And then, the breakthrough. The Three Graces.

One day Clara had decided to try something different, yet again. A painting this time, and her subject would be three elderly neighbors. Friends.

Beatrice, Kaye, and Emilie. Emilie, who had saved Henri. Emilie who had owned the Gamaches’ home.

The Three Graces. Clara had invited them into her home to paint them.

“May I?” Gamache asked, and gestured toward her studio.

Clara got up. “Of course.”

They all walked across the kitchen and into her studio. It smelled of overripe bananas and paint and the strangely evocative and attractive scent of turpentine.

Clara turned the lights on and the room came alive with faces. People looked at them from the walls and easels. One of the canvases was draped in a sheet, like a child’s idea of a ghost. She’d covered her latest work.

Gamache made his way past it and straight across the studio, trying not to be distracted by the other works that seemed to be watching him.

He stopped at the large canvas on the far wall.

“Everything changed with this, didn’t it?” he said.

Clara nodded, also staring at it. “For better, and for worse. It was Peter’s idea, you know. Not the subject matter, but he kept at me to stop doing installations and to try painting. Like him. So I did.”

The four of them stared at the three elderly women on the wall.

“I decided to paint them,” said Clara.

“Oui,” said Gamache. That much was obvious.

“No,” Clara said, smiling. “My plan was to actually paint them. Put paint right on them. They’d be nude. Beatrice was going to be green. The heart chakra. Kaye was going to be blue. The throat chakra. She talked a lot.”

“A blue streak,” confirmed Myrna.

“And Emilie would be violet,” said Clara. “The crown chakra. Oneness with God.”

Beauvoir made a slight squeal, as though he’d just connected to the Internet. Gamache ignored him, though he could sense the rolling eyes.

Clara turned to Beauvoir. “I know. Nuts. But they were willing to try it.”

“And did you paint them?” Beauvoir asked.

“Well, I would have, but I realized I didn’t have enough violet, and I couldn’t really leave Emilie half finished. I was going to send them home, when Emilie suggested just doing their portrait. I wasn’t very enthusiastic. I’d never done portraits.”

“Why not?” Gamache asked.

Clara thought about that. “I guess because it seemed so old-fashioned. Not avant-garde. Not creative.”

“So you’d paint the person, but not their portrait?” asked Beauvoir.

“Exactly. Pretty creative, no?”

“That’s one word for it,” he said, and then mumbled something that sounded like “merde.”

Gamache turned back to the canvas. He’d met all three women, but Clara’s painting of them always stunned him. They were old. Worn. Lined. Creviced. Their clothes were comfortable, sensible. Taken in parts there was nothing remotely remarkable about them in this painting.

But the whole? What Clara had captured? It was breathtaking.

Emilie, Beatrice, and Kaye reached out to each other. Not grasping. These women weren’t drowning. They weren’t clinging to each other.