The Nature of the Beast (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #11)

by Louise Penny

with every telling Clara was letting go of a bit of the unbearable pain. The guilt she felt. The sorrow. It was as though Clara was pulling herself out of the ocean, dripping in grief, but no longer drowning.

Knowledge wasn’t always power. Sometimes it was crippling. Myrna had suggested therapy could, over time, rid Fleming of his demons. But Armand Gamache knew that wasn’t true. Because John Fleming was the demon. And now, from that prison cell, he’d managed to escape. He’d slid out between the bars. In the form of words. John Fleming was out in the world again. He’d come to play.

The illusion shattered. That was the price of looking at things too closely.

“Yes. It’s getting ugly. That table is ordering more and more drinks and talking about going into the woods and forcing their way into that thing we found.” Myrna pushed her glass of red wine away. Nature, she knew, abhorred a vacuum, and these people, faced with an information vacuum, had filled it with their fears. The line between fact and fiction, between real and imagined, was blurring. The tether holding people to civil behavior was fraying. They could see it, and hear it, and feel it coming apart.

A killer hides in chaos. You need to not give him that.”

A Brave Man in a Brave Country Surprised by Joy

Three Pines might be primitive in many ways, but unlike the outside world, it could survive a very long time without power. And that itself was powerful.

He’d planned to read the play at home, in front of the fireplace, but he didn’t want to sully his home. Then he thought he’d take it to the bistro, but decided against that too. For the same reason. “Aren’t you giving it more power than it deserves?” Reine-Marie had asked. “Probably.” But they both knew that words were weapons too, and when fashioned into a story their power was almost limitless.

Clara knew that grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, each Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have been, should have been, a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.

Gamache smiled again. How different she was from Jean-Guy, who’d come right out and demanded, “Are you going to stay here doing nothing, or what, patron?” He’d tried to explain to Jean-Guy that stillness wasn’t nothing. But the taut younger man just didn’t understand. And neither would he have, Gamache knew, in his thirties. But in his fifties Armand Gamache knew that sitting still was far more difficult, and frightening, than running around.

Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.

he said they wanted something unique. Something inspired specifically by the Whore of Babylon.” “Were you tempted?” asked Gamache. He hadn’t meant to ask, it wasn’t at all relevant, but he was curious. “It’s a powerful image.” “It’s a vile image,” she said. “It’s hounded women for centuries and been an excuse for witch trials and torture and burnings. So, no. I wasn’t tempted. I was revolted.”

that’s what Fleming does, what he wants. He tunnels out of his cell through other people’s minds. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go alone today.” “Because you’re immune, patron?” “No, I’m as susceptible as you, but at least there’d only be one of us with Fleming in our heads. And for me, well, he’s already there. The damage is done.” “But it could get worse,” he said. “And that’s why I’m here.”

Would I meet your eyes, and stand, rooted and speechless, while the pavement cracked to pieces and the sky fell down.

People instinctively let down their guard when they saw a limp, an illness, a flaw in someone else. Not out of compassion but because it made them feel superior. Stronger. Those people, Gamache knew, did not always last long. It was not a useful instinct.

He’d become wary. He’d sensed something in Gamache. A slight hesitation, perhaps. A change of pallor, or breathing, or heartbeat. This man was a predator, with the heightened senses that went with a lifetime of stalking. And killing. The only way to stop a predator was to be a bigger one, Gamache knew. He hadn’t survived a lifetime of catching killers by being meek or weak.

And then you ran away and hid, like a child. Probably in that village. What was its name?” Don’t remember it, Gamache prayed. Don’t remember. “Three Pines.” Fleming smiled. “Nice place. Pretty place. It was a kind of rock, with time moving around it, but not through it. It wasn’t really of this world. Is that where you live? Is that why you’re here? Because the Whore of Babylon was disturbing your hiding place? Marring Paradise?” Fleming paused. “I remember there was a woman who sat on her porch and said she was a poet. She’s lucky so many words rhyme with fuck.” He didn’t just remember Three Pines, every detail seemed etched in his memory.