A Trick of the Light (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #7)

Had he hidden himself in the flower beds? Crouching behind the tall peony? Had he peered out from the morning glory climbing the post? Had he knelt behind the growing phlox?

Waiting?

She looked at each and every perennial, each shrub. Looking for something knocked down, knocked askew, a limb twisted, a bud broken off.

But it was perfect. Myrna and Gabri had worked days on the garden, getting it immaculate for the party. And it was. Last night. And it was that morning.

Except for the police, like pests, crawling all over it. And the bright body. A blight.

“Do you see anything?” she asked Gabri.

“No,” he said. “If the murderer hid back here it wasn’t in one of the flower beds. Maybe behind a tree?” He waved toward the maples but Gamache shook his head.

“Too far away. It would take him too long to make it across the lawn and around the flower beds. She’d have seen him coming.”

“So where did he hide?” Olivier asked.

“He didn’t,” said Gamache, sitting in the Adirondack chair. From there the body was also hidden. No, Clara couldn’t see the dead woman.

The Chief Inspector hauled himself up. “He didn’t hide. He waited in plain sight.”

“And she walked right up to him?” Peter asked. “She knew him?”

“Or he walked up to her,” said Gamache. “Either way, she wasn’t alarmed or frightened.”

“What was she doing back here?” Clara asked. “The barbeque was out there,” she waved beyond their home. “Everything was on the green. The food, the drinks, the music. The caterers set up all the tables and chairs out front.”

“But if people wanted to, they could walk into back yards?” Gamache asked, trying to get a picture of the event.

“Sure,” said Olivier. “If they wanted. There weren’t any fences or ropes up to stop them, but there was no need.”

“Well—” said Clara.

They turned to her.

“Well, I didn’t come back here last night, but I have at other parties. To kind of escape for a few minutes, you know?”

To their surprise, Gabri nodded. “I do the same thing, sometimes. Just to be quiet, get away from all the people.”

“Did you last night?” Gamache asked.

Gabri shook his head. “Too much to do. We had caterers, but you still have to supervise.”

“So it’s possible the dead woman came back here for a quiet moment,” said Gamache. “She might not have known it was your home.” He looked at Clara and Peter. “She just chose any place that was private, away from the crowds.”

They were silent then, for a moment. Imagining the woman in the bright red “look at me” dress. Slipping around the side of the old brick home. Away from the music, and fireworks, from the people looking at her.

To find a few moments of peace and quiet.

“She doesn’t seem the shy type,” said Gabri.

“Neither do you,” said Gamache with a small smile and surveyed the garden.

There was a problem. There were quite a few problems, actually, but the one that perplexed the Chief Inspector at the moment was that none of the four people with him now had seen the dead woman alive, at the party.

“Bonjour.”

Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir approached. As he got closer Gabri broke into a smile and extended his hand.

“I’m beginning to think you’re bad luck,” said Gabri. “Every time you come to Three Pines there’s a body.”

“And I think you provide them just for the pleasure of my company,” said Beauvoir, warmly shaking Gabri’s hand, then accepting Olivier’s.

They’d seen each other the evening before, at the vernissage. At that time they’d been in Peter and Clara’s element. The gallery. But now they were in Beauvoir’s habitat. A crime scene.

Art scared him. But pin a dead body to the wall and he was fine. Or, in this case, drop it into a garden. This he understood. It was simple. Always so simple.

Someone had hated the victim enough to kill her.

His job was to find that person and lock him up.

There was nothing subjective about it. No question of good and bad. It wasn’t an issue of perspective or nuance. No shading. Nothing to understand. It just was.

Collect the facts. Put them in the right order. Find the killer.

Of course, while it was simple it wasn’t always easy.

But he’d take a murder over a vernissage any day.

Though, like everyone else here, he suspected in this case the murder and the vernissage were one and the same. Inter-locked.