A Rule Against Murder

“Why indeed?” said Gamache, but chose not to elaborate. “Who do you think killed your stepdaughter?”

“Besides Charles?”

Gamache remained silent.

“This is a difficult family, Chief Inspector. A complicated one.”

“You called them ‘seven mad Morrows in a verchère.’”

“Did I?”

“What did you mean? Or were you just angry about being left behind?”

As Gamache had hoped, that roused the elderly man who up until that moment had seemed perfectly at ease. Now he turned in his chair and looked at Gamache. But not with annoyance. He looked amused.

“I remember I told Clara that not everyone makes the boat,” said Finney. “What I didn’t say is that not everybody wants to make the boat.”

“This is a family, Monsieur Finney, and you’ve been excluded. Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Hurt is having your daughter crushed to death. Hurt is losing your father, your mother. Hurt is all sorts of things. It isn’t being forced to stand on a shore, especially this shore.”

“The surroundings aren’t the issue,” said Gamache quietly. “The interior is. Your body can be standing in the loveliest of places, but if your spirit is crushed, it doesn’t matter. Being excluded, shunned, is no small event.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Finney leaned back again into the deep Adirondack chair. Across the lake a couple of O Canada birds called to each other. It was just after seven.

Bean’s alarms would have gone off by now.

“Did you know that Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were friends?”

“I didn’t,” said Gamache, staring straight ahead, but listening closely.

“They were. Thoreau was once thrown in jail for protesting some government law he believed violated freedom. Emerson visited him there and said, ‘Henry, how did you come to be in here?’ Do you know what Thoreau replied?”

“No,” said Gamache.

“He said, ‘Ralph, how did you come to be out there?’” After a moment Finney made a strangled noise. Gamache turned to look. It was laughter. A soft, almost inaudible, chuckle.

“You called them mad. What did you mean?”

“Well now, that’s just my perception, but I’ve seen men go mad before and I’ve thought about it quite a bit. What do we call madness?”

Gamache was beginning to appreciate that Finney spoke in rhetorical questions.

“Not going to answer?”

Gamache smiled at himself. “Do you want me to? Madness is losing touch with reality, creating and living in your own world.”

“True, though sometimes that’s the sanest thing to do. The only way to survive. Abused people, especially children, do it.”

Gamache wondered how Finney knew that.

“They’ve lost their minds,” said Finney. “Not always a bad thing. But there’s another expression we use to describe madness.”

A movement to his left caught Gamache’s eye, a flapping. Looking over he saw Bean running down the lawn. Fleeing? Gamache wondered. But after a moment he realized the child was neither fleeing nor running.

“We say they’ve taken leave of their senses,” said Finney.

Bean was galloping, like a horse, a huge swimming towel flapping behind.

“The Morrows are mad,” Finney continued, either oblivious of the child or used to it, “because they’ve taken leave of their senses. They live in their heads and pay no heed to any other information flooding in.”

“Peter Morrow’s an artist and a gifted one,” said Gamache. “You can’t be that good an artist without being in touch with your senses.”

“He is gifted,” agreed Finney, “but how much better would he be if he stopped thinking and started just being? Started listening, smelling, feeling?”

Finney sipped his now cool coffee. Gamache knew he should get up, but he lingered, enjoying the company of this extravagantly ugly man.

“I remember the first time I intentionally killed something.”

The statement was so unexpected Gamache looked over to the whittled old man to see what prompted it. Bert Finney pointed a gnarled finger at a point of land. Just drifting round it was a boat with a fisherman, alone in the early morning calm, casting.

Whiz. Plop. And the far-off ticking, like Bean’s clocks, as the line was slowly reeled in.

“I was about ten and my brother and I went out to shoot squirrels. He took my father’s rifle and I used his. I’d seen him shoot often enough but had never been allowed to do it myself. We snuck out and ran into the woods. It was a morning like this, when parents sleep in and kids get up to mischief. We dodged between the trees and threw ourselves onto the ground, pretending to be fighting the enemy. Trench warfare.”