The Long Way Home Read online

  “Were you planning to do a drawing?” Gamache asked.

  “No. I just feel safe, holding them.”

  She brushed the metal pencil holder with her finger, like a rosary. And held on to her sketch pad like a bible.

  A wave battered the window and they pulled back. But the Plexiglas held. They sat in silence then. The sort of strained silence mariners for centuries would recognize, as they rode out a storm.

  Gamache looked at Clara, in profile, as she watched the waves batter the shore. Leaping onto the rocks. Wearing them down. Wearing them smooth.

  Her eyes were both calm and concentrated. Taking in every detail. Of the physical and the metaphysical world.

  “It was particularly cruel, wasn’t it?” she said, still staring at the shore. “Using art to kill.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” he said.

  Now it was Clara’s turn to look at his face in profile. She believed him.

  “I mean, to use something you love against you,” she said.

  “I knew what you meant,” he said.

  The Loup de Mer lurched and shuddered, and both were tossed forward, just managing to stop themselves from falling off the bench completely.

  “Coward,” said Clara.

  “Pardon?”

  “Norman. He’s a coward. He didn’t have to see it. Didn’t have to face what he’d done. He could just smear the asbestos in, mail it off, and get on with his own life. Cowardly.”

  “Most murder is,” said Gamache. “It’s done by weak people, or strong people in a moment of weakness. But it’s almost never a courageous thing to do.”

  “Almost never?”

  Gamache remained silent.

  She brought a cough lozenge out of her pocket and put it on the bench between them.

  “Is there anyone you’d kill, if you didn’t have to see it?” she asked. “If you could just press down on this”—she pointed to the cough drop—“and they’d die. Would you?”

  Gamache stared at the small white square.

  “Would you?” he asked, looking up again.

  “Oh, all sorts of people, every day. Myrna this morning, when she took too long in the bathtub—”

  “You have a bathtub?”

  “It’s a metaphor,” Clara said, and hurried on, leaving a slightly perplexed Gamache to ponder bathtubs. “Ruth. Art critics. Olivier when he gives me too small a croissant. Ruth. Gallery owners who pay more attention to another artist.”

  “Ruth.”

  “Her too,” said Clara.

  “Would you have been tempted to press the lozenge on Peter?”

  “Kill him? There were times I wanted him to be gone,” she said. “Not just away from Three Pines, but gone completely. So that I could stop thinking about him. Stop hoping, and maybe even stop hating him. Or loving him. If he was gone, I could. Maybe.”

  “You didn’t really want him dead,” said Gamache. “You wanted the pain to stop.”

  She looked down at the pastille on the bench.

  “There’ve been times I’ve wished him dead. I’ve wanted it, and dreaded it. It would be a terrible end to our life together. But it would at least be an end.”

  She looked around at the deck, slick with water from the river. At the metal hull of the ship. At the heaving waves and the desolate shore beyond.

  So different from the solid, gentle village. From their home. And their studios and their garden, with the two chairs, and the rings, intertwined.

  She’d fought to think of it as “her” home now. To call it “my” home, in conversation. But it wasn’t. It was their home. Infused with them.

  She missed him so much she thought her insides would cave in.

  And she had to know. How he felt.

  She was pretty sure she already had the answer. His silence said it all. Surely his absence should be enough. But it wasn’t. She needed to hear it from his own mouth.

  Had he stopped loving her? Had he left her, and Three Pines, and made a home somewhere else?

  The fucker wasn’t going to get off that easy. He had to face her.

  Dear, beloved Peter. They had to face each other. And tell each other the truth. And then, she could go home.

  Gamache got up and walked carefully to the window. He stood looking out for a long while, gripping the frames for support against the lunges and heaves of the ship.

  “Can you join me?”

  “I’m not sure I can,” she said, and timed her jump between waves.

  He held her steady, his large hand on her back, practically pinning her to the window.

  “See that cove?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those are the Graves.”

