The Long Way Home Page 16

  It was just after 3 a.m. and he’d gotten up to check his emails. Henri had lifted his head, but even the dog was too tired to take this seriously.

  Gamache had connected to the dial-up, wincing as the beeping and screaming filled the quiet night. Finally the messages downloaded.

  Russian brides.

  Lottery winnings.

  Some emails from a prince in Nigeria, but nothing from Scotland.

  It was 8 a.m. there. He’d hoped Constable Stuart might have an early shift. He also hoped Constable Stuart would care enough about the message to act on it.

  This was, truth be told, the third time that night Gamache had gotten up to check his emails. The first two without real hope, but this time there’d been a chance.

  He returned to bed and fell back into a restless sleep.

  An hour later he got up again. As he crept down the stairs he saw a rectangle of light coming from the study. He didn’t think he’d left a lamp on and smiled as he stood in the door frame.

  “Anything?”

  “Tabarnac!” Beauvoir started. “You scared the shit out of me. Sir.”

  “I hope not.” Gamache went in and looked over Jean-Guy’s shoulder. “Porn?”

  “Not unless waiting ages for the damned dial-up to connect turns you on.”

  “I remember when—” Gamache started and was rewarded with a surly look from Jean-Guy.

  Finally the emails started downloading.

  “Rien,” said Beauvoir, pushing away from the desk. “Nothing.”

  The two men walked into the living room.

  “You think that constable will recognize something from the paintings?” Beauvoir asked, sitting on the arm of the sofa. Gamache dropped into an armchair, crossed his legs and adjusted his dressing gown.

  “Frankly, I’m hoping he doesn’t just delete my messages.”

  “You really think those paintings are landscapes?” Beauvoir seemed less than convinced.

  “I think it’s a possibility.”

  Maybe, thought Gamache, Peter’s paintings really were markers, recording where he was. His inuksuit.

  “If those’re landscapes, Scotland must be a pretty weird place.”

  Gamache laughed. “I didn’t say he was good at it.”

  “No kidding.”

  “It might be like the Impressionists. They painted nature, but it was like they painted with their feelings.”

  “Then he couldn’t have liked Scotland much.” Beauvoir slid off the arm of the sofa and landed on the seat. “But if he was so interested in experimenting with landscapes, couldn’t he have done it in Paris or Venice? Why Scotland?”

  “And why Dumfries?” said Gamache. He hauled himself up. “Back to bed.”

  But at that moment there was a ping.

  They looked at each other. An email had arrived.

  * * *

  Reine-Marie felt the bed beside her. It was cool. She sat up and looked out the window. The sun wasn’t yet up. But Armand was.

  Putting on her dressing gown, she went downstairs. This time Henri followed, his toenails clicking on the wood floors.

  “Armand?”

  The living room was in darkness but a light was on in the study.

  “In here,” came the familiar voice.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  “Something,” said Jean-Guy, stepping out of the way so that his mother-in-law could get a good view. “I think.”

  Gamache offered her his chair.

  Reine-Marie sat down and looked at the screen.

  “It’s cosmic,” she read, then looked up at her husband. “I don’t understand. Do you think he means ‘comic’?”

  Armand and Jean-Guy were staring at the curt message with as much puzzlement as she felt.

  Constable Stuart had replied to Gamache’s email with two short words.

  It’s cosmic.

  * * *

  Robert Stuart had been in the pub the night before when his iPhone buzzed. He had it programmed so that it made different sounds depending on who was trying to reach him.

  This was clearly a work email, and normally it would never occur to him to check it, except that the man on the next barstool had been prattling on and on about how he’d been screwed on some tax bill.

  Stuart lifted his iPhone and gave his companion an apologetic shrug, which the man ignored, and continued to babble. Stuart took his iPhone and his pint and found a seat in a quiet corner.

  The message was from that man in Canada. The French guy with the weird accent. It couldn’t be important.

  Constable Stuart put the device down. The email had served its purpose in allowing him to escape. The actual message could wait until the morning.

  He sipped his beer and looked around, but his eyes kept falling back to the worn wooden table. Finally he picked up the device and opened the message. His eyes widened a bit in interest, then he opened the attachments.

