The Brutal Telling Read online

  He wiped his hands on a dish towel and walked closer to the three easels. He noticed the other guests did the same thing, drawn to the paintings. Around them the candles flickered and threw more light than Gamache had expected, though it was possible Clara’s paintings produced their own light.

  “I have others, of course, but these’ll be the centerpieces of the exhibition at the Galerie Fortin.”

  But no one was really listening. Instead they were staring at the easels. Some at one, some at another. Gamache stood back for a moment, taking in the scene.

  Three portraits, three elderly women, stared back at him.

  One was clearly Ruth. The one that had first caught Denis Fortin’s eye. The one that had led him to his extraordinary offer of a solo show. The one that had the art world, from Montreal to Toronto, to New York and London, buzzing. About the new talent, the treasure, found buried in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

  And there it was, in front of them.

  Clara Morrow had painted Ruth as the elderly, forgotten Virgin Mary. Angry, demented, the Ruth in the portrait was full of despair, of bitterness. Of a life left behind, of opportunities squandered, of loss and betrayals real and imagined and created and caused. She clutched at a rough blue shawl with emaciated hands. The shawl had slipped off one bony shoulder and the skin was sagging, like something nailed up and empty.

  And yet the portrait was radiant, filling the room from one tiny point of light. In her eyes. Embittered, mad Ruth stared into the distance, at something very far off, approaching. More imagined than real.

  Hope.

  Clara had captured the moment despair turned to hope. The moment life began. She’d somehow captured Grace.

  It took Gamache’s breath away and he could feel a burning in his eyes. He blinked and turned from it, as though from something so brilliant it blinded. He saw everyone else in the room also staring, their faces soft in the candlelight.

  The next portrait was clearly Peter’s mother. Gamache had met her, and once met, never forgotten. Clara had painted her staring straight at the viewer. Not into the distance, like Ruth, but at something very close. Too close. Her white hair in a loose bun, her face a web of soft lines, as though a window had just shattered but not yet fallen. She was white and pink and healthy and lovely. She had a quiet, gentle smile that reached her tender blue eyes. Gamache could almost smell the talcum powder and cinnamon. And yet the portrait made him deeply uneasy. And then he saw it. The subtle turn of her hand, outward. The way her fingers seemed to reach beyond the canvas. At him. He had the impression this gentle, lovely elderly woman was going to touch him. And if she did, he’d know sorrow like never before. He’d know that empty place where nothing existed, not even pain.

  She was repulsive. And yet he couldn’t help being drawn to her, like a person afraid of heights drawn to the edge.

  And the third elderly woman he couldn’t place. He’d never seen her before and he wondered if she was Clara’s mother. There was something vaguely familiar about her.

  He looked at it closely. Clara painted people’s souls, and he wanted to know what this soul held.

  She looked happy. Smiling over her shoulder at something of great interest. Something she cared about deeply. She too had a shawl, this of old, rough, deep red wool. She seemed someone who was used to riches but suddenly poor. And yet it didn’t seem to matter to her.

  Interesting, thought Gamache. She was heading in one direction but looking in the other. Behind her. From her he had an overwhelming feeling of yearning. He realized all he wanted to do was draw an armchair up to that portrait, pour a cup of coffee and stare at it for the rest of the evening. For the rest of his life. It was seductive. And dangerous.

  With an effort he pulled his eyes away and found Clara standing in the darkness, watching her friends as they looked at her creations.

  Peter was also watching. With a look of unmarred pride.

  “Bon Dieu,” said Gabri. “C’est extraordinaire.”

  “Félicitations, Clara,” said Olivier. “My God, they’re brilliant. Do you have more?”

  “Do you mean, have I done you?” she asked with a laugh. “Non, mon beau. Only Ruth and Peter’s mother.”

  “Who’s this one?” Lacoste pointed to the painting Gamache had been staring at.

  Clara smiled. “I’m not telling. You have to guess.”

  “Is it me?” asked Gabri.

  “Yes, Gabri, it’s you,” said Clara.

