Still Life (A Three Pines Mystery)

'Yes, sir.' And she left. Five minutes later he met a disheveled Beauvoir on the stairs. As they were leaving they heard a noise and saw Nichol descending.

'Stay here,' commanded Gamache.

'No, sir. It's my light.' She might have said, 'purple door candlestick', for all the sense that made to Gamache or Beauvoir.

'Stay here. That's an order. If you hear shots, call for help.'

As the two men walked briskly across the green toward Jane Neal's home, Gamache thought to ask, 'Did you bring your gun?'

'No. Did you?'

'No. But you've got to know Nichol had her's. Oh, well.'

They could see two lights in the home, one upstairs and another in the living room. Gamache and Beauvoir had done this hundreds of times before, they knew their routine. Gamache was always the first through, Beauvoir on his heels, ready to throw the chief out of any line of fire.

Gamache entered the dark mudroom silently and crept up the two steps into the kitchen. He tiptoed to the living-room door and listened. He could hear voices. A man's and a woman's. Unrecognisable, and unintelligible. He signaled to Beauvoir, took a breath, and shoved the door open.

Ben and Clara stood stunned in the middle of the room. Gamache felt as though he'd stumbled into a Noel Coward drawing-room comedy, all Ben needed was an ascot tied around his neck and a Martini glass. Clara, though, belonged more in a circus. She was wearing a bright red single-piece flannel outfit, complete with feet, and probably a hatch at the back.

'We surrender,' said Clara.

'So do we,' said Beauvoir, looking at her outfit, amazed. You'd never find a francophone woman in that.

'What're you doing here?' Gamache went right to the point. It was 3 a.m. and he'd just geared himself up for some unpleasantness. He wanted to go back to bed.

'That's what I was asking Ben. I haven't been sleeping so well since Jane died, so I got up to use the bathroom and saw the light. I came over to see.'

'By yourself?'

'Well, I didn't want to disturb Peter, and besides, this is Jane's home,' she said, as though that explained it. Gamache thought he understood. Clara considered it a safe place. He'd have to have a talk with her.

'Mr Hadley, what are you doing here?'

Ben was looking very embarrassed by now. 'I set my alarm to come here. I wanted to, well, sort of go upstairs, you know.'

This was so deeply uninformative and uninteresting Beauvoir thought he might actually fall asleep on his feet.

'Go on,' said Gamache.

'Well, to do more work. On the walls. You'd said yesterday how important it was to see everything, and well. Then there's Clara, of course.'

'Go on,' said Gamache. In his peripheral vision he could see Beauvoir swaying.

'You tried to hide it, but I could tell you were getting impatient with me,' Ben said to Clara. 'I'm not a very fast worker. I'm not a very fast person, I guess. Anyway, I wanted to surprise you by doing some work tonight. It was probably a dumb idea.'

'I think it's a beautiful idea,' said Clara, going over and giving Ben a hug. 'But you'll just exhaust yourself, you know, and be slow again tomorrow.'

'I hadn't thought of that,' admitted Ben. 'Do you mind, though, if I just put in a couple of hours?'

'That's fine with me,' said Gamache. 'But next time, please tell us.'

'Should I stay and help?' Clara offered. Ben hesitated and seemed on the verge of saying something, but simply shook his head. As he left Gamache looked back at Ben standing alone in the living room. He looked like a little lost boy.

THIRTEEN

It was Thursday evening and Arts Williamsburg was enjoying a record turnout for a vernissage. The tail of Hurricane Kyla was forecast to hit later that night and the expectation added a frisson to the event, as though going to the opening meant taking your life in your hands and reflected both character and courage. Which wasn't, actually, all that far off the mark for most Arts Williamsburg shows.

At past openings only the artists themselves and a few scraggly friends would show up, fortifying themselves with wine from boxes and cheese produced by a board member's goat. This night a gnarly knot of people surrounded Jane's work, which was sitting cloaked on an easel in the center of the room. Around the white walls the other artists' works were ranged, as were the artists themselves. They'd had the misfortune to be chosen for an exhibition in which their work was clearly upstaged by that of a murdered woman. A few might have agreed their misfortune was eclipsed by that of the person actually dead, but even then she'd bested them, even in misfortune. Life as an artist was indeed unfair.

Gamache was waiting for Fair Day to be unveiled. The board of Arts Williamsburg had decided to make it an 'event', so they'd invited the press, which meant the Williamsburg County News and now the chairperson of the jury was waiting for 'le moment juste'. Gamache glanced enviously at Jean Guy, sprawled on one of the comfortable chairs, refusing to give it up to an elderly man. He was exhausted. Bad art did this to him. Actually, he had to admit, any art did this to him. Bad wine, stinky cheese and pretty smelly art took the will to live right out of him. He looked around and came to the sad but inevitable conclusion that the building wouldn't collapse when Kyla finally blew into town later that night.

'As you know, a tragic event has robbed us of a fine woman and as it turns out, a gifted artist,' Elise Jacob, the jury chair, was saying.