The Long Way Home

TWENTY

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Gamache, staring at the computer screen.

After the cryptic first message from Constable Stuart, It’s cosmic, there’d been nothing. Until now.

A strange photograph had just appeared.

“I think it’s taken eighty years to download,” said Jean-Guy.

It certainly looked like the picture had been snapped long ago. It was black and white and shades of gray, and seemed frayed at the edges.

“What is it?” Reine-Marie asked.

Stare as she might, Reine-Marie couldn’t quite make out what she was seeing. And she sure couldn’t see a connection between the information they’d asked for from the officer in Dumfries and this.

Armand had sent pictures of Peter’s paintings to Scotland, suspecting they were indeed landscapes. In hopes the constable would recognize where they were painted.

And in response, Constable Stuart had sent this.

Had he misunderstood the request? Reine-Marie wondered.

Then a finger, Jean-Guy’s finger, lightly touched the screen. There, along the contours of a small hill, snaking in and out of the mist, was a vague checkerboard pattern. It wove along the shape of the ground as though the fabric of the earth had torn, to reveal the black and white checks in the wound.

Reine-Marie felt herself drawn into the image. It looked like a place not quite of this world, and not quite of the next.

She looked away, into Armand’s eyes, and in them she saw a reflection of the otherworldly image on the screen. Then she looked over to Jean-Guy. Both men were staring, transfixed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jean-Guy whispered.

“One of Peter’s paintings has this checkerboard pattern,” said Gamache. “We thought he was just fooling around with an old art school exercise. But he wasn’t.”

“He was painting what he saw,” said Reine-Marie.

“But what is it?” Jean-Guy asked.

“And where is it?” Gamache added. “May I?”

Reine-Marie stood up and Armand sat in front of the computer. He tapped out an email to Constable Stuart, asking for more specifics.

“May I?” Jean-Guy replaced Gamache in front of the computer and brought up a search engine. He put in key words. Dumfries. Checkerboard.

But nothing useful appeared.

“Try Dumfries, Scotland, checkerboard,” Gamache suggested.

Still nothing.

“May I?” Reine-Marie replaced Beauvoir and added one word to his search. Then hit enter.

And up flashed the answer as though it had been waiting for the magic word.

Cosmic.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” whispered Reine-Marie.

“The Garden of Cosmic Speculation?” Clara asked. “Are you kidding me?”

But their faces told her this was probably not a joke.

Her phone had rung ten minutes earlier and she’d bolted upright, answering on the first ring and looking at the clock. Not yet 6 a.m.

It was Armand. They wanted to come over.

“Now?”

“Now.”

Now four people in dressing gowns, and a dog, stood in Clara’s kitchen. Jean-Guy placed the laptop on the pine table next to Peter’s early paintings.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Clara.

She looked at Peter’s paintings. Then back to the laptop.

Then back to the paintings. One in particular.

“That’s not an exercise in perspective,” she said, staring at the black and white checkerboard pattern that snaked across Peter’s painting. “It’s this.”

She turned back to the photograph, where a black and white pattern wound in and out of the mist. Like a cobra.

“Whoever took this must’ve been almost exactly where Peter stood when he did the painting,” she said. She spoke as though to herself.

Clara felt her heart race, pound. Not in excitement—this was no happy dance in her breast.

There was something eerie about the photograph. It showed a world where anything could come out of the mist. Where anything might crawl out of that rent in the ground, formed by the black and white pattern.

That feeling now transmitted itself to Peter’s painting. While the photo showed a gray world, Peter’s normal world, his actual painting was a wild confusion of color.

But both images had one thing in common. They coalesced around the simple, clear checkerboard snake. In the garden.

She felt her skin crawl and tingle as the blood crept away from the surface. Away from the painting and the photograph. To hide in her core.

“Here,” she said, pointing to the painting. “This is where it happened.”

“What happened?” asked Reine-Marie.

“Where Peter started to change. I was wondering why he didn’t save any of his other works. He probably did some in Paris, he probably did some in Florence and Venice. But he didn’t save them, didn’t give them to Bean to keep safe. Why not?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” said Armand. “Why didn’t he?”

