A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #4)

A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #4) Page 69

And now Dad had done it too.

There’d been four of them all their lives. Thomas, Julia, Peter, Marianna. Four wheels, four walls, four seasons, four elements, four corners of the earth.

But now they were three. Strange as their world had been, it at least made sense, to them. What happens when one corner is removed?

All hell breaks loose. And the first trumpet was heard tonight. His mother’s cry.

“Peter?”

He stood still, not daring to turn round, to show his face to anybody.

“Is it all right that I’m here?” he asked.

“As long as you go no closer, but you know that,” said Gamache.

The two men stared at the scene, though both were actually staring at the pedestal of hard marble. Gamache had come into the garden for some fresh air, to walk off his dinner and try to put order into the pile of evidence they were collecting. But mostly he’d wanted to come here again, to look at the white block. The thing he’d first mistaken for a grave marker. And now it was.

But what troubled him was why the block wasn’t marred. It showed absolutely no sign of the statue’s ever being on it, and certainly no signs of it scraping off. Not a scratch, not a blemish. It was perfect. And it was impossible.

“My mother used to read us stories when we were children,” Peter said. “My father would play the piano and we’d all cram onto the sofa and Mother would read. Our favorite was always from a book on myths. I still remember most of them. Zeus, Ulysses. Thomas loved that one. Always wanted it read. Over and over we heard about the lotus-eaters and the sirens.”

“And Scylla and Charybdis,” said Gamache. “I loved it too. That terrible choice Ulysses faced, to aim his ship for the whirlpool or for the six-headed monster.”

“He chose the monster and it killed six of his men. They died and he sailed on,” said Peter.

“What would you have done?” asked Gamache. He knew the myth well. Ulysses returning from the Trojan War, his long perilous journey. Trying to get home. Coming upon that terrible strait. On one side a whirlpool that sucked every ship and soul into it. And on the other side Scylla. A six-headed monster. On one side certain death for everyone on the ship, and on the other certain death for six of his men.

Which path to take?

Peter felt the tears then. For little Julia, crushed by her brothers, crushed by her mother, crushed by her husband. And finally, just as she’d returned home, crushed by the one man she trusted. Her Ulysses. Her father.

But mostly he was weeping for himself. He’d lost a sister today, but worse, far worse, he felt he’d just lost his mother. A mother who’d decided the dead sister was perfect, and he was a monster.

“Let’s walk,” said Gamache, and the two men turned their backs on the dented earth and the harsh white cube beside it. Gamache clasped his hands behind his back and they fell into step, walking silently across the lawn and toward the lake. The sun was just setting, filling the evening sky with spectacular lurid color. Purples and pinks and golds, it seemed to change every moment.

The men stopped and stared.

“That was a lovely image of your family gathered around your mother as she read.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Peter. “We weren’t gathered around her. We were on the sofa, all four of us. She was across the room in her wing chair.”

Suddenly the image that had been so natural, heartwarming even, that had finally allowed him to see the Morrows as a family, disappeared. Like the sunset, it shifted into something else. Something darker.

Four small children by themselves staring across the straits to their mother, upright and proper and reading about terrible choices. And death.

“You said Ulysses was Thomas’s favorite. What was yours?”

Peter had been thinking of the square of white marble looming over the place where Julia died. Four corners, four walls.

“Pandora’s box,” he said.

Gamache turned away from the sunset and looked at Peter. “Is something bothering you?”

“You mean beyond the murder of my sister?”

“I do mean that. You can tell me.”

“Oh really? Well, someone told my mother what I said to you this afternoon. Yes, look surprised, but can you imagine how I felt? You demand I tell you the truth, I tell it, and get practically kicked out of the family for it. I bet it’s always been easy for you. So sure of yourself. Always fitting in. Well, try being an artist in a family of intellectuals. Try being tone deaf in a family of musicians. Try being taunted all the way to class, not by other kids, but by your own brother, yelling ‘Spot, Spot.’”