The Long Way Home Read online

  Beauvoir leaned away from the screen, as though breathing so close to it would infect him.

  “What was it doing in that tube?” he asked. “Where did it come from?”

  “And where was it going?” asked Gamache. “And what else was in that tube, and was no longer there?”

  They both knew the answer to that.

  Canvases. Art. Deadly art.

  * * *

  When they found Myrna and Clara on the deck of the Loup de Mer, the women weren’t alone. A young woman had joined them.

  “This is Julie Foucault.” Myrna did the introductions. “She’s a new teacher at the school in Blanc-Sablon.”

  “Un plaisir,” said Armand, shaking her hand.

  Jean-Guy nodded, impatient for this Julie to leave so they could tell Myrna and Clara what they’d found.

  “Your first job?” Gamache asked, and sat beside her. She looked no more than twenty, and had bright orange hair down to her shoulders, and ruddy red cheeks. And that newly minted expression. Of excitement and anxiety.

  “Yes. I could’ve flown, but I wanted to see the coast.”

  “Julie was telling us she’ll be teaching everything. You have to, in small schools,” said Clara. “But her specialty is science.”

  “I have a master’s,” she said. “And am working toward my PhD.”

  Beauvoir sat down.

  “Do you know anything about asbestos?” he asked without preamble.

  “I hope that’s not a pickup line,” she said, and even Gamache laughed. She might look young, she might even be young, but she knew how to take care of herself.

  Even Beauvoir smiled. “No. We’re looking into a few things, and asbestos has come up.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do know something about it,” she said. “Not a lot. I’m not a specialist, but it was taught at the university. Used as a cautionary tale of science, industry, and government.”

  “We’re not so much interested in the politics of asbestos,” said the Chief, “as the properties of the substance.”

  “Then yes, I can definitely tell you about that. Why?”

  “Some was found in a box,” said Gamache. “We’re trying to figure out why someone would have it, and how dangerous it might be.”

  “Well, that depends on the form it’s in. If it’s a hunk, then not so much. Asbestos only really becomes dangerous when it can float in the air. And be inhaled.”

  “This was like a powder,” said Beauvoir.

  They all watched the young teacher, waiting for the answer, but they didn’t have to wait long. There was no hesitation, no doubt.

  “That would be dangerous.”

  “How does asbestos kill?” asked Gamache. “If someone swallowed it, would it be bad?”

  “It wouldn’t be good. But with asbestos the real danger is inhaling it. Getting it into the lungs. It works its way into the tissue and causes asbestosis, or mesothelioma. Or lung cancer. Or both. Nasty, nasty stuff. And by the time it’s diagnosed, it’s too late.”

  “How long does it take to kill someone?” Clara asked.

  “Depends.” Now Julie had to pause to think. “One of the reasons it took so long for alarms to go off, besides the desire of the industry and government not to see it—and that was a travesty—”

  “Not the politics,” Gamache reminded her.

  “Sorry. The problem was that it does take a while for the effects to be noticed. The connection between asbestos workers and lung deaths took some time. A miner could be retired for years before showing symptoms.”

  “And what are the symptoms?” asked Myrna.

  “Coughing, of course. Shortness of breath.”

  “Sounds like a lot of things,” said Myrna.

  “And that was part of the problem too. Misdiagnosis. But finally the link was found. And asbestos was banned. But by then it was everywhere.”

  “So,” said Beauvoir, thinking his way through this, “you’d have to get pretty close to it, to inhale it?”

  “Right. Or it would have to be floating around in the air. Like in a mine. You say yours was a powder in a container?”

  “Right.”

  She shook her head. “That would get into the air pretty easily, I think.”

  “And would the person necessarily die, if he inhaled it?” Gamache asked, and saw the immediate look of concern on Julie’s face. She looked from Gamache to Beauvoir and back again.

  “Did one of you?”

  “No,” Gamache smiled reassuringly. “But if we had, then what? Would we die?”

