by Louise Penny
‘I have a question for you.’ Clara waved it back and forth.
‘Give it to me.’ Yolande lunged, but Clara flicked it out of her reach.
‘Why did you cover up her drawings?’
‘So you found them,’ Yolande spat. ‘Filthy, insane things. Everyone thought she was so wonderful but her family knew she was nuts. My grandparents knew she was crazy since she was a teenager and doing those hideous drawings. They were ashamed of her. All her art looked retarded. My mother said she actually wanted to study art but my grandparents put an end to that. Told her the truth. Told her it wasn’t art. It was an embarrassment. They told her never to ever show anyone her scrawls. We told her the truth. It was our duty. We didn’t want her to get hurt, did we? It was for her own good. And what did we get for it? Thrown out of the family home. She actually had the nerve to say I’d be allowed back the moment I apologised. The only thing I was sorry about, I told her, was that she ruined our home. Crazy old lady.’
Clara saw again Jane sitting in the Bistro, crying. Tears of joy that someone, finally, accepted her art. And Clara knew then what it had taken for Jane to expose one of her works.
‘She fooled you, didn’t she? You didn’t know your friend was a freak. Well, now you know what we’ve had to put up with.’
‘You have no idea, have you? No idea what you’ve thrown away? You’re a stupid, stupid woman, Yolande.’ Clara’s mind went blank, as it always did in confrontations. She was vibrating and on the verge of losing it completely. She paid for her outburst by being forced to listen to a string of accusations and threats. Oddly enough, Yolande’s rage was so deeply unattractive Clara could feel her own anger ease.
‘Why that particular wallpaper?’ she asked into Yolande’s purple face.
‘Hideous, wasn’t it? It seemed fitting to cover one monstrosity with another. Besides, it was cheap.’
The door slammed. Clara realised she was still holding the envelope so she slipped it under the door. Done. Just this one thing for Jane. And it wasn’t so hard, after all, standing up to Yolande. All those years she’d stood silent in the face of Yolande’s sly and sometimes outright attacks, and now to find it’s possible to speak out. Clara wondered whether Jane knew this would happen when she addressed the envelope. Knew Clara would be the one to deliver it. Knew Yolande would react the way she always did to Clara. And knew she’d given Clara one last chance to stand up for herself.
As she walked away from the perfect, silent house, Clara thanked Jane.
Yolande saw the envelope appear. Tearing it open she found a single playing card. The Queen of Hearts. The same one Aunt Jane had put out on the kitchen table at night when tiny Yolande had visited her and Aunt Jane had promised that in the morning that card would be different. It would have changed.
She peered into the envelope again. Surely there was something else? Some inheritance from her aunt? A cheque? A key to a safety deposit box? But the envelope was empty. Yolande examined the card, trying to remember whether it was the same one from her childhood. Were the markings on the Queen’s robes the same? Did her face have one eye or two? No, Yolande concluded. This wasn’t the same card. Someone had switched them. She’d been cheated again. As she made for the bucket to clean off the front stoop where Clara had stood, she threw the Queen of Hearts on the fire.
Worthless.
TWELVE
‘Yolande Fontaine and her husband André Malenfant,’
Beauvoir said as he wrote their names in tidy capitals on the sheet of paper. It was 8.15 on Tuesday morning, almost a week and a half since the murder, and the investigators were reviewing the list of suspects. The first two were obvious.
‘Who else?’
‘Peter and Clara Morrow,’ said Nichol, looking up from her doodling.
‘Motive?’ he asked, writing the names.
‘Money,’ said Lacoste. ‘They have very little. Or had. Now they’re rich, of course, but before Miss Neal died they were practically paupers. Clara Morrow comes from a modest background, so she’s used to being careful with money, but not him. He’s a Golden Mile boy, born and bred. A Montreal Brahmin. Best schools, St Andrew’s Ball. I spoke to one of his sisters in Montreal. She was circumspect, as only these people can be, but she made it quite clear the family wasn’t thrilled with his choice of career. Blamed Clara for it. They wanted him to go into business. The family considers him a disappointment, at least his mother does. Too bad, really, because by Canadian art standards he’s a star. Sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of art last year, but that’s still below the poverty level. Clara sold about a thousand dollars. They live frugally. Their car needs major repair work as does their home. She teaches art in the winter to pay the bills, and they sometimes pick up contracts to restore art. They scrape by.’
