The Murder Stone by Louise Penny

Author:Louise Penny
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Police Procedural, General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9780755341016
Publisher: Mcarthur & Co Pub Ltd
Published: 2008-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Peter Morrow stood alone just outside the yellow ribbon. The ground held a Julia-sized indent.

In life she’d torn the family apart and now she was doing it in death. Selfish, greedy and yes, cruel. He’d meant every word.

His mother had cried for her. Had only good things to say about Julia. She’d become perfect Julia, beautiful Julia, kind and loving Julia. Well, who’d stayed and looked after Mother? Who visited her and had her for dinners? Who phoned her and sent cards and gifts?

He stared at the hole and tried to feel something. Tried to remember Julia as a girl. His older sister. Born between the boys, like being born between the wars. Trodden upon and mauled as the boys tried to get at each other. They’d squashed and trampled her in the middle. Flat.

And now Dad had done it too.

There’d been four of them all their lives. Thomas, Julia, Peter, Mariana. Four wheels, four walls, four seasons, four elements, four corners of the earth.

But now they were three. Strange as their world had been, it at least made sense, to them. What happens when one corner is removed?

All hell breaks loose. And the first trumpet was heard tonight. His mother’s cry.

‘Peter?’

He stood still, not daring to turn round, to show his face to anybody.

‘Is it all right that I’m here?’ he asked.

‘As long as you go no closer, but you know that,’ said Gamache.

The two men stared at the scene, though both were actually staring at the pedestal of hard marble. Gamache had come into the garden for some fresh air, to walk off his dinner and try to put order into the pile of evidence they were collecting. But mostly he’d wanted to come here again, to look at the white block. The thing he’d first mistaken for a grave marker. And now it was.

But what troubled him was why the block wasn’t marred. It showed absolutely no sign of the statue’s ever being on it, and certainly no signs of it scraping off. Not a scratch, not a blemish. It was perfect. And it was impossible.

‘My mother used to read us stories when we were children,’ Peter said. ‘My father would play the piano and we’d all cram onto the sofa and Mother would read. Our favourite was always from a book on myths. I still remember most of them. Zeus, Ulysses. Thomas loved that one. Always wanted it read. Over and over we heard about the lotus-eaters and the sirens.’

‘And Scylla and Charybdis,’ said Gamache. ‘I loved it too. That terrible choice Ulysses faced, to aim his ship for the whirlpool or for the six-headed monster.’

‘He chose the monster and it killed six of his men. They died and he sailed on,’ said Peter.

‘What would you have done?’ asked Gamache. He knew the myth well. Ulysses returning from the Trojan War, his long perilous journey. Trying to get home. Coming upon that terrible strait. On one side a whirlpool that sucked every ship and soul into it.

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