The Long Way Home (17 page)

“I know, numb nuts.” Still, much of Ruth’s enthusiasm waned. Then she took a closer look at the tube and perked up.

“There’s no bottle of Scotch inside either,” said Jean-Guy, reading her thoughts. It was a source of some concern that he could.

“Then what’s all the excitement?”

“Peter’s paintings are inside,” said Reine-Marie, staring at the tube, anxious to see them.

It was as though Peter had mailed himself. Not his physical self. She hoped. Peter had posted his thoughts, his feelings. Inside that tube was a diary of where he’d gone, creatively, since he’d left Three Pines.

They crowded around as Clara removed the brown paper. A note, scribbled by Marianna, came loose and drifted to the floor. Jean-Guy scooped it up and read.

“Here’re the paintings. Three on canvas are the most recent. Peter sent them to Bean in May. Don’t know where they were mailed from. The other three are on paper. He gave them to Bean when he visited in the winter. Glad to send them.”

That sounded to Jean-Guy like “Glad to get rid of them.”

“Let’s see,” said Gabri.

He’d just arrived and he and Ruth were elbowing each other for position.

Jean-Guy took one of the canvases and Reine-Marie took another. They unfurled them, but the sides kept curling back up.

“I can’t see,” snapped Ruth. “Hold them open.”

“This is too awkward,” said Myrna.

They looked around the kitchen and finally decided to place the three canvases on the floor, like area rugs.

They smoothed out the canvases, placing a large book at each corner, then stepped back. Rosa waddled toward the pictures.

“Don’t let her step on them,” Clara warned.

“Step on them?” asked Ruth. “You’ll be lucky if she shits on them. Could only improve ’em.”

No one disagreed.

Gamache looked at them. Tilting his head this way and that.

Clara was right. They were a mess. And he realized he hadn’t quite believed they would be.

He’d hoped that the paintings would at least show promise. But he’d actually expected they’d be better than that. Unconventional, yes. Unexpected. Even slightly difficult to fathom. Like a Jackson Pollock. All wild color. Blobs and drips and lines of what looked like spilled paint. Accidents on canvas.

But those coalesced into a form, a feeling.

Gamache leaned slightly to the left. To the right. To the center.

No.

These were just messes.

Sitting on the floor like that, Peter’s paintings literally looked like a dog’s breakfast. If the dog had no sense of taste. And then had thrown up.

Whatever Rosa might drop on the paintings wouldn’t do any damage, thought Gamache.

Clara was across the kitchen and had taken the elastics off the smaller paintings and placed them on the table, anchoring each corner with salt and pepper shakers and mugs.

“So,” she said as the others joined her, “according to Marianna, these are Peter’s earlier works.”

They stared.

These works were no better. In fact, they were, if such a thing was possible, even worse than what lay on the floor.

“Are we sure Peter did them?” Gamache asked. It was extremely difficult to believe the same artist who’d painted the bland, tasteful, precise works in the studio was responsible for these.

Clara was looking doubtful herself. Leaning in, she examined the lower right corner.

“There’s no signature.” She was gnawing the side of her mouth. “He normally signs his works.”

“Yeah, well, he normally takes six months to do a painting,” said Ruth. “He normally doesn’t show any of his works until they’re perfect. He normally uses shades of cream and gray.”

Clara looked at Ruth in astonishment. Perhaps her head wasn’t quite as far up her ass as Clara had assumed.

“Do you think they’re Peter’s?” she asked Ruth.

“They’re his,” said Ruth decisively. “Not because they look like his but because no one in their right mind would take credit for these if they hadn’t painted them.”

“Why didn’t he sign them?” Jean-Guy asked.

“Would you?” Ruth asked.

They went back to studying the three paintings on the table.

Now and then one of them, as though repelled by these three, broke away and went over to the paintings on the floor.

Then, as though repelled again, they returned to the table.

“Well,” said Gabri, after consideration. “I have to say, they stink.”