  “You might. It’s one of those tricks of fate. Not all asbestos miners developed lung disease. Some people exposed only incidentally did.”

  “How much would you have to inhale?” asked Beauvoir.

  “Again, it depends. Sorry to be so vague, but my memory is that some miners inhaled it all their lives and were fine, other people inhaled it once and died. It just depended on the person, the fibers.”

  “But theoretically it could be very little,” said Beauvoir. “And it could be with only one exposure.”

  “Could be,” said Julie, “but really, that would have to be unbelievably unlucky. But it could happen.”

  “If asbestos was found in the insulation of an art gallery and was removed, could some of it get onto the canvases?” Gamache asked.

  “I’d expect the people removing it would’ve cleared the place. Asbestos could only be removed by people trained to do it. It wasn’t just ripped out.”

  “Suppose they hadn’t taken everything down?” asked Gamache.

  Julie studied the large man in front of her.

  “If you want clear answers, you’ll have to ask clear questions.”

  Gamache raised his brows slightly and smiled. “Yes, I can see how that would help. The container the asbestos was found in probably held a rolled-up painting. Or a blank canvas. One or the other. Could the asbestos have been on the canvas and fallen off?”

  Julie thought about that for a moment. “A canvas would actually be a pretty good vehicle for asbestos. It has a fine weave. Asbestos fibers could cling to it.”

  “And if it was painted? Would the asbestos stick to oil paint?” Clara asked.

  “Not as much. But if it was a blank canvas…”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m not an artist—”

  “I am,” said Clara.

  Julie turned to her. “If you got a rolled-up blank canvas, what would you do?”

  “I’d unroll and stretch it. Tack it to a wooden frame, so I could paint it.”

  Julie was nodding. “You’d handle it.”

  “Of course.”

  Clara’s eyes widened. “And that would dislodge the asbestos. Like dust. It would float in the air.”

  Julie was nodding. “And because you were handling it, you’d be close enough to breathe it in. But there’s another thing.”

  “The brush strokes,” said Clara, seeing where the young teacher was going.

  “Exactly. As you brush on the paint, you’d be brushing off the asbestos dust. It would be the perfect way to get it into the air.”

  “And again,” said Gamache, “the artist would be close enough to inhale.”

  “He’d be less than an arm’s length away,” Julie confirmed.

  They considered that for a moment.

  “But suppose the rolled-up canvas was already painted,” said Clara. “Could the asbestos be applied then?”

  “Not as effectively, as I said. It would slide right off. It needs something to stick onto.”

  “Like the back of the canvas,” said Myrna, and they looked at her. “If the front was painted, the back would still be just raw material, right? Something for the asbestos to”—Myrna turned to Julie—“in your words, ‘stick onto.’”

  Julie nodded. “It would work. When the painting was unrolled, the asbestos would get into the air.”

  “But it gets worse,” said Clara. “The painting wouldn’t just be unrolled. It would have to be
tacked onto a frame. I’ve done it lots of times. Bought a cheap old oil painting at a flea market that wasn’t framed. Just rolled up. You have to staple it to a wooden frame.”

  “And if the back was coated with asbestos dust?” asked Myrna.

  “It would get everywhere,” said Julie. “On the hands, the clothing. In the air.”

  “To be inhaled,” said Myrna.

  Julie was looking at them, her exuberance muted by a dawning suspicion.

  “How long would it take someone to get sick?” asked Myrna.

  “Depends on the exposure. Like I said, it might never happen,” said Julie, guarded now. “But mostly it took years, decades, for asbestos to become lethal.”

  She looked at their grim faces. “What’s all this about? You’re not planning to do it, are you?”

  “And if we were?” asked Gamache.

  “You’d be murderers.” She looked pale and Gamache hurried to reassure her.

  They weren’t planning murder. Just the opposite.

  “You’re trying to stop a murder?” she asked, incredulous. Looking from face to face and back to Gamache. “But if it’s asbestos, you’re probably too late. The person would’ve already been murdered. They just haven’t died yet.”

  She left then.

