“What made him angry? What would set him off?”
“Anyone who disagreed with his tenth muse theory. And anything he judged to be mediocre. The two went together in his mind. Unfortunately, as the year went on he became more and more unbalanced. We didn’t know when he’d go over the edge, and who he might take with him. We had to protect the students. But we didn’t act in time.”
“There was an incident?” asked Reine-Marie.
Beside her, Ruth was no help at all. Reine-Marie wasn’t even sure she was listening. There was a goofy smile on her face as she watched Professor Massey.
“Not violence,” said the professor. “Not physical anyway. Without telling anyone, or getting the college’s permission, Sébastien Norman created the Salon des Refusés.”
“Clara Morrow told us about that. But what was it?”
“It was a show that ran parallel to the real exhibition. It featured the rejected works.”
“And why was that so bad?”
Reine-Marie could immediately feel his censure. It radiated from him, waves of disapproval, of disappointment. In her. And she found herself regretting asking the question. Intellectually she knew that was silly. It was a legitimate question. But in her gut she felt she’d let this man down in not knowing the answer.
Even Ruth deserted her now. She drifted off and started examining the paintings on the walls. Pausing before each one. Paying more attention to them than she ever had, as far as Reine-Marie knew, to Clara’s or Peter’s.
“Are you a teacher?” Professor Massey asked.
Reine-Marie shook her head. “A librarian.”
“But you have children?”
“Two. Both grown up now. And two grandchildren.”
“And when they go to school and get an assignment wrong, would you like the teacher to hold it up in front of the class? In front of the school? For ridicule?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, that’s what Professor Norman did. Ask your friend Clara how it felt. How it still feels. These are young people, Madame Gamache. They’re gifted, and many are fragile, having been marginalized most of their lives for being creative. We live in a society that doesn’t value being different. When they come here, to art college, it’s probably the first time in their lives they feel they belong. Safe. Not just valued, but precious.”
He held her eyes, his voice deep and calm, almost mesmerizing. And Reine-Marie felt again the pull of this man, even in his old age. How powerful he must have been in his prime.
And how comforting his message to the young, lost, wounded men and women who straggled into the college with their screw-you attitudes and piercings and broken hearts.
Here they were safe. To experiment, to explore. To fail and try again. Without fear of ridicule.
She looked at the worn sofa and could almost see the generations of young, excited artists lounging about in animated debate. Finally free.
Until Professor Norman got ahold of them. And then it was no longer safe.
The Salon des Refusés.
Reine-Marie was beginning to see just how vile that was.
“Would the college have Professor Norman’s address in their files?”
“They might. He was from Québec. I know that. He had a funny sort of accent.”
“Do you know where in Québec?” Reine-Marie asked, and he shook his head.
“Did Peter ask these questions, when he visited you?”
“About Professor Norman?” Massey was clearly both surprised and amused. “No. We talked about him briefly, but I think I was the one who brought him up.”
“Is it possible Peter’s looking for Professor Norman?” Reine-Marie asked.
“I doubt it,” said Massey. “He said nothing about that when he left. Why?”
“Clara and my husband and some others are trying to find Peter,” she said. “And it seems Peter was trying to find someone named Norman.”
“I’d be shocked if it was the same man,” said Massey. And he looked shocked. “I hope that’s not true.”
“Why?”
“If Sébastien Norman was insane thirty years ago, I hate to think what he is now.” Massey took a breath and shook his head. “When she left, I advised Clara to just go home. To get on with her life. And that Peter would come back, when he was ready.”
“Do you think he planned to return to her?” Reine-Marie asked.
“He didn’t mention it,” Massey admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t going to do it.”
“Like looking for Norman, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
The professor’s gaze left Reine-Marie and found Ruth. She was down at the far end of his studio looking at another painting.
“I don’t suppose you have a picture of Professor Norman?”
“In my wallet?” Professor Massey smiled. “Actually, I might be able to find you one. In our yearbook.”
While Massey examined the bookcase, Reine-Marie walked over to Ruth.
“Is this the painting Myrna said was so good?” asked Reine-Marie. She looked at it and saw what Myrna meant. The rest were good. This was great. Mesmerizing.
She rallied herself and turned to Ruth. “Are you ready to leave or are you measuring the windows for curtains?”
“And would that be so laughable?” Ruth asked.
Reine-Marie was shocked into silence. Stunned not by what Ruth said, but by her own behavior. Belittling, even ridiculing, Ruth’s feelings for the professor.
“I’m so sorry,” said Reine-Marie. “That was stupid of me.”
Ruth looked over at the elderly man, pulling out yearbooks, examining them, then returning them.
The old poet drew herself up and said, “Noli timere.”
Reine-Marie sensed the words were not for her ears, just as the look on Ruth’s face was not for her eyes.
“Here it is.”
Professor Massey walked toward them holding up a yearbook in triumph. “I was afraid it’d gotten lost in the renovations. Or sealed up in the walls. You’d be surprised what they found when they took them down.”
