The Long Way Home (21 page)

But both images had one thing in common. They coalesced around the simple, clear checkerboard snake. In the garden.

She felt her skin crawl and tingle as the blood crept away from the surface. Away from the painting and the photograph. To hide in her core.

“Here,” she said, pointing to the painting. “This is where it happened.”

“What happened?” asked Reine-Marie.

“Where Peter started to change. I was wondering why he didn’t save any of his other works. He probably did some in Paris, he probably did some in Florence and Venice. But he didn’t save them, didn’t give them to Bean to keep safe. Why not?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” said Armand. “Why didn’t he?”

“Because they weren’t worth saving?” Jean-Guy suggested, and was rewarded with a beam from Clara.

“Exactly. Exactly. But he saved these. He must’ve heard about this garden in his travels and decided to go there—”

“But why?” asked Beauvoir.

“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s so strange. Venice and Florence and Paris are beautiful, but conventional. Every artist goes there for inspiration. Peter wanted something different.”

“Well, he found it,” said Jean-Guy, looking at the paintings.

They were still
merde
. It was as though Peter had fallen into a pile of shit. Then painted it.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Clara. “But something in that garden changed Peter. Or began the change.”

“Like a ship,” said Gamache. “Changing course. It might take a while to get to port, but at least it was going in the right direction.”

Peter was no longer lost. He’d finally found his North Star, thought Gamache.

If so, why had he then flown to Toronto? Was it to deliver the paintings to Bean? But they could have been mailed, like the others.

Was it to visit his old professor? Was he looking for approval, for a mentor? Or maybe it was simpler, more human. More Peter.

Maybe he was running away again, frightened by what he’d seen in the garden. Unwilling to go further down that path. Maybe he went to Toronto to hide.

And once again the Samarra story came to mind. There was no hiding. Not from fate. Peter’s destiny would find him.

Toronto, then, was another step closer to his destination.

As though they’d all had the same thought at the same time, they turned as one to look at the far wall. And the canvases tacked up there. Peter’s latest works. Perhaps his last works. Certainly his last signposts.

*   *   *

“Gimme a bacon butty,” said Constable Stuart. He said it as a Wild West sheriff might’ve ordered a shot of whiskey.

He took off his jacket and smoothed his wet hair.

“What happened to you, boy?” the waiter at the breakfast bar asked, as he wiped crumbs off the melamine surface.

“What do you know about that garden down the road?”

The circular motion of the damp rag slowed. To a stop. The elderly man considered the constable.

“It’s just a garden. Like any other.”

Stuart got up off the round stool. “I’ll let you think about that answer. When I get back I’d like a better one. And that butty. And a black coffee.”

In the men’s room Stuart used the toilet, then washed his hands and scrubbed his face, trying to get off the dirt and grass ground into his skin. Some of the dirt turned out to be bruises and he stopped scrubbing.

He gripped the porcelain sink and leaned toward the mirror, staring into his wide eyes. He knew that lawyers were taught never to ask a question unless they were prepared for the answer. They did not like surprises.

But cops were the opposite. They were almost always surprised. And rarely in a good way.

Robert Stuart wondered if he was prepared for the answer that awaited him.

*   *   *

Clara sat at the laptop Jean-Guy had brought over when they’d arrived.

Coffee had been made and poured, and now she brought the computer out of sleep mode.

There on the screen was a home page.

“What is it?” Clara asked. “It can’t be just a normal garden. Not with a name like that.”

“We didn’t have a chance to read much about it,” said Reine-Marie, bringing a chair over to sit beside Clara. “We wanted to get here as quickly as possible. All we know is that it’s not far from Dumfries.”

The men also brought over chairs and sipped coffee and read about a garden of cosmic speculation.

*   *   *

Constable Stuart swung his leg over the stool. A bacon butty and black coffee awaited him, but there was no sign of the elderly waiter. Or anyone else. But he did hear voices from behind the swinging door.