‘His mother’s still alive?’ Gamache asked, trying to do some quick calculations.
‘Ninety-two,’ said Lacoste. ‘Pickled, by all accounts, but breathing. An old tartar. Probably outlive them all. Family lore has it she found her husband next to her one morning, dead, and she rolled over and went back to sleep. Why be inconvenienced?’
‘We only have Mrs Morrow’s word for it that they didn’t know what was in the will,’ said Beauvoir. ‘Miss Neal might have told them they’d inherit, n’est-ce pas?’
‘If they needed money, wouldn’t they have gone to Miss Neal for a loan instead of murdering her?’ Gamache asked.
‘Maybe they did,’ said Beauvoir. ‘And she said no. And, they had the best chance of luring her to the woods. If either Clara or Peter had called her at 6.30 in the morning and asked to see her without the dog, she’d have gone. No questions asked.’
Gamache had to agree.
‘And’, Beauvoir was on a roll, ‘Peter Morrow’s an accomplished archer. His specialty is the old wooden recurve. He says he only target shoots, but who knows? Besides, as you found out, it’s easy enough to replace the snub-nosed tip with the killer tip. He could have gotten them from the clubhouse, killed her, cleaned the equipment and returned it. And even if we found his prints or fibers, it’d mean nothing. He used the equipment all the time anyway.’
‘He was on the jury that chose her art work,’ Lacoste was warming to the possibility, ‘suppose he was jealous of her, saw her potential and, I don’t know, flipped out or something.’ She sputtered to a stop. None of them could see Peter Morrow ‘flipping out’. But Gamache knew the human psyche was complex. Sometimes people reacted to things without knowing why. And often that reaction was violent, physically or emotionally. It was just possible Peter Morrow, having struggled with his art and his family’s approval all his life, saw brilliance in Jane Neal’s work and couldn’t take it. Was consumed with jealousy. It was possible, not probable, but just possible.
‘Who else?’ asked Gamache.
‘Ben Hadley,’ said Lacoste. ‘He’s also a good archer, with access to the weapons. And trusted by Miss Neal.’
‘But without a motive,’ said Gamache.
‘Well, not money, anyway,’ admitted Lacoste. ‘He’s worth millions. All inherited from his mother. Before that he was on a generous allowance.’
Nichol snorted. She hated these ‘trust fund’ kids who did nothing with their lives except wait for Mommy and Daddy to die.
Beauvoir chose to ignore the snort. ‘Could he have had another motive besides money? Lacoste, anything in the papers you found in Jane Neal’s home?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No diary?’
‘Except the diary where she made a list of people who wanted to kill her.’
‘Well, you might have mentioned it.’ Beauvoir smiled.
Gamache looked at the list of suspects. Yolande and André, Peter and Clara and Ben Hadley.
‘Anyone else?’ Beauvoir was closing his notebook.
‘Ruth Zardo,’ said Gamache. He explained his thinking.
‘So her motive’, said Lacoste, ‘would be to stop Jane from telling everyone what she’d done. Wouldn’t it’ve b
‘Actually, yes, and that’s been bothering me. We don’t know that Ruth Zardo didn’t kill Timmer Hadley.’
‘And Jane found out about it?’ asked Lacoste.
‘Or suspected. She was the type, I think, who would’ve gone directly to Ruth and asked her about her suspicions. She probably thought it was a mercy killing, one friend relieving another of pain.’
‘But Ruth Zardo couldn’t have actually fired the arrow,’ said Beauvoir.
‘True. But she might have enlisted the aid of someone who could, and would do anything. For a fee.’
‘Malenfant,’ said Beauvoir with a certain glum glee.