  “Really?” Too late he saw her smiling.

  The funny thing was, thought Gamache, it almost could have been Gabri. He looked again at the portrait in the soft candlelight. Not physically, but emotionally. There was happiness there. But there was also something else. Something that didn’t quite fit with Gabri.

  “So which one’s me?” asked Ruth, limping closer to the paintings.

  “You old drunk,” said Gabri. “It’s this one.”

  Ruth peered at her exact double. “I don’t see it. Looks more like you.”

  “Hag,” muttered Gabri.

  “Fag,” she mumbled back.

  “Clara’s painted you as the Virgin Mary,” Olivier explained.

  Ruth leaned closer and shook her head.

  “Virgin?” Gabri whispered to Myrna. “Obviously the mind fucks don’t count.”

  “Speaking of which,” Ruth looked over at Beauvoir, “Peter, do you have a piece of paper? I feel a poem coming on. Now, do you think it’s too much to put the words ‘asshole’ and ‘shithead’ in the same sentence?”

  Beauvoir winced.

  “Just close your eyes and think of England,” Ruth advised Beauvoir, who had actually been thinking of her English.

  Gamache walked over to Peter, who continued to stare at his wife’s works.

  “How are you?”

  “You mean, do I want to take a razor to those and slash them to bits, then burn them?”

  “Something like that.”

  It was a conversation they’d had before, as it became clear that Peter might soon have to cede his place as the best artist in the family, in the village, in the province, to his wife. Peter had struggled with it, not always successfully.

  “I couldn’t hold her back even if I tried,” said Peter. “And I don’t want to try.”

  “There’s a difference between holding back and actively supporting.”

  “These are so good even I can’t deny it anymore,” admitted Peter. “She amazes me.”

  Both men looked over at the plump little woman looking anxiously at her friends, apparently unaware of the masterpieces she’d created.

  “Are you working on something?” Gamache nodded toward the closed door to Peter’s studio.

  “Always am. It’s a log.”

  “A log?” It was hard to make that sound brilliant. Peter Morrow was one of the most successful artists in the country and he’d gotten there by taking mundane, everyday objects and painting them in excruciating detail. So that they were no longer even recognizable as the object they were. He zoomed in close, then magnified a section, and painted that.

  His works looked abstract. It gave Peter huge satisfaction to know they weren’t. They were reality in the extreme. So real no one recognized them. And now it was the log’s turn. He’d picked it up off the pile beside their fireplace and it was waiting for him in his studio.

  The desserts were served, coffee and cognac poured; people wandered about, Gabri played the piano, Gamache kept being drawn to the paintings. Particularly the one of the unknown woman. Looking back. Clara joined him.

  “My God, Clara, they’re the best works of art ever produced by anyone, anywhere.”

  “Do you mean it?” she asked in mock earnestness.

  He smiled. “They are brilliant, you know. You have nothing to be afraid of.”

  “If that was true I’d have no art.”

  Gamache nodded toward the painting he’d been staring at. “Who is she?”

  “Oh, just someone I know.”

&n
bsp; Gamache waited, but Clara was uncharacteristically closed, and he decided it really didn’t matter. She wandered off and Gamache continued to stare. And as he did so the portrait changed. Or perhaps, he thought, it was a trick of the uncertain light. But the more he stared the more he got the sense Clara had put something else in the painting. Where Ruth’s was of an embittered woman finding hope, this portrait also held the unexpected.

  A happy woman seeing in the near and middle distance things that pleased and comforted her. But her eyes seemed to just be focusing on, registering, something else. Something far off. But heading her way.

  Gamache sipped his cognac and watched. And gradually it came to him what she was just beginning to feel.

  Fear.

  NINE

  The three Sûreté officers said their good-byes and walked across the village green. It was eleven o’clock and pitch-black. Lacoste and Gamache paused to stare at the night sky. Beauvoir, a few paces ahead as always, eventually realized he was alone and stopped as well. Reluctantly he looked up and was quite surprised to see so many stars. Ruth’s parting words came back to him.