“Because they weren’t worth saving?” Jean-Guy suggested, and was rewarded with a beam from Clara.

“Exactly. Exactly. But he saved these. He must’ve heard about this garden in his travels and decided to go there—”

“But why?” asked Beauvoir.

“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s so strange. Venice and Florence and Paris are beautiful, but conventional. Every artist goes there for inspiration. Peter wanted something different.”

“Well, he found it,” said Jean-Guy, looking at the paintings.

They were still merde. It was as though Peter had fallen into a pile of shit. Then painted it.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Clara. “But something in that garden changed Peter. Or began the change.”

“Like a ship,” said Gamache. “Changing course. It might take a while to get to port, but at least it was going in the right direction.”

Peter was no longer lost. He’d finally found his North Star, thought Gamache.

If so, why had he then flown to Toronto? Was it to deliver the paintings to Bean? But they could have been mailed, like the others.

Was it to visit his old professor? Was he looking for approval, for a mentor? Or maybe it was simpler, more human. More Peter.

Maybe he was running away again, frightened by what he’d seen in the garden. Unwilling to go further down that path. Maybe he went to Toronto to hide.

And once again the Samarra story came to mind. There was no hiding. Not from fate. Peter’s destiny would find him.

Toronto, then, was another step closer to his destination.

As though they’d all had the same thought at the same time, they turned as one to look at the far wall. And the canvases tacked up there. Peter’s latest works. Perhaps his last works. Certainly his last signposts.

“Gimme a bacon butty,” said Constable Stuart. He said it as a Wild West sheriff might’ve ordered a shot of whiskey.

He took off his jacket and smoothed his wet hair.

“What happened to you, boy?” the waiter at the breakfast bar asked, as he wiped crumbs off the melamine surface.

“What do you know about that garden down the road?”

The circular motion of the damp rag slowed. To a stop. The elderly man considered the constable.

“It’s just a garden. Like any other.”

Stuart got up off the round stool. “I’ll let you think about that answer. When I get back I’d like a better one. And that butty. And a black coffee.”

In the men’s room Stuart used the toilet, then washed his hands and scrubbed his face, trying to get off the dirt and grass ground into his skin. Some of the dirt turned out to be bruises and he stopped scrubbing.

He gripped the porcelain sink and leaned toward the mirror, staring into his wide eyes. He knew that lawyers were taught never to ask a question unless they were prepared for the answer. They did not like surprises.

But cops were the opposite. They were almost always surprised. And rarely in a good way.

Robert Stuart wondered if he was prepared for the answer that awaited him.

Clara sat at the laptop Jean-Guy had brought over when they’d arrived.

Coffee had been made and poured, and now she brought the computer out of sleep mode.

There on the screen was a home page.

“What is it?” Clara asked. “It can’t be just a normal garden. Not with a name like that.”

“We didn’t have a chance to read much about it,” said Reine-Marie, bringing a chair over to sit beside Clara. “We wanted to get here as quickly as possible. All we know is that it’s not far from Dumfries.”

The men also brought over chairs and sipped coffee and read about a garden of cosmic speculation.

Constable Stuart swung his leg over the stool. A bacon butty and black coffee awaited him, but there was no sign of the elderly waiter. Or anyone else. But he did hear voices from behind the swinging door.

He took a huge bite of the grilled sandwich. It was warm and the smoked bacon crackled and tasted of his settled childhood. Reluctantly he put the butty down and looked around to see if anyone was watching. But he was alone in the diner. He walked swiftly and softly over to the door.

“What’re you going to tell ’im?” a woman’s voice, elderly and difficult, was asking.

“The truth.”

Stuart recognized the waiter.

“You ridiculous old man, you don’t know the truth any more than I do. There is no ‘truth.’”

“There is. Look, at least I’ve been there. You haven’t.”

“You went there to shoot hares. Nothing cosmic about it.”