He took a huge bite of the grilled sandwich. It was warm and the smoked bacon crackled and tasted of his settled childhood. Reluctantly he put the butty down and looked around to see if anyone was watching. But he was alone in the diner. He walked swiftly and softly over to the door.

“What’re you going to tell ’im?” a woman’s voice, elderly and difficult, was asking.

“The truth.”

Stuart recognized the waiter.

“You ridiculous old man, you don’t know the truth any more than I do. There is no ‘truth.’”

“There is. Look, at least I’ve been there. You haven’t.”

“You went there to shoot hares. Nothing cosmic about it.”

“I didn’t say there was.” Now the old man sounded petulant.

“You’ve bored enough people with your drunken tale. Now get out there before he steals the condiments,” said the cook. “I know the type. Sneaky.”

Constable Stuart stood up straight, miffed, then sneaked quickly back to his breakfast.

*   *   *

Clara scrolled through image after image of the garden on the website. In one, several huge DNA double helixes rose from the ground as though expelled. In another part of the garden, bold sculptures representing various scientific theories mixed with tall trees to form a forest. Man-made, nature-made. Almost indistinguishable.

And then there were the checkerboard patterns that swooped up and down and in and out, bursting through from another dimension.

The photographs on the website had been taken in daylight, in sunshine. But still there was something disturbing about them. This was no temporary sculpture garden. This one felt old, enduring.

It felt like Stonehenge or the haunting hilltop shards of Bryn Cader Faner in Wales. Their meaning obscured, but their power unmistakable.

Why? Clara asked herself. Why had someone created this garden? And why had Peter gone there?

*   *   *

“Never met the owner,” said the elderly man, whose name turned out, unexpectedly, to be Alphonse.

“Should I call you Al?” Constable Stuart asked.

“No.”

“Did he create the garden?” Stuart asked.

“With his late wife, aye. Nice people from what I hear. Did it just for themselves, but when word got out, they decided to open it to the public.”

Stuart nodded. He knew that much. And he also knew it was open for only one day a year.

“Not a day,” Alphonse corrected. “Five hours. Once a year. The first Sunday in May.”

“Is that when you saw it?” Stuart asked, knowing the answer.

“Not exactly. I went there in the evening.”

“Why?”

This was clearly not the line of questioning Alphonse had expected. Should he say he’d gone there to poach hares? Not for food, they had plenty of that. But for fun. As he’d done since he was a boy. Shooting squirrels and rabbits. Moles and voles.

Should he tell this policeman about the last time he’d gone shooting in the garden? It had been dusk. He’d seen movement and had raised his rifle.

He had the hare in the crosshairs. It was sitting on one of the strange sculptures, a bone-white stairway that cascaded down a hill, cut into the grass from a great height.

It was a magnificent hare. Huge. Old. Gray. As Alphonse watched through the sight of his rifle, the hare stood up slowly on its hind legs. Tall. Alert. Sensing something.

Alphonse stared at him down the barrel of his gun. And pulled the trigger.

But nothing happened. The gun had jammed.

Swearing, Alphonse had broken open the chamber, replaced the shell and snapped it shut, expecting the hare to be long gone.

But it remained where it was. Like a sculpture. Like a part of the garden. An old gray stone. Both alive and inanimate.

Alphonse raised his gun, knowing he had the power to decide which one the hare would be.

*   *   *

“The first Sunday in May?” Reine-Marie read out loud from the website. “But Peter had come back to Canada by then. He must’ve done the painting sometime in the early winter.”

“That means he must’ve trespassed,” said Clara. She tried to make it sound nonchalant. A simple statement of fact. But it was much more than that. For her.

The man she knew followed rules. He followed recipes, for God’s sake. He read instructions, paid his bills on time and had his teeth cleaned twice a year. He did as he was told and taught. It was not in his nature to trespass.

But Peter had changed. He was no longer the man she knew.

She’d sent him away, hoping he’d change. But now faced with more evidence that he had, she found herself suddenly afraid. That he’d not only changed, but changed course. Away from her.

To hide her upset, she went back to studying the website. At first she just stared, hoping no one would notice her distress, but after a few moments the images sunk in. They were like nothing she’d ever seen before.

