Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1) - Louise Penny Page 0,105

she was sure. And then, finally, she understood.

The problem was Gamache.

There he was talking and laughing, smug and oblivious to the pain he caused. He was no different than the police her father had told her about in Czechoslovakia. How could she have been so blind? With relief she realised she needn’t tell her father anything. After all, it wasn’t her fault.

Nichol turned away, the sight too painful, of people having fun and her own lonely reflection.

An hour later the party had emigrated from Arts Williamsburg to Jane’s home. The wind was picking up and the rain was just beginning. Clara stationed herself in the middle of the living room, just as Jane might have, so that as everyone arrived she could see their reactions.

‘Oh. My. God.’ was heard a lot, as was ‘Holy shit’ and ‘Tabarouette’. ‘Tabarnouche’ and ‘Tabernacle’ bounced off the walls. Jane’s living room had become a shrine to multilingual swearing. Clara felt pretty much at home. A beer in one hand and cashews in the other, she watched as the guests arrived and were swept away by amazement. Most of the downstairs walls had been exposed and there, swooping and swirling before them, was the geography and history of Three Pines. The cougars and lynx, long since disappeared, the boys marching off to the Great War, and straight on to the modest stained-glass window of St Thomas’s, commemorating the dead. There were the dope plants growing outside the Williamsburg police station, a happy cat sitting on the window looking down at the healthy growth.

The first thing Clara did, of course, was find herself on the wall. Her face poked out from a bush of Old Garden Roses, while Peter was found crouching behind a noble statue of Ben in shorts, standing on his mother’s lawn. Peter was in his Robin Hood outfit and sported a bow and arrow, while Ben stood bold and strong, staring at the house. Clara looked quite closely to see whether Jane had painted snakes oozing out of the old Hadley home, but she hadn’t.

The home was quickly filling with laughter and shrieks and howls of recognition. And sometimes a person was moved to tears they couldn’t explain. Gamache and Beauvoir worked the room, watching and listening.

‘… but what gets me is the delight in the images,’ Myrna was saying to Clara. ‘Even the deaths, accidents, funerals, bad crops, even they have a kind of life. She made them natural.’

‘Hey, you,’ Clara called out to Ben who came over eagerly. ‘Look at yourself.’ She waved at his image on the wall.

‘Very bold.’ He smiled. ‘Chiseled, even.’

Gamache looked over at Ben’s image on Jane’s wall, a strong man, but staring at his parent’s home. Not for the first time he thought Timmer Hadley’s death might have been quite timely for her son. He might finally get away from her shadow. Interestingly, though, it was Peter who was standing in shadow. Ben’s shadow. Gamache wondered what that could mean. He was beginning to appreciate that Jane’s home was a kind of key to the community. Jane Neal had been a very observant woman.

Elise Jacob arrived at that moment, nodding to Gamache as she walked in. ‘Phew, what a night, –’ but her eyes quickly refocused to the wall behind him. Then she spun around to examine the wall behind her.

‘Christ,’ said the lovely, soignee woman, waving to Gamache and the room in general as though perhaps she was the first to notice the drawings. Gamache simply smiled and waited for her to gather herself.

‘Did you bring it?’ he asked, not altogether sure her ears were working yet.

‘C’est brillant,’ she whispered. ‘Formidable. Magnifique. Holy shit.’

Gamache was a patient man and he gave her a few minutes to absorb the room. Besides, he realised he had developed a kind of pride about the home, as though he had had something to do with its creation.

‘It’s genius, of course,’ said Elise. ‘I used to work as a curator at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Ottawa before retiring down here.’ Gamache again marveled at the people who chose to live in this area. Was Margaret Atwood a garbage collector perhaps? Or maybe Prime Minister Mulroney had picked up a second career delivering the mail. No one was who they seemed. Everyone was more. And one person in this room was very much more.

‘Who’d have thought the same woman who painted that dreadful Fair Day did all this?’ Elise continued. ‘I guess we all have bad days. Still,