The Brutal Telling

THIRTY

“There it is.” Thérèse Brunel pointed.

They’d driven into downtown Montreal and now the Superintendent was pointing at a building. Gamache slowed the car and immediately provoked honking. In Quebec it was almost a capital crime to slow down. He didn’t speed up, ignored the honking, and tried to see what she was pointing at. It was an art gallery. Heffel’s. And outside was a bronze sculpture. But the car had drifted past before he got a good look. He spent the next twenty minutes trying to find a parking spot.

“Can’t you just double-park?” asked Superintendent Brunel.

“If we want to be slaughtered, yes.”

She harrumphed, but didn’t disagree. Finally they parked and walked back along Sherbrooke Street until they were in front of Heffel’s Art Gallery, staring at a bronze sculpture Gamache had seen before but never stopped to look at.

His cell phone vibrated. “Pardon,” he said to the Superintendent, and answered it.

“It’s Clara. I’m wondering when you might be ready.”

“In just a few minutes. Are you all right?” She’d sounded shaky, upset.

“I’m just fine. Where can I meet you?”

“I’m on Sherbrooke, just outside Heffel’s Gallery.”

“I know it. I can be there in a few minutes. Is that okay?” She sounded keen, even anxious, to leave.

“Perfect. I’ll be here.”

He put the phone away and went back to the sculpture. Silently he walked around it while Thérèse Brunel watched, a look of some amusement on her face.

What he saw was an almost life-sized bronze of a frumpy middle-aged woman standing beside a horse, a dog at her side and a monkey on the horse’s back. When he arrived back at Superintendent Brunel he stopped.

“This is ‘woo’?”

“No, this is Emily Carr. It’s by Joe Fafard and is called Emily and Friends.”

Gamache smiled then and shook his head. Of course it was. Now he could see it. The woman, matronly, squat, ugly, had been one of Canada’s most remarkable artists. Gifted and visionary, she’d painted mostly in the early 1900s and was now long dead. But her art only grew in significance and influence.

He looked more closely at the bronze woman. She was younger here than the images he’d seen of her in grainy old black-and-white photos. They almost always showed a masculine woman, alone. In a forest. And not smiling, not happy.

This woman was happy. Perhaps it was the conceit of the sculptor.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Superintendent Brunel said. “Normally Emily Carr looks gruesome. I think it’s brilliant to show her happy, as she apparently only was around her animals. It was people she hated.”

“You said you’d found ‘woo.’ Where?”

He was disappointed and far from convinced Superintendent Brunel was right. How could a long dead painter from across the continent have anything to do with the case?

Thérèse Brunel walked up to the sculpture and placed one manicured hand on the monkey.

“This is Woo. Emily Carr’s constant companion.”

“Woo’s a monkey?”

“She adored all animals, but Woo above all.”

Gamache crossed his arms over his chest and stared. “It’s an interesting theory, but the ‘woo’ in the Hermit’s cabin could mean anything. What makes you think it’s Emily Carr’s monkey?”

“Because of this.”

She opened her handbag and handed him a glossy brochure. It was for a retrospective of the works of Emily Carr, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gamache looked at the photographs of Carr’s unmistakable paintings of the West Coast wilderness almost a century ago.

Her work was extraordinary. Rich greens and browns swirled together so that the forest seemed both frenzied and tranquil. It was a forest long gone. Logged, clear-cut, ruined. But still alive, thanks to the brush and brilliance of Emily Carr.

But that wasn’t what had made her famous.

Gamache flipped through the brochure until he found them. Her signature series. Depicting what haunted any Canadian soul who saw them.

The totem poles.

Sitting on the shores of a remote Haida fishing village in northern British Columbia. She’d painted them where the Haida had put them.

And then a single perfect finger pointed to three small words.

Queen Charlotte Islands.

That’s where they were.

Charlotte.

Gamache felt a thrill. Could they really have found Woo?

“The Hermit’s sculptures were carved from red cedar,” said Thérèse Brunel. “So was the word Woo. Red cedar grows in a few places, but not here. Not Quebec. One of the places it grows is in British Columbia.”

“On the Queen Charlotte Islands,” whispered Gamache, mesmerized by the paintings of the totem poles. Straight, tall, magnificent. Not yet felled as heathen, not yet yanked down by missionaries and the government.

Emily Carr’s paintings were the only images of the totems as the Haida meant them to be. She never painted people, but she painted what they created. Long houses. And towering totem poles.

Gamache stared, losing himself in the wild beauty, and the approaching disaster.

Then he looked again at the inscription. Haida village. Queen Charlottes.

And he knew Thérèse was right. Woo pointed to Emily Carr, and Carr pointed to the Queen Charlotte Islands. This must be why there were so many references to Charlotte in the Hermit’s cabin. Charlotte’s Web, Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte Martinù, who’d given her husband the violin. The Amber Room had been made for a Charlotte. All leading him here. To the Queen Charlotte Islands.

“You can keep that.” Superintendent Brunel pointed to the brochure. “It has a lot of biographical information on Emily Carr. It might be helpful.”

“Merci.” Gamache closed the catalog and stared at the sculpture of Carr, the woman who had captured Canada’s shame, not by painting the displaced, broken people, but by painting their glory.

Clara stared at the gray waters of the St. Lawrence as they drove over the Champlain Bridge.

“How was your lunch?” Gamache asked when they were on the autoroute heading to Three Pines.

“Well, it could have been better.”

Clara’s mood was swinging wildly from fury to guilt to regret. One moment she felt she should have told Denis Fortin more clearly what a piece of merde he was, the next she was dying to get home so she could call and apologize.

Clara was a fault-magnet. Criticisms, critiques, blame flew through the air and clung to her. She seemed to attract the negative, perhaps because she was so positive.

