A Fatal Grace

by Louise Penny

  ‘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.’

  ‘When did you realize she was El’s daughter?’

  Mother hesitated. Beauvoir had the impression it wasn’t to think up a lie, but rather to cast her mind back.

  ‘It was a cascade. What put it beyond doubt for me was the reference to Ramen Das in her book.’ Mother nodded to the small altar by the wall with its sticks of stinky incense sitting in holders on a brightly colored and mirrored piece of cloth. Stuck to the wall above it was a poster, and below that a framed photograph. Beauvoir got up and looked at them. The poster showed an emaciated Indian man in a diaper standing by a stone wall gripping a long cane and smiling. He looked like Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, but then all elderly Indians did to Beauvoir. It was the same poster he’d disappeared into during his last visit. In the smaller photograph the same man was sitting with two young western women, slim and also smiling, and wearing billowy nightgowns. Or maybe they were curtains. Or sofa covers. Astonished, he turned to Mother. Wild-haired, pear-shaped, exhausted Mother.

  ‘That’s you?’ He pointed to one of the women. Mother joined him and smiled at his amazement and inability to conceal it. She wasn’t insulted. It often amazed her too.

  ‘And that’s El.’ She pointed to the other woman. While both the guru and Mother were smiling, the other woman seemed to radiate. Beauvoir could barely take his eyes off her. Then he thought of the autopsy pictures Gamache had shown him. True, Mother had changed, but in ways recognizable and natural, if not attractive. The other woman had disappeared. The glow gone, the radiance dimmed and dulled and finally extinguished beneath layers of filth and despair.

  ‘Not many people know about Ramen Das. There was more, of course.’ Mother plopped into a seat. ‘CC called her philosophy Li Bien. I’d lived for over seventy years and only ever heard that phrase from one other person. El. CC called her business and her book Be Calm. And she used a logo only we knew about.’

  ‘The eagle?’

  ‘The symbol of Eleanor of Aquitaine.’

  ‘Explain that to me, Mother.’ Beauvoir couldn’t believe he’d just called her Mother, but he had, and it felt natural. He hoped he wouldn’t be suckling soon.

  ‘We studied British and French history in school,’ said Mother. ‘Canada apparently had no history. Anyway, when we got to the section on Eleanor of Aquitaine El became obsessed. She decided she was Eleanor of Aquitaine. Don’t look so smug, Inspector. You can’t tell me you didn’t run around playing cowboys and Indians or pretending to be Superman or Batman.’

  Beauvoir snorted. He’d done nothing of the sort. That’d be crazy. He’d been Jean-Claude Killy, the world’s greatest Olympic skier. He’d even told his mother she had to call him Jean-Claude. She’d refused. Still, he’d skied astonishing races in his bedroom, winning Olympic gold, often outrunning catastrophic avalanches, saving nuns and grateful millionaires along the way.

  ‘El was searching even then, knowing something wasn’t right, as though she didn’t belong in her own skin. She found comfort in thinking she was Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Em even made her a necklace with Eleanor’s heraldic symbol. The eagle. A particularly aggressive eagle.’

  ‘So you put it all together and when CC moved here you realized she was El’s daughter.’

  ‘That’s right. We knew she’d had a child. El had disappeared for a few years, then we suddenly got a card from Toronto. She’d gotten into a relationship with some guy who quickly disappeared, but not before getting El pregnant. She wasn’t married and at the time, in the late fifties, that was a scandal. I’d known when she left India that she wasn’t well emotionally. Her mind was brilliant and delicate and unbalanced. Poor CC, being raised in a home like that. No wonder the idea of balance was so important to her.’ Mother looked at Beauvoir, stunned. It had just occurred to her. ‘I felt no sympathy for CC, no compassion. At first, when we realized she was our beloved El’s daughter we tried to invite her into our lives. I can’t say we ever warmed to her. She was unlikable in the extreme. El was like sunshine, bright and loving and kind. But she gave birth to darkness. CC didn’t live in her mother’s shadow, she was her mother’s shadow.’

  ‘This was found in El’s hand.’ Gamache tried to say it gently, but knew there was no hiding the horror of it. ‘El’s mind might have been unbalanced, but her heart was steady. She knew what was important. Through all the years on the street she held on to these two things.’ He touched the box and nodded to the necklace. ‘The three of you. She surrounded herself with her friend

s.’

  ‘We tried to follow her but she was in and out of hospitals and then finally put onto the streets. We couldn’t imagine our El living on the streets. We tried to get her into shelters but she always left. We had to learn to respect her wishes.’

