A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #2)

A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #2) Page 111

‘Her name was Eleanor, wasn’t it?’ Gamache asked, though he was certain of the answer.

‘Eleanor Allaire.’

Gamache sighed and closed his eyes. There. He’d done it.

‘El, short for Eleanor,’ he whispered.

Émilie nodded. ‘May I?’ Her tiny hands reached across the table and took the box, holding it in open palms as though inviting it to fly away. ‘I haven’t seen this in years. Mother gave it to her when El left the ashram in India. They went there together, you know.’

‘She was the L in B KLM, wasn’t she?’

Em nodded.

‘Mother Bea is B, Kaye is K and you’re M. Bea, Kaye, El and Em.’

‘You’re very clever, Chief Inspector. We would have been friends anyway, but the coincidence of our names all sounding like letters of the alphabet appealed to us. Especially since we all adored reading. It also seemed romantic, a kind of secret code.’

‘Is that where Be Calm came from?’

‘You figured that out as well? How?’

‘There were too many references to Be Calm in this case. Then I visited Mother’s meditation center.’

‘Be Calm.’

‘Yes, but it was the writing on the wall that gave it away.’

‘That seems to happen to you a lot. Must be helpful in your trade to have the answers written on the wall.’

‘It’s recognizing them that’s the trick. It was a misquote and that didn’t seem in character. Mother might give the impression of being not of this world, but I suspect she’s very much here. She’d never have put Be calm, and know that I am God on her wall unless she meant to.’

‘Be still, and know that I am God,’ quoted Em correctly. ‘That was El’s problem. She couldn’t be still. Kaye was the one who noticed that we could put our letters together and make a word, sort of. B KLM. Be calm. Close enough to make sense to us, and far enough away to make it a secret. Our secret. But you figured it out, Chief Inspector.’

‘Took me far too long.’

‘Is there a time limit on these things?’

Gamache laughed. ‘No, I suppose not, but sometimes my own blindness takes my breath away. I’d been staring at these letters for days, knowing they were significant to El. I even had the example of Ruth’s poetry book. I’m FINE. The capital letters all stand for some other word.’

‘Mais non. What?’

‘Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Egotistical,’ he said, slightly embarrassed about using a swear word in front of such a dignified woman, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she was laughing.

‘J’adore Ruth. Just when I think she’s loathsome she does something like that. Parfait.’

‘I kept staring at the letters on the box and assumed the space between the B and the KLM wasn’t significant. But it was. It held the answer. It lay in what wasn’t there. In the tiny space between letters.’

‘Like those wild flowers in the land God gave to Cain,’ said Em. ‘You have to look hard to see it.’

‘I didn’t think it was a deliberate space. I thought that was where the C went,’ Gamache admitted.

‘The C?’

‘Open the box.’

Em did and stared for a very long time. She reached into the box and brought out a tiny letter. Balancing it on her finger she showed it to Gamache. A C.

‘She put her daughter into the box too,’ said Em. ‘This is what love looks like.’

‘What happened?’

Em cast her mind back again, to the days when the world was new. ‘El was a pilgrim soul. While the rest of us settled down, El grew more restless. She seemed frail, fragile. Sensitive. We kept pleading with her to be calm.’

‘You even called your curling team Be Calm,’ said Gamache. ‘That was another clue. You only ever spoke of three members of the original team, but a curling team has four. Someone was missing. When I saw Clara Morrow’s picture of the three of you as the Graces there seemed to be someone missing. There was a hole in the composition.’

‘But Clara never met El,’ said Émilie. ‘Never even heard of her as far as I know.’

‘That’s true, but as you said, Clara sees things others don’t. She created the work with the three of you forming a sort of vase, a vessel she called it. Only there’s a piece missing, a crack. Where El would be.

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering,

There’s a crack in everything,