Still Life (18 page)

He turned the book over and looked at the back, with its ‘blurb’ and brief bio of the author, the famous McGill University doctor and geneticist, Dr Vincent Gilbert. Dr Gilbert glared back, strangely stern for a man who wrote about compassion. This particular book was about his work with Brother Albert Mailloux at ‘La Porte’, mostly with men and women with Down’s syndrome. It was really a meditation on what he’d learned watching these people.
What he’d learned about them and the nature of humanity and what he’d learned about himself. It was a remarkable study of arrogance and humility and, above all, forgiveness.

The walls of the shop were lined with bookcases, all ordered and labeled and filled with books, some new, some already read, some French, most English. Myrna had managed to make it feel more like the library in a cultured and comfortable country home than a store. She’d set up a couple of rocking chairs beside an open fire, with a couch facing it. Gamache sank into one of the rockers and reminded himself of the beauty of
Being.

‘Now there’s a good book,’ said Myrna, dropping into the chair opposite. She’d brought a pile of used books and some price stickers. ‘We haven’t actually met. I’m Myrna Landers. I saw you at the public meeting.’

Gamache got up and shook her hand, smiling. ‘I saw you too.’

Myrna laughed. ‘I’m hard to miss. The only black in Three Pines and not exactly a slip of a woman.’

‘You and I are well matched.’ Gamache smiled, rubbing his stomach.

She picked a book out of her pile. ‘Have you read this?’

She held a worn copy of Brother Albert’s book,
Loss.
Gamache shook his head and figured it probably wasn’t the cheeriest of reads. She turned it over in her huge hands and seemed to caress it.

‘His theory is that life is loss,’ said Myrna after a moment. ‘Loss of parents, loss of loves, loss of jobs. So we have to find a higher meaning in our lives than these things and people. Otherwise we’ll lose ourselves.’

‘What do you think of that?’

‘I think he’s right. I was a psychologist in Montreal before coming here a few years ago. Most of the people came through my door because of a crisis in their lives, and most of those crises boiled down to loss. Loss of a marriage or
an important relationship. Loss of security. A job, a home, a parent. Something drove them to ask for help and to look deep inside themselves. And the catalyst was often change and loss.’

‘Are they the same thing?’

‘For someone not well skilled at adapting they can be.’

‘Loss of control?’

‘That’s a huge one, of course. Most of us are great with change, as long as it was our idea. But change imposed from the outside can send some people into a tailspin. I think Brother Albert hit it on the head. Life is loss. But out of that, as the book stresses, comes freedom. If we can accept that nothing is permanent, and change is inevitable, if we can adapt, then we’re going to be happier people.’

‘What brought you here? Loss?’

‘That’s hardly fair, Chief Inspector, now you’ve got me. Yes. But not in a conventional way, since of course I always have to be special and different.’ Myrna put back her head and laughed at herself. ‘I lost sympathy with many of my patients. After twenty-five years of listening to their complaints I finally snapped. I woke up one morning bent out of shape about this client who was forty-three but acting sixteen. Every week he’d come with the same complaints, “Someone hurt me. Life is unfair. It’s not my fault.” For three years I’d been making suggestions, and for three years he’d done nothing. Then, listening to him this one day, I suddenly understood. He wasn’t changing because he didn’t want to. He had no intention of changing. For the next twenty years we would go through this charade. And I realised in that same instant that most of my clients were exactly like him.’

‘Surely, though, some were trying.’

‘Oh, yes. But they were the ones who got better quite quickly. Because they worked hard at it and genuinely wanted it. The others said they wanted to get better, but I
think, and this isn’t popular in psychology circles’ – here she leaned forward and whispered, conspiratorially – ‘I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.’

Myrna leaned back again in her chair and took a long breath.

‘Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead “still” lives, waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘Waiting for someone to save them. Expecting someone to save them or at least protect them from the big, bad world. The thing is no one else can save them because the problem is theirs and so is the solution. Only they can get out of it.’