  ‘When was CC taken from her?’ Gamache asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. I think she was about ten when El was put into hospital.’

  They were silent for a moment, each imagining the little girl taken from the only home she knew. Filthy, unhealthy place, but home nevertheless.

  ‘When did you see El again?’

  ‘Mother and Kaye and I often take the bus into Montreal and a couple of years ago we saw El at the station. It was a shock, seeing her like that, but we eventually got used to it.’

  ‘And you showed her some of Clara’s art?’

  ‘Clara? Why would we do that?’ Em was obviously confused. ‘We never had long with her, just a few minutes, so we’d give her clothes and blankets and food and some money. But we never showed her Clara’s art. Why would we?’

  ‘Did you ever show her a picture of Clara?’

  ‘No.’ Again Em seemed baffled by the question.

  Why indeed, thought Gamache.

  I’ve always loved your art, Clara, El had said when Clara was down and distressed.

  I’ve always loved your art.

  Gamache felt the warmth of the fire on his face. He wondered whether El had ever had a cod quota or worked construction.

  ‘How did you know El had been killed?’ There was no cushioning that question.

  Em had clearly been bracing for it and hardly reacted at all.

  ‘We went back to Montreal on December twenty-third to give her a Christmas gift.’

  ‘Why go back? Why not give her the present after Ruth’s book launch?’

  ‘El was a creature of habit. Anything outside her routine upset her. A few years ago we tried to give her a gift early and she didn’t react well, so we learned. It had to be the twenty-third. You look puzzled.’

  And he did. He couldn’t believe a woman living on the streets followed a Day Timer. How’d she even know what day it was?

  ‘Henri knows dinner time and when it’s time for his promenade,’ said Em after Gamache had told her what was bothering him. ‘I don’t want to compare El to my puppy, but in the end she was like that. Almost all instinct. El lived on the streets; she was crazy, covered in her own excrement, obsessive and drunk. But she was still the purest soul I’ve ever met. We looked for her outside Ogilvy’s, then the bus station. We eventually called the police. That’s when we found out she’d been killed.’

  Em broke eye contact, her self-possession slipping. But still Gamache knew she’d have to endure one more question.

  ‘When did you know it was her daughter who killed her?’

  Émilie’s eyes widened. ‘Sacré,’ she whispered.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ‘No,’ Beauvoir screamed at the television. ‘Stop him. Defense, defense.’

  ‘Watch it, watch it.’ Beside him Robert Lemieux was twisting on the sofa, trying to check the New York Ranger who was racing down the ice at the New Forum.

  ‘He shoots!’ the announcer screamed. Beauvoir and Lemieux leaned forward, all but clasping hands, watching the tiny black dot on the screen shoot off the Ranger stick. Gabri was gripping his easy chair and Olivier’s hand was stopped halfway to the cheese plate.

  ‘He scores!’ the announcer shrieked.

  ‘Thomas. Fucking Thomas.’ Lemieux turned to Beauvoir. ‘They’re paying him what? Sixteen zillion a year and he can’t stop that.’ He gestured to the screen.

  ‘They’re only paying him about five million,’ said Gabri, his enormous fingers delicately spreading a piece of baguette with Saint-Albray cheese and dabbing a bit of jam on top. ‘More wine?’

  ‘Please.’ Beauvoir held out his glass. It was the first hockey game he’d watched without chips and beer. He quite liked the cheese and wine change-up. And he was realizing he quite liked Agent Lemieux. Up until this moment he’d seen him as a piece of mobile furniture, like a chair on wheels. There for a purpose, but not to be friendly with. But now they were sharing this humiliating defeat at the hands of the crappy New York Rangers, and Lemieux was proving himself a staunch and knowledgable ally. Granted, so were Gabri and Olivier.

  The Hockey Night in Canada theme was playing and Beauvoir got up to stretch his legs and walk around the living room of the B. & B. In another chair Chief Inspector Gamache was making a call.

  ‘Thomas let in another,’ said Beauvoir.

  ‘I saw. He’s coming too far out of the net,’ said Gamache.

  ‘That’s his style. He intimidates the other team, forces them to shoot.’

  ‘And is it working?’

  ‘Not tonight,’ Beauvoir agreed. He picked up the chief’s empty glass and wandered away. Fucking Thomas. I could do better. And while the commercials were on Jean Guy Beauvoir imagined himself in net for the Canadians. But Beauvoir wasn’t a goalie. He was a forward. He liked the limelight, the puck play, the panting, the skating and the shooting. Hearing an opponent grunt as he was forced into the boards. And maybe giving him an extra elbow.