Well, she’d had enough. She sat up straighter in her seat. Fuck him. But, then again, maybe she should apologize and stand up for herself after the solo show.

What an idiot she’d been. Why in the world had she thought it was a good idea to piss off the gallery owner who was offering her fame and fortune? Recognition. Approval. Attention.

Damn, what had she done? And was it reversible? Surely she could have waited until the day after the opening, when the reviews were in the New York Times, the London Times. When his fury couldn’t ruin her, as it could now.

As it would now.

She’d heard his words. But more important, she’d seen it in Fortin’s face. He would ruin her. Though to ruin implied there was something built up to tear down. No, what he’d do was worse. He’d make sure the world never heard of Clara Morrow. Never saw her paintings.

She looked at the time on Gamache’s dashboard.

Ten to four. The heavy traffic out of the city was thinning. They’d be home in an hour. If they got back before five she could call his gallery and prostrate herself.

Or maybe she should call and tell him what an asshole he was.

It was a very long drive back.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Gamache asked after half an hour of silence. They’d turned off the highway and were heading toward Cowansville.

“I’m not really sure what to say. Denis Fortin called Gabri a fucking queer yesterday in the bistro. Gabri didn’t hear it, but I did, and I didn’t say anything. I talked to Peter and Myrna about it, and they listened, but they pretty much left it up to me. Until this morning when Peter kinda said I should talk to Fortin.”

Gamache turned off the main road. The businesses and homes receded and the forest closed in.

“How did Fortin react?” he asked.

“He said he’d cancel the show.”

Gamache sighed. “I’m sorry about that, Clara.”

He glanced over at her unhappy face staring out the window. She reminded him of his daughter Annie the other night. A weary lion.

“How was your day?” she asked. They were on the dirt road now, bumping along. It was a road not used by many. Mostly just by people who knew where they were going, or had completely lost their way.

“Productive, I think. I have a question for you.”

“Ask away.” She seemed relieved to have something else to do besides watching the clock click closer to five.

“What do you know about Emily Carr?”

“Now, I’d never have bet that was the question,” she smiled, then gathered her thoughts. “We studied her in art school. She was a huge inspiration to lots of Canadian artists, certainly the women. She inspired me.”

“How?”

“She went into the wilderness where no one else dared to go, with just her easel.”

“And her monkey.”

“Is that a euphemism, Chief Inspector?”

Gamache laughed. “No. Go on.”

“Well, she was just very independent. And her work evolved. At first it was representational. A tree was a tree, a house a house. It was almost a documentary. She wanted to capture the Haida, you know, in their villages, before they were destroyed.”

“Most of her work was on the Queen Charlotte Islands, I understand.”

“Many of her most famous works are, yes. At some point she realized that painting exactly what could be seen wasn’t enough. So she really let go, dropped all the conventions, and painted not just what she saw, but what she felt. She was ridiculed for it. Ironically those are now her most famous works.”

Gamache nodded, remembering the totem poles in front of the swirling, vibrant forest. “Remarkable woman.”

“I think it all started with the brutal telling,” said Clara.

“The what?”

“The brutal telling. It’s become quite well known in artistic circles. She was the youngest of five daughters and very close to her father. It was apparently a wonderful relationship. Nothing to suggest it wasn’t simply loving and supportive.”

“Nothing sexual, you mean.”

“No, just a close father-daughter bond. And then in her late teens something happened and she left home. She never spoke to him or saw him again.”

“What happened?” Gamache was slowing the car. Clara noticed this, and watched the clock approaching five to five.

“No one knew. She never told anyone, and her family said nothing. But she went from being a happy, carefree child to an embittered woman. Very solitary, not very likeable apparently. Then, near the end of her life, she wrote to a friend. In the letter she said that her father had said something to her. Something horrible and unforgivable.”

“The brutal telling.”

“That’s how she described it.”

They’d arrived. He stopped in front of her home and they sat there quietly for a moment. It was five past five. Too late. She could try, but knew Fortin wouldn’t answer.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“And so have you.”

“I wish that was true.” He smiled at her. But, remarkably, she seemed to be feeling better. Clara got out of the car, and instead of going inside she paused on the road then slowly started to walk. Around the village green. Round and round she strolled, until the end met the beginning and she was back where she started. And as she walked she thought about Emily Carr. And the ridicule she’d endured at the hands of gallery owners, critics, a public too afraid to go where she wanted to take them.

Deeper. Deeper into the wilderness.

Then Clara went home.

It was late at night in Zurich when an art collector picked up the odd little carving he’d paid so much for. The one he’d been assured was a great work of art, but more important, a great investment.

At first he’d displayed it in his home, until his wife had asked him to move it. Away. So he’d put in into his private gallery. Once a day he’d sit in there with a cognac, and look at the masterpieces. The Picassos, the Rodins and Henry Moores.

But his eyes kept going back to the jolly little carving, of the forest, and the happy people building a village. At first it had given him pleasure, but now he found it spooky. He was considering putting it somewhere else again. A closet perhaps.

When the broker had called earlier in the day and asked if he’d consider sending it back to Canada for a police investigation he’d refused. It was an investment, after all. And there was no way he could be forced. He’d done nothing wrong and they had no jurisdiction.

The broker, though, had passed on two requests from the police. He knew the answer to the first, but still he picked up the carving and looked at its smooth base. No letters, no signature. Nothing. But the other question just sounded ridiculous. Still, he’d tried. He was just about to replace the carving and e-mail that he’d found nothing when his eyes caught something light among the dark pines.

He peered closer. There, deep in the forest, away from the village, he found what the police were looking for.

A tiny wooden figure. A young man, not much more than a boy, hiding in the woods.