by Louise Penny
‘Let’s see. By pretending to be a stone?’ asked Julia. Thomas shot her an angry look, then his face fell back to its attractive, easy expression.
‘You haven’t forgotten the story, I see.’
‘I haven’t forgotten anything, Thomas,’ Julia said, and sat down. Gamache took it all in. The Finneys rarely spoke to each other, but when they did their words seemed laden, heavy with a meaning that escaped him.
Thomas hesitated, then turned back to Gamache who was longing for his bed, though mostly longing for this story to be over.
‘It pretends to be a stone,’ said Thomas, his eyes boring into Gamache. The large man stared back, suddenly aware there was a significance to what was being said. Something was being communi cated to him. But what?
‘In order to survive it must hide. Pretend to be something it isn’t,’ said Thomas.
‘It’s just a plant,’ said Mariana. ‘It doesn’t do anything on purpose.’
‘It’s cunning,’ said Julia. ‘A survival instinct.’
‘It’s just a plant,’ repeated Mariana. ‘Don’t be foolish.’
Ingenious, thought Gamache. It doesn’t dare show itself for what it really is, for fear of being killed. What had Thomas just said?
Things aren’t as they seem. He was beginning to believe it.
FOUR
‘I enjoyed this evening,’ said Reine-Marie, slipping into the cool, crisp sheets beside her husband.
‘So did I.’ He took off his half-moon reading glasses and folded his book onto the bed. It was a warm evening. Their tiny back room had only one window, onto the kitchen garden, so there wasn’t much of a through draught, but the window was thrown open and the light cotton curtains were billowing slightly. The lamps on their bedside tables provided ponds of light and the rest was in darkness. It smelled of wood from the log walls and pine from the forest, and a hint of sweetness from the herb garden below.
‘Two days’ time and it’s our anniversary,’ said Reine-Marie. ‘July first. Imagine, thirty-five years together. Were we so young?’
‘I was. And innocent.’
‘Poor boy. Did I scare you?’
‘Maybe just a little. But I’m over it now.’
Reine-Marie leaned back on the pillow. ‘Can’t say I’m looking forward to meeting the missing Finneys tomorrow.’
‘Spot and Claire. Spot must be a nickname.’
‘Let’s hope.’
Picking up his book he tried to focus, but his eyes were growing heavy, flickering as he strained to keep them open. He gave up the fight, realizing it wasn’t one he could win or needed to. Kissing Reine-Marie, he burrowed into his pillow and fell asleep to the chorus of creatures outside and the scent of his wife beside him.
Pierre Patenaude stood at the door of the kitchen. It was clean and orderly, everything in its place. The glasses lined up, the silverware in its sleeves, the bone china carefully stacked with fine tissue between each plate. He’d learned that from his mother. She’d taught him that order was freedom. To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.
From his father he’d learned leadership. On rare days off school he’d been allowed to go to the office. He’d sat on his father’s lap, smelling cologne and tobacco, while his father made phone calls. Even as a child Pierre knew he was being groomed. Trimmed and shaped, buffed and burnished.
Would his father be disappointed in him? Being just a maître d’? But he thought not. His father had wanted only one thing for him. To be happy.
He turned out the light and walked through the empty dining room and into the garden to look once again at the marble cube.
Mariana unwrapped herself, veil after veil, humming. Every now and then she looked over to the single bed next to hers. Bean was either asleep or pretending to be.
‘Bean?’ she whispered. ‘Bean, kiss Mommy goodnight.’
The child was silent. Though the room itself wasn’t. Clocks filled almost every surface. Ticking clocks and digital clocks, electric clocks and wind-up ones. All set to go off at seven a.m. All moving towards that time, as they had every morning for months. There seemed to be more of them than ever.
Mariana wondered if it had gone too far. Whether she should do something. Surely it wasn’t normal for a ten year old to do this? What had started as one alarm clock a year ago had blossomed and spread like an invasive weed until Bean’s room at home was choked with them. The riot each morning was beyond belief. From her own bedroom she could hear her strange child clicking them all off, until the last tinny call to the day was silenced.
