The Long Way Home (4 page)

The women talked not as mother and daughter, but as women who’d shared a life raft and were now, finally, on dry land.

“He’s going to his therapist,” said Annie. “And to his AA meetings. Never misses. I think he actually looks forward to it now but would never admit it. Dad?”

“He does his physio. We go for long walks. He can go farther every day. He’s even talking about taking up yoga.”

Annie laughed. She had a face, a body, made not for a Paris runway but for good meals and books by the fire and laughter. She was constructed from, and for, happiness. But it had taken Annie Gamache a long while to find it. To trust it.

And even now, in the still summer night, part of her feared it would be taken away. Again. By a bullet, a needle. A tiny painkilling pill. That caused so much pain.

She shifted her seat and shoved the thought aside. After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it.

Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she’d looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn’t joking.

He was warning her.

But it was a hard habit to break, especially since she now had so much to lose. And had almost lost it all. To a bullet. A needle. A tiny pill.

As her mother had almost lost it all.

They’d both had the phone call in the middle of the night.
Come quickly. Come now. Before it’s too late.

But it hadn’t been too late. Not quite.

And while her father and Jean-Guy might recover, Annie wasn’t sure she and her mother ever really would. From the ringing, the ringing in the night.

But for now they were safe. On the porch. Annie saw the rectangle of light through the sitting room window. Where her father and Jean-Guy sat. Also safe.

For now.

No, she warned herself. No. There is no threat.

She wondered when she’d actually believe it. And she wondered if her mother believed it.

“Can you see Dad on the village green doing the sun salutation every morning?”

Reine-Marie laughed. The funny thing was, she could see it. It wouldn’t be pretty, but she could imagine Armand doing it.

“Is he really okay?” Annie asked.

Reine-Marie turned in her seat to look at the porch light above the door. What had started as a gentle tapping of moth wings against the bulb had turned into near frantic beating as the moth rammed itself against the hot light on the cool night. It was getting on her nerves.

She turned back to Annie. She knew what her daughter was asking. Annie could see her father’s physical improvements—what concerned her now was what was unseen.

“He sees Myrna once a week,” said Reine-Marie. “That helps.”

“Myrna?” asked Annie. “Myrna?” She gestured toward the “financial district” of Three Pines, which was made up of the general store, the bakery, the bistro, and Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore.

Reine-Marie realized her daughter only knew Myrna from the shop. In fact, she only knew all the villagers from their lives here, not from their lives before. Annie had no idea that the large black woman who sold used books and helped them in the garden was Dr. Landers, a retired psychologist.

Reine-Marie now wondered how newcomers would view her and Armand. The middle-aged couple in the white clapboard house.

Would they be the slightly loopy villagers who made bouquets of weeds? Who sat on their porch with their day-old
La Presse
newspaper? Perhaps they’d only be known as Henri’s parents.

Would newcomers to Three Pines ever know that she’d once been a senior librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec?

Would it matter?

And Armand?

What life would a new villager think he’d left behind? A career in journalism perhaps, writing for the intellectual and almost indecipherable daily
Le Devoir.
Would they think he’d passed his days wearing a pilled cardigan and writing long op-ed pieces on politics?

The more astute might guess that he’d been a professor at the Université de Montréal. The kindly one who was passionate about history and geography and what happened when the two collided.

Would someone new to Three Pines ever suspect that the man tossing the ball to the shepherd, or sipping Scotch in the bistro, had once been the most celebrated cop in Québec? In Canada? Would they guess, could they guess, that the large man doing the sun salutation each morning had once hunted murderers for a living?

Reine-Marie hoped not.

She dared to think that that was behind them. Those lives now lived only in memory. They roamed the mountains that surrounded the village, but had no place here. Had no place now. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, had done his job. It was someone else’s turn.

But her heart tightened as Reine-Marie remembered the door to the sitting room closing. And clicking.

The moth still fluttered around the light, butting and bumping against the bulb. Was it warmth it wanted, Reine-Marie wondered, was it light the moth sought?

