Still Life (A Three Pines Mystery)

'This is for you.' From behind her back Clara brought a large photograph, stylised, layered by video and taken as a still off her Mac. She beamed as Peter stared at it. But slowly the smile flattened. He didn't get it. This wasn't unusual, he rarely understood her work. But she'd hoped this would be different. Her gift to him was both the photograph and trusting him enough to show it to him. Her art was so painfully personal it was the most exposed she could ever be. After not telling Peter about the deer blind and the trail and holding back other things she now wanted to show him that she'd been wrong. She loved and trusted him.

He stared at the weird photo. It showed a box on stilts, like a treehouse. Inside was a rock or an egg, Peter didn't know which. So like Clara to be unclear. And the whole thing was spinning. It made him feel a little nauseous.

'It's the blind house,' she said, as though that explained it. Peter didn't know what to say. Recently, for the last week, there hadn't been a lot to say to anyone.

Clara wondered whether she should explain about the stone and its symbolism with death. But the object might be an egg. Symbolic of life. Which was it? That was the glorious tension in the luminous work. Up until that morning the treehouse had been static, but all that talk of people being stuck had given Clara the idea of spinning the house, like a little planet, with its own gravity, its own reality. Like most homes, it contained life and death, inseparable. And the final allusion. Home as an allegory for self. A self-portrait of our choices. And our blind spots.

Peter didn't get it. Didn't try. He left Clara standing there with a work of art that, unbeknownst to either of them, would one day make her famous.

She watched him wander almost aimlessly into his studio and shut the door. One day she knew he'd leave his safe and sterile island and come back to this messy mainland. When he did she'd be waiting, her arms open, as always.

Now Clara sat in the living room and took a piece of paper from her pocket. It was addressed to the minister of St Thomas's church. She crossed out the first bit of writing. Below it she carefully printed something, then she put on her coat and walked up the hill to the white clapboard church, handed the paper to the minister and returned to the fresh air.

The Revd James Morris unfolded the slip of paper and read. It was instructions for the engraving on Jane Neal's headstone. On the top of the page was written, 'Matthew 10:36.' But that had been crossed out and something else had been printed underneath. He took out his Bible and looked up Matthew 10:36.'And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.' Below it was the new instruction. 'Surprised by Joy.'

At the top of the hill Armand Gamache stopped the car and got out. He looked down at the village and his heart soared. He looked over the rooftops and imagined the good, kind, flawed people inside struggling with their lives. People were walking their dogs, raking the relentless autumn leaves, racing the gently falling snow. They were shopping at M. Beliveau's general store and buying baguettes from Sarah's boulangerie. Olivier stood at the Bistro doorway and shook out a tablecloth. Life was far from harried here. But neither was it still.

Keep reading for an excerpt from

Louise Penny's new Three Pines mystery

A FATAL GRACE

Coming soon in hardcover from St. Martin's Minotaur

ONE

Had CC de Poitiers known she was going to be murdered, she might have bought her husband, Richard, a Christmas gift. She might even have gone to her daughter's end of term pageant at Miss Edward's School for Girls, or 'girths' as CC liked to tease her expansive daughter. Had CC de Poitiers known the end was near, she might have been at work instead of in the cheapest room the Ritz in Montreal had to offer. But the only end she knew was near belonged to a man named Saul.

'So, what do you think? Do you like it?' She balanced her book on her pallid stomach.

Saul looked at it, not for the first time. She'd dragged it out of her huge purse every five minutes for the past few days. In business meetings, dinners, taxi rides through the snowy streets of Montreal, CC'd suddenly bend down and emerge triumphant, holding her creation as though another virgin birth.

'I like the picture,' he said, knowing the insult. He'd taken the picture. He knew she was asking, pleading, for more and he knew he no longer cared to give it. And he wondered how much longer he could be around CC de Poitiers before he became her. Not physically, of course. At forty-eight she was a few years younger than him. She was slim and ropy and toned, her teeth impossibly white and her hair impossibly blonde. Touching her was like caressing a veneer of ice. There was a beauty to it, and a frailty he found attractive. But there was also danger. If she ever broke, if she shattered, she'd tear him to pieces.