How the Light Gets In: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel (2 page)

Constance laughed, a puff of humor that floated over the village green and joined the wood smoke from the chimneys.

Four days ago she thought she’d had her last laugh. But ankle-deep in snow and freezing her bottom off beside Ruth, she’d discovered more. Hidden away. Here in Three Pines. Where laughter was kept.

The two women watched the activity on the village green in silence, except for the odd quack, which Constance hoped was the duck.

Though much the same age, the elderly women were opposites. Where Constance was soft, Ruth was hard. Where her hair was silky and long, and done in a neat bun, Ruth’s was coarse and chopped short. Where Constance was rounded, Ruth was sharp. All edges and edgy.

Rosa stirred and flapped her wings. Then she slid off Ruth’s lap onto the snowy bench and waddled the few paces to Constance. Climbing onto Constance’s lap, Rosa settled.

Ruth’s eyes narrowed. But she didn’t move.

It had snowed day and night since Constance had arrived in Three Pines. Having lived in Montréal all her adult life, she’d forgotten snow could be quite so beautiful. Snow, in her experience, was something that needed to be removed. It was a chore that fell from the sky.

But this was the snow of her childhood. Joyful, playful, bright and clean. The more the merrier. It was a toy.

It covered the fieldstone homes and clapboard homes and rose brick homes that ringed the village green. It covered the bistro and the bookstore, the boulangerie and the general store. It seemed to Constance that an alchemist was at work, and Three Pines was the result. Conjured from thin air and deposited in this valley. Or perhaps, like the snow, the tiny village had fallen from the sky, to provide a soft landing for those who’d also fallen.

When Constance had first arrived and parked outside Myrna’s bookstore, she’d been worried when the flurries intensified into a blizzard.

“Should I move my car?” Constance had asked Myrna before they went up to bed. Myrna had stood at the window of her New and Used Bookstore and considered the question.

“I think it’s fine where it is.”

It’s fine where it is.

And it was. Constance had had a restless night, listening for the sirens from the snow plows. For the warning to dig her car out and move it. The windows of her room had rattled as the wind whipped the snow against it. She could hear the blizzard howl through the trees and past the solid homes. Like something alive and on the hunt. Finally Constance drifted off to sleep, warm under the duvet. When she awoke, the storm had blown by. Constance went to the window, expecting to see her car buried, just a white mound under the foot of new snow. Instead, the road had been plowed and all the cars dug out.

It’s fine where it is.

And so, finally, was she.

For four days and four nights snow had continued to fall, before Billy Williams returned with his plow. And until that happened, the village of Three Pines was snowed in, cut off. But it didn’t matter, since everything they needed was right there.

Slowly, seventy-seven-year-old Constance Pineault realized she was fine, not because she had a bistro, but because she had Olivier and Gabri’s bistro. There wasn’t just a bookstore, there was Myrna’s bookstore, Sarah’s bakery, and Monsieur Béliveau’s general store.

She’d arrived a self-sufficient city woman, and now she was covered in snow, sitting on a bench beside a crazy person, and she had a duck on her lap.

Who was nuts now?

But Constance Pineault knew, far from being crazy, she’d finally come to her senses.

“I came to ask if you’d like a drink,” said Constance.

“For chrissake, old woman, why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Ruth stood and brushed the flakes off her cloth coat.

Constance also rose and handed Rosa back to Ruth, saying, “Duck off.”

Ruth snorted and accepted the duck, and the words.

Olivier and Gabri were walking over from the B and B, and met them on the road.

“It’s a gay blizzard,” said Ruth.

“I used to be as pure as the driven snow,” Gabri confided in Constance. “Then I drifted.”

Olivier and Constance laughed.

“Channeling Mae West?” said Ruth. “Won’t Ethel Merman be jealous?”

“Plenty of room in there for everyone,” said Olivier, eyeing his large partner.

Constance had had no dealings with homosexuals before this, at least not that she knew of. All she knew about them was that they were “they.” Not “us.” And “they” were unnatural. At her most charitable, she’d considered homosexuals defective. Diseased.

But mostly, if she thought of them at all, it was with disapproval. Even disgust.

