Free How the Light Gets In: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny Page B

Jérôme,” said Gamache, as he rose and picked up Henri’s leash. He said his good-byes, left them, and headed into the night.
    The lights of the cities and towns and villages faded in his rearview mirror as they drove deeper into the forest. After a while the darkness was complete, except for the beams of his headlights on the snowy roads. Eventually he saw a soft glow ahead, and knew what it was. Gamache’s car crested a hill, and there in the valley he saw three huge pines lit with green and red and yellow Christmas lights. Thousands of them, it seemed. And around the village cheery lights were hung along porches and picket fences and over the stone bridge.
    As his car descended, the signal on his device disappeared. No phone reception, no emails. It was as though he and Henri, asleep on the backseat, had fallen off the face of the earth.
    He parked in front of Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore and noted the lights still on upstairs. So often he’d come here to find death. This time he’d brought it with him.

 
    EIGHT
    Clara Morrow was the first to notice the car arrive.
    She and Myrna had had a simple dinner of reheated stew and a salad, then she’d gotten up to do the dishes, but Myrna soon joined her.
    “I can do them,” said Clara, squirting the dishwashing liquid into the hot water and watching it foam. It was always strangely satisfying. It made Clara feel like a magician, or a witch, or an alchemist. Not, perhaps, as valuable as turning lead into gold, but useful all the same.
    Clara Morrow was not someone who liked housework. What she liked was magic. Water into foam. Dirty dishes into clean. A blank canvas into a work of art.
    It wasn’t change she liked so much as metamorphosis.
    “You sit down,” she said, but Myrna took the tea towel and reached for a warm, clean dish.
    “It helps take my mind off things.”
    They both knew drying the dinner dishes was a fragile raft on a rough sea, but if it kept Myrna afloat for a while Clara was all for it.
    They fell into a reassuring rhythm. She washed and Myrna dried.
    When Clara was finished she drained the water, wiped the sink, and turned to face the room. It hadn’t changed in the years since Myrna had given up her psychologist’s practice in Montréal and packed her tiny car with all her worldly possessions. When she rolled into Three Pines she looked like someone who’d run away from the circus.
    Out she climbed, an immense black woman, surely larger than the car itself. She’d gotten lost on the back roads, and when she found the unexpected village she’d stopped for a coffee, a pastry, a bathroom break. A pit stop on her way somewhere else. Somewhere more exciting, more promising. But Myrna Landers never left.
    Over café au lait and patisserie in the bistro, she realized that she was fine where she was.
    Myrna had unpacked, leased the empty shop next to Olivier’s Bistro, and opened a new and used bookstore. She’d moved upstairs, into the loft space.
    That’s how Clara had first really gotten to know Myrna. She’d dropped by to check out how the new bookstore was going and heard sweeping and swearing from above. Climbing the stairs at the back of the shop, Clara had found Myrna.
    Sweeping and swearing.
    They’d been friends ever since.
    She’d watched Myrna work her magic, turning an empty store into a bookshop. Turning an empty space into a meeting place. Turning a disused loft into a home. Turning an unhappy life into contentment.
    Three Pines might be stable but it was never still.
    When Clara surveyed the room, seeing the Christmas lights through the windows, she wasn’t sure she’d seen that brief flash. Headlights.
    But then she heard the car engine. She turned to Myrna, who’d also heard it.
    They were both thinking the same thing.
    Constance.
    Clara tried to stomp down the relief, knowing it was premature, but found it bubbled up and around her caution.
    There was the tinkle of the door downstairs. And steps. They could hear a