Instead, this man had brought delicate leaded crystal with him into the woods.
Gamache scanned the books, not daring to touch them. “Have these been dusted?”
“They have,” said Morin. “And I looked inside for a name, but they’re no help. Different names written in most of them. Obviously secondhand.”
“Obviously,” whispered Gamache to himself. He looked at the one still in his hand. Opening it to the bookmark he read,
Gamache turned to the front page and inhaled softly.
It was a first edition.
NINETEEN
“Peter?” Clara knocked lightly on the door to his studio.
He opened it, trying not to look secretive but giving up. Clara knew him too well, and knew he was always secretive about his art.
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad,” he said, longing to close the door and get back to it. All day he’d been picking up his brush, approaching his painting then lowering the brush again. Surely the painting wasn’t finished? It was so embarrassing. What would Clara think? What would his gallery think? The critics? It was unlike anything else he’d ever done. Well, not ever. But certainly since childhood.
He could never let anyone see this.
It was ridiculous.
What it needed, clearly, was more definition, more detail. More depth. The sorts of things his clients and supporters had come to expect. And buy.
He’d picked up and lowered his brush a dozen times that day. This had never happened to him before. He’d watched, mystified, as Clara had been racked by self-doubt, had struggled and had finally produced some marginal piece of work. Her
That’s what came of inspiration.
No, Peter was much more clear. More disciplined. He planned each piece, drew and drafted each work, knew months in advance what he’d be working on. He didn’t rely on airy-fairy inspiration.
Until now. This time he’d come into the studio with a fireplace log, cut cleanly so that the rings of age were visible. He’d taken his magnifying glass and approached it, with a view to enlarging a tiny part of it beyond recognition. It was, he liked to tell art critics at his many sold-out
They ate it up. But this time it hadn’t worked. He’d been unable to see the simple truth. Instead, he’d painted this.
When Clara left Peter plopped down in his chair and stared at the bewildering piece of work on his easel and repeated silently to himself,
Olivier stood on the
The cabin had been found. He’d prayed this wouldn’t happen, but it had. And for the first time since he’d arrived in Three Pines he felt the dark forest closing in.
But if all these things,” Beauvoir nodded to the interior of the single room, “are priceless why didn’t the murderer take them?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” said Gamache from the comfort of the large wing chair by the empty fireplace. “What was the murder about, Jean Guy? Why kill this man who seems to have lived a quiet, secret life in the woods for years, maybe decades?”
“And then once he’s dead, why take the body but leave the valuables?” Beauvoir sat in the chair opposite the Chief.
“Unless the body was more valuable than the rest?”
“Then why leave it at the old Hadley house?”
“If the murderer had just left the body here we’d never have found it,” reasoned Gamache, perplexed. “Never known there’d been a murder.”
“Why kill the man, if not for his treasure?” asked Beauvoir.
“Treasure?”
“What else is it? Priceless stuff in the middle of nowhere? It’s buried treasure, only instead of being buried in the ground it’s buried in the forest.”
But the murderer had left it there. And instead, had taken the only thing he wanted from that cabin. He’d taken a life.
“Did you notice this?” Beauvoir got up and walked to the door. Opening it he pointed upward, with a look of amusement.
There on the lintel above the door was a number.
16