Until four days ago. Until the snow began to fall, and the little village in the valley was cut off. Until she’d discovered that Olivier, the man she’d been cool to, had dug her car out. Unasked. Without comment.

Until she’d seen, from her bedroom window in Myrna’s loft above the bookstore, Gabri trudging, head bent against the blowing snow, carrying coffee and warm croissants for villagers who couldn’t make it to the bistro for breakfast.

As she watched, he delivered the food, then shoveled their porches and stairs and front walks.

And then left. And went to the next home.

Constance felt Olivier’s strong hand on her arm, holding her secure. If a stranger came into the village at this moment, what would he think? That Gabri and Olivier were her sons?

She hoped so.

Constance stepped through the door and smelled the now familiar scent of the bistro. The dark wood beams and wide-plank pine floors were permeated with more than a century of maple-wood fires and strong coffee.

“Over here.”

Constance followed the voice. The mullioned windows were letting in whatever daylight was available, but it was still dim. Her eyes went to the large stone hearths at either end of the bistro, lit with cheery fires and surrounded by comfortable sofas and armchairs. In the center of the room, between the fires and sitting areas, antique pine tables were set with silverware and mismatched bone china. A large, bushy Christmas tree stood in a corner, its red, blue, and green lights on, a haphazard array of baubles and beads and icicles hung from the branches.

A few patrons sat in armchairs nursing
cafés au lait
or hot chocolates, and read day-old newspapers in French and English.

The shout had come from the far end of the room, and while Constance couldn’t yet clearly see the woman, she knew perfectly well who had spoken.

“I got you a tea.” Myrna was standing, waiting for them by one of the fireplaces.

“You’d better be talking to her,” said Ruth, taking the best seat by the fire and putting her feet on the hassock.

Constance hugged Myrna and felt the soft flesh under the thick sweater. Though Myrna was a large black woman at least twenty years her junior, she felt, and smelt, like Constance’s mother. It had given Constance a turn at first, as though someone had shoved her slightly off balance. But then she’d come to look forward to these embraces.

Constance sipped her tea, watched the flames flicker, and half listened as Myrna and Ruth talked about the latest shipment of books, delayed by the snow.

She felt herself nodding off in the warmth.

Four days. And she had two gay sons, a large black mother, a demented poet for a friend and was considering getting a duck.

It was not what she’d expected from this visit.

She became pensive, mesmerized by the fire. She wasn’t at all sure Myrna understood why she’d come. Why she’d contacted her after so many years. It was vital that Myrna understand, but now time was running out.

“Snow’s letting up,” said Clara Morrow. She ran her hands through her hair, trying to tame her hat head, but she only made it worse.

Constance roused and realized she’d missed Clara’s arrival.

She’d met Clara her very first night in Three Pines. She and Myrna had been invited over for dinner, and while Constance yearned for a quiet dinner alone with Myrna, she didn’t know how to politely decline. So they’d put on their coats and boots and trudged over.

It was supposed to be just the three of them, which was bad enough, but then Ruth Zardo and her duck had arrived and the evening went from bad to a fiasco. Rosa, the duck, had muttered what sounded like “Fuck, fuck, fuck” the whole night, while Ruth had spent the evening drinking, swearing, insulting and interrupting.

Constance had heard of her, of course. The Governor General’s Award–winning poet was as close as Canada came to having a demented, embittered poet laureate.

Who hurt you once / so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture / with curling lip?

It was, Constance realized as the evening ground on, a good question. One she was tempted to ask the crazy poet, but didn’t for fear she’d be asked it in return.

Clara had made omelettes with melted goat cheese. A tossed salad and warm, fresh baguettes completed the meal. They’d eaten in the large kitchen, and when the meal was over and Myrna made coffee, and Ruth and Rosa retired to the living room, Clara had taken her into the studio. It was cramped, filled with brushes and palettes and canvasses. It smelled of oil and turpentine and ripe banana.

“Peter would’ve pestered me to clean this up,” said Clara, looking at the mess.

Clara had talked about her separation from her husband over dinner. Constance had plastered a sympathetic look on her face and wondered if she could possibly crawl out the bathroom window. Surely dying in a snow bank couldn’t be all that bad, could it?

