How the Light Gets In

EIGHT

Clara Morrow was the first to notice the car arrive.

She and Myrna had had a simple dinner of reheated stew and a salad, then she’d gotten up to do the dishes, but Myrna soon joined her.

“I can do them,” said Clara, squirting the dishwashing liquid into the hot water and watching it foam. It was always strangely satisfying. It made Clara feel like a magician, or a witch, or an alchemist. Not, perhaps, as valuable as turning lead into gold, but useful all the same.

Clara Morrow was not someone who liked housework. What she liked was magic. Water into foam. Dirty dishes into clean. A blank canvas into a work of art.

It wasn’t change she liked so much as metamorphosis.

“You sit down,” she said, but Myrna took the tea towel and reached for a warm, clean dish.

“It helps take my mind off things.”

They both knew drying the dinner dishes was a fragile raft on a rough sea, but if it kept Myrna afloat for a while Clara was all for it.

They fell into a reassuring rhythm. She washed and Myrna dried.

When Clara was finished she drained the water, wiped the sink, and turned to face the room. It hadn’t changed in the years since Myrna had given up her psychologist’s practice in Montréal and packed her tiny car with all her worldly possessions. When she rolled into Three Pines she looked like someone who’d run away from the circus.

Out she climbed, an immense black woman, surely larger than the car itself. She’d gotten lost on the back roads, and when she found the unexpected village she’d stopped for a coffee, a pastry, a bathroom break. A pit stop on her way somewhere else. Somewhere more exciting, more promising. But Myrna Landers never left.

Over café au lait and patisserie in the bistro, she realized that she was fine where she was.

Myrna had unpacked, leased the empty shop next to Olivier’s Bistro, and opened a new and used bookstore. She’d moved upstairs, into the loft space.

That’s how Clara had first really gotten to know Myrna. She’d dropped by to check out how the new bookstore was going and heard sweeping and swearing from above. Climbing the stairs at the back of the shop, Clara had found Myrna.

Sweeping and swearing.

They’d been friends ever since.

She’d watched Myrna work her magic, turning an empty store into a bookshop. Turning an empty space into a meeting place. Turning a disused loft into a home. Turning an unhappy life into contentment.

Three Pines might be stable but it was never still.

When Clara surveyed the room, seeing the Christmas lights through the windows, she wasn’t sure she’d seen that brief flash. Headlights.

But then she heard the car engine. She turned to Myrna, who’d also heard it.

They were both thinking the same thing.

Constance.

Clara tried to stomp down the relief, knowing it was premature, but found it bubbled up and around her caution.

There was the tinkle of the door downstairs. And steps. They could hear a person, one person, walking across the floor below them.

Myrna grabbed Clara’s hand and called out, “Hello?”

There was a pause. And then a familiar voice.

“Myrna?”

Clara felt Myrna’s hand grow cold. It wasn’t Constance. It was the messenger. The telegraph man, pulled up on his bicycle.

It was the head of homicide for the Sûreté.

Myrna held the mug of tea, untouched, in both hands. The purpose was to warm, not to drink.

She stared into the window of the woodstove, at the flames and embers. They reflected off her face, giving it more animation than it actually held.

Clara was on the sofa and Armand sat in the armchair across from Myrna. He too held a cup of tea in his large hands. But he watched Myrna, not the fire.

Henri, after sniffing around the loft, had come to rest on the rug in front of the hearth.

“Do you think she suffered?” Myrna asked, her eyes not leaving the fire.

“I don’t.”

“And you don’t know who did it?”

It. It. Myrna couldn’t yet bring herself to say out loud what “it” was.

When a day had gone by and Constance hadn’t shown up, hadn’t even called, Myrna had prepared herself for the worst. That Constance had had a heart attack. A stroke. An accident.

It had never occurred to her that it could be even worse. That her friend hadn’t lost her life, but that it had been taken from her.

“We don’t know yet, but I’ll find out.” Gamache was sitting forward now.

“Can you?” asked Clara, speaking for the first time since he’d broken the news. “Didn’t she live in Montréal? Isn’t that out of your jurisdiction?”

“It is, but the head of homicide for Montréal’s a friend. He handed the case over to me. Did you know Constance well?” he asked Myrna.

Myrna opened her mouth, then looked over at Clara.

“Oh,” said Clara, with sudden understanding. “Would you like me to leave?”

Myrna hesitated then shook her head. “No, sorry. Force of habit, to not talk about a client.”

“She was a client then,” said Gamache. He didn’t take out his notebook, preferring to listen intently. “Not just a friend.”

