The Long Way Home

As they talked, Reine-Marie studied page after page of photographs of young men and women. Most of the students were white. Most with long greasy hair. And tight turtlenecks, and tighter jeans. And petulant, disinterested expressions.

Too cool for school. Too cool to care.

Reine-Marie stopped and turned back a page.

There, unmistakably, was Clara, with hair that looked like Einstein’s. Wearing a shapeless smock and a huge, happy grin on her face.

And beside her on the sofa, the same sofa Reine-Marie had just been on, various students slouched. Professor Massey, younger and even more vigorous, was standing behind them, speaking to a young man.

They were locked in earnest conversation. A cigarette hung from the young man’s mouth, a puff of smoke obscuring his face. Except for one eye. Sharp, assessing. Aware.

It was Peter.

Reine-Marie smiled at the photograph, then returned to searching for Sébastien Norman. But when she found the section on the professors it was a disappointment.

“I’d forgotten,” said Massey, when shown the section. “That was the year the editors decided not to use our actual photographs. Maybe in response to the Salon des Refusés, they published pictures of our art instead. I think they deliberately chose the most embarrassing examples.”

He took the book back and turned a few pages, and grimaced. “That’s mine. The worst thing I think I’ve done.”

There were columns of bright paint, with slashes through it. It seemed to Reine-Marie quite dynamic. Not bad at all.

But then, artists probably weren’t the best judges of their own work.

“May I take this?” she asked, indicating the yearbook.

“Yes, as long as you bring it back.”

He spoke, not surprisingly, to Ruth. He said it so tenderly that Reine-Marie was tempted to answer for her.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said to the old poet. “I just sit where I’m put, composed of stone and wishful thinking.”

Reine-Marie recognized the quote from one of Ruth’s poems. She wanted to warn this man to stop. She wanted to tell him that while he might think he was wooing Ruth with her own words, he had no idea what he was poking.

Ruth turned to Professor Massey and spoke, her voice strong and clear.

“That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.”

She’d completed the couplet.

As they left for home, Reine-Marie mulled over what she’d heard. About Professor Norman. His passion, and his folly. The tenth muse. The missing muse.

That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.

Was the tenth muse that deity? Like the other muses, did it inspire? Did it heal?

But did this one also kill, for pleasure?

TWENTY-SIX

Marcel Chartrand placed the rolled-up canvases on the wooden table.

They were in his office at the back of the gallery, away from prying eyes.

The gallery itself was open, and tourists and artists and enthusiasts had streamed in all day. Not to buy, but to pay homage.

It was easy to spot those from away, and those from Québec. The tourists from other provinces or countries stood before the Clarence Gagnon oil paintings and smiled, appreciating the works of art.

Those from Québec looked about to burst into tears. An unsuspected yearning uncovered, discovered. For a simpler time and a simpler life. Before Internet, and climate change, and terrorism. When neighbors worked together, and separation was not a topic or an issue or wise.

Yet the Gagnon paintings weren’t idealized images of country life. They showed hardship. But they also showed such beauty, such peace, that the paintings, and the people looking at them, ached.

Gamache stood at the door between the office and the gallery and watched the patrons react to the paintings.

“Armand?”

Clara called him back in. He closed the door behind him and joined the others at the table.

Over lunch they’d discussed what to do next. They’d spent the morning driving to the cabin Peter had rented. Far from being a charming little Québécois chalet, this was a nondescript, cheap one-room hovel, one step up from a slum.

The landlady remembered Peter.

“Tall. Anglo. Paid cash,” she said, and looked around with distaste at the room, under no illusions about its quality. “Rents by the month. You interested?”

She eyed Clara, the most likely prospect.

“Did he have any visitors?” Clara asked.

The landlady looked at her as though it was a ridiculous question, which it was, but one that had to be asked. As was the next—

“Did he ask you about a man named Norman?”