Surely this wasn’t normal?
But then so much about Bean wasn’t normal. To call in a psychologist now, well, it felt a bit like trying to outrun a tidal wave of odd, thought Mariana. She lifted Bean’s hand off the book and smiled as she laid it on the floor. It’d been her own favourite book as a child and she wondered which story Bean liked the most. Ulysses? Pandora? Hercules?
Leaning down to kiss Bean Mariana noticed the chandelier and its old corded electrical wire. In her mind she saw a spark leap in a brilliant arc onto the bedding, smouldering at first then bursting into flames as they slept.
She stepped back, closed her eyes, and placed the invisible wall round Bean.
There, safe.
She turned off the light and lay in bed, her body feeling sticky and flabby. The closer she got to her mother the heavier her body felt, as though her mother had her own atmosphere and gravity. Tomorrow Spot would arrive, and it would begin. And end.
She tried to get comfortable, but the night was close and the covers collapsed and stuck to her. She kicked them off. But what really stood between her and sleep wasn’t the stinking heat, the snoring child, the clinging bedclothes.
It was a banana.
Why did they always goad her? And why, at the age of forty-seven, did she still care?
She turned over, trying to find a cool place on the now damp bedding.
Banana. And she heard again their laughter. And saw their mocking looks.
Let it go, she begged herself. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the banana and the clocks tsk, tsk, tsking in her head.
Julia Martin sat at the vanity and took off her single string of pearls. Simple, elegant, a gift from her father for her eighteenth birthday.
‘A lady is always understated, Julia,’ he’d said. ‘A lady never shows off. She always puts others at ease. Remember that.’
And she had. As soon as he’d said it she knew the truth of it. And all the stumbling and bumbling she’d done, all the uncertainties and solitude of her teen years, had fallen away. Ahead of her stretched a clear path. Narrow, yes, but clear. The relief she felt was absolute. She had a purpose, a direction. She knew who she was and what she had to do. Put others at ease.
As she undressed she went over the events of the day, making a list of all the people she might have hurt, all the people who might dislike her because of her words, her inflection, her manner.
And she thought of the nice French man and their conversation in the garden. He’d seen her smoking. What must he think of her? And then she’d flirted with the young waiter and accepted a drink. Drinking, smoking, flirting.
God, he must think she was shallow and weak.
She’d do better tomorrow.
She coiled the strand of pearls, like a young snake, onto its soft blue velvet bed then took off her earrings, wishing she could also remove her ears. But she knew it was too late.
The Eleanor rose. Why did they do it? After all these years, when she was trying to be nice, why bring up the rose again?
Let it go, she begged herself, it doesn’t matter. It was a joke. That’s all.
But the words had already coiled themselves inside her and wouldn’t leave.
Next door, in the Lake Room, Sandra stood on their balcony surrounded by the wild stars and wondered how they could get the best table for breakfast. She was tired of being served last, always having to insist and even
then getting the smallest portions, she was sure of it.
And that Armand, worst bridge player she’d ever seen. Why’d she been paired with him? The staff fawned over him and his wife, probably because they were French. It wasn’t fair. They were staying in that broom closet at the back of the Manoir, the cheapest room. A shopkeeper almost certainly and his cleaning woman wife. Didn’t seem right to have to share the Manoir with them. Still, she’d been courteous. They couldn’t ask for more.
Sandra was hungry. And angry. And tired. And tomorrow Spot would arrive and it would get even worse.
From inside their splendid room, Thomas looked at his wife’s rigid back.
He’d married a beautiful woman and still, from a distance and from the back, she was lovely.
But somehow, recently, her head seemed to have expanded and the rest shrunk, so that he had the impression he was now attached to a flotation device, deflated. Orange and soft and squishy and no longer doing its job.
Swiftly, while Sandra’s back was turned, he took off the old cufflinks his father had given him on his eighteenth birthday.
