Still Life (Three Pines Mysteries)

by Louise Penny

  ‘How long have you loved her?’ Gamache asked quietly, not looking at Ben. Ben turned in his seat and stared at Gamache’s profile, flabbergasted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Clara. How long have you loved her?’

  Ben gave a long sigh, like a man waiting all his life to exhale. ‘We were all at art school together, though Peter and I were a couple of years ahead of Clara. He fell for her right away.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Took me a little longer. I think I’m more guarded than Peter. I find it harder to open up to people. But Clara’s different, isn’t she?’ Ben was watching her, smiling.

  Myrna lit the knot of Jane’s sage, and it started to smoke. As they walked around the green the procession of women stopped at the four directions, North, South, East and West. And at each stop Myrna handed the smoking knot to another woman, who softly wafted her hand in front of the sage, encouraging the sweet-smelling smoke to drift toward the homes.

  Myrna explained this was called ‘smudging’. It was cleansing away the bad spirits and making room for the good. Gamache breathed deeply and inhaled the fragrant mix of woodsmoke and sage. Both venerable, both comforting.

  ‘Is it obvious?’ Ben asked anxiously. ‘I mean, I used to dream about us getting together, but that was long ago. I could never, ever do anything like that. Not to Peter.’

  ‘No, it isn’t obvious.’ Ben and Gamache watched as the line of women walked up rue du Moulin and into the woods.

  It was cold and dark, dead leaves underfoot and overhead and swirling in the air in between. The women’s high spirits had been replaced by restlessness. A shadow crept over the jovial gathering. Even Myrna became subdued, her smiling, friendly face growing watchful.

  The forest creaked. And shivered. The poplar leaves trembled in the wind.

  Clara wanted to leave. This was not a happy place.

  Lucy began to growl, a long, low song of warning. Her hackles rose and she slowly sunk to the ground, her muscles bunched as though ready to spring.

  ‘We must form a circle,’ said Myrna, trying to sound casual while actually looking around the gathering trying to figure out who she could outrun if it came to that. Or would she be the straggler? Damn that grounding casserole.

  The circle, the tiniest, tightest known to math, was made, the women grasping hands. Myrna picked up the prayer stick from where Lucy had dropped it and thrust it into the ground, deep. Clara half expected the earth to howl.

  ‘I’ve brought these ribbons.’ Myrna opened her bag. Piled there were brightly colored ribbons, all intertwined. ‘We asked you all to bring something that was symbolic of Jane.’

  From her pocket Myrna brought out a tiny book. She rummaged around in the bag until she found a crimson ribbon. First she tied the book to the ribbon, then she went to the prayer stick and spoke as she tied the ribbon on to it.

  ‘This is for you, Jane, to thank you for sharing your love of the written word with me. Bless you.’

  Myrna stood at the prayer stick for a moment, huge head bowed, and then she stepped away, smiling for the first time since coming to this place.

  One by one the women took a ribbon, tied an item to it, tied the ribbon to the stick and spoke a few words. Some were audible, some weren’t. Some were prayers, some were simple explanations. Hanna tied an old 78 record to the prayer stick, Ruth a faded photograph. Sarah tied a spoon and Nellie, a shoe. Clara reached into her head and pulled out a duck barrette. She tied that to a bright yellow ribbon and the ribbon to the now festooned prayer stick.

  ‘This is for helping me see more clearly,’ said Clara. ‘I love you, Jane.’ She looked up and spotted the blind, hovering above them in the near distance. Blind. How strange, thought Clara, blind, but now I see.

  And Clara had an idea. An inspiration. ‘Thank you, Jane,’ she whispered, and felt the elderly arms around her for the first time in a week. Before moving off Clara pulled a banana out of her pocket, and tied it to the stick, for Lucy. But she had one more item to add. From her other pocket she drew a playing card. The Queen of Hearts. Tying it to the prayer stick Clara thought of Yolande, and the wonderful gift she’d been offered as a child, and either rejected or forgot. Clara stared at the pattern on the Queen of Hearts, memorising it. She knew the magic wasn’t in it staying the same, but in the changes.

