‘When Kaye asked why her father and the other boys would have screamed “Fuck the Pope” as they ran to their deaths you said maybe it was because they knew that words could kill. Kaye dismissed it, but I think you were right. I know words can kill. I saw it on Christmas Eve. You might consider it melodramatic, Chief Inspector, but I saw CC murder her daughter with words.’
‘What happened to El?’ he asked again.
Beauvoir brought the car to a halt and sat for a moment. The heater was on and the car seats had warmed. On the stereo Beau Dommage was singing ‘La complainte du phoque en Alaska’. He’d necked to that at school dances. It was always the last song and always brought the girls to tears.
He didn’t want to leave. Not just because the car was so comfortable, filled with warm and sticky memories, but because of what awaited him. The meditation center sat bathed in sharp morning sun.
‘Bonjour, Inspecteur.’ Mother smiled, opening the door before he knocked. But the smile didn’t extend to her eyes. It barely left her lips, which were tight and white. He could sense her tension and felt himself relax. He had the advantage now and knew it.
‘May I come in?’ He was damned if he was going to ask, ‘Mother, may I?’ He was also damned if he was going to ask why everyone called her Mother, though he was dying to know.
‘I was under the impression this wasn’t your favorite place,’ she said, regaining some ground on him. Beauvoir didn’t know what it was with this woman. She was squat and unattractive. She wobbled instead of walked and her hair stuck out in all directions. And she wore sheets, or perhaps curtains, or maybe they were slipcovers. By all standards she was ludicrous. And yet there was something about her.
‘I came down with the flu when I was last here. I’m sorry if I behaved badly.’ Although it caught in his throat to apologize Gamache had pointed out that it actually gave him an advantage. And he’d noticed, over the years, that it was true. People felt a certain superiority if they thought they had something on you. But as soon as you apologized they had nothing. Pissed them off.
Now Beauvoir felt equal to Madame Mayer.
‘Namaste,’ she said, putting her hands together in prayer and bowing.
Damn her. He felt off balance again. He knew he was meant to ask, but didn’t. Taking his boots off he strode through to the large meditation room with its soothing aqua walls and warm green-carpeted floor.
‘I have some questions for you.’ He turned to watch Madame Mayer waddle toward him. ‘What did you think of CC de Poitiers?’
‘I’ve already told the Chief Inspector about that. In fact, you were here, though I suppose you might have been too ill to listen.’
She was exhausted. Her compassion was spent. She didn’t care any more. She knew she couldn’t keep this up much longer, and now she yearned for the end. She no longer woke in the middle of the night and worried. Now she simply didn’t go to sleep.
Mother was dead tired.
‘CC was delusional. Her entire philosophy was crap. She’d taken a bunch of teachings and mashed them together and come up with this poisonous idea that people shouldn’t show emotions. That’s ridiculous. We are emotion. That’s what makes us who we are. Her idea that truly evolved people feel no emotions is ridiculous. Yes, we want to be in balance, but that doesn’t mean not feeling or showing things. It means the opposite. It means,’ now Mother was getting worked up, too exhausted to contain herself any longer, ‘it means feeling things fully, passionately. It means embracing life. And then letting go.
‘She thought she was so great, coming here and lording it over us. Li Bien this, Be Calm that. All her tasteful white clothes and furnishings and bedding linens and stupid aura pillows and calming baby blankets and God knows what other crap. She was sick. Her emotions were denied and stunted and twisted and made into something grotesque. She claimed to be so balanced, so grounded. Well, she was so grounded it killed her. Karma.’
Beauvoir wondered whether karma was an Indian word for irony.
Mother radiated anger. It was how he liked his suspects. Out of control, liable to say and do anything.
‘And yet you and CC both called your places Be Calm. Doesn’t calm mean placid? Showing nothing?’
‘There’s a difference between flat and calm.’
‘I think you’re just playing word games. Like you did with that.’ He pointed to the wall where the quote was stenciled. Then he walked over to it.
‘Be calm, and know that I am God. You told Chief Inspector Gamache it came from Isaiah, but doesn’t it actually come from Psalms?’
He loved this part of the job. He could see her deflate in front of him, surprised she didn’t make a little squealing sound. Slowly he brought out his notebook.
‘Psalm 46 verse 10. Be still, and know that I am God. You lied and you intentionally put a misquote on your wall. Why? What does Be Calm really mean?’
They were both still then. Beauvoir could hear her breathing.
Then something happened. He saw what he’d just done. He’d broken an elderly woman. Something shifted and he saw before him a beaten old lady, with wild hair and a plump sagging body. Her face was very white and wrinkled and soft and her hands were veined and bony and trembling.
Her head was bowed.
He’d done this. He’d done it on purpose and he’d done it gleefully.
‘Eleanor and Mother stayed at the commune for six months,’ Em told Gamache, her hands suddenly restless, playing with the handle of her espresso cup. ‘Mother was getting deeper and deeper into it but El started to get agitated again. Eventually she left, came back to Canada, but not back home. We lost track of her for a while.’
‘When did you realize she was unstable?’ Gamache asked.
‘We’d always known that. Her mind would race. She couldn’t concentrate on any one thing, but hopped about from project to project, brilliant at them all. But, to be fair, if she found something she liked she’d become possessed by it. She’d bring all her talents, all her energies, to bear. And when she did that she was formidable.’
‘Like Li Bien?’ Gamache brought a cardboard box from his satchel.
‘What else have you got in there?’ Em leaned around the table to look at his leather satchel. ‘The Montreal Canadians?’
‘Hope not. They’re playing tonight.’ Em stared at his huge, careful hands as they peeled back the wrap, slowly revealing the object below. It stood on the table next to the wooden box, and for a golden moment Émilie Longpré was in her young body, staring at the Li Bien ball for the first time. It was luminous and somehow unreal, its beauty imprisoned beneath the layer of invisible glass. It was both lovely and horrible.
It was Eleanor Allaire.
Young Émilie Longpré had known then that they’d lose her. Had known then their luminous friend couldn’t survive in the real world. And now the Li Bien ball had returned to Three Pines, but without its creator.
‘May I hold it?’
Gamache placed it in her hands as he had the box and again she held it, but this time in hands closed tightly round it, as though hugging and protecting something precious.
He reached into his satchel for the last time and withdrew a long leather cord, stained with dirt and oils and blood. And dangling from it was an eagle’s head.
‘I need the whole truth, madame.’
Beauvoir was sitting next to Mother now, listening intently as he had when as a child his own mother had read stories of adventure and tragedy.
‘When CC first came here,’ Mother explained, ‘she showed an almost unnatural interest in us.’
Beauvoir knew instinctively that by ‘us’ she meant Émilie, Kaye and herself.
‘She’d drop in and seem to interrogate us. It wasn’t a normal sort of social call even for someone as maladroit as CC.’