Louise Penny - Still Life (Three Pines Mysteries)

‘What brought you here? Loss?’

‘That’s hardly fair, Chief Inspector, now you’ve got me. Yes. But not in a conventional way, since of course I always have to be special and different.’ Myrna put back her head and laughed at herself. ‘I lost sympathy with many of my patients. After twenty-five years of listening to their complaints I finally snapped. I woke up one morning bent out of shape about this client who was forty-three but acting sixteen. Every week he’d come with the same complaints, “Someone hurt me. Life is unfair. It’s not my fault.” For three years I’d been making suggestions, and for three years he’d done nothing. Then, listening to him this one day, I suddenly understood. He wasn’t changing because he didn’t want to. He had no intention of changing. For the next twenty years we would go through this charade. And I realised in that same instant that most of my clients were exactly like him.’

‘Surely, though, some were trying.’

‘Oh, yes. But they were the ones who got better quite quickly. Because they worked hard at it and genuinely wanted it. The others said they wanted to get better, but I think, and this isn’t popular in psychology circles’—here she leaned forward and whispered, conspiratorially—‘I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.’

Myrna leaned back again in her chair and took a long breath.

‘Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead “still” lives, waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘Waiting for someone to save them. Expecting someone to save them or at least protect them from the big, bad world. The thing is no one else can save them because the problem is theirs and so is the solution. Only they can get out of it.’

“‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”’

Myrna leaned forward, animated, ‘That’s it. The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices. But, but’—now her eyes shone and she almost vibrated with excitement—‘the most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. We’re the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted. I used to love talking about this with Timmer. Now there was a bright woman. I miss her.’ Myrna threw herself back in her chair. ‘The vast majority of troubled people don’t get it. The fault is here, but so is the solution. That’s the grace.’

‘But that would mean admitting there was something wrong with them. Don’t most unhappy people blame others? That’s what was so stark, so scary about that line from Julius Caesar. Who among us can admit that the problem is us?’

‘You got it.’

‘You mentioned Timmer Hadley. What was she like?’

‘I only met her near the end of her life. Never knew her when she was healthy. Timmer was a smart woman, in every way. Always well turned out, trim, elegant, even. I liked her.’

‘Did you sit with her?’

‘Yes. Sat with her the day before she died. Took a book to read but she wanted to look at old pictures so I got her album down and we flipped through it. There was a picture of Jane in it, from centuries ago. She must have been sixteen, maybe seventeen. She was with her parents. Timmer didn’t like the Neals. Cold, she said, social climbers.’

Myrna suddenly stopped, on the verge of saying something else.

‘Go on,’ prompted Gamache.

‘That’s it,’ said Myrna.

‘Now, I know that wasn’t all she said. Tell me.’

‘I can’t. She was doped up with morphine and I know she would never have said anything had she been in her right mind. Besides, it has nothing to do with Jane’s death. It happened over sixty years ago.’

‘The funny thing about murder is that the act is often committed decades before the actual action. Something happens, and it leads, inexorably, to death many years later. A bad seed is planted. It’s like those old horror films from the Hammer studios, of the monster, not running, never running, but walking without pause, without thought or mercy, toward its victim. Murder is often like that. It starts way far off.’

‘I still won’t tell you what Timmer said.’

Gamache knew he could persuade her. But why? If the lab tests exonerated the Crofts, then he’d come back, but otherwise she was right. He didn’t need to know, but, God knew, he really wanted to know.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I won’t press. But one day I might ask again and you’ll need to tell me.’

‘Fair enough. You ask again, and I’ll tell you.’

‘I have another question. What do you think of the boys who threw the manure?’

‘We all do stupid, cruel things as children. I remember I once took a neighbor’s dog and shut it in my house, then told the little girl her dog had been picked up by the dog catcher and destroyed. I still wake up at three in the morning seeing her face. I tracked her down about ten years ago to say I was sorry but she’d been killed in a car accident.’

‘You have to forgive yourself,’ said Gamache, holding up Being.

‘You’re right, of course. But maybe I don’t want to. Maybe that’s something I don’t want to lose. My own private hell. Horrible, but mine. I’m quite thick at times. And places.’ She laughed, brushing invisible crumbs from her caftan.

‘Oscar Wilde said there’s no sin except stupidity.’

‘And what do you think of that?’ Myrna’s eyes lit up, happy to so obviously turn the spotlight on him. He thought a moment.

‘I’ve made mistakes that have allowed killers to take more lives. And each of those mistakes, upon looking back, was stupid. A conclusion jumped to, a false assumption held too firmly. Each wrong choice I make puts a community at risk.’

‘Have you learned from your mistakes?’

‘Yes, teacher, I believe I have.’

‘Then that’s all you can ask of yourself, Grasshopper. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll forgive myself if you forgive yourself.’

‘Deal,’ said Gamache, and wished it was that easy.

Ten minutes later Armand Gamache was sitting at the table by the Bistro window looking out on to Three Pines. He’d bought just one book from Myrna, and it wasn’t Being or Loss. She’d seemed slightly surprised when he put the book next to her till. He now sat and read, a Cinzano and some pretzels in front of him, and every now and then he’d lower the book to stare through the window and through the village and into the woods beyond. The clouds were breaking up, leaving patches of early evening sunshine on the small mountains that surrounded Three Pines. Once or twice he flipped through the book, looking for illustrations. Finding what he was looking for he ear-marked them and continued reading. It was a very pleasant way to pass the time.

A manila file hitting the table brought him back to the Bistro.

‘The autopsy report.’ The coroner, Sharon Harris, sat down and ordered a drink.

He lowered his book and picked up the dossier. After a few minutes he had a question. ‘If the arrow hadn’t hit her heart, would it still have killed her?’

‘If it had come close to the heart, yes. But’, Dr Harris leaned forward and bent the autopsy report down so she could see it, upside down, ‘she was hit straight through the heart. You see? Whoever did it must have been a great shot. That wasn’t a fluke.’

‘And yet I suspect that’s exactly the conclusion we’re going to reach, that it was a fluke. A hunting accident. Not the first in Quebec history.’