“I didn’t say there was.” Now the old man sounded petulant.

“You’ve bored enough people with your drunken tale. Now get out there before he steals the condiments,” said the cook. “I know the type. Sneaky.”

Constable Stuart stood up straight, miffed, then sneaked quickly back to his breakfast.

Clara scrolled through image after image of the garden on the website. In one, several huge DNA double helixes rose from the ground as though expelled. In another part of the garden, bold sculptures representing various scientific theories mixed with tall trees to form a forest. Man-made, nature-made. Almost indistinguishable.

And then there were the checkerboard patterns that swooped up and down and in and out, bursting through from another dimension.

The photographs on the website had been taken in daylight, in sunshine. But still there was something disturbing about them. This was no temporary sculpture garden. This one felt old, enduring.

It felt like Stonehenge or the haunting hilltop shards of Bryn Cader Faner in Wales. Their meaning obscured, but their power unmistakable.

Why? Clara asked herself. Why had someone created this garden? And why had Peter gone there?

“Never met the owner,” said the elderly man, whose name turned out, unexpectedly, to be Alphonse.

“Should I call you Al?” Constable Stuart asked.

“No.”

“Did he create the garden?” Stuart asked.

“With his late wife, aye. Nice people from what I hear. Did it just for themselves, but when word got out, they decided to open it to the public.”

Stuart nodded. He knew that much. And he also knew it was open for only one day a year.

“Not a day,” Alphonse corrected. “Five hours. Once a year. The first Sunday in May.”

“Is that when you saw it?” Stuart asked, knowing the answer.

“Not exactly. I went there in the evening.”

“Why?”

This was clearly not the line of questioning Alphonse had expected. Should he say he’d gone there to poach hares? Not for food, they had plenty of that. But for fun. As he’d done since he was a boy. Shooting squirrels and rabbits. Moles and voles.

Should he tell this policeman about the last time he’d gone shooting in the garden? It had been dusk. He’d seen movement and had raised his rifle.

He had the hare in the crosshairs. It was sitting on one of the strange sculptures, a bone-white stairway that cascaded down a hill, cut into the grass from a great height.

It was a magnificent hare. Huge. Old. Gray. As Alphonse watched through the sight of his rifle, the hare stood up slowly on its hind legs. Tall. Alert. Sensing something.

Alphonse stared at him down the barrel of his gun. And pulled the trigger.

But nothing happened. The gun had jammed.

Swearing, Alphonse had broken open the chamber, replaced the shell and snapped it shut, expecting the hare to be long gone.

But it remained where it was. Like a sculpture. Like a part of the garden. An old gray stone. Both alive and inanimate.

Alphonse raised his gun, knowing he had the power to decide which one the hare would be.

“The first Sunday in May?” Reine-Marie read out loud from the website. “But Peter had come back to Canada by then. He must’ve done the painting sometime in the early winter.”

“That means he must’ve trespassed,” said Clara. She tried to make it sound nonchalant. A simple statement of fact. But it was much more than that. For her.

The man she knew followed rules. He followed recipes, for God’s sake. He read instructions, paid his bills on time and had his teeth cleaned twice a year. He did as he was told and taught. It was not in his nature to trespass.

But Peter had changed. He was no longer the man she knew.

She’d sent him away, hoping he’d change. But now faced with more evidence that he had, she found herself suddenly afraid. That he’d not only changed, but changed course. Away from her.

To hide her upset, she went back to studying the website. At first she just stared, hoping no one would notice her distress, but after a few moments the images sunk in. They were like nothing she’d ever seen before.

The creators of the garden wanted to explore the laws of nature, the mysteries of the universe, and what happened when the two intersected.

Collided.

Was it like a nuclear bomb, wiping out all life? Or was it like the double helix. Creating life?

There were no answers in the garden, only questions. Speculation.

The Peter Clara knew was about certainties. But he’d gone halfway around the world to a place where questions were planted. And grew. Where uncertainty flourished.

And Clara began to feel a small seed of relief. It was the sort of place she would love to visit. The old Peter would have scoffed. He might have accompanied her, but grudgingly, and with snide asides.