Does it hurt? Reine-Marie wondered. The singeing of the wings, the little legs, like threads, landing on the white-hot glass, then pushing away. Does it hurt that the light doesn’t give the moth what it so desperately desires?

She got up and turned the porch light off, and after a few moments the beating of the wings stopped and Reine-Marie returned to her peaceful seat.

It was quiet now, and dark. Except for the buttery light from the sitting room window. As the silence grew, Reine-Marie wondered if she’d done the moth a favor. Had she saved its life, but taken away its purpose?

And then the beating started again. Flitting, desperate. Tiny, delicate, insistent. The moth had moved down the porch. Now it was beating against the window of the room where Armand and Jean-Guy sat.

It had found its light. It would never give up. It couldn’t.

Reine-Marie got up, watched by her daughter, and turned the porch light back on. It was in the moth’s nature to do what it was doing. And Reine-Marie could not stop it, no matter how much she might want to.

*   *   *

“How’s Annie?” Gamache asked. “She looks happy.”

Armand smiled as he thought of his daughter, and remembered dancing with her on the village green at her wedding to Jean-Guy.

“Are you asking if she’s pregnant?”

“Of course not,” snapped the Chief. “How could you think such a thing?” He picked up the paperweight on the coffee table, put it down, then picked up a book and fiddled with it as though he’d never held one before. “That’s none of my business.” He hiked himself up in the chair. “Do you think I think only a pregnancy would make her happy? What sort of man do you think I am? What sort of father?” He glared at the younger man across from him.

Jean-Guy simply stared back, watching the uncharacteristic bluster.

“It’s all right to ask.”

“Is she?” asked Gamache, leaning forward.

“No. She had a glass of wine at dinner. Didn’t you notice? Some detective.”

“Not anymore, I’m not.” He caught Jean-Guy’s eyes and they both smiled. “I really wasn’t asking, you know,” said Gamache truthfully. “I just want her to be happy. And you too.”

“I am,
patron
.”

The two men looked at each other, searching for wounds only they could see. Searching for signs of healing only they would know were genuine.

“And you, sir? Are you happy?”

“I am.”

Beauvoir didn’t need to probe. Having spent his career listening to lies, he recognized the truth when he heard it.

“And how’s Isabelle doing?” asked Gamache.

“Acting Chief Inspector Lacoste?” asked Beauvoir with a smile. His protégée had taken over as head of homicide for the Sûreté, a job everyone had once assumed would be his on the Chief’s retirement. Though Jean-Guy knew it wasn’t accurate to describe what had happened as a retirement. That made it sound predictable. No one could have predicted the events that had caused the head of homicide to quit the Sûreté and buy a home in a village so small and obscure it didn’t appear on any map.

“Isabelle’s doing fine.”

“You mean Ruth Zardo ‘fine’?” asked Gamache.

“Pretty much. With a little work she’ll get there. She had you as a role model, sir.”

Ruth had called her latest slim volume of poetry
I’m FINE.
Only people who read it realized that FINE stood for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.

Isabelle Lacoste called Gamache at least once a week, and they met for lunch in Montréal a couple times a month. Always away from Sûreté headquarters. He insisted on that, so he wouldn’t undermine the new Chief Inspector’s authority.

Lacoste had questions only the former Chief could answer. Sometimes procedural issues, but often questions that were more complex and human. About uncertainties, about insecurities. About her fears.

Gamache listened and sometimes talked about his own experiences. Reassuring her that what she felt was natural, and normal, and healthy. He’d felt all those things almost every day of his career. Not that he was a fraud, but that he was afraid. When the phone rang, or there was a knock on the door, he worried there would be a life-and-death issue he could not resolve.

“I have a new trainee,
patron
,” Isabelle had told him over their lunch at Le Paris earlier in the week.

“
Ah, oui?
”

“A young agent just out of the academy. Adam Cohen. I think you know him.”

