Louise Penny - Still Life (Three Pines Mysteries)

Nothing. The chest was empty.

They spent a few minutes making sure there were no secret drawers then the disheartened group flopped back into their seats around the fireplace. Slowly Gamache sat up. He turned to Beauvoir, ‘What did Olivier ask? Who decorated this place?’

‘So?’

‘Well, how do we know it was Jane Neal?’

‘You think she hired someone to do this?’ asked Beauvoir, amazed. Gamache just stared at him. ‘No, you’re thinking someone else who stayed here did it. My God, what an idiot I am,’ said Beauvoir. ‘Yolande. When I interviewed her yesterday she said she’d been decorating here

‘That’s right,’ said Clara, leaning forward in her seat, ‘I saw her lugging in a step ladder and bags full of stuff from the Reno Depot in Cowansville. Peter and I talked about whether she planned to move in.’ Peter nodded his agreement.

‘So Yolande put up the wallpaper?’ Gamache got up and looked at it again. ‘Her home must be a real monstrosity if this is how she decorates.’

‘Not even close,’ said Beauvoir. ‘Just the opposite. Her home is all off-whites and beiges and tasteful colors, like a Decormag model home.’

‘No Happy Faces?’ asked Gamache.

‘Probably never.’

Gamache stood up and paced slowly, his head down, hands clasped behind his back. He took a couple of quick strides over to the Port Neuf pottery, speaking as he went, and was standing facing a wall like a naughty schoolboy. Then he turned to face them. ‘Yolande. What does she do? What drives her?’

‘Money?’ suggested Peter after a moment’s silence.

‘Approval?’ said Beauvoir, coming up beside Gamache, the chief’s excitement transmitting itself to everyone in the room.

‘Close, but it goes deeper. In herself.’

‘Anger?’ Peter tried again. He didn’t like being wrong but he was again, he could tell by Gamache’s reaction. After a moment’s silence Clara spoke, thinking out loud, ‘Yolande lives in a world of her own making. The Decormag perfect world, even though her husband’s a criminal and her son’s a thug and she lies and cheats and steals. And she’s not a

real blonde, in case you hadn’t figured it out. She’s not a real anything from what I can tell. She lives in denial -’

‘That’s it ’Gamache almost jumped up and down like a game-show host. ‘Denial. She lives in denial. She coveres things up. That’s the reason for all her make-up. It’s a mak. Her face is a mask, her home is a mask, a sad attempt to paint and paper over something very ugly.’ He turned to face the wall then knelt down, his hand on a seam of wallpaper. ‘People tend to be consistent. That’s what’s wrong here. Had you said’, he turned to Beauvoir, ‘that Yolande had this same wallpaper at hom, that’d be one thing, but she doesn’t. So why would she spend days putting this up?’

‘To hide something’ said Clara, kneeling down beside him. His fingers had found a small corner of the wallpaper that was already peeling back

‘Exactly.’ Carefully Gamache pulled back one the corner and it rolled off, exposing about a foot of wall, and more wallpaper underneath.

‘Could she have put two layers on?’ Clara asked , feeling herself deflating.

‘I don’t think she had time,’ said Gamache. Clara leaned in closer.

‘Peter, look at this.’ He joined them on his knees and peered at the exposed wall. ‘This isn’t wallpaper,’ he said, looking at Clara, stunned.

‘ I didn’t think so,’ said Clara

‘Well, what is it, for God’s sake?’ said Gamache.

‘It’s Jane’s drawing,’ said Clara. ‘Jane drew this.’

Gamache looked again and could see it. The bright colors, the childish strokes. He couldn’t tell what is was, not enough had been revealed, but it had indeed been put there by Miss Neal.

‘Is it possible?’ he asked Clara as the two stood and looked around the room.

‘Is what possible?’ asked Beauvoir. ‘Voyons, what are you talking about?’

‘The wallpaper,’ said Gamache. ‘I was wrong. It wasn’t meant to distract, it was meant to cover up. Where you see wallpaper, that’s where she drew.’

‘But it’s everywhere,’ protested Beauvoir. ‘She couldn’t—’ He stopped, seeing the look on the chief’s face. Maybe she did. Was it possible, he wondered, joining the others and turning around and around. All the walls? The ceiling? The floors even? He realised he’d far underestimated Les Anglais and their potential for insanity.

‘And upstairs?’ he asked. Gamache caught his eye and it was as though the world paused for an instant. He nodded.

‘C’est incroyable, ’ whispered the two men together. Clara was beyond speech, and Peter was already over at another seam across the room, tugging.

‘There’s more here,’ he called, standing up.

‘This was her shame,’ said Gamache, and Clara knew the truth of it.

Within an hour Peter and Clara had spread tarpaulins and moved the furniture. Before leaving, Gamache gave his approval for them to remove the wallpaper and as much of the covering paint as possible. Clara called Ben and he readily volunteered. She was delighted. She would have called Myrna, who would definitely have been a far harder worker than Ben, but this was a job that called for delicacy and the touch of an artist, and Ben had that.

‘Any idea how long this’ll take?’ asked Gamache.

‘Honestly? Including the ceiling and the floors? Probably a year.’

Gamache frowned.

‘It’s important, isn’t it?’ said Clara, reading his expression.

‘Could be. I don’t know, but I think it is.’

‘We’ll go as fast as we dare. Don’t want to ruin the images underneath. But I think we can get a lot of the stuff off, enough to see what’s underneath.’

Fortunately Yolande, proving slapdash to the end, hadn’t prepped the wall, so the paper was peeling off already. Nor had she used primer under the painted bits, to Peter and Clara’s great relief. They started after lunch and continued with only a break for beer and chips mid-afternoon. In the evening Peter rigged up some floodlights and they continued, except Ben who felt maybe his elbow was acting up.

At about seven a tired and bedraggled Peter and Clara decided to break for food and joined Ben by the fireplace. He’d at least managed to lay it and light it, and now they found him, his feet on the hassock, sipping red wine and reading Jane’s latest copy of The Guardian Weekly. Gabri arrived with Szechwan take-out. He’d heard rumors of the activity and wanted desperately to see for himself. He’d even rehearsed.

The huge man, made even more enormous by his coat and scarves, swept into the room. Stopping dead in the center, and making sure he held his audience, he looked around and declared, ‘Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.’

His appreciative audience roared their approval, took the food and kicked him out feeling that Jane and Oscar Wilde made one dead person too many in the room.

They worked into the night, and finally gave it up around midnight, too tired to trust themselves anymore and both slightly nauseous from inhaling paint remover. Ben had long since gone home.

The next morning, in the light of day, they saw they’d done about four square feet upstairs and a quarter of one wall downstairs. It looked as though Gamache had been right. Jane had covered every inch of her home. And Yolande had covered that. By midday a little more had been uncovered. Clara stood back to admire the few feet of wallpaper she’d stripped and Jane’s work underneath. Enough was emerging now to make it quite exciting. There seemed to be a pattern and purpose to Jane’s work. But what that purpose might be wasn’t clear, yet.