  Scrolling through the pictures quickly, he shook his head and felt vaguely disappointed. He didn’t know much about art, but he knew shit when he saw it. He was glad Apple hadn’t yet figured out how to send smells.

  And yet. And yet. There was something about one of the images in particular. The Canadian man, a retired homicide investigator he said, hadn’t asked him to judge the art. Just to tell him if any of the places looked familiar.

  They did not. Truth be told, they didn’t look like “places.” Just splotches of bright paint.

  Except for one. One had bright paint, but it had something else.

  “Hey, Doug.” He waved a fellow over. “Look at this, will ya?”

  Doug took the device and appeared to be having trouble focusing.

  “What the fook is that?”

  “Does it look familiar?”

  “It looks like a migraine.”

  He tossed the device back to Stuart.

  “Look again, you great scrotum,” said Stuart. “I think I know this place.”

  “It’s a place?” Doug took it and looked again. “On earth? Poor ones.”

  “Not just on earth, down the road.”

  “You’re pissed,” Doug said, but continued to study the picture. Then his eyes widened and he looked at Stuart.

  “Speculation, lad.”

  “Aye,” said Stuart. “I thought so too. It’s cosmic.”

  * * *

  Next morning, Constable Stuart got up early and drove six miles north. The sun was just coming up and burning off the mist when he parked the car and got out.

  He changed into rubber boots and took his cell phone with him. Studying the photos Gamache had sent, Constable Stuart set off across the grass.

  Once away from the road, the land dipped and he found himself in a gully where the mist and fog pooled. He wore a sweater, but suddenly wished it was thicker, heavier. And he suddenly wished he wasn’t alone.

  Constable Stuart was not given to flights of imagination. Not more than any other Celt. But standing there, all color drained from the world, most color drained from him, the ghouls of his maternal grandmother’s tales came back. The warnings of his paternal grandfather came back.

  The ancient ghosts, the restless souls, the malevolent spirits came back. They took all the colors from the world, and in the drained mist they settled around him.

  “Pull yourself together,” he told himself. “Do this quickly, then get back in time for a coffee and a bacon butty.”

  The very idea of the bacon sandwich cheered him as he walked carefully through the fog, his feet testing the ground in front of him.

  He kept the image of the bacon butty in the forefront of his mind, like a talisman. A charm. A replacement for the crucifix his grandmother once wore.

  Pulling out his device, he paused to send the Québec fellow a message.

  “It’s cosmic” he typed, and got no further.

  His foot slipped on the grass, wet with dew. His arms pinwheeled, trying to move backward in time. To before the misstep. To before he arrived. To before he’d
decided to come to this God-forsaken place.

  His right leg slipped out from under him. Then his left. His hand opened and his iPhone flew away. It went sailing through the air, to be grabbed by the ghouls in the mist. For an instant, Constable Robert Stuart was suspended in midair. Flying.

  And then he fell, hitting the ground hard, knocking the wind out of him. Everything became a confusion of images and sensations as he skidded and tumbled and somersaulted down the slope, disoriented and grabbing, grappling for purchase. And finding none in the dew-slick grass.

  He hurtled and skidded downward. Where would it end? With a tree? A cliff?

  And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. It took him a moment to realize he was no longer moving. His head swam, his eyes unfocused, his body and brain in two separate places.

  Constable Stuart lay still. It was over.

  And then the panic. It wasn’t over.

  His eyes widened. His mouth widened.

  He couldn’t move and he couldn’t breathe. He was paralyzed. The blades of grass, so close to his eyes, were huge. He knew they were the last things he’d see. Trees of grass.

  He was about to die. His neck broken. Internal bleeding. He’d die in the gully. Where no one would find him for days. Weeks. And when they did he’d be unrecognizable. He’d seen enough bodies like that, and thought them grotesque. He was about to become grotesque.

  They’d hold a state funeral for him, of course. His coffin draped in the Scottish flag. They’d sing “Flower of Scotland,” his grieving widow, his friends and colleagues. Inconsolable, his—

  A whoop of air was sucked into his lungs. Expanding them. And then he exhaled. A long, painful moan.

  He breathed in. He breathed out. He closed his hands, clutching the grass. The soft, sweet grass. He could move. He could breathe.

  Stop the music. Put the funeral on hold. His life wasn’t over yet.