The paintings were garish, splashes and clashes of color. Reds and purples, yellows and oranges. Fighting with each other. Dashed on the paper and canvas. It was as though Peter had taken a club to every rule he’d learned. Hacking away at them. Breaking them like a piñata. And out of those shattered certainties paint had poured. Gobs and gobs of brilliant paint. All the colors he’d sniffed at, sneered at, mocked with his clever artist friends. All the colors he’d withheld and Clara had used. They poured out. Like blood. Like guts.

They hit the paper and this was the result.

“What does this say about Peter?” Gamache asked.

“Do we really need to look in that cave?” Myrna whispered to him.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted. “But is there any difference between these”—he pointed to the ones on the table—“and those?” He gestured toward the floor. “Do you see an improvement? An evolution?”

Clara shook her head. “They look like an exercise in art school. You see here?”

She pointed to a checkerboard pattern in one of the paintings on the table. They leaned in and nodded.

“Every high school art student does something like that, to learn about perspective.”

Gamache’s brows came together in consideration. Why would one of the most successful artists in Canada paint these? And include an exercise kids are taught in school?

“Is this even art?” Jean-Guy asked.

It was another good question.

When Beauvoir had first met these people, and this village, he knew little about art and what he knew was more than he found useful. But after many years of exposure to the art world, he’d become interested. Sort of.

What mostly interested him wasn’t the art, but the environment. The infighting. The casual cruelty. The hypocrisy. The ugly business of selling beautiful creations.

And how that ugliness sometimes grew into crime. And how the crime sometimes festered into murder. Sometimes.

Jean-Guy liked Peter Morrow. A part of him understood Peter Morrow. The part Beauvoir admitted to very few.

The fearful part. The empty part. The selfish part. The insecure part.

The cowardly part of Jean-Guy Beauvoir understood Peter Morrow.

But while Beauvoir had fought hard to face that part of himself, Peter had simply run from it. Increasing the chasm, the tear.

Fear didn’t make the hole bigger, Beauvoir had learned. But cowardice did.

Still, Jean-Guy Beauvoir liked Peter Morrow, and was worried that something horrible had happened to the man. But at least no one would kill for these pictures. Except perhaps Peter. He might kill to suppress them.

But he hadn’t, had he? In fact, far from suppressing them, he’d actually taken pains to make sure they were safe.

“Why did he keep these?” Jean-Guy asked. “And why give them to Bean?”

Instead of answering any questions, the paintings had created even more.

*   *   *

Ruth left. Bored and more than a little revolted.

“They’re revolting,” she’d said, in case anyone had missed how she felt. “I’m off to clean out Rosa’s litter box. Anyone want to help?”

It was tempting, and shortly after Ruth left, Gabri made his excuses.

“I think I should dig the hair out of the bathroom drains,” he said as he made for the door.

Peter’s works seemed to remind people of disgusting chores. If he’d set out into the world to find a way to be useful, this probably wasn’t what he had in mind.

Armand, Reine-Marie, Clara, Myrna, and Jean-Guy were left standing uncertainly around the paintings.

“Okay,” said Gamache, walking over to the canvases on the floor. “These are the more recent works. Mailed by Peter in late spring. They’re on canvas, while the earlier works”—he took three long strides over to the pine table—“given to Bean in the winter, are on paper.”

They looked like some living thing had fallen from a great height. And hit the table.

They could not be considered a triumph. Or a success. Or a good end.

But these, Gamache knew, weren’t anywhere close to an end. These were the beginning. They were signposts. Markers.

The Inuit used to erect stone men as a navigation tool, to mark their path. To point out where they were going and where they’d been. The way forward and the way home.
Inuksuit,
they were called. Literally, a substitute for a man. When found by Europeans they were initially destroyed. Then they were loathed as heathen. Now they’re recognized as not only markers, but works of art.

That’s what Peter had done. These might be works of art, but more than that, they were markers, signposts. Pointing out where he’d been and where he was going. The route he was traveling, artistically, emotionally, creatively. These odd paintings were his
inuksuit,
recording not so much his location, but the progress of his thoughts and feelings.

These paintings were a substitute for the man. Peter’s insides, out.

With that insight, Gamache looked more closely at the six paintings. What did they tell him about Peter?

They at first appeared to be simply splashes of color. The most recent ones, on canvas, seemed to clash even more violently than the early ones.

