“That series wasn’t all that long ago,” Gamache reminded her.

“True.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Not at all. It was such fun. And strangely powerful. Everyone thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t.”

“What was it?” Gamache asked.

“A step along the way.”

He nodded and got up. But before leaving, he bent down and whispered, “And I bet everyone thought you were nuts.”

*   *   *

“He wasn’t just crazy,” said Professor Massey. “He was insane.”

He looked from one woman to the next. They were seated in his classroom studio. He’d given Ruth what was clearly his favorite chair. The one that looked across the open space filled with drop sheets and easels, old gummed-up palettes. Blank canvases were stacked in a corner and Massey’s own paintings, unframed, were here and there on the walls, as though stuck up casually. They were very good, enlivening and warming the space.

“And not the fun sort of insanity,” Professor Massey warned. “Not eccentric. This was the dangerous kind.”

“Dangerous? Like violent?” Reine-Marie asked.

Try as she might to catch and hold his eye, the elderly professor’s attention never stayed on her for long. His eyes kept drifting back.

To Ruth.

Ruth, for her part, seemed to have lost her mind. But found, Reine-Marie thought, her heart.

The old poet had actually giggled when Professor Massey had taken her hand in greeting.

They’d arrived half an hour earlier, unannounced, though Reine-Marie had called ahead to make sure that Professor Massey would be there.

He was.

He always was, it seemed. And now Reine-Marie started noticing other things. A pillow with blankets folded neatly on top of it, beside the worn sofa.

A microwave oven on the counter by the paint-encrusted sink. A hotplate. A small fridge.

She looked around the classroom and realized it felt less a classroom and more a studio. And less like a studio and more like a loft space. A living space.

Reine-Marie’s gaze returned to the elderly man. Perfectly turned out in pressed corduroy slacks, a crisp cotton shirt, a light sweater vest. Neat. Clean.

How did it happen, she wondered? Did he once have a wife and children? A home in the Annex?

Did the children move away? Did the wife pass away?

Did he just stop going home? Until this became home? In the company of familiar and comforting scents. And blank canvases. Where students dropped by at all hours. To ask questions. To have a drink and a sandwich and to talk pretentious nonsense.

She looked at the canvas on the easel.

How long, she wondered, had it sat there. Empty.