Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #14) - Louise Penny Page 0,69
drawers and closets.
They acknowledged him.
“Chief.”
Beauvoir nodded back but was, for the most part, silent. Watching. Taking it in. Not monitoring their activity but absorbing the surroundings.
It was always an odd feeling, walking around a person’s home uninvited. Seeing it as they’d left it in the morning. Not realizing they’d never return. Not realizing it was the day of their death.
There was something solid, comfortable, restful about this place. It was a home, not a trophy.
The colors were muted. A soft blue-gray for the walls. But there were touches that seemed almost playful.
A lime-green geometric print on the curtains in the master bedroom. Vintage Expo 67 posters were on the walls of the hallway.
Some clothes were tossed casually on a chair in the bedroom. There were balled-up tissues in the wastepaper basket. Some loose change sat on the chest of drawers, along with a framed photo of Baumgartner with his children. A boy and a girl.
On the bedside table, there was a nonfiction book about American politics and a copy of L’actualité newsmagazine.
Taking out a pen, Beauvoir pulled open the drawer. More magazines. Pens. Cough drops.
He closed the drawer and looked around for evidence of someone else living there. Or visiting. Overnight.
No one else’s clothes, or toothbrush, seemed to be there.
If Baumgartner had a partner or a lover, there was no evidence.
Beauvoir walked down the hall and turned the corner into the room Baumgartner used as a study. And stopped dead.
He didn’t know much about art. Did not recognize any artist. With one exception. And that exception was on the wall, over the fireplace in the study.
It was a Clara Morrow. And not just any “Clara,” it was a copy of her painting of Ruth. But not just Ruth.
Clara had painted the demented old poet as the aging Virgin Mary. Forgotten.
Embittered.
A clawlike hand gripped a ragged blue shawl at her neck. Her face was filled with loathing. Rage. There was none of the tender young virgin about this grizzled old thing.
Ruth.
But. But. There. In her eyes. Was a glint, a gleam.
With all the brushstrokes. All the detail. All the color, the painting, finally came down to one tiny dot.
Ruth as the Virgin Mary saw something in the distance. Barely visible. Hardly there. More a suggestion.
In a bitter old woman’s near-blind eyes, Clara Morrow had painted hope.
Beauvoir knew that most people who looked at the painting saw the despair. It was hard to miss. But what they did miss was the whole point of the painting. That one dot.
The few who got it, though, never forgot it. Dealers and collectors then went back and discovered more treasures in Clara’s odd, sometimes fantastical, sometimes deceptively conventional portraits.
But it was Ruth who’d made her reputation and career. Ruth and a dot of light.
Beauvoir nodded to the portrait and heard the old poet snarl, “Numbnuts.”
“You old hag,” he murmured.
The agents, working in the study, looked at him, but he just gave them a curt nod to continue.
Chief Inspector Beauvoir walked around the room, trying not to get in anyone’s way. He paused at the mantel, to look at the photographs.
Baumgartner with friends. With politicians. At business banquets. More photos of his children. One of Baumgartner and his now ex-wife. They looked good together. A confident and attractive couple. Then Jean-Guy picked up a small picture in a silver frame. It was black and white. This must have been his parents.
The father was slender, handsome, unsmiling. Severe. A tough man to please, Beauvoir guessed.
And his son took after him, at least in looks. In personality too? It didn’t seem so, from the pictures. He was almost always smiling in them.
But then Anthony Baumgartner was good at hiding what he was really feeling. That much had been proven.
Beauvoir’s attention shifted to the other person in the photograph. The Baroness.
She was, by just about any measure, ugly. No way around that. With a round body and sagging spaniel eyes and a complexion that even in the old photo looked blotched.
But she was smiling and had a look of near-permanent amusement about her. There was a gleam in her eyes too. And Beauvoir found himself smiling back.
The Baroness, despite all appearances, was far more attractive than her husband.
Though there was also a slight haughtiness, a suggestion of cunning, in that face.
Hugo Baumgartner obviously took after her.
And Caroline Baumgartner? More the father than the mother, though the Baroness’s haughtiness was there. But what passed for cunning in the mother came out as cruelty in the daughter.