  By the end the prayer stick was brilliant with waving and weaving colored ribbons, dangling their gifts. The wind caught the objects and sent them dancing into the air around the prayer stick, clinking and clanging into each other, like a symphony.

  The women looked around and saw their circle was no longer bound by fear, but was loose and open. And in the center, on the spot Jane Neal had last lived and died, a wealth of objects played, and sang the praises of a woman who was much loved.

  Clara allowed her gaze, free now from fear, to follow the ribbons as they were caught in the wind. Her eye caught something at the end of one of the ribbons. Then she realised it wasn’t attached to a ribbon at all, but to the tree behind.

  High up in one of the maple trees she saw an arrow.

  Gamache was just getting into his car to drive back to Montreal when Clara Morrow shot out of the woods, running toward him down du Moulin as though chased by demons. For a wild moment Gamache wondered whether the ritual had inadvertently conjured something better left alone. And, in a way, it had. The women, and their ritual, had conjured an arrow, something someone must sorely wish had been left undisturbed.

  Gamache immediately called Beauvoir in Montreal then followed Clara to the site. He hadn’t been there for almost a week and was impressed by how much it’d changed. The biggest changes were the trees. Where they’d been bright and bold with cheery color a week ago, now they were past their prime, with more leaves on the ground than in the branches. And that’s what had revealed the arrow. When he’d stood at this spot a week ago and looked up he would never, could never, have seen the arrow. It’d been hidden by layers of leaves. But no longer.

  The other change was the stick in the ground with ribbons dancing around it. He supposed it had something to do with the ritual. Either that or Beauvoir had very quickly become very weird without his supervision. Gamache walked over to the prayer stick, impressed by its gaiety. He caught at some of the items to look at them, including an old photograph of a young woman, plump and shortsighted, standing next to a rugged, handsome lumberjack. They were holding hands and smiling. Behind them a slender young woman stood, looking straight into the camera. A face taken by bitterness.

  ‘So? It’s an arrow.’ Matthew Croft looked from Beauvoir to Gamache. They were in the cell at the Williamsburg jail. ‘You’ve got five of them. What’s the big deal with this one?’

  ‘This one,’ said Gamache, ‘was found twenty-five feet up a maple tree two hours ago. Where Jane Neal was killed. Is this one of your father’s?’

  Croft examined the wood shaft, the four-bladed tip, and finally, critically, the feathering. By the time he pulled away he felt faint. He took a huge breath, and collapsed on to the side of the cot.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered on the exhale, having difficulty focusing now. ‘That was Dad’s. You’ll see for sure when you compare it to the others from the quiver, but I can tell you now. My father made his own feathering, it was a hobby of his. He wasn’t very creative, though, and they were all the same. Once he found what he liked and what worked he saw no need to change.’

  ‘Good thing,’ said Gamache.

  ‘Now,’ Beauvoir sat on the cot opposite him. ‘You have a lot to tell us.’

  ‘I need to think.’

  ‘There’s nothing to think about,’ said Gamache. ‘Your son shot this arrow, didn’t he?’ Croft’s mind was racing. He’d so steeled himself to stick to his story it was hard now to give it up, even in the face of this evidence. ‘And if he shot this arrow and it ended up in that tree,’ continued Gamache, ‘then he couldn’t have killed Jane Neal. He didn’t do it. And neither did you, this arrow proves someone else d
id it. We need the truth from you now.’

  And still Croft hesitated, afraid there was a trap, afraid to give up his story.

  ‘Now, Mr Croft,’ said Gamache in a voice that brooked no argument. Croft nodded. He was too stunned to feel relief, yet.

  ‘All right. This is what happened. Philippe and I had had an argument the night before. Some stupid thing, I can’t even remember what. The next morning when I got up Philippe was gone. I was afraid he’d run away, but about 7.15 he comes skidding into the yard on his bike. I decided not to go out and see him, but to wait for him to come to me. That was a mistake. I found out later he went directly to the basement with the bow and arrow then took a shower and changed his clothes. He never did come to see me, but stayed in his room all day. That wasn’t unusual. Then Suzanne started to act strange.’

  ‘When did you hear about Miss Neal?’ Beauvoir asked.

