“That bad?”
“Oh, well, you know. It’s only torture.”
“Have you finished all the paintings?”
“They’re all done, at least. They’re crap, of course, but at least they’re finished. Denis Fortin is coming down himself to discuss how they’ll be hung. I have a specific order in mind. And if he disagrees I have a plan. I’ll cry.”
Gamache laughed. “That’s how I got to be Chief Inspector.”
“I told you so,” Ruth hissed at Rosa.
“Your art is brilliant, Clara. You know that,” said Gamache, leading her away from the crowd.
“How’d you know? You’ve only seen one piece. Maybe the others suck. I wonder if I made a mistake going with the paint by numbers.”
Gamache made a face.
“Would you like to see them?” Clara asked.
“Love to.”
“Great. How about after dinner? That gives you about an hour to practice saying, ‘My God, Clara, they’re the best works of art ever produced by anyone, anywhere.’ ”
“Sucking up?” smiled Gamache. “That’s how I made Inspector.”
“You’re a Renaissance Man.”
“I see you’re good at it too.”
“Merci. Speaking of your job, do you have any idea who that dead man is?” She’d lowered her voice. “You told Ruth you didn’t, but is that true?”
“You think I’d lie?” he asked. But why not, he thought. Everyone else does. “You mean, how close are we to solving the crime?”
Clara nodded.
“Hard to say. We have some leads, some ideas. It makes it harder to know why the man was killed not knowing who he was.”
“Suppose you never find out?”
Gamache looked down at Clara. Was there something in her voice? An imperfectly hidden desire that they never find out who the dead man was?
“It makes our job harder,” he conceded, “but not impossible.”
His voice, while relaxed, became momentarily stern. He wanted her to know they’d solve this case, one way or another. “Were you at the bistro last night?”
“No. We’d gone to the fair with Myrna. Had a disgusting dinner of fries, burgers and cotton candy. Went on a few rides, watched the local talent show, then came back here. I think Myrna might’ve gone in, but we were tired.”
“We know the dead man wasn’t a villager. He seems to have been a stranger. Have you seen any strangers around?”
“People come through backpacking or bicycling,” said Clara, sipping her red wine and thinking. “But most of them are younger. I understand this was quite an old man.”
Gamache didn’t tell her what the coroner had said that afternoon.
“Roar Parra told Agent Lacoste he’d seen someone lurking in the woods this summer. Does that sound familiar?” He watched her closely.
“Lurking? Isn’t that a bit melodramatic? No, I haven’t seen anyone and neither has Peter. He’d have told me. And we spend a lot of time outside in the garden. If there was someone there we’d have seen him.”
She waved toward their backyard, in darkness now, but Gamache knew it was large and sloped gently toward the Rivière Bella Bella.
“Mr. Parra didn’t see him there,” said Gamache. “He saw him there.”
He pointed to the old Hadley house, on the hill above them. The two of them took their drinks and walked out the door to the front veranda. Gamache was wearing his gray flannels, shirt, tie and jacket. Clara had a sweater, and needed it. In early September the nights grew longer and cooler. All around the village lights shone in homes, and even in the house on the hill.
The two looked at the house in silence for a few moments.
“I hear it’s sold,” said Gamache, finally.
Clara nodded. They could hear the murmur of conversation from the living room, and light spilled out so that Gamache could see Clara’s face in profile.
“Few months ago,” she said. “What are we now? Labor Day? I’d say they bought it back in July and have been doing renovations ever since. Young couple. Or at least, my age, which seems young to me.”
Clara laughed.
It was hard for Gamache to see the old Hadley house as just another place in Three Pines. For one thing, it never seemed to belong to the village. It seemed the accusation, the voyeur on the hill, that looked down on them. Judged them. Preyed on them. And sometimes took one of the villagers, and killed them.
Horrible things had happened in that place.
Earlier in the year he and his wife Reine-Marie had come down and helped the villagers repaint and repair the place. In the belief that everything deserved a second chance. Even houses. And the hopes someone would buy it.
And now someone had.
“I know they hired Roar to work on the grounds,” said Clara. “Clean up the gardens. He’s even built a barn and started reopening the trails. There must have been fifty kilometers of bridle paths in those woods in Timmer Hadley’s time. Grown over, of course. Lots of work for Roar to do.”
“He said he saw the stranger in the woods while he worked. Said he’d felt himself being watched for a while but only caught sight of someone once. He’d tried to run after him but the guy disappeared.”
Gamache’s gaze shifted from the old Hadley house down to Three Pines. Kids were playing touch football on the village green, eking out every last moment of their summer vacation. Snippets of voices drifted to them from villagers sitting on other porches, enjoying the early evening. The main topic of conversation, though, wouldn’t be the ripening tomatoes, the cooler nights, or getting in the winter wood.
Into the gentle village something rotten had crawled. Words like “murder,” “blood,” “body,” floated in the night air, as did something else. The soft scent of rosewater and sandalwood from the large, quiet man beside Clara.
Back inside Isabelle Lacoste was pouring herself another watered-down Scotch from the drinks tray on the piano. She looked around the room. A bookcase covered an entire wall, crammed with books, broken only by a window and the door to the veranda through which she could see the Chief and Clara.
Across the living room Myrna was chatting with Olivier and Gabri while Peter worked in the kitchen and Ruth drank in front of the fireplace. Lacoste had been in the Morrow home before, but only to conduct interviews. Never as a guest.
It was as comfortable as she’d imagined. She saw herself going back to her husband in Montreal and convincing him they could sell their home, take the kids out of school, chuck their jobs and move here. Find a cottage just off the village green and get jobs at the bistro or Myrna’s bookshop.
She subsided into an armchair and watched as Beauvoir came in from the kitchen, a pâté-smeared piece of bread in one hand and a beer in the other, and started toward the sofa. He halted suddenly, as though repelled, changed course, and went outside.
Ruth rose and limped to the drinks tray, a malevolent sneer on her face. Scotch replenished she returned to the sofa, like a sea monster slipping beneath the surface once again, still waiting for a victim.
“Any idea when we can reopen the bistro?” Gabri asked as he, Olivier and Myrna joined Agent Lacoste.
“Gabri,” said Olivier, annoyed.
“What? I’m just asking.”
“We’ve done what we need to,” she told Olivier. “You can open up whenever you’d like.”
“You can’t stay closed long, you know,” said Myrna. “We’d all starve to death.”
Peter put his head in and announced, “Dinner!”
“Though perhaps not immediately,” said Myrna, as they headed for the kitchen.
Ruth hauled herself out of the sofa and went to the veranda door.
“Are you deaf?” she shouted at Gamache, Beauvoir and Clara. “Dinner’s getting cold. Get inside.”
Beauvoir felt his rectum spasm as he hurried past her. Clara followed Beauvoir to the dinner table, but Gamache lingered.