Clara sat in her studio with her morning coffee, staring at the box. It was still there, only now it stood on four legs, made of tree branches. Initially she’d seen it on a single leg, like the trunk of a tree. Like the blind. That’s the image that had come to her in the woods during the ritual, when she’d looked over and seen the blind. It was such a perfect and appropriate image. Of being blind. Of the people who use the blind not seeing the cruelty of what they did, not seeing the beauty of what they were about to kill. It was, after all, a perfect word for that perch. A blind. And it was how Clara felt these days. Jane’s killer was among them, that much was obvious. But who? What wasn’t she seeing?
But the single tree trunk idea hadn’t worked. The box had looked unbalanced, off-putting. So she’d added the other legs and what had been a perch, a blind, now looked like a home on great long stilts. But it still wasn’t right. Closer. But there was something she needed to see. As always when faced with this problem Clara tried to clear her mind, and let the work come to her.
Beauvoir and Agent Lacoste were in the process of searching the Malenfant home. Lacoste had been prepared for filth, for a stench so thick she could see it. She hadn’t been prepared for this. She stood in Bernard’s bedroom and felt ill. It was perfect, not a dirty sock, not a plate of congealing food. Her kids were under five and their rooms already looked, and smelled, like the beach at low tide. This kid was, what? Fourteen? And his room smelled of Lemon Pledge. Lacoste felt like retching. As she put on her gloves and began her search she wondered if there wasn’t a coffin in the basement which he slept in.
Ten minutes later she found something, though not what she’d expected. She walked out of Bernard’s room and into the living room, making sure to catch the boy’s eye. Rolling up the document she discreetly put it in her evidence bag. Not so discreetly, though, that Bernard didn’t see. It was the first time she’d seen fear on his face.
‘Well, look what I found.’ Beauvoir came out of the other bedroom holding up a large manila folder. ‘Oddly enough,’ he said into Yolande’s lemon-sucked face and André’s lean leer, ‘it was taped to the back of a picture, in your bedroom.’
Beauvoir opened the folder and flipped through the contents. They were rough sketches, Jane Neal’s rough sketches of the county fair all the way back to 1943.
‘Why did you take these?’
‘Take? Who said anything about take? Aunt Jane gave them to us,’ said Yolande in her most convincing, ‘the roof is nearly new’ real estate agent’s voice.
Beauvoir wasn’t buying. ‘And you taped it behind that print of a lighthouse?’
‘She told us to keep them out of the light,’ said Yolande in her ‘the plumbing isn’t lead’ voice.
‘Why not just wallpaper over them?’ André actually gave a snort of laughter before being silenced by Yolande. ‘All right, take them in,’ said Beauvoir. It was getting close to lunch and he longed for a beer and a sandwich.
‘And the boy?’ asked Lacoste, picking up the cue. ‘He’s a minor. Can’t stay here without parents.’
‘Call Children’s Aid.’
‘No.’ Yolande grabbed Bernard and tried to put her arms around him. They wouldn’t go. Bernard himself didn’t seem all that upset at the thought of a foster home. André looked as though he thought this might be a good idea. Yolande was apoplectic.
‘Or’, said Beauvoir in his best, ‘you’d better make an offer before the owners change their minds’ voice, ‘you can tell us the truth right now.’ He held up the folder. Part of him felt badly about using Bernard but he figured he’d get over it.
The beans spilled. She’d found the folder sitting on the coffee table in Aunt Jane’s home. In full view. Yolande described this as though she’d found an S and M magazine. She was about to toss it on the fire but she decided, out of respect and love for dear Aunt Jane, to keep the pictures.
‘Why did you take them?’ Beauvoir repeated, walking toward the door.
‘OK, OK. I thought maybe they’d be worth something.’
‘I thought you hated your aunt’s work.’
‘Not as art, you great shit,’ said André. ‘I thought I could sell them to her friends, maybe Ben Hadley.’
‘Why would he buy them?’
‘Well, he has lots of money and maybe if I threatened to burn them he’d want to save them.’
‘But why take them out of the house? Why not keep the sketches there?’
‘Because they disgust me,’ Yolande was transformed. All the make-up in the world, and she was pretty close to wearing it all, couldn’t hide the hideous person underneath. In an instant she became a bitter middle-aged woman, twisted and made grotesque like a metalwork sculpture. All rust and sharp edges. Even Bernard edged away from her. ‘I needed them where I knew no one else would see them.’