  ‘That night, a week ago. Roar Parra called, said it was a hunting accident. When I went to your meeting next day I was sad, but not like it was the end of the world. Suzanne, on the other hand, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t relax. But honestly I didn’t think much about it, women can be more sensitive than men, that’s all I figured it was.’

  ‘How’d you find out about Philippe?’

  ‘When we got home. Suzanne had been silent in the car, then once we got back she laid into me. She was furious, violent almost, because I’d asked you back to look at the bows and arrows. She told me then. She’d found out because she found Philippe’s clothes ready for the wash, blood stains on them. Then she’d gone into the basement and found the bloody arrow. She got the story from Philippe. He thought he’d killed Miss Neal, so he grabbed the bloody arrow and ran, thinking it was his. He didn’t look at it, neither did Suzanne. I guess they didn’t notice it wasn’t the same as the others. Suzanne burned the arrow.’

  ‘What did you do when you heard all this?’

  ‘I burned his clothes in the furnace but then you arrived so I told Suzanne to burn the bow, to destroy everything.’

  ‘But she didn’t.’

  ‘No. When I put the clothes in it smothered the flames, so she had to build them back up. Then she realised the bow would have to be chopped up. She didn’t think she could do it without making a noise so she came upstairs, to try to warn me. But you wouldn’t let her go back down. She was going to do it when we were out shooting arrows.’

  ‘How’d you know how Miss Neal’s body was lying?’

  ‘Philippe showed me. I went to his room, to confront him, to hear the story from him. He wouldn’t speak to me. Just as I was leaving his room he stood up and did that.’ Croft shuddered at the memory, baffled by where this child could have come from. ‘I didn’t know what he meant by it at the time but later, when you asked me to show you how she was lying, it clicked. So I just did what Philippe had done. What does that mean?’ Croft nodded to the arrow.

  ‘It means’, said Beauvoir, ‘someone else shot the arrow that killed Miss Neal.’

  ‘It means’, clarified Gamache, ‘that she was almost certainly murdered.’

  Beauvoir tracked down Superintendent Michel Brébeuf at the Montreal Botanical Gardens, where he volunteered one Sunday a month in the information booth. The people gathered around waiting to ask where the Japanese garden was were left to wonder just how wide a mandate these volunteers had.

  ‘I agree, it sounds like murder,’ said Brébeuf over the phone, nodding and smiling to the suddenly guarded tourists waiting in front of him. ‘I’m giving you the authority to treat this as a homicide.’

  ‘Actually, sir, I was hoping it’d be Chief Inspector Gamache’s investigation. He was right, Matthew Croft didn’t kill Miss Neal.’

  ‘Do you really think that’s what this was about, Inspector? Armand Gamache was suspended not because we disagreed over who did it, but because he refused to carry out a direct order. And that’s still true. Besides, as I recall, left to himself he would’ve arrested a fourteen-year-old boy.’

  A tourist reached out and took the hand of his teenage son, who was so shocked he actually allowed his father to hold it, for about a nanosecond.

  ‘Well, not arrested, exactly,’ said Beauvoir.

  ‘You’re not helping your case here, Inspector.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The Chief Inspector knows this case and these people. It’s been a week already, and we’ve let the trail go cold by being forced to treat this as a probable accident. He’s the logical person to lead this investigation. You know it, and I know it.’

  ‘And he knows it.’

  ‘At a guess I’d have to agree. Voyons, is this about punishment, or getting the best results?’

  ‘All right. And tell him he’s lucky to have an advocate like you. I wish I did.’

  ‘You do.’

  When Brébeuf hung up he turned his attention to the tourists at his booth and found he was alone.

  ‘Thank you, Jean Guy,’ Gamache took his warrant card, badge and gun. He’d thought about why it had stung so much to give them up. Years ago, when he’d first been issued with the card and gun, he’d felt accepted, a success in the eyes of society and, more important, in the eyes of his parents. Then, when he’d had to give up the card and gun he’d suddenly felt afraid. He’d been stripped of a weapon, but more than that, he’d been stripped of approval. The feeling had passed, it was no more than an echo, a ghost of the insecure young man he’d once been.

