Cruelest Month

‘Yes sir.’ He treated her like a child.

‘A case has come up. It’s not certain it’s murder, but if it is you’ll be on the team. I’ve made sure of it. It’s time. Are you sure you can do it, Agent Nichol? If not, you need to tell me now. There’s too much at stake.’

‘I can do it.’

And she’d believed it when she’d said it. Yesterday. But suddenly it was today. It was murder. It was time.

And she was scared to death. In less than two hours she’d be in Three Pines with the team. But while they tried to find a murderer, she’d try to find a traitor to the Sûreté. No, not find. Bring to justice.

Agent Yvette Nichol liked secrets. She liked gathering other people’s and she liked having her own. She put them all in her own secret garden, built a wall around them, kept them alive, thriving and growing.

She was good at keeping secrets. And she wondered whether maybe her boss had chosen her because of that. But she suspected the reason was more mundane. He’d chosen her because she was already despised.

‘You can do this,’ she said to the strange young woman in the mirror. Fear had suddenly made her ugly. ‘You can do it,’ she said with more conviction. ‘You’re brilliant, courageous, beautiful.’

She raised her lipstick to her lips with an unsteady hand. Lowering it for a moment she looked sternly at the girl in the mirror.

‘Don’t fuck this up.’

Clasping her wrist with her other hand she guided the bright red drug store hue over her lips, as though her head was an Easter egg and she was about to paint it. She’d make her relatives proud, after all.

Agent Isabelle Lacoste stood in the clear morning light on the road outside the old Hadley house staring at the buckled and heaved walk. It looked as though something was trying to tear itself from the earth.

Her courage had finally found its limits. After more than five years with Chief Inspector Gamache on homicide, facing deranged and demented murderers, she had finally been stopped by this house. Still, she forced herself to stand there a moment longer, then turned and walked away, her back to the house, feeling it watching her. She picked up speed until she was sprinting to her car.

She took a deep breath and turned to stare again at the house. She needed to go in. But how? Alone wasn’t any good; she knew she’d never make it past the threshold alone. She needed company. Looking down into the village, to the smoke drifting from chimneys, to the lights in the homes, imagining people just sitting down for their first cup of coffee and warm toast and jam, she wondered whom she’d pick. It was a strangely powerful feeling, and she wondered if this was how judges had felt when Canada still had the death penalty.

Then her gaze fell on one home in particular. And she realized then that there had never been much doubt whom she’d pick.

‘I’ll get it,’ Clara called from her studio. She’d risen early hoping in the fresh morning light she’d see what Peter had seen a few days ago. The flaw in the work. The colors that were off. The wrong shade of blue perhaps? Or green? Should it be viridian green instead of celadon? She’d deliberately stayed away from Marian Blue, but maybe that was the mistake.

She had just a week now to complete the painting before Denis Fortin arrived.

Time was running out. And something was wrong with the work and she didn’t know what. She sat on the stool, sipping her strong morning coffee, eating a Montreal bagel, hoping the spring sun would tell her.

But it was silent.

Dear God, what am I going to do?

Just then someone knocked on the door. She wondered whether that was God, but thought he probably didn’t knock.

‘No, you’re working,’ called Peter from the kitchen, glancing at the clock. Just after seven. ‘I’ll get it.’

He’d felt horrible about what he’d said about Clara’s work. He’d since tried to tell her he’d over-reacted. There was nothing wrong with it. Just the opposite. But she’d thought he’d been condescending then. It would never occur to her that he’d lied the first time. That her painting was brilliant. It was luminous and extraordinary and all the words he dreamed would be applied to his own works.

True, gallery owners and decorators loved his paintings. He took an object from life, a twig say, and got in so close it was unrecognizable, abstract. For some reason the idea of obscuring the truth appealed to him. Critics used words like complex and deep and riveting. And all that had been enough, until he’d seen Clara’s painting. Now he longed for someone, just one person, to look at his works and call them ‘luminous’.

Peter hoped Clara wouldn’t change a thing in this painting. And he hoped she would.

Now he strolled to the door, opening it to reveal Agent Isabelle Lacoste.

‘Bonjour,’ she smiled.

‘Is it God?’ Clara called from her studio.

Peter looked at Lacoste who shook her head apologetically.

‘No, not God, honey. Sorry.’

Clara appeared wiping her hands on a rag and smiled warmly. ‘Hello, Agent Lacoste. Haven’t seen you in a while. Would you like a coffee?’