‘My own father gave me these, and now it’s time to pass them to you,’ his father had said. Thomas had taken the cufflinks, and the weary velvet pouch they came in, and shoved them into his pocket in a cavalier move he’d hoped would wound his father. And he could tell it had.
His father never gave him anything again. Nothing.
He quickly peeled off the old jacket and shirt, thankful no one had noticed the slight wear on the cuffs. Now Sandra was coming through the door. He casually tossed the shirt and jacket onto a nearby chair.
‘I didn’t appreciate your contradicting me over bridge,’ she said.
‘I did?’
‘Of course you did. In front of your family and that couple, the shopkeeper and his cleaning woman wife.’
‘It was her mother who cleaned houses,’ Thomas corrected her.
‘There, you see. Can’t you just let me say something without correcting me?’
‘You want to be wrong?’
It was a path worn through their marriage.
‘All right, what did I say?’ he finally asked.
‘You know very well what you said. You said pears went best with melted chocolate.’
‘That’s it? Pears?’
He made it sound stupid but Sandra knew it wasn’t. She knew it was important. Vital.
‘Yes, pears. I said strawberries and you said pears.’
It was actually beginning to sound trivial to her. That wasn’t good.
‘But that’s what I think,’ he said.
‘Come on, you can’t tell me you even have an opinion.’
All this talk of warm chocolate dripping off fresh strawberries, or even pears, was making her collagen-filled mouth water. She looked around for the tiny chocolates hotels put on pillows. Her side of the bed, his side, the pillows, the night table. She ran to the bathroom. Nothing. Staring at the sink, she wondered how many calories there were in toothpaste.
Nothing. Nothing to eat. She looked down at her cuticles, but she was saving those for an emergency. Returning to the room she looked at his frayed cuffs and wondered how they’d frayed. Surely not by repeated touch.
‘You humiliated me in front of everyone,’ she said, transferring her hunger to eat into a hunger to hurt. He didn’t turn round. She knew she should let it go, but it was too late. She’d chewed the insult over, torn it apart and swallowed it. The insult was part of her now.
‘Why do you always do it? And over a pear? Why couldn’t you just agree with me for once?’
She’d eaten twigs and berries and goddamned grasses for two months and lost fifteen pounds for only one reason. So that his family would say how lovely and slim she looked, and then maybe Thomas would notice. Maybe he’d believe it. Maybe he’d touch her. Just touch her. Not even make love. Just touch her.
She was starved for it.
Irene Finney looked into the mirror and lifted her hand. She brought the soapy cloth close, then stopped.
Spot would be there tomorrow. And then they’d all be together. The four children, the four corners of her world.
Irene Finney, like many very elderly people, knew that the world was indeed flat. It had a beginning and an end. And she had come to the edge.
There was only one more thing to do. Tomorrow.
Irene Finney stared at her reflection. She brought the cloth up and scrubbed. In the next room Bert Finney gripped the bed sheets listening to his wife’s stifled sobs as she removed her face.
Armand Gamache awoke to young sun pouring through the still curtains, hitting their squirrelled-up bedding and his perspiring body. The sheets were kicked into a wet ball on the very end of the bed. Beside him Reine-Marie roused.
‘What time is it?’ she asked sleepily.
‘Six thirty.’
‘In the morning?’ She got up on one elbow. He nodded and smiled. ‘And it’s already this hot?’ He nodded again. ‘It’s going to be a killer.’
‘That’s what Pierre said last night. Heat wave.’
‘I finally figured out why they call it a wave,’ said Reine-Marie, tracing a line down his wet arm. ‘I need a shower.’
‘I have a better idea.’
Within minutes they were on the dock, kicking off their sandals and dropping their towels like nests onto the warm wooden surface. Gamache and Reine-Marie looked onto this world of two suns, two skies, of mountains and forests multiplied. The lake wasn’t glass, it was a mirror. A bird gliding across the clear sky appeared on the tranquil water as well. It was a world so perfect it broke into two. Hummingbirds buzzed in the garden and monarch butterflies bobbed from flower to flower. A couple of dragonflies clicked around the dock. Reine-Marie and Gamache were the only people in the world.
