The Long Way Home

“I’m heading out,” said Myrna, pausing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Are you safe in there? You won’t fall asleep, will you?”

“Drown and miss the rest of this voyage?” asked Clara. “No way. They’re going to have to call the cops to get me off this ship. Where’re you going?”

“To see the cops.”

Myrna found their cabin down a surprisingly dingy hallway.

Double-checking to make sure the plaque on the door really said Admiral’s Suite, she knocked. It was opened by Jean-Guy, and in the background, which wasn’t really all that far back, she could see Armand. Going through Chartrand’s coat pocket.

“I was looking for change,” he stammered, then regaining his composure he squared his shoulders and said with some dignity. “For the coffee machine.”

“Of course,” said Myrna. She’d have entered the room, had it been possible. Instead she got her head in and looked around.

Chipped and curling wood veneer covered the walls, making a minuscule room seem all the smaller. A single berth sat against a wall, converted into a narrow sofa during the day. The porthole was covered with grime. The place smelled of mothballs and urine.

“We’re sorry about taking the better cabin,” said Gamache. “Yours must be pretty grim. Would you like to switch?”

Jean-Guy turned and gave him a filthy look.

Myrna assured him that she and Clara were fine where they were. They’d soldier on, somehow. She gave them all the change she had.

Then left.

*   *   *

Their first port of call along the coast was Anticosti Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“Says here,” said Clara, reading from a guidebook she found in the passenger lounge, “that there’ve been four hundred shipwrecks off Anticosti.”

“Oh really,” said Jean-Guy, folding his arms across his chest. “Tell me more.”

“Apparently it’s known as the cemetery of the Gulf,” she said.

“I was being sarcastic,” said Beauvoir.

“I know,” said Clara. “But at least we now know what that pilot meant when he said the big challenge for the ship was the Graves. We get it behind us early.”

“This isn’t the Graves,” said Gamache. He got up from the arborite table in the lounge and walked to the windows. Through the dirty streaks he could see the island approaching. It was huge and almost completely uninhabited. By humans.

The only settlement was Port-Menier, where fewer than three hundred people lived.

But the waters teemed with huge salmon and trout and seals. And the forests were full of deer and moose and grouse.

Gamache stepped through the door to the deck, followed by Clara, Myrna, Jean-Guy, and Marcel Chartrand. The air was cooler than in Baie-Saint-Paul. Fresher. A mist hung over the forest and crept onto the river, softening the line between land and water and air.

It felt as though they were approaching the past. A primordial forest so lush and green and unspoiled it could not possibly exist in the age of space travel, cell phones, Botox.

The only signs of habitation were the lighthouse and the row of bright wooden homes along the shore.

“What’s that?” asked Clara.

“What?” asked Chartrand.

“That.” Clara cocked her head to one side and pointed into the air.

Applause. Clapping.

She scanned the shore. Perhaps it was a tradition. Perhaps when the supply ship arrived, the residents came out and applauded. She would.

But that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite human.

“It’s the trees,” said Chartrand. He guided her gently around until Clara was looking away from the harbor, toward the forest.

“They’re happy to see us,” he said quietly.

Clara looked into his face, into his eyes. He wasn’t watching her. He was taking in the woods. The joyous trees with the leaves that clapped together in the slightest breeze.

Beside her Myrna looked down at the guidebook, and didn’t have the heart to tell them that the trees were called quaking aspens. And if they felt anything on seeing the ship approach, it was alarm. She would too, if she was a tree.

“We’ll be docking and unloading supplies,” the tinny voice over the PA system advised. “You are free to go ashore, but be aware that we will be leaving in four hours.”

With or without you was the implication.

“We can jump ship,” said Beauvoir. “There must be a plane we can charter.”

“No. We stay with the ship,” said Clara. “I’m sorry, Jean-Guy, I know this isn’t your first choice, but if Peter took this route, then we do too. We don’t know where he got off. It might be here.”