On a slip of paper Beauvoir wrote a receipt for the folder and gave it to Yolande who took it in her manicured hand as though he’d passed her a sheet of toilet paper.
Clara had given up waiting for her tree house to speak and had gone to Jane’s to do more work. She’d begun to see Jane’s work as a masterpiece. One giant mural, like the Sistine Chapel or Da Vinci’s Last Supper. She didn’t hesitate to make the comparisons. Jane had captured the same elements as those master works. Awe. Creation. Wonderment. Longing. Even logging, in Jane’s case.
Ben couldn’t be moving more slowly if he tried. Still, Clara had to remind herself that it didn’t really matter. It would all be revealed, eventually.
‘Oh, my God, it’s a disaster,’ Ruth’s voice rang loud and clear. Clara came up from the basement with her bucket. Ruth and Gamache were standing in the center of the living room and Clara was a little disheartened to see Ben also there, lounging by the desk.
‘Did you do this?’ Ruth wanted to know.
‘I helped uncover it. Jane did the drawings.’
‘I never thought I’d say it, but I’m on Yolande’s side.
Cover them up.’
‘I want to show you something.’ Clara took Ruth’s elbow and guided her to the far wall. ‘Look at that.’ Unmistakable, there was a picture of Ruth as a child, holding her mother’s hand in the schoolhouse. Little Ruth, tall and gawky, school books for feet. Encyclopedia feet. Piglets dancing in her hair. Which could mean one of two things.
‘I had pigtails as a child,’ said Ruth, apparently reading her thoughts. But Clara thought Jane’s message was that even then Ruth was pig-headed. The other children were laughing but one child was coming over to hug her. Ruth stood, transfixed, in front of Jane’s wall:‘Jenny kissed me when we met, jumping from the chair she sat in; time, you thief, who love to get sweets into your list, put that in: say I’m weary, say I’m sad, say that health and wealth have missed me; say I’m growing old, but add, Jenny kissed me.’
Ruth recited the poem in a whisper, and the still room heard. ‘Leigh Hunt. “Rondeau”. That’s the only poem I wish I’d written. I didn’t think Jane remembered, I didn’t think it’d meant anything to her. This is my first day here, when my father came to work in the mill. I was eight years old, the new kid, tall and ugly, as you can see, and not very nice even then. But when I walked into that schoolhouse, terrified, Jane walked all the way down the aisle and she kissed me. She didn’t even know me but it didn’t matter to her. Jane kissed me when we met.’
Ruth, her brittle-blue eyes glistening, took a breath and then took a long look around the room. Then slowly shook her head and whispered, ‘It’s extraordinary. Oh, Jane, I’m so sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’ Gamache asked.
‘Sorry she didn’t know we loved her enough to be trusted with this. Sorry she felt she had to hide it from us.’ Ruth gave a hurrumph of unamused laughter. ‘I thought I was the only one with a wound. What a fool.’
‘I think the key to Jane’s murder is here,’ said Gamache, watching the elderly woman limp around the room. ‘I think she was killed because she was about to let everyone see it. I don’t know why but there you have it. You knew her all her life, I want you to tell me what you see here. What strikes you, what patterns you see, what you don’t see
‘Most of the upstairs, for starters,’ said Clara, and watched Ben flinch.
‘Well, spend as much time as you can here.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m supposed to address the United Nations and Clara, aren’t you accepting the Nobel prize?’
‘That’s right, for art.’
‘I canceled both engagements,’ said Gamache, thinking little Ruthie Zardo was a bad influence on Clara. They smiled and nodded. Ben and Clara went back upstairs while Ruth inched along the walls, examining the images, occasionally hooting when one struck her as particularly apt. Gamache sat in the big leather chair by the fire and let the room come to him.
Suzanne picked Matthew up late in the day at his sister’s in Cowansville where he’d stayed until the Provincial Guardians Office had finished its investigation. Even though Philippe had recanted his accusation of abuse, the Office was obligated to investigate. It found nothing. In his heart Matthew was disappointed. Not, of course, at being exonerated. But so much damage had been done he wished they’d made a public statement that he was, in reality, a wonderful father. A kind, compassionate, firm parent. A loving father.
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