Page 77 of Miss Wolcott’s Ghost

Her studio in their modest cottage off the village green in Three Pines was next to Peter’s. But much smaller. Really just a spare bedroom turned into a workspace. Peter’s was a specially designed and built studio, from money his mother had given him.

He’d spent all day in that studio. Each work of meticulous art took Peter months to create. Each of his paintings had been admired by, and sold to, collectors. To be distinguished, Armand knew, from connoisseurs.

Clara’s works were at best ignored, often ridiculed. When viewed in the few small cooperative shows that accepted her work, they often elicited snickers. Her series of Warrior Uteruses was especially mocked. She’d given one to Peter’s censorious mother in an act of either delusion or kindness. No one quite knew.

It was not well received.

And then an art critic, visiting Three Pines to interview the revered Peter Morrow, was sitting in his studio when he happened to glance across the hall into Clara’s overstuffed room. And there he saw, leaning against a wall, the painting that would change their lives.

It was the one Clara had done of their elderly neighbor. She’d painted Ruth as an old and embittered Virgin Mary. Clutching her moth-eaten blue shawl to her scrawny neck, the mother of Christ glared out at a world that had killed her son and forgotten her.

But as the critic stepped into the small space that smelled of old bananas with a very slight undercurrent of lemon meringue pie, he peered into the old woman’s angry eyes. And there he saw what Clara had really painted.

Hurt, pain, anger, sorrow, despair certainly. But something else. Something only hinted at, not yet seen. And yet it overwhelmed everything else in the painting.

Two small dabs of titanium white in those rheumy eyes captured the moment despair began, just began, to turn into hope.

The critic, so jaded and cynical and unhappy, felt it all slide away. The optimism he’d kept hidden for decades, and was afraid to show, resurfaced as he stepped into a world where there was reason to hope. Where it was safe to hope.

It was at that moment that Clara Morrow was recognized as a genius. And a far greater, more gifted, certainly more courageous artist than her husband.

Peter Morrow did not take it well.

But that was years ago now. Though Armand was beginning to think that, in this case of the body on the grave, the past was very present.

“Yes, an interesting couple.” Charles Fillmore had stepped back to better survey both works. Husband and wife. Side by side. “Brian admires them both. He regrets discovering Monsieur Morrow too late. Never got to meet him.”

Armand turned to look at Charles. His face close up was far less boyish. There were tiny lines all over it, like stress fractures in metal. Or the cracks that appeared in the veneer of an old painting.

“And did he meet Madame Morrow?”

“No. But we hope to, when he gets back. When he finally got around to doing our own family tree, it seemed we might actually be related to the Morrows.”

Armand was left to contemplate the lie Charles just told. Why hide the fact Brian had indeed met, and even stayed with, Clara?

Why would Charles Fillmore not want him to know that?

While Charles watched, Armand went through his brother’s desk. He found an open bag of humbugs, and an old pipe. He found linen handkerchiefs embroidered with the initials BF.

There were file folders. Armand flipped through them, but nothing leaped out.

Just as he replaced a file, he saw on the bottom of a drawer some florets. Dried. Taking out an evidence bag, he carefully placed the delicate flowers in it. He recognized them from the stews he and Reine-Marie made each winter. It was rosemary.

Next he went into the bathroom attached to the office and searched the medicine cabinet, half expecting to see old elixirs. Instead, there were bottles of aspirin and Band-Aids, expired cough medicines and tweezers.

“I’d like to take this.” He held up a Mason Pearson brush with a few strands of grey hair attached.

“What for?”

Armand knew, since reading Isabelle’s message, that he would have to say something. To at least sound a warning.

“DNA. I told you there’s been a murder. Up until a few minutes ago, we’d thought the body might be that of a woman. I’ve just been told it’s a man. In his late forties or early fifties. He was wearing vintage clothing.” As he spoke, he saw Charles’s face go slack, as it emptied of any emotion or thoughts. “I’m afraid there’s a chance he’s your brother.”

Armand had seen hundreds of people react to this horrific news. Though for some, it was not news.

It was easy enough to feign surprise, but what could not be faked was blood flow. A person could not make themselves blush or, as Charles did now, turn pale.

This was clearly a shock. But was it shocking to Charles Fillmore that his brother might be dead. Or that the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec knew about it and was standing two feet away?