The creators of the garden wanted to explore the laws of nature, the mysteries of the universe, and what happened when the two intersected.

Collided.

Was it like a nuclear bomb, wiping out all life? Or was it like the double helix. Creating life?

There were no answers in the garden, only questions. Speculation.

The Peter Clara knew was about certainties. But he’d gone halfway around the world to a place where questions were planted. And grew. Where uncertainty flourished.

And Clara began to feel a small seed of relief. It was the sort of place she would love to visit. The old Peter would have scoffed. He might have accompanied her, but grudgingly, and with snide asides.

But this Peter had gone to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on his own.

Perhaps, perhaps, he was changing course, but not away from her. He was moving closer. If not physically, then in every other way.

“Huh,” Reine-Marie grunted, reading. “It’s a garden but not in the conventional sense. It’s a mix of physics and nature,” she said, looking up from the screen. “A sort of crossroads.”

Peter had placed his easel at that crossroads, and created.

Clara longed to speak to him. To find out what he found. To hear how he felt. He’d finally turned the corner. Moved toward her. And then fallen off the face of the earth.

*   *   *

“It’s become quite a draw,” said Alphonse. “People come from all over to see it. Some call it mystical.”

He said it with a snort, but Constable Stuart was unconvinced. He’d heard what the cook had said. The warning. Not to tell his drunken tale again.

“What happened to you in the garden, Alphonse?”

*   *   *

Clara went back to Peter’s paintings. Not the one with the checkerboard snake, but the other two.

She didn’t know for sure, but she suspected they’d also been painted in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The palette was the same, the urgency the same.

Like the first one, these were explosions of color. Clashing, almost frantic. Unlikely, unattractive combinations of color. Peter seemed to have painted them with abandon, desperate to grab hold of something fleeting, to capture it.

“It looks as though his brain exploded onto the page,” said Jean-Guy, standing beside Gamache.

What had Peter seen, Clara wondered, in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation? What had he felt?

*   *   *

Alphonse looked behind him, toward the swinging door into the kitchen, then leaning his elbows on the counter, he lowered his voice.

“This is to go no further, understand?”

Constable Stuart lied, and nodded.

“It was sometime last fall. I went there in the early evening to shoot rabbits.”

And out came the story.

He paused after describing the first, failed attempt to kill the hare.

“I’d done it many times before, mind. Since I was a boy.”

“Had you been to the garden before?” Stuart asked.

Alphonse nodded. “Killed lots of rabbits there. But never seen one quite like this.”

“How was it different?”

Alphonse studied the constable. He no longer seemed like a waiter in a roadside diner. He was inches from Constable Stuart’s face, and he looked ancient. But not frail. He looked like a seaman who’d turned his face into the wind all his life. Navigating. Searching.

Until he’d found what he sought. Dry land.

“Shall I tell you?” he asked.

And Constable Stuart wondered, yet again, if he really wanted the answer.

He nodded.

“I watched as he stood on his hind legs, this hare. Straight up. Huge. Gray. He didn’t move. Even when I raised my rifle again. He just stood there. I could see his chest. I could see him breathing. I could see his heart beating. And then I noticed something behind him.”

“A movement? The owner?”

“No. Not a man. But another hare. Almost as big. Just standing there too. I’d been so taken with the one I hadn’t noticed the others.”

“Others?”

“Must’ve been twenty. All standing on their hind legs. Straight upright. In a perfect circle. Not moving.”

Constable Stuart felt himself grow very quiet. Very still. The old man’s eyes were on him, like searchlights.

“The wife says I was drunk, and I’d had a few. But not more than usual. She says I was seeing double. Triple. She says I was seeing things.”

He dropped his eyes and his head and spoke into the hacked and stained old counter.

“And she was right. I saw something.”

“What?”

*   *   *

“What’s that?” Clara asked, leaning closer to the vile colors.

“What?” asked Reine-Marie, getting to within inches of the painting.

“There, by that zigzag.”