Louise Penny: Still Life (Three Pines Mysteries)

‘What’s Fair Day’s special meaning?’ Ben asked.

‘Now, that would be cheating. You have to figure it out.

It’s there.’ Jane turned to Ben, smiling. ‘You’ll figure it out, I’m sure.’

‘Why’s it called Fair Day?’ he asked.

‘It was painted at the county fair, the closing parade.’ Jane gave Ben a meaningful look. His mother, her friend, Timmer, had died that afternoon. Was it only a month ago? The whole village had been at the parade, except Timmer, dying of cancer alone in bed, while her son Ben was away in Ottawa at an antiques auction. Clara and Peter had been the ones to break the news to him. Clara would never forget the look on his face when Peter told him his mother was dead. Not sadness, not even pain, yet. But utter disbelief. He wasn’t the only one.

‘Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table,’ Jane said almost under her breath. ‘Auden,’ she explained, nodding to the book in Gabri’s hand and flashing a smile that broke the unexpected, and unexplained, tension.

‘I might just sneak down and take a look at Fair Day before the show,’ said Ben.

Jane took a deep breath. ‘I’d like to invite you all over for drinks after the opening of the exhibition. In the living room.’ Had she said ‘In the nude’ they wouldn’t have been more amazed. ‘I have a bit of a surprise for you.’

‘No kidding,’ said Ruth.

Stomachs full of turkey and pumpkin pie, port and espresso, the tired guests walked home, their flashlights bobbing like huge fireflies. Jane kissed Peter and Clara good-night. It had been a comfortable, unremarkable early Thanksgiving with friends. Clara watched Jane make her way along the winding path through the woods that joined their two homes. Long after Jane had disappeared from view her flashlight could be seen, a bright white light, like Diogenes. Only when Clara heard the eager barking of Jane’s dog Lucy did she gently close her door. Jane was home. Safe.

TWO

Armand Gamache got the call Thanksgiving Sunday just as he was leaving his Montreal apartment. His wife Reine-Marie was already in the car and the only reason he wasn’t on the way to his grand-niece’s christening was because he suddenly needed to use the facilities.

‘Oui, allô?’

‘Monsieur l’Inspedeur?’ said the polite young voice at the other end. ‘This is Agent Nichol. The Superintendent asked me to call. There’s been a murder.’

After decades with the Sûreté du Quebec, most of them in homicide, those words still sent a frisson through him. ‘Where?’ he was already reaching for the pad and pen, which stood next to every phone in their flat.

‘A village in the Eastern Townships. Three Pines. I can be by to pick you up within a quarter hour.’

‘Did you murder this person?’ Reine-Marie asked her husband when Armand told her he wouldn’t be at the two-hour service on hard benches in a strange church.

‘If I did, I’ll find out. Want to come?’

‘What would you do if I ever said yes?’

‘I’d be delighted,’ he said truthfully. After thirty-two years of marriage he still couldn’t get enough of Reine-Marie. He knew if she ever accompanied him on a murder investigation she would do the appropriate thing. She always seemed to know the right thing to do. Never any drama, never confusion. He trusted her.

And once again she did the right thing, by declining his invitation.

‘I’ll just tell them you’re drunk, again,’ she said when he asked whether her family would be disappointed he wasn’t there.

‘Didn’t you tell them I was in a treatment center last time I missed a family gathering?’

‘Well, I guess it didn’t work.’

‘Very sad for you.’

‘I’m a martyr to my husband,’ said Reine-Marie, getting into the driver’s seat. ‘Be safe, dear heart,’ she said.

‘I will, mon coeur.’ He went back to his study in their second-floor flat and consulted the huge map of Quebec he had tacked to one wall. His finger moved south from Montreal to the Eastern Townships and hovered around the border with the United States.

‘Three Pines ... Three Pines,’ he repeated, as he tried to find it. ‘Could it be called something else?’ he asked himself, unable for the first time with this detailed map to find a village. ‘Trois Pins, perhaps?’ No, there was nothing. He wasn’t worried since it was Nichol’s job to find the place. He walked through the large apartment they’d bought in the Outremont quartier of Montreal when the children had been born and even though they’d long since moved out and were having children of their own now, the place never felt empty. It was enough to share it with Reine-Marie. Photos sat on the piano and shelves bulged with books, testament to a life well lived. Reine-Marie had wanted to put up his commendations, but he’d gently refused. Each time he came across the framed commendations in his study closet he remembered not the formal Sûreté ceremony, but the faces of the dead and the living they left behind. No. They had no place on the walls of his home. And now the commendations had stopped completely, since the Arnot case. Still, his family was commendation enough.

Agent Yvette Nichol raced around her home, looking for her wallet.

‘Oh, come on, Dad, you must have seen it,’ she pleaded, watching the wall clock and its pitiless movement.

Her father felt frozen in place. He had seen her wallet. He’d taken it earlier in the day and slipped twenty dollars in. It was a little game they played. He gave her extra money and she pretended not to notice, though every now and then he’d come home from the night shift at the brewery and there’d be an éclair in the fridge with his name on it, in her clear, almost childlike, hand.

He’d taken her wallet a few minutes ago to slip the money in, but when the call had come through for his daughter to report for a homicide case he’d done something he never dreamed he’d do. He hid it, along with her Sûreté warrant card. A small document she’d worked years to earn. He watched her now, throwing cushions from the sofa on to the floor. She’ll tear the place apart looking for it, he realised.

‘Help me, Dad, I’ve got to find it.’ She turned to him, her eyes huge and desperate. Why’s he just standing in the room not doing anything? she wondered. This was her big chance, the moment they’d talked about for years. How many times had they shared this dream of her one day making it on to the Sûreté? It had finally happened, and now, thanks to a lot of hard work and, frankly, her own natural talents as an investigator, she was actually being handed the chance to work on homicide with Gamache. Her Dad knew all about him. Had followed his career in the papers.

‘Your Uncle Saul, now he had a chance to be on the police force, but he washed out,’ her father had told her, shaking his head. ‘Shame on him. And you know what happens to losers?’

‘They lose their lives.’ Yvette knew the right answer to that. She’d been told the family story since she’d had ears to hear.

‘Uncle Saul, your grandparents. All. Now you’re the bright one in the family, Yvette. We’re counting on you.’

And she’d exceeded every expectation, by qualifying for the Sûreté. In one generation her family had gone from victims of the authorities in Czechoslovakia, to the ones who made the rules. They’d moved from one end of the gun to the other.

She liked it there.

But now the only thing standing between the fulfillment of all their dreams and failure, like stupid Uncle Saul, was her missing wallet and her warrant card. The clock was ticking. She’d told the Chief Inspector she’d be at his place in fifteen minutes. That was five minutes ago. She had ten minutes to get across town, and to pick up coffee on the way.