A Trick of the Light

“Who hated her enough to kill her?” Dominique asked.

“Anyone who met her,” said Clara.

“But that’s not fair,” said Myrna. “You hadn’t seen her in more than twenty years. And it’s possible she was simply mean to you. It happens sometimes. We trigger something in someone else, bring out the worst in each other.”

“Not Lillian,” said Clara. “She was generous in her disdain. She hated everyone and everyone eventually hated her. Like you said before. The frog in the frying pan. She’d turn up the heat.”

“I hope that isn’t a dinner suggestion,” said Ruth, “because that’s what I had for breakfast.”

They looked at her and she grinned. “Well, maybe it was an egg.”

They turned back to Myrna.

“Maybe it wasn’t a frying pan,” Ruth continued. “But a glass. And now that I think of it, it wasn’t an egg at all.”

They turned back to Ruth.

“It was Scotch.”

They focused back on Myrna, who explained the psychological phenomenon.

“I think I always hated myself for staying so long, for letting Lillian hurt me so much before I actually left. Never again.”

Clara was surprised when Myrna said nothing.

“Gamache probably thinks I did it.” Clara finally broke the silence. “I’m screwed.”

“I’d have to agree,” said Ruth.

“Of course you’re not,” said Dominique. “In fact, just the opposite.”

“What d’you mean?”

“You have something the Chief Inspector doesn’t,” said Dominique. “You know the art world and you know most of the people at your party. What’s the biggest question you have?”

“Besides who killed her? Well, what was Lillian doing here?”

“Excellent,” said Dominique, getting up. “Good question. Why don’t we ask?”

“Who?”

“The guests still here in Three Pines.”

Clara thought for a moment. “Worth a try.”

“Waste of time,” said Ruth. “I still think you did it.”

“Watch it, old woman,” said Clara. “You’re next.”

*   *   *

The forensics team met Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir at Lillian Dyson’s apartment in Montréal. While they took prints and collected specimens, Gamache and Beauvoir looked around.

It was a modest apartment on the top floor of a triplex. None of the buildings were tall in the Plateau Mont Royal district so while petite, Lillian’s apartment was bright.

Beauvoir walked briskly into the main room and got to work but Gamache paused. To get a feel for the place. It smelled stale. Of oil paint and unopened windows. The furniture was old without being vintage. The kind you found in the Sally Ann, or on the side of the road.

The floors were parquet with dull area rugs. Unlike some artists who cared about the aesthetics of their home, Lillian Dyson appeared indifferent to what was within these walls. What she was not indifferent to was what was on the walls.

Paintings. Luminous, dazzling paintings. Not bright or splashy, but dazzling in their images. Had she collected them? Perhaps from an artist friend in New York?

He leaned in to read the signature.

Lillian Dyson.

Chief Inspector Gamache stepped back and stared, astonished. The dead woman had painted these. He moved from painting to painting, reading the signatures and the dates, just to be sure. But he knew there was no doubt. The style was so strong, so singular.

They were all created by Lillian Dyson, and all within the last seven months.

These were like nothing he’d ever seen before.

Her paintings were lush and bold. Cityscapes, Montréal, made to look and feel like a forest. The buildings were tall and wonky, like strong trees growing this way and that. Adjusting to nature, rather than the other way around. She managed to make the buildings into living things, as though they’d been planted and watered and nurtured, and had sprung from the concrete. Attractive, the way all vital things were attractive.

It was not a relaxing world she painted. But neither was it threatening.

He liked them. A lot.

“More in here, Chief,” called Beauvoir, when he noticed Gamache staring at the paintings. “Looks like she turned her bedroom into a studio.”

Chief Inspector Gamache walked by the forensics team, lifting fingerprints and taking samples, and joined Beauvoir in the small bedroom. A single bed, made up nicely, was shoved against the wall and there was a chest of drawers, but the rest of the modest room was taken up with brushes soaking in tins, canvases leaning against the walls. The floor was covered in a tarpaulin and the room smelled of oil and cleaner.

Gamache walked over to the canvas sitting on the easel.

It was unfinished. It showed a church, in bright red, almost as though it was on fire. But it wasn’t. It simply glowed. And beside it swirled roads like rivers and people like reeds. No other artist he knew was painting in this style. It was as though Lillian Dyson had invented a whole new art movement, like the Cubists or the Impressionists, like the post-modernists and Abstract Expressionists.

And now there was this.

Armand Gamache could barely look away. Lillian was painting Montréal as though it was a work of nature, not man. With all the force, the power, the energy and beauty of nature. And the savagery too.