  Robert Stuart lay there for a long time, breathing in. Breathing out. Staring up as the ghostly mist burned off into blue sky.

  He sat up slowly. Then stood up on shaky new legs. And looked around.

  He’d never been here before. This place rumored to exist by its own rules. In its own reality, its own space and time. With the power of life and death. Or death then life. This place that first killed and then resurrected.

  Stuart stared at the world he’d tumbled into. A netherworld. An underworld.

  A few yards up the hill he spotted his iPhone. Grasping it, he began taking photographs. Trying to capture what he saw. Only in reviewing them later did he realize no photo could really do that.

  But those paintings had. Or at least they’d come close. Suddenly those paintings seemed a lot less odd.

  TWENTY

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Gamache, staring at the computer screen.

  After the cryptic first message from Constable Stuart, It’s cosmic, there’d been nothing. Until now.

  A strange photograph had just appeared.

  “I think it’s taken eighty years to download,” said Jean-Guy.

  It certainly looked like the picture had been snapped long ago. It was black and white and shades of gray, and seemed frayed at the edges.

  “What is it?” Reine-Marie asked.

  Stare as she might, Reine-Marie couldn’t quite make out what she was seeing. And she sure couldn’t see a connection between the information they’d asked for from the officer in Dumfries and this.

  Armand had sent pictures of Peter’s paintings to Scotland, suspecting they were indeed landscapes. In hopes the constable would recognize where they were painted.

  And in response, Constable Stuart had sent this.

  Had he misunderstood the request? Reine-Marie wondered.

  Then a finger, Jean-Guy’s finger, lightly touched the screen. There, along the contours of a small hill, snaking in and out of the mist, was a vague checkerboard pattern. It wove along the shape of the ground as though the fabric of the earth had torn, to reveal the black and white checks in the wound.

  Reine-Marie felt herself drawn into the image. It looked like a place not quite of this world, and not quite of the next.

  She looked away, into Armand’s eyes, and in them she saw a reflection of the otherworldly image on the screen. Then she looked over to Jean-Guy. Both men were staring, transfixed.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jean-Guy whispered.

  “One of Peter’s paintings has this checkerboard pattern,” said Gamache. “We thought he was just fooling around with an old art school exercise. But he wasn’t.”

  “He was painting what he saw,” said Reine-Marie.

  “But what is it?” Jean-Guy asked.

  “And where is it?” Gamache added. “May I?”

  Reine-Marie stood up and Armand sat in front of the computer. He tapped out an email to Constable Stuart, asking for more specifics.

  “May I?” Jean-Guy replaced Gamache in front of the computer and brought up a search engine. He put in key words. Dumfries. Checkerboard.

  But nothing useful appeared.

  “Try Dumfries, Scotland, checkerboard,” Gamache suggested.

  Still nothing.

  “May I?” Reine-Marie replaced Beauvoir and added one word to his search. Then hit enter.

  And up flashed the answer as though it had been waiting for the magic word.

  Cosmic.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” whispered Reine-Marie.

  * * *

  “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation?” Clara asked. “Are you kidding me?”

  But their faces told her this was probably not a joke.

  Her phone had rung ten minutes earlier and she’d bolted upright, answering on the first ring and looking at the clock. Not yet 6 a.m.

  It was Armand. They wanted to come over.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Now four people in dressing gowns, and a dog, stood in Clara’s kitchen. Jean-Guy placed the laptop on the pine table next to Peter’s early paintings.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Clara.

  She looked at Peter’s paintings. Then back to the laptop.

  Then back to the paintings. One in particular.

  “That’s not an exercise in perspective,” she said, staring at the black and white checkerboard pattern that snaked across Peter’s painting. “It’s this.”

  She turned back to the photograph, where a black and white pattern wound in and out of the mist. Like a cobra.

  “Whoever took this must’ve been almost exactly where Peter stood when he did the painting,” she said. She spoke as though to herself.

  Clara felt her heart race, pound. Not in excitement—this was no happy dance in her breast.

  There was something eerie about the photograph. It showed a world where anything could come out of the mist. Where anything might crawl out of that rent in the ground, formed by the black and white pattern.

  That feeling now transmitted itself to Peter’s painting. While the photo showed a gray world, Peter’s normal world, his actual painting was a wild confusion of color.

  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 th
is 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.