A Fatal Grace

‘She thought she was so great, coming here and lording it over us. Li Bien this, Be Calm that. All her tasteful white clothes and furnishings and bedding linens and stupid aura pillows and calming baby blankets and God knows what other crap. She was sick. Her emotions were denied and stunted and twisted and made into something grotesque. She claimed to be so balanced, so grounded. Well, she was so grounded it killed her. Karma.’

Beauvoir wondered whether karma was an Indian word for irony.

Mother radiated anger. It was how he liked his suspects. Out of control, liable to say and do anything.

‘And yet you and CC both called your places Be Calm. Doesn’t calm mean placid? Showing nothing?’

‘There’s a difference between flat and calm.’

‘I think you’re just playing word games. Like you did with that.’ He pointed to the wall where the quote was stenciled. Then he walked over to it.

‘Be calm, and know that I am God. You told Chief Inspector Gamache it came from Isaiah, but doesn’t it actually come from Psalms?’

He loved this part of the job. He could see her deflate in front of him, surprised she didn’t make a little squealing sound. Slowly he brought out his notebook.

‘Psalm 46 verse 10. Be still, and know that I am God. You lied and you intentionally put a misquote on your wall. Why? What does Be Calm really mean?’

They were both still then. Beauvoir could hear her breathing.

Then something happened. He saw what he’d just done. He’d broken an elderly woman. Something shifted and he saw before him a beaten old lady, with wild hair and a plump sagging body. Her face was very white and wrinkled and soft and her hands were veined and bony and trembling.

Her head was bowed.

He’d done this. He’d done it on purpose and he’d done it gleefully.

‘Eleanor and Mother stayed at the commune for six months,’ Em told Gamache, her hands suddenly restless, playing with the handle of her espresso cup. ‘Mother was getting deeper and deeper into it but El started to get agitated again. Eventually she left, came back to Canada, but not back home. We lost track of her for a while.’

‘When did you realize she was unstable?’ Gamache asked.

‘We’d always known that. Her mind would race. She couldn’t concentrate on any one thing, but hopped about from project to project, brilliant at them all. But, to be fair, if she found something she liked she’d become possessed by it. She’d bring all her talents, all her energies, to bear. And when she did that she was formidable.’

‘Like Li Bien?’ Gamache brought a cardboard box from his satchel.

‘What else have you got in there?’ Em leaned around the table to look at his leather satchel. ‘The Montreal Canadians?’

‘Hope not. They’re playing tonight.’ Em stared at his huge, careful hands as they peeled back the wrap, slowly revealing the object below. It stood on the table next to the wooden box, and for a golden moment Émilie Longpré was in her young body, staring at the Li Bien ball for the first time. It was luminous and somehow unreal, its beauty imprisoned beneath the layer of invisible glass. It was both lovely and horrible.

It was Eleanor Allaire.

Young Émilie Longpré had known then that they’d lose her. Had known then their luminous friend couldn’t survive in the real world. And now the Li Bien ball had returned to Three Pines, but without its creator.

‘May I hold it?’

Gamache placed it in her hands as he had the box and again she held it, but this time in hands closed tightly round it, as though hugging and protecting something precious.

He reached into his satchel for the last time and withdrew a long leather cord, stained with dirt and oils and blood. And dangling from it was an eagle’s head.

‘I need the whole truth, madame.’

Beauvoir was sitting next to Mother now, listening intently as he had when as a child his own mother had read stories of adventure and tragedy.

‘When CC first came here,’ Mother explained, ‘she showed an almost unnatural interest in us.’

Beauvoir knew instinctively that by ‘us’ she meant Émilie, Kaye and herself.

‘She’d drop in and seem to interrogate us. It wasn’t a normal sort of social call even for someone as maladroit as CC.’

‘When did you realize she was El’s daughter?’

Mother hesitated. Beauvoir had the impression it wasn’t to think up a lie, but rather to cast her mind back.

‘It was a cascade. What put it beyond doubt for me was the reference to Ramen Das in her book.’ Mother nodded to the small altar by the wall with its sticks of stinky incense sitting in holders on a brightly colored and mirrored piece of cloth. Stuck to the wall above it was a poster, and below that a framed photograph. Beauvoir got up and looked at them. The poster showed an emaciated Indian man in a diaper standing by a stone wall gripping a long cane and smiling. He looked like Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, but then all elderly Indians did to Beauvoir. It was the same poster he’d disappeared into during his last visit. In the smaller photograph the same man was sitting with two young western women, slim and also smiling, and wearing billowy nightgowns. Or maybe they were curtains. Or sofa covers. Astonished, he turned to Mother. Wild-haired, pear-shaped, exhausted Mother.