But this Peter had gone to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on his own.

Perhaps, perhaps, he was changing course, but not away from her. He was moving closer. If not physically, then in every other way.

“Huh,” Reine-Marie grunted, reading. “It’s a garden but not in the conventional sense. It’s a mix of physics and nature,” she said, looking up from the screen. “A sort of crossroads.”

Peter had placed his easel at that crossroads, and created.

Clara longed to speak to him. To find out what he found. To hear how he felt. He’d finally turned the corner. Moved toward her. And then fallen off the face of the earth.

“It’s become quite a draw,” said Alphonse. “People come from all over to see it. Some call it mystical.”

He said it with a snort, but Constable Stuart was unconvinced. He’d heard what the cook had said. The warning. Not to tell his drunken tale again.

“What happened to you in the garden, Alphonse?”

Clara went back to Peter’s paintings. Not the one with the checkerboard snake, but the other two.

She didn’t know for sure, but she suspected they’d also been painted in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The palette was the same, the urgency the same.

Like the first one, these were explosions of color. Clashing, almost frantic. Unlikely, unattractive combinations of color. Peter seemed to have painted them with abandon, desperate to grab hold of something fleeting, to capture it.

“It looks as though his brain exploded onto the page,” said Jean-Guy, standing beside Gamache.

What had Peter seen, Clara wondered, in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation? What had he felt?

Alphonse looked behind him, toward the swinging door into the kitchen, then leaning his elbows on the counter, he lowered his voice.

“This is to go no further, understand?”

Constable Stuart lied, and nodded.

“It was sometime last fall. I went there in the early evening to shoot rabbits.”

And out came the story.

He paused after describing the first, failed attempt to kill the hare.

“I’d done it many times before, mind. Since I was a boy.”

“Had you been to the garden before?” Stuart asked.

Alphonse nodded. “Killed lots of rabbits there. But never seen one quite like this.”

“How was it different?”

Alphonse studied the constable. He no longer seemed like a waiter in a roadside diner. He was inches from Constable Stuart’s face, and he looked ancient. But not frail. He looked like a seaman who’d turned his face into the wind all his life. Navigating. Searching.

Until he’d found what he sought. Dry land.

“Shall I tell you?” he asked.

And Constable Stuart wondered, yet again, if he really wanted the answer.

He nodded.

“I watched as he stood on his hind legs, this hare. Straight up. Huge. Gray. He didn’t move. Even when I raised my rifle again. He just stood there. I could see his chest. I could see him breathing. I could see his heart beating. And then I noticed something behind him.”

“A movement? The owner?”

“No. Not a man. But another hare. Almost as big. Just standing there too. I’d been so taken with the one I hadn’t noticed the others.”

“Others?”

“Must’ve been twenty. All standing on their hind legs. Straight upright. In a perfect circle. Not moving.”

Constable Stuart felt himself grow very quiet. Very still. The old man’s eyes were on him, like searchlights.

“The wife says I was drunk, and I’d had a few. But not more than usual. She says I was seeing double. Triple. She says I was seeing things.”

He dropped his eyes and his head and spoke into the hacked and stained old counter.

“And she was right. I saw something.”

“What?”

“What’s that?” Clara asked, leaning closer to the vile colors.

“What?” asked Reine-Marie, getting to within inches of the painting.

“There, by that zigzag.”

“They’re stairs, I think,” said Armand.

“No, I don’t mean the zigzag, I mean beside it.” Clara spoke urgently, as though it would disappear at any moment.

“It’s a stone,” said Jean-Guy.

Clara peered closer.

“The hares were made of stone.”

The two men stared into each other’s eyes.

“It’s a sculpture garden,” said Constable Stuart. “They probably were stone.”

“No.”

Alphonse spoke softly, almost regretfully. And Constable Stuart understood then that this man hadn’t been searching for dry land. He’d been searching for company. One person. Who’d believe him.

“I saw the old one move. I saw his heart beat. And I saw him turn to stone.”