“What?” asked Ruth, while Reine-Marie took the yearbook.
“Well, asbestos for one, but they expected to find that. That’s why they did the renovations. It was the other stuff that was a surprise.”
The yearbook was dusty and Reine-Marie turned to the professor. “Asbestos?”
“Yes.” He looked at her, then understood why she’d asked. He laughed. “Don’t worry. That’s just two decades of dust. No asbestos on it.”
He took the book back, wiped it off with his sleeve, and handed it back. He led them to the sofa.
Ruth and Paul Massey sat, while Reine-Marie stood and flipped through the yearbook.
“What did they find in the walls?” asked Ruth. Her voice was almost unrecognizable to Reine-Marie.
“Old newspapers mostly. Turns out the building, or its foundations, were much older than anyone thought. Some Italian workers had left parts of sandwiches, and biologists were able to grow some tomato plants from the old seeds they found. Plants that had become all but extinct. They also found a couple of canvases.”
“Was that one?” Ruth pointed to the painting they’d been looking at, at the back of the studio.
Professor Massey laughed. “You think that’s garbage?”
He didn’t seem insulted, simply amused. Pleased even.
“Professor Massey painted that,” said Reine-Marie, jumping in to smooth over a potentially embarrassing moment, though she seemed the only one uncomfortable over what Ruth had said.
“You can see the paintings they found in a display case near the front door,” said Massey. “Nothing remarkable, I’m afraid. No Emily Carr or Tom Thomson stuffed in for insulation.”
As they talked, Reine-Marie studied page after page of photographs of young men and women. Most of the students were white. Most with long greasy hair. And tight turtlenecks, and tighter jeans. And petulant, disinterested expression
s.
Too cool for school. Too cool to care.
Reine-Marie stopped and turned back a page.
There, unmistakably, was Clara, with hair that looked like Einstein’s. Wearing a shapeless smock and a huge, happy grin on her face.
And beside her on the sofa, the same sofa Reine-Marie had just been on, various students slouched. Professor Massey, younger and even more vigorous, was standing behind them, speaking to a young man.
They were locked in earnest conversation. A cigarette hung from the young man’s mouth, a puff of smoke obscuring his face. Except for one eye. Sharp, assessing. Aware.
It was Peter.
Reine-Marie smiled at the photograph, then returned to searching for Sébastien Norman. But when she found the section on the professors it was a disappointment.
“I’d forgotten,” said Massey, when shown the section. “That was the year the editors decided not to use our actual photographs. Maybe in response to the Salon des Refusés, they published pictures of our art instead. I think they deliberately chose the most embarrassing examples.”
He took the book back and turned a few pages, and grimaced. “That’s mine. The worst thing I think I’ve done.”
There were columns of bright paint, with slashes through it. It seemed to Reine-Marie quite dynamic. Not bad at all.
But then, artists probably weren’t the best judges of their own work.
“May I take this?” she asked, indicating the yearbook.
“Yes, as long as you bring it back.”
He spoke, not surprisingly, to Ruth. He said it so tenderly that Reine-Marie was tempted to answer for her.
“I’ll be waiting,” he said to the old poet. “I just sit where I’m put, composed of stone and wishful thinking.”
Reine-Marie recognized the quote from one of Ruth’s poems. She wanted to warn this man to stop. She wanted to tell him that while he might think he was wooing Ruth with her own words, he had no idea what he was poking.
Ruth turned to Professor Massey and spoke, her voice strong and clear.
“That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.”
She’d completed the couplet.
As they left for home, Reine-Marie mulled over what she’d heard. About Professor Norman. His passion, and his folly. The tenth muse. The missing muse.
That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.
Was the tenth muse that deity? Like the other muses, did it inspire? Did it heal?
But did this one also kill, for pleasure?
TWENTY-SIX
Marcel Chartrand placed the rolled-up canvases on the wooden table.
They were in his office at the back of the gallery, away from prying eyes.
The gallery itself was open, and tourists and artists and enthusiasts had streamed in all day. Not to buy, but to pay homage.
It was easy to spot those from away, and those from Québec. The tourists from other provinces or countries stood before the Clarence Gagnon oil paintings and smiled, appreciating the works of art.
Those from Québec looked about to burst into tears. An unsuspected yearning uncovered, discovered. For a simpler time and a simpler life. Before Internet, and climate change, and terrorism. When neighbors worked together, and separation was not a topic or an issue or wise.
Yet the Gagnon paintings weren’t idealized images of country life. They showed hardship. But they also showed such beauty, such peace, that the paintings, and the people looking at them, ached.
Gamache stood at the door between the office and the gallery and watched the patrons react to the paintings.
“Armand?”
Clara called him back in. He closed the door behind him and joined the others at the table.
Over lunch they’d discussed what to do next. They’d spent the morning driving to the cabin Peter had rented. Far from being a charming little Québécois chalet, this was a nondescript, cheap one-room hovel, one step up from a slum.
The landlady remembered Peter.