  On the way home after being suspended, Gamache had remembered an analogy someone told him years ago. Living our lives was like living in a long house. We entered as babies at one end, and we exited when our time came. And in between we moved through this one, great, long room. Everyone we ever met, and every thought and action lived in that room with us. Until we made peace with the less agreeable parts of our past they’d continue to heckle us from way down the long house. And sometimes the really loud, obnoxious ones told us what to do, directing our actions even years later.

  Gamache wasn’t sure he agreed with that analogy, until the moment he’d had to place his gun into Jean Guy’s palm. Then that insecure young man lived again, and whispered, You’re nothing without it. What will people think? Realising how inappropriate the reaction was didn’t banish the fearful young man from Gamache’s long house, it just meant he wasn’t in charge.

  ‘Where to now? Jane Neal’s home?’ Now they could officially treat the case as a murder investigation, Beauvoir was dying to get in, as was Gamache .

  ‘Soon, We have a stop to make first.’

  ‘Oui, allô?’ a cheery voice answered the phone followed by a baby’s shriek.

  ‘Solange?’ asked Clara.

  ‘Allô? Allô?’

  ‘Solange’ called Clara.

  ‘Bonjour? Hello?’ a wail filled Solange’s home and Clara’s head.

  ‘Solange,’ Clara shrieked.

  ‘C’est moi-même,’ cried Solange.

  ‘It’s Clara Morrow,’ yelled Clara.

  ‘No, I can’t tomorrow,’

  ‘Clara Morrow.’

  ‘Wednesday?’

  Oh, dear, God, thought Clara, thank you for sparing me children.

  ‘Clara!’ she wailed.

  ‘Clara? Clara who?’ asked Solange, in a perfectly normal voice, the spawn from Hell having been silenced, probably bv a breast.

  ‘Clara Morrow, Solange. We met in exercise class. Congratulations on the child,’ she tried to sound sincere.

  ‘Yes, I remember. How are you?’

  ‘Just fine. But I called with a question. I’m sorry to disturb you on your leave, but this has something to do with your notary practice.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. The office calls every day. What can I help you with?’

  ‘Did you know that Jane Neal had died?’

  ‘No, no, I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was an accident. In the woods.’

  ‘Oh, I did hear about that when I got back. I was visiting my parents in Montreal for Thanksgiving,
so I missed it. You mean, that was Jane Neal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Weren’t the police involved?’

  ‘Yes. They seem to think Norman Stickley, in Williamsburg, was her notary. But I thought she’d come to you.’

  ‘Could you come to my office tomorrow morning?’

  ‘What time’s good for you?’

  ‘Say eleven? Clara, could you invite the police? I think they’ll be interested.’

  It took Philippe Croft a few minutes to trust it wasn’t a trap before he admitted everything. His long pale fingers picked at a pill of fluff on his sweatpants as he told his story. He’d wanted to punish his father, so he’d taken the old bow and arrows and gone hunting. He’d fired just once. But that was enough. Instead of the stag he knew he’d killed, he found Jane Neal, spread-eagled. Dead. He could still see those eyes. They followed him.

  ‘You can let them go now,’ said Gamache, quietly. ‘They’re someone else’s nightmare.’

  Philippe had simply nodded and Gamache was reminded of Myrna, and the pain we choose to carry around. He wanted to take Philippe in his arms and tell him he wouldn’t be fourteen for ever. Just to hold on.

  But Gamache didn’t. He knew that while the intention was kind, the act would be seen as an assault. An insult. Instead he stuck out his large, steady hand to the boy. After a moment Philippe slipped his own pale hand in, as though he’d never shook hands with a man before, and squeezed.

  Gamache and Beauvoir arrived back in the village to find Agent Lacoste fending off Yolande. She’d been sent to Jane Neal’s cottage, warrant in hand. She’d managed to get Yolande out and to lock the door, and was now practicing her impression of a Palace Guard, immutable in the face of provocation.

  ‘I’ll sue your ass. I’ll get you fired, you ugly little tramp.’ Spying Beauvoir, Yolande turned on him. ‘How dare you kick me out of my own home?’

  ‘Did you show Ms Fontaine the warrant, Agent?’

  ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘Then you know’, Beauvoir turned to Yolande, ‘that this is now a homicide investigation. I take it you want to find out who killed your aunt?’