myrna. “But happy merde.”
“Peter did them.” Clara shook her head. It was unbelievable. But true.
She’d called Peter’s sister, Marianna, and caught Bean in. She asked Bean who’d painted the pictures and Bean’s answer came immediately, and with surprise. Surely Aunt Clara knew.
“Uncle Peter.”
“He gave them to you?”
“Yes. And some he mailed. We got a pipe thing with more a few months ago.”
It was at that point Clara spoke to Marianna again and arranged for all the paintings to be couriered to her in Three Pines.
“I’ll get them out this morning. I’m sorry, I thought you knew he’d painted them. Not very good, are they?” Marianna said with barely disguised pleasure. “He showed some to me when he came over. Seemed to want me to say something about them. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.”