“A client first, then a friend.”

“How did you meet?”

“She came for counseling a number of years ago.”

“How long ago?”

Myrna thought. “Twenty-three years.” She seemed a little amazed by that. “I’ve known her for twenty-three years,” Myrna marveled, then forced herself back to the reality. “After she stopped coming for therapy, we stayed in touch. We’d go for dinner, a play. Not often, but as two single women we found we had a lot in common. I liked her.”

“Was that unusual,” Gamache asked, “becoming personal friends with a client?”

“A former client, but yes, extremely. It’s the only time it’s happened with me. A therapist has to have clear boundaries, even with former clients. People already get into our heads—if they also get into our lives, there’s a problem.”

“But Constance did?”

Myrna nodded. “I think we were both a little lonely, and she seemed pretty sane.”

“Pretty?” Gamache asked.

“Who among us is totally sane, Chief Inspector?”

They looked at Clara, whose hair was again standing on end, the terrible convergence of hat head, static electricity, and the habit of running her hands through it.

“What?” asked Clara.

Gamache turned back to Myrna. “Had you seen Constance since you moved to Three Pines?”

“A couple of times, when I went in to Montréal. Never out here. Mostly we kept in touch through cards and phone calls. The truth is, we’d drifted apart in recent years.”

“So what brought her down for a visit now?” the Chief asked. “Did you invite her?”

Myrna thought about that, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I think it was her idea, though it’s possible she hinted she’d like to come and I invited her.”

“Did she have any particular reason for wanting to visit?”

Again, Myrna considered before answering. “Her sister died in October, as you probably heard—”

Gamache nodded. It had been in the news, as Constance’s death would be. The murder of Constance Pineault was a statistic. The murder of Constance Ouellet was headline news.

“With her sisters gone there was no one else in her life,” said Myrna. “Constance was very private. Nothing wrong with that, but it had become a sort of mania with her.”

“Can you give me the names of some of her friends?”

Myrna shook her head.

“You don’t know any?” he asked.

“She didn’t have any.”

“Pardon?”

“Constance had no friends,” said Myrna.

Gamache stared at her. “None?”

“None.”

“You were her friend,” said Clara. “She was friends with everyone here. Even Ruth.”

Though even as she said it, Clara realized her error. She’d mistaken being friendly for being friends.

Myrna was quiet for a moment before she spoke.

“Constance gave the impression of friendship and intimacy without actually feeling it.”

“You mean that was all a lie?” asked Clara.

“Not totally. I don’t want you to think she was a sociopath or anything. She liked people, but there was always a barrier.”

“Even for you?” asked Gamache.

“Even for me. There were large parts of her life she kept well hidden.”

Clara remembered their exchange in the studio, when Constance had refused to let Clara paint her portrait. She hadn’t been rude, but she had been firm. It was certainly a shove back.

“What is it?” Gamache asked, seeing the look of concentration on Myrna’s face.

“I was just thinking about what Clara said, and she’s right. I think Constance was happy here, I think she genuinely felt comfortable with everyone, even Ruth.”

“What does that tell you?” Gamache asked.

Myrna thought. “I wonder…”

She stared across the room, out the window, to the pines lit for Christmas. The bulbs bobbed in the night breeze.

“I wonder if she was finally opening up,” said Myrna, bringing her gaze back to her guests. “I hadn’t thought about it, but she seemed less guarded, more genuine, especially as the days went on.”

“She wouldn’t let me paint her portrait,” said Clara.

Myrna smiled. “But that’s understandable, don’t you think? It was the very thing she and her sisters most feared. Being put on display.”

“But I didn’t know who she was then,” said Clara.

“Wouldn’t matter. She knew,” said Myrna. “But I think by the time she left, she felt safe here, whether her secret was out or not.”

“And was her secret out?” Gamache asked.

“I didn’t tell,” said Myrna.

Gamache looked at the magazine on the footstool. A very old copy of Life, and on the cover a famous photo.

“And yet you obviously knew who she was,” he said to Clara.

“I told Clara this afternoon,” Myrna explained. “When I began to accept that Constance would probably never show up.”

“And no one else knew?” he repeated, picking up the magazine and staring at the picture. One he’d seen many times before. Five little girls, in muffs and pretty little winter coats. Identical coats. Identical girls.

“Not that I know of,” said Myrna.

And once again, Gamache wondered if the man who’d killed Constance knew who she was, and realized he was killing the last of her kind. The last of the Ouellet quintuplets.