Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Louise Penny is the multi-award winning author of the Chief Inspector Gamache novels, set in her home province of Québec, Canada. Her books, including State of Terror written with Hillary Rodham Clinton, have sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, topped international bestseller lists, including the New York Times, and been translated into 32 languages. The recipient of both the Order of Canada and l’Ordre national du Québec, her country’s highest civilian honours, her Three Pines Foundation reaches out to those in crisis and offers financial and emotional support, with a special focus on literacy as well as dementia care. Her husband, Michael, died of dementia in 2016. She lives with her Golden Retrievers Muggins and Charlie in a village south of Montréal.

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A Trick of the Light

Minotaur Books

Oh, no, no, no, thought Clara Morrow as she walked toward the closed doors.

She could see shadows, shapes, like wraiths moving back and forth, back and forth across the frosted glass. Appearing and disappearing. Distorted, but still human. Still the dead one lay moaning.

The words had been going through her head all day, appearing and disappearing. A poem, half remembered. Words floating to the surface, then going under. The body of the poem beyond her grasp. What was the rest of it?

It seemed important.

Oh, no, no, no.

The blurred figures at the far end of the long corridor seemed almost liquid, or smoke. There, but insubstantial. Fleeting. Fleeing.

As she wished she could.

This was it. The end of the journey. Not just that day's journey as she and her husband, Peter, had driven from their little Québec village into the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montréal, a place they knew well. Intimately. How often had they come to the MAC to marvel at some new exhibition? To support a friend, a fellow artist? Or to just sit quietly in the middle of the sleek gallery, in the middle of a weekday, when the rest of the city was at work? Art was their work. But it was more than that. It had to be. Otherwise, why put up with all those years of solitude? Of failure? Of silence from a baffled and even bemused art world?

She and Peter had worked away, every day, in their small studios in their small village, leading their tiny lives. Happy. But still yearning for more.

Clara took a few more steps down the long, long, white marble hallway.

This was the "more." Through those doors. Finally. The end point of everything she'd worked toward, walked toward, all her life.

Her first dream as a child, her last dream that morning, almost fifty years later, was at the far end of the hard white hallway.

They'd both expected Peter would be the first through those doors. He was by far the more successful artist, with his exquisite studies of life in close-up. So detailed, and so close that a piece of the natural world appeared distorted and abstract. Unrecognizable. Peter took what was natural and made it appear unnatural.

People ate it up. Thank God. It kept food at the table and the wolves, while constantly circling their little home in Three Pines, were kept from the door. Thanks to Peter and his art.

Clara glanced at him walking slightly ahead of her, a smile on his handsome face. She knew most people, on first meeting them, never took her for his wife. Instead they assumed some slim executive with a white wine in her elegant hand was his mate. An example of natural selection. Of like moving to like.

The distinguished artist with the head of graying hair and noble features could not possibly have chosen the woman with the beer in her boxing glove hands. And the pv¢té in her frizzy hair. And the studio full of sculptures made out of old tractor parts and paintings of cabbages with wings.

No. Peter Morrow could not have chosen her. That would have been unnatural.

And yet he had.

And she had chosen him.

Clara would have smiled had she not been fairly certain she was about to throw up.

Oh, no, no, no, she thought again as she watched Peter march purposefully toward the closed door and the art wraiths waiting to pass judgment. On her.

Clara's hands grew cold and numb as she moved slowly forward, propelled by an undeniable force, a rude mix of excitement and terror. She wanted to rush toward the doors, yank them open and yell, "Here I am!"

But mostly she wanted to turn and flee, to hide.

Clara stared from the purse on the gleaming marble floor to the man crouched across from her.

It wasn't Peter.

Instead, she saw her friend and neighbor from Three Pines, Olivier Brulé. He was kneeling beside her, watching, his kind eyes life preservers thrown to a drowning woman. She held them.

"Deep breath in," he whispered. His voice was calm. This was their own private crisis. Their own private rescue.

She took a deep breath in. "I don't think I can do it." Clara leaned forward, feeling faint. She could feel the walls closing in, and see Peter's polished black leather shoes on the floor ahead. Where he'd finally stopped. Not missing her right away. Not noticing his wife was kneeling on the floor.

"I know," whispered Olivier. "But I also know you. Whether it's on your knees or on your feet, you're going through that door." He nodded toward the end of the hall, his eyes never leaving hers. "It might as well be on your feet."

"But it's not too late." Clara searched his face. Seeing his silky blond hair, and the lines only visible very close up. More lines than a thirty- eight-year-old man should have. "I could leave. Go back home."

Olivier's kindly face disappeared and she saw again her garden, as she'd seen it that morning, the mist not yet burned off. The dew heavy under her rubber boots. The early roses and late peonies damp and fragrant. She'd sat on the wooden bench in their backyard, with her morning coffee, and she'd thought about the day ahead.

Not once had she imagined herself collapsed on the floor. In terror. Longing to leave. To go back to the garden.

But Olivier was right. She wouldn't return. Not yet.

Oh, no, no, no. She'd have to go through those doors. They were the only way home now.

"Deep breath out," Olivier whispered, with a smile.

Clara laughed, and exhaled. "You'd make a good midwife."

"What're you two doing down there?" Gabri asked as he watched Clara and his partner. "I know what Olivier usually does in that position and I hope that isn't it." He turned to Peter. "Though that might explain the laughter." "Ready?" Olivier handed Clara her purse and they got to their feet.

Gabri, never far from Olivier's side, gave Clara a bear hug. "You OK?"

now, but then, so was his. She'd dyed it auburn for many years but just recently had stopped doing that. He was glad. Like him, she was in her mid-fifties. And this was what a couple of that age looked like. If they were lucky. Not like models. No one would mistake them for that. Armand Gamache wasn't heavy, but solidly built. If a stranger visited this home he might think Monsieur Gamache a quiet academic, a professor of history or literature perhaps at the Université de Montréal.

But that too would be a mistake.

Books were everywhere in their large apartment. Histories, biographies, novels, studies on Québec antiques, poetry. Placed in orderly bookcases. Just about every table had at least one book on it, and often several magazines. And the weekend newspapers were scattered on the coffee table in the living room, in front of the fireplace. If a visitor was the observant type, and made it further into the apartment to Gamache's study, he might see the story the books in there told. And he'd soon realize this was not the home of some retiring professor of French literature. The shelves were packed with case histories, with books on medicine and forensics, with tomes on Napoleonic and common law, finger printing, genetic coding, wounds and weapons.

Murder. Armand Gamache's study was filled with it.

But still, even among the death, space was made for books on philosophy and poetry.

Watching Reine-Marie as they sat on the balcony, Gamache was once...