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Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter’s landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.

How shattering it must have been, then, to have played it safe all his life and been expelled anyway. From home. From his career.Advertisement

What would a person do when the tried-and-true was no longer true?

Gamache’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the landscape before him. And listened. Not to the dogs this time. Not the birds or even the oaks and maples and murmuring pines. Now he listened to snippets of conversation, floating up from his memory. Remembering in more detail the conversation from the night before. Putting together a sentence here, a gesture there. A dab, a dot, a brush stroke of words. Until a picture formed.

He stood up, still staring into the distance. Waiting for the final elements. And then he had it.

As he stuffed the book back into his pocket and started down the hill, he saw Myrna leave her bookstore, still in her dressing gown, and practically run across the village green.

They were headed, he knew, for the same place.

Clara’s home.

* * *

“Where are you?” Myrna called.

“In here.”

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Clara got off the stool and went to the studio door and saw Myrna standing like an Easter Island monument, if they’d been carved out of flannel. Myrna often dropped by, but rarely this early and normally she got dressed. Rarely did Myrna bother announcing herself. And Clara had rarely heard this tone in her voice.

Panic? No, not panic.

“Clara?”

Another voice, but the same tone, had arrived.

It was Armand and the tone was excitement.

“I think I know what Peter’s been doing,” he said.

“So do I,” said Myrna.

“So do I,” said Clara. “But I have to make a call.”

“Oui,” said Gamache as he and Myrna followed Clara to the telephone in the living room.

A few minutes later she hung up and, turning to them, she nodded.

They were right. A huge piece of the puzzle had appeared, or at least soon would.

FIFTEEN

“It came to me just now when I looked at his latest work,” said Clara.

They’d moved into Peter’s studio, drawn there by the canvas on the easel.

“How’d you figure it out?” she asked Myrna.

“The color wheel.” Myrna described her vivid English muffin. Gamache, who hadn’t yet had breakfast, thought the marmberry sounded genius.

“You?” Myrna asked him.

“I was thinking of the dog’s breakfast,” he said, and described his different route to the same conclusion. “And how very difficult it must be to paint a feeling. A real mess at first.”

In front of them was the painting Peter had left behind. It was all in shades of white. Beautifully nuanced. It was almost impossible to distinguish the canvas from the paint. The medium from the method.

Someone would probably pay a lot of money for that. And one day, Gamache thought, it might be worth a lot of money. Like finding an artifact from a lost civilization. Or, more accurately, a dinosaur bone. Bleached and fossilized. Valuable only because it was extinct. The last of its kind.

Such a contrast to Myrna’s and Clara’s descriptions of Bean’s exuberant paintings.

They were a mess. A riot of clashing colors. Without technique. Having heard the rules, Bean had understood them, then ignored them. Choosing instead to move away from the conventions.

“When you looked at the paintings on Bean’s wall,” he asked his companions, “what did you feel?”

Clara smiled broadly, remembering. “Honestly? I thought they were awful.”

“You thought that,” Gamache persisted, “but what did you feel?”

“Amusement,” said Myrna.

“Were you laughing at them?” he asked, and Myrna considered.

“No,” she said slowly. “I think they made me happy.”

“Me too,” said Clara. “They were weird and fun and unexpected. I felt sorta buoyed up, you know?”

Myrna nodded.

“And this?” Gamache gestured toward the easel.

All three looked again at the bleached, tasteful canvas. It would go perfectly in someone’s penthouse, in the dining room. No danger of ruining the appetite.

Both women shook their heads. Nothing. It was like looking into a void.

“So Bean is the better painter after all,” said Gamache. “If only Bean had painted them.”

And that was the giant piece of the puzzle they’d all found at the same time. pqdm.com