  She braced herself and looked across to a bay that should have been sheltered, but was in fact a churning mess of eddies, of whirlpools. It was a different movement altogether from the relentless waves. They came straight at them. But the movement in the cove was as though some creature was writhing and swirling just below the surface.

  “Rocks under the water,” Gamache explained, though she hadn’t asked. “They create that effect. Any vessel caught in them hasn’t a chance.”

  Clara felt her skin grow cold, from the inside out. Felt it crawl. Felt it try to crawl away. From the killing eddies, from the bleak shore.

  “Is that what sank the Empress of Ireland?” she asked.

  Clara had read about it in school and knew they must be close to where it happened.

  “No, that was another phenomenon. The fog around here is apparently like no other. The two ships got lost in it.”

  He didn’t need to finish. They both knew what happened next.

  In 1914 the passenger liner Empress of Ireland went down, rammed by another ship. In the dark. In the fog. In these waters. In fifteen minutes. With a loss of more than a thousand lives. Men, women and children.

  Clara looked into the roiling waters. The river beneath them teemed with life, and with death. Those lost beneath the waves. Souls not saved.

  “My grandmother raised me on tales of voyageurs condemned forever to paddle their canoe through the skies,” said Gamache. “They’d swoop down and pick up naughty children and bring them here.”

  “To the Graves?” she asked.

  “No. Further along the coast. To the Île aux demons.”

  “Demon Island,” said Clara. “This place is just one big fun park.”

  Gamache smiled. “I didn’t believe her, of course. Until I came here myself.”

  He looked across, at the shoreline. Barren. Without a sign of life.

  But he knew that wasn’t true. Lots of things lived here. Unseen.

  “I’d love to draw it,” she said. “If this ever calms.”

  “I envy you your art,” he said. “It must be therapeutic.”

  They lurched back to the bench.

  “You think I need therapy?”

  “I think everyone on this boat probably does.”

  She laughed. “The Voyage of the Demented.”

  Clara watched as Gamache reached into the innermost pocket of his coat. And brought out The Balm in Gilead.

  “I found this by my father’s bedside,” he said, looking down at it. “When I was nine years old. The night my parents died. I was inconsolable. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always did when I was frightened. I went into their bedroom. And I crawled into bed. And I waited for the nightmare to be over. To wake up, and there they’d be. On either side of me. Protecting me. But of course, there was no sleep and there was no waking.”

  He paused, to gather himself. Wave after wave pounded the windows in front of them, as though the river was throwing itself against it on purpose. Trying to get in. Trying to get at them. Trying, perhaps, to shelter from its own storm.

  “They’d been killed in a car accident. But not just an accident though, I learned later. When I first joined the Sûreté I looked up their file. I don’t know why.”

  “You needed to know,” said Clara. “It’s natural.”


  “A lot of things are natural, but not good. Like asbestos. This was like asbestos. It burrowed into me. I wish now I hadn’t looked. My grandmother hadn’t told me that my parents had been killed by a drunk driver. He survived, of course.”

  Clara looked at Gamache. Over the years she’d heard many things in his voice. Tenderness, wonder, rage, disappointment. Warning. But never bitterness. Until now.

  “Anyway,” he said, as though what he’d just told her was trivial, “I found this book on my father’s bedside table. The bookmark exactly where he left it. I took it and put it in a box with other things.”

  Treasures from childhood. Old keys to old homes he no longer lived in. Pennants from races won. A particularly fine chestnut. A piece of wood someone assured him was from Jean Béliveau’s hockey stick. Relics from the saints of childhood. Talismans.

  He’d been given the crucifix his father always wore, and had been wearing when he died. They’d wanted to bury him with it, but his grandmother had retrieved it, Armand didn’t know how and never asked.

  She’d given it to him when his first child, Daniel, had been born.

  He’d cherished it. And given it, in turn, to Daniel when Florence was born.