  “ ‘Jean Guy’ and ‘bite me’ actually rhyme, don’t they?”

  He was in trouble.

  Just then a light went on above Myrna’s bookstore, in her loft. They could see her moving about, making herself tea, putting cookies on a plate. Then the light went out. “We just saw her pour a drink and put cookies on a plate,” said Beauvoir.

  The others wondered why he’d just told them the obvious.

  “It’s dark. To do anything inside you need light,” said Beauvoir.

  Gamache thought about this string of obvious statements, but it was Lacoste who got there first.

  “The bistro, last night. Wouldn’t the murderer need to put on the lights? And if he did, wouldn’t someone have seen?”

  Gamache smiled. They were right. A light at the bistro must have been noticed.

  He looked around to see which houses were the most likely to have seen anything. But the homes fanned out from the bistro like wings. None would have a perfect view, except the place directly opposite. He turned to look. The three majestic pines on the village green were there. They’d have seen a man take another man’s life. But there was something else directly opposite the bistro. Opposite and above.

  The old Hadley house. It was a distance away, but at night, with a light on in the bistro, it was just possible the new owners could have witnessed a murder.

  “There’s another possibility,” said Lacoste. “That the murderer didn’t put the lights on. He’d know he could be seen.”

  “He’d use a flashlight, you mean?” asked Beauvoir, imagining the murderer in there the night before, waiting for his victim, turning a flashlight on to make his way around.

  Lacoste shook her head. “That could also be seen from outside. He wouldn’t want to risk even that, I think.”

  “So he’d leave the lights off,” said Gamache, knowing where this was leading. “Because he wouldn’t need lights. He’d know his way around in the dark.”

  The next morning dawned bright and fresh. There was some warmth in the sun again and Gamache soon took off his sweater as he walked around the village green before breakfast. A few children, up before parents and grandparents, did some last-minute frog hunting in the pond. They ignored him and he was happy to watch them from a distance then continue his solitary and peaceful stroll. He waved at Myrna, cresting the hill on her own solitary walk.

  This was the last day of summer vacation, and while it had been decades since he’d gone to school, he still felt the tug. The mix of sadness at the end of summer, and excitement to see his chums again. The new clothes, bought after a summer’s growth. The new pencils, sharpened over and over, and the smell of the shavings. And the new notebooks. Always strangely thrilling. Unmarred. No mistakes yet. All they held was promise and potential.

  A new murder investigation felt much the same. Had they marred their books yet? Made any mistakes?

  As he slowly circled the village green, his hands clasped behind his back and his gaze far off, he thought about that. After a few leisurely circuits he went inside to breakfast.

  Beauvoir and Lacoste were already down, with frothy café au lait in front of them. They stood up as he entered the room, and he motioned them down. The aroma of maple-cured back bacon and eggs and coffee came from the kitchen. He’d barely sat down when Gabri swept out of the kitchen with plates of eggs Benedict, fruit and muffins.

  “Olivier’s just left for the bistro. He’s not sure if he’ll open today,” said the large man, who looked and sounded a great deal like Julia Child that morning. “I told him he should, but we’ll see. I pointed out he’d lose money if he didn’t. That usually does the trick. Muffin?”

  “S’il vous plaît,” said Isabelle Lacoste, taking one. They looked like nuclear explosions. Isabelle Lacoste missed her children and her husband. But it amazed her how this small village seemed able to heal even that hole. Of course, if you stuff in enough muffins even the largest hole is healed, for a while. She was willing to try.

  Gabri brought Gamache his café au lait and when he left Beauvoir leaned forward.

  “What’s the plan for today, Chief?”

  “We need background checks. I want to know all about Olivier, and I want to know who might have a grudge against him.”

  “D’accord,” said Lacoste.

  “And the Parras. Make inquiries, here and in the Czech Republic.”

  “Will do,” said Beauvoir. “And you?”

  “I have an appointment with an old friend.”