“Why paint some on paper and the rest on canvas?” Reine-Marie asked.

Clara had been wondering that herself. She stared at the groupings. Frankly, they all seemed equally crappy to her. It wasn’t like the three on canvas were clearly better and worth preserving and the paper ones were disposable.

“I guess there might be a couple of reasons,” she said. “He either didn’t have any canvases when he painted the first three, or he knew they’d be experiments. Not meant to last.”

“But these were?” Jean-Guy pointed to the works on the floor.

“Sometimes the magic works…” said Clara, and Gamache gave a small laugh.

“Peter’s a smart man,” said Reine-Marie. “A successful artist. He must have realized these aren’t great. They’re not even good.”

Jean-Guy nodded. “Exactly. Why keep them? And not just keep them, but give them to someone else, let someone else see them?”

“What do you do with the works you don’t like?” Reine-Marie asked Clara.

“Oh, I keep most.”

“Even the ones you couldn’t save?” asked Reine-Marie.

“Even those.”

“Why?”

“Well, you just never know. On a slow day, or when I’m stuck for inspiration, I’ll pull them out and look again. Sometimes I even put them on their sides, or upside down. That can give me a different perspective. Jog something loose that I hadn’t seen before. Some small thing that’s worth pursuing. A color combination, a series of strokes, that sort of thing.”

Beauvoir looked at the paintings on the floor. Only a series of strokes would explain them.

“You keep the ones that don’t work out,” said Myrna. “But you don’t show them off.”

“True,” admitted Clara.

“Jean-Guy’s right. There’s a reason Peter kept these,” said Gamache. “And a reason he sent them to Bean.”

He walked over to the smaller images on the worn pine table.

“Where’s the one you said was a smile?” Gamache asked Myrna. “The lips? I can’t see them.”

“Oh, that. I’d forgotten,” she said. “It’s over in this group.” She walked him back to the floor show. “You find it.”

“Dreary woman,” he said, but didn’t protest. After a minute or so Myrna opened her mouth, but the Chief stopped her. “Now, don’t tell me. I’ll get it.”

“Well, I’m going outside,” said Clara.

They poured lemonades and went into the garden, but Beauvoir stayed behind with the Chief.

Gamache bent over each painting, then straightened up and held his hands behind his back. He rocked slightly back and forth, heel to toe. Heel to toe.

Beauvoir took a few steps back. Then a few more. Then he dragged one of the chairs over from the pine table and got up on it.

“Nothing from up here.”

“What’re you doing?” Gamache demanded, striding over to Jean-Guy. “Get off that chair right now.”

“It’s sturdy. It’ll hold my weight.” But he jumped down anyway.

He didn’t like the tone in the Chief’s voice.

“You don’t know that,” said Gamache.

“And you don’t know it won’t,” said Beauvoir.

The two stared at each other until a sound made Gamache turn around. Myrna stood at the door, the empty lemonade jug in her hand.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not at all,” the Chief said, and forced a smile. Then he took a deep breath, expelled the air, and turned back to Beauvoir, who was still glaring.

“I’m sorry, Jean-Guy. Get back up if you want to.”

“No, I’ve seen what I need to see.”

Gamache had the feeling he was talking about more than the paintings.

“There it is,” said Jean-Guy.

Gamache joined him.

Jean-Guy had found the smile. The smiles.

And Gamache realized his mistake. He’d been looking for one big set of lips. A valley that formed a mountain. But Peter had painted a whole bunch of them, tiny smiles, small valleys of mirth that marched across and deep into the painting.

Gamache grinned.

It didn’t make the painting good, but it was the first of Peter’s works that had produced any feeling at all in him.

He turned to look at the table. Even those paintings had created a feeling, though he didn’t think nausea was considered an emotion. But it was at least something. In the gut. Not in the head.

If this was the start, Armand Gamache was even more anxious to know where the smiles led.

SEVENTEEN

Reine-Marie was smiling.

Gamache had shown her the parade of tiny lips. It had taken her a moment to actually recognize what they were, but he knew the moment it clicked.

Her own lips curled into a grin. Then into a full-blown smile.