  Armand watched as she walked away, steadying herself in the increasing roll and pitch of the ship. She looked like a gull in trouble.

  And Gamache knew that while she’d helped them, they had not helped her.

  Julie wasn’t as cheery, not as bright as before she’d joined them. They’d tarnished her.

  Now the four friends walked around the deck, mulling the young teacher’s information. As they circumnavigated the ship, the Loup de Mer made its way up the coast. Every now and then they needed to steady themselves as the ship plowed up and through and down a wave. The wind was stronger now, and the waves higher, splashing over the sides and turning the deck slick.

  “Those tubes almost certainly contained paintings,” said Gamache. “No Man’s paintings.”

  “But why would there be asbestos on them?” asked Clara. “Who put it there?”

  “And why?” asked Myrna.

  They walked in silence, each trying to work it out.

  “Asbestos is deadly,” said Gamache. “There was no guarantee, but there was a pretty good chance that whoever handled his asbestos-infected paintings would inhale it and eventually die.”

  “Was he like those maniacs who sent anthrax through the mail?” asked Beauvoir. “Are we dealing with a serial killer?”

  “Do you think he sent those paintings to galleries all over Canada?” asked Clara.

  Myrna, Clara, Beauvoir, and Gamache walked, and thought, and remembered the only picture they had of Professor Norman. A self-portrait. Of a madman.

  A sin-sick soul, thought Gamache. Who smeared asbestos onto his own paintings. And shipped them off. Knowing whoever opened the container, unrolled the canvases, held them, admired them, was sealing their own fate.

  The asbestos would be dislodged, would float into the air and hang there, little crystals, tiny fibers. To be inhaled, to nest in the person’s lungs. And from there to burrow. And burrow. Digging deep tunnels.

  While outside, the lover of art would carry on with his or her life. Unaware they’d just inhaled the scent of Samarra. Their own death.

  The deck was too difficult now, and they’d retreated to the shelter of the lounge when Gamache’s phone rang.

  It was the principal of the art college.

  “I got worried after our conversation, Monsieur Gamache,” he said. “So I asked the health and safety person to check out some spots in the college for asbestos. She won’t have the definitive results for a few days, but it looks like we’re clear, with one exception. There’s a suspicious spot in Professor Massey’s studio.”

  “What does it mean?” Myrna asked.

  “I think it’s pretty clear what it means,” said Clara. They’d used the last of their change to get scalding hot chocolates out of the vending machine, and now they took a table by one of the water-slashed windows.

  The bow of the Loup de Mer was rising and falling, rising and falling. Every now and then it rose higher, higher, paused there, then crashed down. A gale was building, coming straight at them. And they were heading straight for it.

  They held on to their hot chocolates, but still some slopped over the sides. Clara spared a thought for Marcel Chartrand, downstairs, in the bowels.

  “It means we know who Norman sent his asbestos-infected paintings to,” said Clara.

  “Professor Massey,” said Beauvoir.

  “But why?” asked Myrna. “Massey got him fired. Why would he trust him with his works?”

  “He wasn’t trying to trust him, he was trying to kill him,” said Gamache.

  He turned, by habit, to Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

  This was familiar territory now, to both men. How often had they sat just like this, facing each other across arborite tables, at hacked wooden tables, at desks and in muddy fields, in cars, and planes, and trains. In the bright sunshine, and in winter blizzards.

  The two of them.

  Trying not to see their way clear, but to see their way into a dark heart. Trying to solve the first, the oldest, crime. Cain’s crime. Murder.

  Beauvoir thought about it. “But if No Man infected his paintings and sent them off to Massey, wasn’t there a chance Massey would sell them on? Find buyers?”

  That had been troubling Gamache too. Once out of No Man’s hands anything could happen to the canvases. He had no way of knowing if they’d kill Massey, or a student, or some poor anonymous art collector.

  Maybe No Man didn’t really care who else he killed, as long as Professor Massey was one of them. Or maybe …

  “Maybe they weren’t very good,” said Gamache. “Maybe he deliberately sent paintings he knew Massey wouldn’t show to anyone else.”