And now here Clara was again talking about her husband. Her estranged husband. It was like parading around in her underwear. Revealing her intimates. It was unsightly and unseemly and unnecessary. And Constance just wanted to go home.

From the living room she heard, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She didn’t know, and no longer cared, whether it was the duck or the poet who was saying it.

Clara walked past an easel. The ghostly outline of what might become a man was just visible on the canvas. Without much enthusiasm, Constance followed Clara to the far end of her studio. Clara turned on a lamp and a small painting was illuminated.

At first it seemed uninteresting, certainly unremarkable.

“I’d like to paint you, if you don’t mind,” Clara had said, not looking at her guest.

Constance bristled. Had Clara recognized her? Did she know who Constance was?

“I don’t think so,” she’d replied, her voice firm.

“I understand,” Clara had said. “Not sure I’d want to be painted either.”

“Why not?”

“Too afraid of what someone might see.”

Clara had smiled, then walked back to the door. Constance followed, after taking one last look at the tiny painting. It was of Ruth Zardo, who was now passed out and snoring on Clara’s sofa. In this painting the old poet was clutching a blue shawl at her neck, her hands thin and claw-like. The veins and sinews of her neck showed through the skin, translucent, like onion paper.

Clara had captured Ruth’s bitterness, her loneliness, her rage. Constance now found it almost impossible to look away from the portrait.

At the door to the studio she looked back. Her eyes weren’t that sharp anymore, but they didn’t have to be, to see what Clara had really captured. It was Ruth. But it was someone else too. An image Constance remembered from a childhood on her knees.

It was the mad old poet, but it was also the Virgin Mary. The mother of God. Forgotten, resentful. Left behind. Glaring at a world that no longer remembered what she’d given it.

Constance was relieved she’d refused Clara’s request to paint her. If this was how she saw the mother of God, what would Clara see in her?

Later in the evening, Constance had drifted, apparently aimlessly, back to the studio door.

The single light still shone on the portrait, and even from the door Constance could see that her host hadn’t simply painted mad Ruth. Nor had she simply painted forgotten and embittered Mary. The elderly woman was staring into the distance. Into a dark and lonely future. But. But. Just there. Just slightly out of reach. Just becoming visible. There was something else.

Clara had captured despair, but she’d also captured hope.

Constance had taken her coffee and rejoined Ruth and Rosa, Clara and Myrna. She’d listened to them then. And she’d begun, just begun, to understand what it might be like to be able to put more than a name to a face.

That had been four days ago.

And now she was packed and ready to leave. Just one last cup of tea in the bistro, and she’d be off.

“Don’t go.”

Myrna had spoken softly.

“I have to.”

Constance broke eye contact with Myrna. It was altogether too intimate. Instead, she looked out the frosted windows, to the snow-covered village. It was dusk and Christmas lights were appearing on trees and homes.

“Can I come back? For Christmas?”

There was a long, long silence. And all Constance’s fears returned, crawling out of that silence. She dropped her eyes to her hands, neatly folded in her lap.

She’d exposed herself. Been tricked into thinking she was safe, she was liked, she was welcome.

Then she felt a large hand on her hand and she looked up.

“I’d love that,” Myrna said, and smiled. “We’ll have such fun.”

“Fun?” asked Gabri, plopping onto the sofa.

“Constance is coming back for Christmas.”

“Wonderful. You can come to the carol service on Christmas Eve. We do all the favorites. ‘Silent Night.’ ‘The First Noël’—”

“‘The Twelve Gays of Christmas,’” said Clara.

“‘It Came Upon a Midnight Queer,’” said Myrna.

“The classics,” said Gabri. “Though this year we’re practicing a new one.”

“Not ‘O Holy Night,’ I hope,” said Constance. “Not sure I’m ready for that one.”

Gabri laughed. “No. ‘The Huron Carol.’ Do you know it?” He sang a few bars of the old Québécois carol.

“I love that one,” she said. “But no one does it anymore.”

Though it shouldn’t have surprised her that in this little village she’d find something else that had been all but lost to the outside world.

Constance said her good-byes, and to calls of “
À bientôt!
,” she and Myrna walked to her car.