  Armand Gamache climbed the hill leading out of Three Pines. He carried his tweed jacket over his arm and kicked a chestnut ahead of him. The air smelled of apples, sweet and warm on the trees. Everything was ripe, lush, but in a few weeks there’d be a killing frost. And it would all be gone.

  As he walked the old Hadley house grew larger and larger. He steeled himself against it. Prepared for the waves of sorrow that rolled from it, flowing over and into anyone foolish enough to get close.

  But either his defenses were better than he’d expected, or something had changed.

  Gamache stopped in a spot of sunshine and faced the house. It was a rambling Victorian trophy home, turreted, shingles like scales, wide swooping verandas and black wrought-iron rails. Its fresh paint gleamed in the sun and the front door was a cheery glossy red. Not like blood, but like Christmas. And cherries. And crisp autumn apples. The path had been cleared of brambles and solid flagstones laid. He noticed the hedges had been clipped and the trees trimmed, the deadwood removed. Roar Parra’s work.

  And Gamache realized, to his surprise, that he was standing outside the old Hadley house with a smile. And was actually looking forward to going inside.

  The door was opened by a woman in her mid-seventies.

  “Oui?”

  Her hair was steel gray and nicely cut. She wore almost no makeup, just a little around the eyes, which looked at him now with curiosity, then recognition. She smiled and opened the door wider.

  Gamache offered her his identification. “I’m sorry to bother you, madame, but my name is Armand Gamache. I’m with the Sûreté du Québec.”

  “I recognize you, monsieur. Please, come in. I’m Carole Gilbert.”

  Her manner was friendly and gracious as she showed him into the vestibule. He’d been there before. Many times. But it was almost unrecognizable. Like a skeleton that had been given new muscles and sinew and skin. The structure was there, but all else had changed.

  “You know the place?” she asked, watching him.

  “I knew it,” he said, swinging his eyes to hers. She met his look steadily, but without challenge. As a chatelaine would, confident in her place and without need to prove it. She was friendly and warm, and very, very observant, Gamache guessed. What had Peter said? She’d been a nurse once? A very good one, he presumed. The best ones were observant. Nothing got past them.

  “It’s
changed a great deal,” he said and she nodded, drawing him farther into the house. He wiped his feet on the area rug protecting the gleaming wooden floor and followed her. The vestibule opened into a large hall with crisp new black and white tiles on the floor. A sweeping staircase faced them and archways led through to various rooms. When he’d last been here it had been a ruin, fallen into disrepair. It had seemed as though the house, disgusted, had turned on itself. Pieces were thrown off, wallpaper hung loose, floorboards heaved, ceilings warped. But now a huge cheerful bouquet sat on a polished table in the center of the hall, filling it with fragrance. The walls were painted a sophisticated tawny color, between beige and gray. It was bright and warm and elegant. Like the woman in front of him.

  “We’re still working on the house,” she said, leading him through the archway to their right, down a couple of steps and into the large living room. “I say ‘we’ but it’s really my son and daughter-in-law. And the workers, of course.”

  She said it with a small self-deprecating laugh. “I was foolish enough to ask if I could do anything the other day and they gave me a hammer and told me to put up some drywall. I hit a water pipe and an electrical cord.”

  Her laugh was so unguarded and infectious Gamache found himself laughing too.

  “Now I make tea. They call me the tea lady. Tea?”

  “Merci, madame, that would be very nice.”

  “I’ll tell Marc and Dominique you’re here. It’s about that poor man in the bistro, I presume?”

  “It is.”

  She seemed sympathetic, but not concerned. As though it had nothing to do with her. And Gamache found himself hoping it didn’t.

  As he waited he looked around the room and drifted toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, where sun streamed in. The room was comfortably furnished with sofas and chairs that looked inviting. They were upholstered in expensive fabrics giving them a modern feel. A couple of Eames chairs framed the fireplace. It was an easy marriage of contemporary and old world. Whoever had decorated this room had an eye for it.

  The windows were flanked by tailored silk curtains that touched the hardwood floor. Gamache suspected the curtains were almost never closed. Why shut out that view?