  But this book he’d kept. Just for himself. Safe in the box. Sealed in the box.

  Always there but never touched. The box was brought out and looked at sometimes, but never opened.

  Until he and Reine-Marie had moved to Three Pines.

  Until he’d stopped hunting killers. He’d done his duty by the souls of the dead and the souls of the damned. And he could, at long last, rest in peace in the little village in the valley.

  Only then was it safe to open the box.

  Or so he’d thought.

  Out of it came the scent of the book, and the scent of his father. Musky, masculine. Embedded in the pages of the book. Like a ghost.

  “There is a balm in Gilead,” he’d read that first morning, in their garden. “To make the wounded whole.”

  He’d been overwhelmed then. With relief. That maybe now he could put down the burden.

  Armand Gamache had long suspected that far from being one of the passengers on the bewitched canoe, he was one of the voyageurs. Forever paddling, never stopping. Taking the souls of the wicked away. Endlessly.

  “There’s power enough in Heaven,” he’d read. “To cure a sin-sick soul.”

  The words he needed to hear. It was as though his father had spoken to him. Taken him in his strong arms, and held him, and told him it would be all right.

  He could stop.

  Every morning after that he sat on the bench overlooking the village, and he had a small, private visit with his father.

  “But you never read beyond the bookmark,” said Clara. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to go beyond it. I don’t want to leave him behind.”

  He inhaled the maritime air. And closing his eyes, he tilted his head slightly back.

  Something else had come out of that sealed box. Something so unexpected it had taken Gamache a long time to even recognize it. And admit it.

  Gamache shifted his gaze to the pastille now wedged between two slats by the rolling of the ship.

  “I read the report on my parents’ death.” He spoke to the white lozenge. “And the boy who’d survived. He was a minor. His name had been expunged.”

  Clara couldn’t think of anything to say, so she said nothing.

  “He only had his learner’s permit. Driving illegally. Drunk. He was less than ten years older than me. He’d be in his mid-sixties now. Probably still alive.”

  Gamache put out his finger. It hovered over the cough drop until the slightest heave of the boat would have driven the pastille into his finger.

  But the boat didn’t heave. It didn’t ho. The waves seemed to calm for a moment.

  Gamache looked over the side. To the shore.

  They’d cleared the Graves and were plowing through the waters, ever closer to the end of the journey.

  He brought his hand back, to the book. And there it rested.

  “Patron.”

  Beauvoir wove across the unsteady floor like a cowboy just off a long trail ride. Myrna was behind him, lurching from bench to bench.

  Gamache put the book back in his jacket just as Beauvoir arrived.

  “The principal got back to us. He tried calling you, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “The phone’s in my pocket,” said Gamache. “I didn’t hear it.”

  “You asked where the asbestos in Massey’s studio was all found.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “They’ve sealed the room and are doing more tests but so far the asbestos seems concentrated in only one place.”

  “The storeroom?” asked Gamache. “Where Massey probably kept No Man’s paintings.”

  “No. It was at the back of the studio, on one of the paintings.”

  Clara drew her brows together in concentration and some confusion. “But there was only one painting back there.” She paled. “I didn’t see it, but you did,” she said to Myrna.

  Gamache felt his heart take a sudden leap, as though hit from behind. Reine-Marie had also seen that painting. Had stood close enough to appreciate it. To breathe it in.

  “And it was covered in asbestos?” he demanded.

  “Not covered. There were traces.” Beauvoir immediately understood the concern. “Only at the back. That science teacher was right. No Man put the asbestos where Massey would dislodge it when he handled the painting. But it wouldn’t be a danger to anyone else. It wasn’t in the air anymore. You couldn’t breathe it in.”

  Gamache’s heart calmed while his mind picked up speed.

  “That painting”—he turned to Clara—“it was the really good one, right?”

  “I didn’t actually see it, but Myrna did.”

  “It was wonderful,” Myrna confirmed. “Far better than the rest.”