“It’s a circle of stones,” said Armand, also leaning in.

Their eyes were adjusting to Peter’s wild colors, until what had appeared to be chaos became a design.

“But the website doesn’t show a stone circle, by the stairs,” said Clara.

“And then they turned back into rabbits,” said Alphonse. “They came alive again.”

His eyes shone, not with fear, but with wonderment. The astonishment of an elderly man, closer to death than life.

“Did you ever go back?” Stuart asked.

“Every night. I go back every night. But I don’t take my rifle anymore.”

Alphonse smiled. Constable Stuart smiled.

When the others left to get dressed, Gamache stayed behind.

“Do you mind?” he asked Clara, and she shook her head.

“Make some more coffee,” she waved toward the old electric perk. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

While the coffee perked, Gamache carried a chair over, to face the wall of paintings. He sat and stared.

“Oh, God,” came the familiar voice. “Am I walking in on something I shouldn’t know about?”

Gamache stood up. Myrna was in the doorway holding a loaf of what he could smell was fresh banana bread.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She waved her hand up and down to indicate both his attire and his very presence.

He looked down and realized he was still in his dressing gown and slippers. He pulled the gown more securely around him.

“Did you and Clara have a slumber party?” Myrna asked, putting the warm loaf on the kitchen counter.

“This is Clara’s house?” he asked, apparently bewildered. “Damn. Not again.”

Myrna laughed and, walking to the counter, she cut and buttered thick slices of the loaf while Gamache poured coffees.

“What’s up?” Myrna asked.

He brought her up to speed on the Garden of Cosmic Speculation.

She peppered him with questions, all of which started with why and none of which he could answer.

“That’s better,” said Clara, returning to the kitchen and pouring herself a coffee. All three took their seats and stared at the latest paintings as though waiting for the show to begin.

If the works Peter painted in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation looked like his head had exploded onto the paper, these later ones looked like his guts had exploded.

“Something happened to Peter in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation,” said Gamache. He found he liked saying the name and pledged to say it every morning while in his own garden, speculating. “He left and came back to Canada. And painted these.”

“How do we know these weren’t painted in the garden too?” asked Myrna, indicating with her banana bread the three canvases nailed to the wall.

“Because Peter gave those three”—Gamache pointed with his slice to the paintings on the table—“to Bean in the winter. When he’d returned from Dumfries. He only mailed these bigger ones later.”

“Ergo, he painted them on his return to Canada,” said Clara.

“Ergo?” asked Myrna.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to use it,” said Clara.

“Not now that I hear how it really sounds.”

They fell silent, staring at the works.

“Do you think they’re landscapes too?” Myrna finally asked.

“I do,” said Armand, though he sounded not completely convinced. It didn’t look like any landscape he’d ever seen. Besides the flying lips, nothing really even looked like anything.

“Clara,” said Gamache slowly, elongating her name. Buying time to sort his thoughts. “What did you say you do with your failed paintings?”

“I keep them and bring them out when I’m between projects.”

Gamache nodded slowly. “And what do you do with them?”

“I told you before,” said Clara, confused by the question. “I look at them.”

Gamache said nothing and Clara wondered what he was getting at, and then her eyes widened. She’d remembered what she did with her old paintings.

She got to her feet and, pulling the nails out of the wall, she took down Peter’s lip painting.

“The only reason we put these paintings up this way around,” she said as Myrna and Armand went to help, “is because it’s how Bean had them on the bedroom wall. But suppose Bean was wrong? There’s no signature to tell which way is up.”

She nailed it back into place. Upside down. And all three stepped back. To examine it.

Not upside down at all, but finally the right way around.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Myrna.

The slashes of vivid color had become a wide and turbulent river. The bold red lips had become waves. What had appeared to be trees now became cliff faces.

The three of them stood in front of what Peter had really created. The smiles weren’t smiles at all. There was nothing giddy, nothing joyous about this picture. Peter had painted a vast and endless river of sorrow.

“I know this place,” said Gamache.