‘“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”’

Myrna leaned forward, animated, ‘That’s it. The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices. But, but’ – now her eyes shone and she almost vibrated with excitement – ‘the most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. We’re the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted. I used to love talking about this with Timmer. Now there was a bright woman. I miss her.’ Myrna threw herself back in her chair. ‘The vast majority of troubled people don’t get it. The fault is here, but so is the solution. That’s the grace.’

‘But that would mean admitting there was something wrong with them. Don’t most unhappy people blame others? That’s what was so stark, so scary about that line from
Julius Caesar.
Who among us can admit that the problem is us?’

‘You got it.’

‘You mentioned Timmer Hadley. What was she like?’

‘I only met her near the end of her life. Never knew her when she was healthy. Timmer was a smart woman, in every way. Always well turned out, trim, elegant, even. I liked her.’

‘Did you sit with her?’

‘Yes. Sat with her the day before she died. Took a book to read but she wanted to look at old pictures so I got her album down and we flipped through it. There was a picture of Jane in it, from centuries ago. She must have been sixteen, maybe seventeen. She was with her parents. Timmer didn’t like the Neals. Cold, she said, social climbers.’

Myrna suddenly stopped, on the verge of saying something else.

‘Go on,’ prompted Gamache.

‘That’s it,’ said Myrna.

‘Now, I know that wasn’t all she said. Tell me.’

‘I can’t. She was doped up with morphine and I know she would never have said anything had she been in her right mind. Besides, it has nothing to do with Jane’s death. It happened over sixty years ago.’

‘The funny thing about murder is that the act is often committed decades before the actual action. Something happens, and it leads, inexorably, to death many years later. A bad seed is planted. It’s like those old horror films from the Hammer studios, of the monster, not running, never running, but walking without pause, without thought or mercy, toward its victim. Murder is often like that. It starts way far off.’

‘I still won’t tell you what Timmer said.’

Gamache knew he could persuade her. But why? If the lab tests exonerated the Crofts, then he’d come back, but otherwise she was right. He didn’t need to know, but, God knew, he really wanted to know.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I won’t press. But one day I might ask again and you’ll need to tell me.’

‘Fair enough. You ask again, and I’ll tell you.’

‘I have another question. What do you think of the boys who threw the manure?’

‘We all do stupid, cruel things as children. I remember I once took a neighbor’s dog and shut it in my house, then told the little girl her dog had been picked up by the dog catcher and destroyed. I still wake up at three in the morning seeing her face. I tracked her down about ten years ago to say I was sorry but she’d been killed in a car accident.’

‘You have to forgive yourself,’ said Gamache, holding up
Being.

‘You’re right, of course. But maybe I don’t want to. Maybe that’s something I don’t want to lose. My own private hell. Horrible, but mine. I’m quite thick at times. And places.’ She laughed, brushing invisible crumbs from her caftan.

‘Oscar Wilde said there’s no sin except stupidity.’

‘And what do you think of that?’ Myrna’s eyes lit up, happy to so obviously turn the spotlight on him. He thought a moment.

‘I’ve made mistakes that have allowed killers to take more lives. And each of those mistakes, upon looking back, was stupid. A conclusion jumped to, a false assumption held too firmly. Each wrong choice I make puts a community at risk.’

‘Have you learned from your mistakes?’

‘Yes, teacher, I believe I have.’

‘Then that’s all you can ask of yourself, Grasshopper. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll forgive myself if you forgive yourself.’

‘Deal,’ said Gamache, and wished it was that easy.

Ten minutes later Armand Gamache was sitting at the table by the Bistro window looking out on to Three Pines. He’d bought just one book from Myrna, and it wasn’t
Being
or
Loss.
She’d seemed slightly surprised when he put the book next to her till. He now sat and read, a Cinzano and
some pretzels in front of him, and every now and then he’d lower the book to stare through the window and through the village and into the woods beyond. The clouds were breaking up, leaving patches of early evening sunshine on the small mountains that surrounded Three Pines. Once or twice he flipped through the book, looking for illustrations. Finding what he was looking for he ear-marked them and continued reading. It was a very pleasant way to pass the time.

A manila file hitting the table brought him back to the Bistro.