  “But it was painted by Professor Massey,” said Clara. “Not No Man. So how could it be infected?”

  Gamache sat back on the bench, perplexed. It all fitted so well. Almost. If he just ignored that one question.

  If Massey had painted that picture, how could No Man have put asbestos on it?

  How had No Man gained access to it? And to asbestos, for that matter.

  “We’re missing something,” said Gamache. “We’ve gone wrong somewhere.”

  It was dinnertime, but the cooks didn’t dare put the ovens and stoves on, so they had sandwiches. And held on tight as the waves deepened and broadened. And as even the seasoned sailors’ faces grew strained.

  The friends took their minds off the pitching ship by going over and over what they did know. The facts.

  Peter’s trek across Europe. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The stone hare.

  Beauvoir reached in his pocket and felt the rabbit’s foot, still there.

  Peter’s trip to Toronto, and the art college. His meeting with Professor Massey.

  And then taking off for Charlevoix. Baie-Saint-Paul. In search, it seemed, of the muse. The tenth muse. The untamed muse, who could both heal and kill. And her champion. No Man.

  This the four of them went over and over. And over.

  But it still wasn’t clear what they’d missed, if anything.

  “Well,” said Clara. “We’ll have our answer tomorrow. The ship gets in to Tabaquen in the morning.”

  She held out her hand, and from it dangled a large key.

  “What’s that?” asked Beauvoir.

  “The key to our cabin,” said Myrna.

  “Is this a proposal?” he asked.

  “We haven’t been at sea that long,” said Myrna, and heard a grunt of laughter from Gamache. “It’s an invitation. Our sofa turns into a bed.”

  “But you’ll be using it,” Beauvoir pointed out.

  “No, we’ll be in the bedroom.”

  “Bedroom?”

  “I believe they call it a stateroom,” said Myrna. “Feel fre
e to use our shower, or the tub.”

  “For a metaphoric bath?” Gamache asked Clara, who reddened.

  Beauvoir’s eyes narrowed and he grabbed the key from her hand.

  “And help yourself to what’s in the fridge,” said Myrna as they left, zigzagging back across the observation deck.

  Beauvoir put the key in his pocket, next to the hare’s foot.

  They talked a little longer, going back over some of the details. But still couldn’t see their way clear.

  Gamache stood up. “I’m tired, and Clara’s right. We’ll arrive at the answer tomorrow.”

  The two men got to the Captain’s Suite, having stopped at the Admiral’s to check on Chartrand and get their toiletries and clean clothing.

  On opening the door to the Captain’s Suite, Beauvoir stopped.

  “What is it?” Gamache asked. “Can you fit in?”

  “The fleet could fit in,” said Beauvoir, and stepped aside so that the Chief could see.

  The kitchen. The polished dining table. The picture windows. The armchairs. The closed mahogany door leading, presumably, to the stateroom where Clara and Myrna slept.

  And then there was the sofa, opened to a large bed and made up with clean, crisp linens and pillows and a duvet.

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” whispered Beauvoir. “I’d like to marry this room.”

  “Not while I’m in it,” said Gamache, brushing past him.

  They took turns taking hot, sloshing baths, not trusting themselves to keep their footing in the shower. When Beauvoir emerged, wearing one of the fluffy bathrobes, he found Gamache gripping the edge of the dining table, examining one of Peter’s paintings.

  “The lips,” said Beauvoir, joining him. They frowned up at the men and the men frowned down at them.

  After traveling on this same waterway for two days, Beauvoir could appreciate even more what Peter had been trying to capture.

  Peter had seen and felt and tried to paint the ever-changing face and fortunes of the river.

  “We’re still at sea,” said Jean-Guy.

  “But perhaps a little closer to the shore.”

  “Yeah, well, the shore isn’t always such a great place to be,” said Beauvoir, stumbling over to the bed.

  “True, mon vieux,” said Gamache. “I’m going to take a bath.”