‘You first,’ said Reine-Marie. She loved to watch this. So did their kids when they were younger.
He smiled, bent his knees and thrust his body off the solid dock and into mid-air. He seemed to hover there for a moment, his arms outstretched as though he expected to reach the far shore. It seemed more of a launch than a dive. And then, of course, came the inevitable, since Armand Gamache couldn’t in fact fly. He hit the water with a gargantuan splash. It was cool enough to take his breath for that first instant, but by the time he popped up, he was refreshed and alert.
Reine-Marie watched as he flicked his head around to rid his phantom hair of the lake water, as he’d done the first time they’d visited. And for years after that, until there was no longer any need. But still he did it, and still she watched, and still it stopped her heart.
‘Come on in,’ he called, and watched as she dived, graceful, though her legs always parted and she’d never mastered the toe-point, so there was always a fin of bubbles as her feet slapped the water. He waited to see her emerge, face to the sun, hair gleaming.
‘Was there a splash?’ she asked, treading water as the waves headed into the shore.
‘Like a knife you went in. I barely even knew you dived.’
‘There, breakfast time,’ said Reine-Marie ten minutes later as they hauled themselves up the ladder back onto the dock.
Gamache handed her a sun-warmed towel. ‘What’ll you have?’
They walked back describing for each other impossible amounts of food they’d eat. At the Manoir he stopped and took her off to the side.
‘I want to show you something.’
She smiled. ‘I’ve already seen it.’
‘Not this,’ he chuckled and then stopped. They were no longer alone. There, at the side of the Manoir, someone was hunched over, digging. The movement stopped and slowly the figure turned to face them.
It was a young woman, covered in dirt.
‘Oh, hello.’ She seemed more startled than they. So startled she spoke in English rather than the traditional French of the Manoir.
‘Hello.’ Reine-Marie smiled reassuringly, speaking English back.
‘Désolée,’ the young woman
said, smearing more dirt onto her perspiring face. It turned to mud instantly, so that she looked a little like a clay sculpture, animated. ‘I didn’t think anyone was up yet. It’s the best time to work. I’m one of the gardeners.’
She’d switched to French and she spoke easily with only a slight accent. A whiff of something sweet, chemical, and familiar came their way. Bug spray. Their companion was doused in it. The scents of a Quebec summer. Cut grass and bug repellent.
Gamache and Reine-Marie looked down and noticed holes in the ground. She followed their gaze.
‘I’m trying to transplant all those before it gets too hot.’ She waved to a few drooping plants. ‘For some reason all the flowers in this bed’re dying.’
‘What’s that?’ Reine-Marie was no longer looking at the holes.
‘That’s what I wanted to show you,’ said Gamache.
There, off to the side and slightly hidden by the woods, was the huge marble cube. At least now there was someone to ask.
‘Not a clue,’ was the gardener’s answer to his question. ‘A huge truck dropped it here a couple of days ago.’
‘What is it?’ Reine-Marie touched it.
‘It’s marble,’ said the gardener, joining them as they stared.
‘Well here we are,’ said Reine-Marie eventually, ‘at the Manoir Bellechasse, surrounded by woods and lakes and gardens and you and I,’ she took her husband’s hand, ‘are staring at the one unnatural thing for miles around.’
He laughed. ‘What are the chances?’
They nodded to the gardener and returned to the Manoir to change for breakfast. But Gamache found it interesting that Reine-Marie had the same reaction to the marble cube he’d had the night before. Whatever it was, it was unnatural.
The terrasse was mottled with shade and not yet scorching hot, though by noon the stones would be like coals. Both Reine-Marie and Gamache wore their floppy sun hats.
Elliot brought their café au lait and breakfasts. Reine-Marie poured Eastern Townships maple syrup onto her wild blueberry crêpe and Gamache speared his eggs Benedict, watching the yolk mix with the hollandaise sauce. By now the terrasse was filling with Finneys.