‘The autopsy report.’ The coroner, Sharon Harris, sat down and ordered a drink.

He lowered his book and picked up the dossier. After a few minutes he had a question. ‘If the arrow hadn’t hit her heart, would it still have killed her?’

‘If it had come close to the heart, yes. But’, Dr Harris leaned forward and bent the autopsy report down so she could see it, upside down, ‘she was hit straight through the heart. You see? Whoever did it must have been a great shot. That wasn’t a fluke.’

‘And yet I suspect that’s exactly the conclusion we’re going to reach, that it was a fluke. A hunting accident. Not the first in Quebec history.’

‘You’re right, lots of hunting accidents every season with rifles. But arrows? You’d have to be a good hunter to get her through the heart and good hunters don’t often make mistakes like that. Not archers. They aren’t the usual yahoos.’

‘What are you saying, doctor?’

‘I’m saying if the death of Miss Neal was an accident the killer had very bad Karma. Of all the accidental hunting deaths I’ve investigated as medical examiner none has involved a good bow hunter.’

‘You mean if a good hunter did this it was on purpose?’

‘I’m saying a good bow hunter did this and good bow hunters don’t make mistakes. You connected the dots.’ She smiled warmly then nodded to the people at the next table. Gamache remembered she lived in the area.

‘You have a home at Cleghorn Halt, don’t you? Is it close by?’

‘About twenty minutes from here toward the Abbey. I know Three Pines quite well from the Tours Des Arts. Peter and Clara Morrow live here, right? Just over there?’ She pointed through the window across the green to their redbrick home.

‘That’s right. Do you know them?’

‘Just their art. He’s a member of the Royal Academy of Canada, quite a distinguished artist. Does the most amazing works, very stark. They look like abstracts, but they’re actually just the opposite, they’re hyper-realism. He takes a subject, say that glass of Cinzano,’ she picked it up, ‘and he gets really close.’ She leaned in until her eyelashes were licking the moisture on the outside of his glass. ‘Then he takes a microscope device and gets even closer. And he paints that.’ She put his glass back on the table. ‘They’re absolutely dazzling. Takes him for ever, apparently, to do a single piece. Don’t know where he finds the patience.’

‘How about Clara Morrow?’

‘I have one of her works. I think she’s fabulous, but very different from him. Her art is quite feminist, a lot of female nudes and allusions to goddesses. She did the most wonderful series on Sophia’s Daughters.’

‘The Three Graces, Faith, Hope and Charity?’

‘Very impressive, Chief Inspector. I have one of that series. Hope.’

‘Do you know Ben Hadley?’

‘Of Hadley Mills? Not really. We’ve been at a few functions together. Arts Williamsburg has an annual garden
party, often on his mother’s property, and he’s always there. I guess it’s his property now.’

‘He never married?’

‘No. Late forties and still single. I wonder if he’ll marry now.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘It just seems often the case. No woman could come between mother and son, though I don’t think Ben Hadley had the hots for Mommy. Anytime he spoke of her it was of how she’d somehow put him down. Some of his stories were horrible, though he never seemed to notice. I always admired that.’

‘What does he do?’

‘Ben Hadley? I don’t know. I always had the impression he did nothing, sort of emasculated by Mom. Very sad.’

‘Tragic’ Gamache was remembering the tall, ambling, likeable professor type, slightly befuddled all the time. Sharon Harris picked up the book he’d been reading and read the back cover.

‘Good idea.’ She placed it back on the table, impressed. Seems she’d been lecturing Gamache on things he already knew. It probably wasn’t the first time. After she left Gamache went back to his book, flipping to the dog-eared page and staring at the illustration. It was possible. Just possible. He paid for his drink, shrugged into his field coat and left the warmth of the room to head into the cold and damp and approaching dark.

Clara stared at the box in front of her and willed it to speak. Something had told her to start work on a big wooden box. So she had. And now she sat in her studio and stared, trying to remember why building a big box had seemed such a good idea. More than that. Why had it seemed an artistic idea? In fact, what the hell was the idea anyway?