  “It still doesn’t make sense,” said Myrna. “Professor Massey hated Sébastien Norman. He got Norman the job, and then Norman took complete advantage of the situation to lecture on his own pet theory of the tenth muse. Then he held the show for the rejected artwork. Professor Norman did everything but burn down the college. Why would Massey help him?”

  “Would you?”

  The question came from Beauvoir, and it was directed at Gamache.

  “Clara and Myrna here both thought Professor Massey reminded them of you, patron. I’ve seen you do some pretty weird things for people everyone else had given up on. Including me. Do you think Massey might still try to help Norman?”

  Gamache considered that. “He might. Maybe he didn’t hate Norman,” Gamache said to Myrna, “but felt sorry for him. Maybe he even felt responsible. For putting both Norman and the school in that position.”

  Myrna looked at Armand. And Armand looked at Myrna.

  “Yes,” she said, remembering their private therapy sessions. “It’s possible.”

  “I think Massey was the agent that Luc Vachon was sending the canvases to,” said Gamache.

  “Asbestos-infected canvases,” said Beauvoir. “Massey might not have hated Norman, but Norman hated Massey. For getting him fired.”

  “How many embittered employees go into their workplaces with a gun?” said Myrna. “The paintings were Norman’s gun.”

  “But where did he get the asbestos? And where’re the paintings now?” asked Clara. “Where did Professor Massey put them? We didn’t see any on the walls.”

  “They might be in a storage room,” said Gamache. “Maybe that was the hot spot they found. I’ll call the principal back.”

  “Fortunately it looks like No Man’s plan didn’t work,” said Myrna, as Gamache placed the call.

  “What do you mean?” asked Beauvoir.

  “I keep forgetting that you didn’t see Professor Massey. A more healthy eighty-five-year-old would be hard to find. If those paintings began arriving decades ago, and the asbestos had done its job, he’d be either de
ad or dying.”

  “What was it Julie called it?” said Clara. “A twist of fate.”

  “Sometimes the magic works…” said Beauvoir. “But why would Massey suddenly go to Tabaquen now?”

  Gamache hung up, having left a message on the principal’s voice mail with both his and Beauvoir’s numbers.

  “Why would Peter go all the way to Tabaquen?” asked Clara.

  “To find the tenth muse,” Myrna reminded her. “To become a better painter. He didn’t know any of this stuff. All he knows is that he’s desperate and lost and Professor Norman was offering an easy way to get from his head to his heart. The quick fix. A muse for the modern man.”

  The ship shuddered as it hit a particularly massive wave. The river leapt up and beat against the windows.

  But while slowed for a moment, the Loup de Mer plowed ahead. Getting closer and closer to its destination. The Sorcerer. The source.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  They spent the afternoon apart. Each trying to just ride out the storm.

  Armand Gamache came upon Clara in the men’s cabin, the so-called Admiral’s Suite. She’d brought soup and bread down to Chartrand, who was still asleep on the narrow bunk. There wasn’t much soup left in the bowl, most of it having slopped out as Clara tried to carry it.

  The gale was upon them now. Battering the ship. Pushing it and pulling it, so that the people inside were tossed this way and that, without warning.

  “I was just coming to check on him myself. Is he okay?” Gamache whispered as he clung on to the door frame.

  “Yes. Just really seasick.”

  Clara put the bread on the bedside table, but held on to the soup. No use leaving the bowl, it would just end up on the floor. Or on Chartrand.

  She got up, but not before feeling Chartrand’s forehead. It felt like a cod and looked like underwear. An improvement. She rested her large hand on his chest. Just for a moment.

  They left him and fought their way back to the observation deck. The river was froth and foam. The deck was awash.

  Clara had chosen a bench next to the window and Gamache sat beside her, as they had each morning in Three Pines. Like strangers waiting for a bus.

  Clara had her sketchbook and pencil case on her lap, but kept them unopened.