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

by Louise Penny

“What was it Oscar Wilde said?” “I can resist everything except temptation.”

To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.

Let it go, she begged herself, it doesn’t matter. It was a joke. That’s all. But the words had already coiled themselves inside her and wouldn’t leave.

She knew she should let it go, but it was too late. She’d chewed the insult over, torn it apart and swallowed it. The insult was part of her now.

“He’s the original recycler,” agreed Peter. “He collects conversations and events then uses them years later, against you. Recycle, retaliate, repulse. Nothing’s ever wasted with our Thomas.”

Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.

Murder was deeply human. A person was killed and a person killed. And what powered the final thrust wasn’t a whim, wasn’t an event. It was an emotion. Something once healthy and human had become wretched and bloated and finally buried. But not put to rest. It lay there, often for decades, feeding on itself, growing and gnawing, grim and full of grievance. Until it finally broke free of all human restraint. Not conscience, not fear, not social convention could contain it. When that happened, all hell broke loose. And a man became a murderer.

A room full of grief was even worse than a room full of anger. Anger a person got used to, met most days, learned to absorb or ignore. Or walk away from. But there was no hiding from grief. It would find you, eventually. It was the thing we most feared. Not loss, not sorrow. But what happened when you rendered those things down. They gave us grief.

What she saw skipped her eyes completely and lodged right in her chest. In an instant she was pitched forward, beyond grief, into a wilderness where no anguish, no loss, no passion existed.

He often felt like a ferryman, taking men and women from one shore to another. From the rugged, though familiar, terrain of grief and shock into a netherworld visited by a blessed few. To a shore where men killed each other on purpose. They’d all seen it from a safe distance, on television, in the papers. They’d all known it existed, this other world. Now they were in it.

But privately Reine-Marie wondered. Wondered whether what people did in a crisis was, in fact, their real selves. Stripped of artifice and social training. It was easy enough to be decent when all was going your way. It was another matter to be decent when all hell was breaking loose.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

What killed people wasn’t a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.

The blades of grass had sprung back up, erect where yesterday they too had been crushed. Too bad people couldn’t do the same thing, be revitalized after a rain and some sun. Spring back to life. But some wounds were too grave.

She could feel her heart racing and her hands trembling as they always did when she was enraged. And of course her brain didn’t work. It had run away with her heart, the cowards, leaving her defenseless and blithering.

After years of investigating murders Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you forever to the person you hated. Murder wasn’t committed out of hate, it was done as a terrible act of freedom. To finally rid yourself of the burden.

You can’t get milk from a hardware store. So stop asking for something that can’t be given. And look for what is offered.

Peter walked out, feeling calmer than he had in days. But he knew that was because he was curled up in the back seat, and something else was driving. Something rancid and stinking and horrible. The something he’d hidden all his life. It was finally in charge.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished.

She waved at Peter and Clara then hurried down the stairs and into his arms. They were home. He always felt a bit like a snail, but instead of carrying his home on his back, he carried it in his arms.

“You’re making hurting a habit. Spreading it around won’t lessen your pain, you know. Just the opposite.”

She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.

It was the most devastating thing Finney could have said. Not that Peter was hated by his father. But that he’d been loved all along. He’d interpreted kindness as cruelty, generosity as meanness, support as tethers. How horrible to have been offered love, and to have chosen hate instead. He’d turned heaven into hell.

The only thing money really buys?” Gamache waited. “Space.” “Space?” Gamache repeated. “A bigger house, a bigger car, a larger hotel room. First-class plane tickets. But it doesn’t even buy comfort. No one complains more than the rich and entitled. Comfort, security, ease. None of that comes with money.”

“We’re all blessed and we’re all blighted, Chief Inspector,” said Finney. “Every day each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?”

And she’d tell them about Pandora who lived in Paradise, a world without pain or sorrow, without violence or disease. Then one day Zeus, the greatest of the gods, gave Pandora a gift. A magnificent box. The only catch was that it should never be opened. Every day Pandora was drawn to the box and every day she managed to walk away, remembering the warning. It must never be opened. But one day it was too much for her, and she opened the box. Just a crack. But it was enough. Too much. Out flew all the winged horrors. Hate, slander, bitterness, envy, greed, all shrieked and escaped into the world. Disease, pain, violence. Pandora slammed the box shut, but it was too late.