“Tall. Anglo. Paid cash,” she said, and looked around with distaste at the room, under no illusions about its quality. “Rents by the month. You interested?”
She eyed Clara, the most likely prospect.
“Did he have any visitors?” Clara asked.
The landlady looked at her as though it was a ridiculous question, which it was, but one that had to be asked. As was the next—
“Did he ask you about a man named Norman?”
Same response.
“Do you know a man named Norman?”
“Look, you want the place or not?”
Not.
The landlady locked up.
“Did he say why he was here?” Clara tried one more time as they stood outside the door.
“Oh, sure, we had long discussions over fondue and white wine.”
She looked at Clara with distaste. “I don’t know why he was here. I don’t care. He paid cash.”
“Did he tell you where he was going, when he left?” Clara persevered in the face of obvious defeat.
“I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell.”
And that was that.
Then they went back to the brasserie, to cleanse their palates with burgers.
“What next?” Clara asked.
“Reine-Marie should be at your college in Toronto,” Gamache said, looking at his watch. “She’ll let us know what she finds out.”
“And until then?” Myrna asked.
“There is one thing we can do, I suppose,” said Clara, shooting a glance at Gamache. “We could show Peter’s paintings to Marcel.”
Clara turned to Myrna and laid a hand on the rolled-up canvas.
“What do they tell you?”
Myrna noticed the protective action. “I take it you don’t want my opinion as an art critic.”
“Since you happen to think I’m a genius, I think your expertise in that area is unquestioned. But no, it’s the other I want.”
Myrna studied her friend for a moment. “They tell me that Peter was deeply troubled.”
“Do you think he’d lost his mind?” Clara asked.
“I think,” said Myrna slowly, “that Peter could afford to lose some of his mind. It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”
Myrna smiled then. Just a little.
“Right,” said Clara, getting up and grabbing the scrolled paintings. “Let’s go.”
She marched away like a Crimean war general leading a futile charge.
She headed up the hill to the Galerie Gagnon, leaving the others, and the bill, behind.
“She has flair, I’ll give her that,” said Jean-Guy, hurriedly taking a last huge bite of his hamburger. Gamache, paying, knew that “flair” was not one of Beauvoir’s compliments.
And now they stood over the table as Marcel Chartrand unrolled the canvases.
The one on top was of the lips.
Gamache studied the curator as Chartrand studied the painting. But study, Gamache realized, was the wrong word. Chartrand was absorbing it. Trying not to think about the painting, but to experience it. In fact, the other man’s eyes were almost closed.
Chartrand tilted his head a little this way. Then that.
And then a slight smile formed. His trained eye had seen the painted lips.
For the painting was smile-up. It was the giddy, laughing perspective.
“It’s a bit of a mess,” Chartrand said. “Here and here.” He waved his hands over the canvas. “It looks like Peter was just filling in gaps, not sure what to do. There’s no cohesion. But there is, I have to admit, a certain”—he searched for the word—“buoyancy.”
Clara reached out and slowly turned Peter’s painting. Like the rotation of the earth. Around. Slowly around. Until day became night. Smiles became frowns. Laughter became sorrow. Sky became water.
“Oh.”
That was all Chartrand said, and needed to say. His expression said the rest. His body, in its sudden tension, spoke.
Gamache
felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Excusing himself, he stepped out the back door.
“Bonjour? Reine-Marie?”
“Oui. We’re in the airport lounge, catching the next flight back to Montréal. I wanted to give you a quick call.”
“How’d it go?”
“I’m not really sure.”
She filled him in on their visit to the art college and Professor Massey. And Professor Norman.
“So he was from Québec,” said Armand. “But they don’t know where?”
“The office is looking,” she said. “The registrar is a bit overwhelmed right now. Getting ready for her own vacation, but I think I convinced her to look for Professor Norman’s dossier. The old files aren’t on computer, so she’ll have to go through them manually.”
“And she’s willing to do it?”
“Fortunately you only really need that one kidney, right, Armand?”
He grimaced. “As long as that’s the only body part you offered her.”
Reine-Marie’s laughter came down the line and he smiled as he turned in her direction. In the background he heard them calling her flight.
“Armand, what do you know about the Muses?”
“The Muses?” He wasn’t sure he heard her over the general boarding announcement. And then there was another, clearer voice.
“Get off the phone, for chrissake.”
“Is that Ruth?”
“She came with me. I think she has a crush on Professor Massey.”
“Ruth?”
“I know. You should’ve seen her. All giggly and blushing. They even recited part of her poetry together. I just sit where I’m put … That one.”
“Ruth?”
“Hurry up,” came the snarly voice. “If we get on now we might down a Scotch before the fucking thing takes off.”
Ruth.
“I have to go,” said Reine-Marie. “I’ll tell you more once we’re home. Professor Massey gave me a yearbook. I’ll study it on the flight.”
“Merci,” he called down the line. “Merci.”
But she was gone.
He returned to the office to find the four of them bent over one of the other canvases.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Chartrand shook his head and straightened up as though repulsed by the canvas. “Poor Peter.”