The Chief had smiled. “
Merci,
Isabelle.”

Young Monsieur Cohen had flunked out on his first try and had taken a job as a guard at a penitentiary. Gamache had met Cohen months ago, when almost everyone else was attacking the Chief. Professionally. Personally. And finally, physically. But Adam Cohen had stood beside him. Hadn’t run away, despite having every reason to. Including to save his own skin.

The Chief hadn’t forgotten. And when the crisis had passed, Gamache had approached the head of the Sûreté academy and asked that Cohen be given a rare second chance. And then he’d tutored the young man, guided him. Encouraged him. And had stood at the back of the hall, during graduation, and applauded him.

Gamache had asked Isabelle to take Cohen on. To, essentially, take him under her wing. He could not imagine a better mentor for the young man.

“Agent Cohen started this morning,” said Lacoste, taking a forkful of quinoa, feta, and pomegranate salad. “I called him into the office and told him that there were four statements that lead to wisdom. I said I was only going to recite them once, and he could do with them as he wished.”

Armand Gamache lowered his fork to his plate and listened.

“I don’t know. I was wrong. I’m sorry.” Lacoste recited them slowly, lifting a finger to count them off.

“I need help,” the Chief said, completing the statements. The ones he’d taught young Agent Lacoste many years ago. The ones he’d recited to all his new agents.

And now, sitting at home in Three Pines, he said, “I need your help, Jean-Guy.”

Beauvoir grew still, alert, and gave a curt nod.

“Clara came to see me this morning. She has a…” Gamache searched for the word. “Puzzle.”

Beauvoir leaned forward.

*   *   *

Clara and Myrna sat side by side in the large wooden Adirondack chairs in Clara’s back garden. The crickets and frogs were singing and every now and then the women heard rustles in the dark woods.

Below that sound, beyond that sound, the Rivière Bella Bella burbled its way from the mountains, past the village, and out the other side. Heading home, but in no big hurry.

“I’ve been patient,” said Myrna. “Now you need to tell me what’s wrong.”

Even in the dark, Myrna knew the expression on Clara’s face as her friend turned to her.

“Patient?” asked Clara. “It’s been an hour since the party broke up.”

“Okay, ‘patient’ might be the wrong word. I’ve been worried. And it’s not just since dinner. Why have you been sitting with Armand every morning? And what happened today between you? You practically ran away from him.”

“You noticed?”

“For God’s sake, Clara, the bench is on top of the hill out of Three Pines. You might as well have been sitting on a neon sign.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide.”

“Then you succeeded.” Myrna softened her voice. “Can you tell me?”

“Can you guess?”

Myrna turned her entire body until she was facing her companion.

Clara still had paint in her wild hair, not the speckles that come from painting a wall or ceiling. These were streaks of ochre and cadmium yellow. And a fingerprint of burnt sienna on her neck, like a bruise.

Clara Morrow painted portraits. And in the process, she often painted herself.

On their way into the garden Myrna had glanced into Clara’s studio and seen her latest work on the easel. A ghostly face was just appearing, or disappearing, into the canvas.

Myrna was astonished by her friend’s portraits. On the surface they were simple representations of the person. Nice. Recognizable. Conventional. But … but if she stood in front of the work long enough, if she let her own conceptions drift away, let her defenses down, let go of all judgment, then another portrait appeared.

Clara Morrow didn’t actually paint faces, she painted emotions, feelings, hidden, disguised, locked and guarded behind a pleasant façade.

The works took Myrna’s breath away. But this was the first time a portrait had actually frightened her.

“It’s Peter,” Myrna said as they sat in the cool night air.

She knew that both this conversation, and that eerie portrait, were about Peter Morrow. Clara’s husband.

Clara nodded. “He didn’t come home.”

*   *   *

“So?” said Jean-Guy. “What’s the problem? Clara and Peter are separated, aren’t they?”

“Yes, a year ago,” Gamache agreed. “Clara asked him to leave.”

“I remember. Then why would she expect him home?”