  No, he knew himself enough to know he’d never make a goalie.

  That was Gamache. The one they all depended on to make the save.

  He took the filled wine glass back and put it on the table by the phone, Gamache smiling his thanks.

  ‘Bonjour?’ Gamache heard the familiar voice and his heart contracted.

  ‘Oui, bonjour, is this Madame Gamache, the librarian? I hear you have a book overdue.’

  ‘I have a husband overdue, and he is a little bookish,’ she said, laughing. ‘Hello, Armand. How are things going?’

  ‘Eleanor Allaire.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Thank you, Armand. Eleanor Allaire.’ Reine-Marie said the name as though part of the novena. ‘Beautiful name.’

  ‘And a beautiful woman, I’ve been told.’

  He told her everything then. About Eleanor, about her friends, about India and the daughter. About being the crack in the vessel, and finding herself on the streets. About CC, taken from her home, raised by God knows who, searching for her mother and even going to Three Pines.

  ‘Why did she think her mother would be there?’ Reine-Marie asked.

  ‘Because that was the image her mother had painted on the Christmas decoration. The Li Bien ball. The only thing CC had from El. She was either told or must have guessed that the three pine trees on the ball meant the village where her mother was born and raised. This afternoon we spoke to old-timers and they remember the Allaires. Just the one daughter, Eleanor. They left almost fifty years ago.’

  ‘So CC bought a home in Three Pines to search for her mother? I wonder why she did it now? Why not years ago?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure,’ said Gamache, sipping his wine. In the background he could hear the Hockey Night in Canada theme. Reine-Marie was watching the game as well this Saturday night. ‘Thomas isn’t having a good night.’

  ‘He should stay closer to the net,’ she said. ‘The Rangers have his number.’

  ‘Do you have a theory why CC would suddenly decide to search for her mother now?’

  ‘You said CC had approached an American company about a catalogue?’

  ‘What’re you thinking?’

  ‘I was wondering whether maybe CC waited until she felt she was a success.’

  Gamache thought about it, watching the players on the television pass the puck up the ice, lose it, skate furiously backwards as the other team charged. Beauvoir and Lemieux fell back into the sofa, groaning.

  ‘The American contract.’ He nodded. ‘And the book. We think that’s why El moved from the bus station to Ogilvy’s. CC had posters put up advertising her book. One was at the bus station. El must have seen it and realized CC de Poitiers was her daughter, so she went to Ogilvy’s to find her.’

  ‘And CC went to Three Pines to find her mother,’ said Reine-Marie. It was heartbreaking to think of the two wounded women searching for each other.

  An image sprang to Gamache’s mind of frail little El, old and cold, shuffling the long blocks, giving up her prized place on the subway grate in hopes of finding her daughter.

  ‘Shoot, shoot,’ the guys in the living room were shouting.

  ‘He shoots, he scores!’ the announcer yelled to wild applause from the New Forum and near hysteria from Beauvoir, Lemieux, Gabri and Olivier, who were hugging and dancing around the room.

  ‘Kowalski,’ Beauvoir called to Gamache. ‘Finally. It’s three to one now.’

  ‘What did CC do in the village?’ Reine-Marie asked. She’d turned the television off in their sitting room to concentrate on the conversation.

  ‘Well, she thought one of the elderly women was her mother so she seems to have interviewed them all.’

  ‘And then she found her mother at Ogilvy’s,’ said Reine-Marie.

  ‘El must have recognized CC. I think she must have approached and CC paid no attention, thinking it was just another bum on the street. But El would have been insistent. Following her, maybe even using her name. But even then CC might have put it down to the vagrant’s knowing her name from the book. Finally I think El became desperate and opened her front to reveal the necklace. That would have stopped CC dead. She’d have remembered the necklace from her childhood. It was made by Émilie Longpré. There was no other like it.’

  ‘And CC would have known then the woman was her mother,’ said Reine-Marie, softly, imagining the scene and trying to imagine how she’d feel. Yearning to find her mother. Longing not only for her mother but her mother’s approval. Longing to be scooped up in those old arms.

  And then to be confronted by El. A stinking, drunken, pathetic bag lady. Her mother.

  And what had CC done?

  She’d lost her mind. Reine-Marie guessed what had happened. CC had grabbed the necklace and yanked it off her mother’s neck. Then she’d grabbed the long scarf and she’d pulled and pulled, tighter and tighter.

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