A Fatal Grace

Crie is CC’s 14-year-old daughter—a painfully overweight teenager who attends Miss Edward’s School for Girls. Usually banished to the role of stagehand for the annual Christmas pageant, this year Crie will play the role of a snowflake. “Her mother, she knew, revered light” (10), and since a snowflake is the lightest of all elements, Crie hopes her mother will think she’s beautiful.

Clara Morrow, married to impoverished artist Peter Morrow, prepares for a day of shopping in Montreal. Her good friend Myrna arrives to drive them to town. Myrna is African American and a former psychologist. Like Clara, she fell in love with Three Pines. Myrna now owns the local bookstore.

Clara’s friend Jane Neal was murdered the year before and left Clara all of her money. This Christmas is the first time that Clara feels comfortable spending any of that inheritance on gifts.

Saul asks CC for the name of the photographer whose portfolio he admires. All she’ll reveal is that the artist is someone from Three Pines: “some pathetic little person” who asked CC to show the work to her gallery friends (14); she instructs Saul to put the back in the garbage can. Each secretly wants to end their affair.

CC contemplates the Victorian house she recently bought in Three Pines and where she, her husband, and daughter live. She thinks it will be the perfect backdrop for the catalog she plans to create for a new line of clothing and furniture called Li Bien. Once Saul finishes the photography for the catalog, she’ll dump him.

Saul thinks CC must know something about the village that nobody else does, which might benefit him financially. He intends to take a closer look at Three Pines.

Crie makes her debut as a snowflake in the school play but freezes onstage. Her mother isn’t in the audience. No one comes to pick her up after school either. She’s heartbroken.

Clara and Myrna have lunch in Montreal and split up for shopping errands. They meet again in the basement of Ogilvy’s department store where a poet from Three Pines named Ruth Zardo has a book signing. Clara wonders if the photography portfolio she gave to CC will result in an art show of her own at a major Montreal gallery.

Clara and Myrna greet their crusty friend Ruth as she signs copies of her book entitled I’m FINE. Ruth berates them for not coming to the event earlier. Many other supporters from Three Pines are in the audience.

A stack of CC’s books sits on a table nearby. Someone points out that the author stole the title, Be Calm, from the name of the village meditation center. The center’s owner, Mother Bea, appears to be angry, though her friends say CC probably meant the title as an homage.

CC is leaving the Ritz after an assignation with Saul. Her mind drifts back to a childhood Christmas. Her mother is enraged and hysterical. She hurls an ornament from the tree, and CC catches it:

It glowed and was warm to the touch. On it was painted a simple image. Three tall pine trees grouped together like a family, snow nestled on the bowing branches. Below it was written, in her mother’s hand, Noël (37).

Her mother painted the ornament, the “Li Bien ball” that CC writes about in her book. Holding it as a child, CC felt a sense of calm and light just as someone arrived to take her mother away to an institution.

Crie walks past the Ritz. Her hands and feet are frozen because she expected to be driven home, but her mother never arrived. The girl is emotionally and physically numb.

Meanwhile, CC has gone shopping and is just now leaving Ogilvy’s. CC notices Clara coming up the escalator across from her. CC makes a casual comment to the stranger next to her. She pretends she’s talking to an influential gallery owner and implies that the man said Clara’s work is amateur and banal. Clara is crushed: “Murdered by words. Murdered by CC. So casual and so cruel” (42). Clara stops outside to give food to a beggar. The woman says that she always loved Clara’s art.

The next day, Clara tells Myrna about her encounter with the beggar, claiming that it was a message from God. Myrna remains skeptical and defends her position to her friend: “Now, in my place what would you believe? That CC was right and the work is crap or that a beggar was God and the work is brilliant?” Myrna advises that Clara should stop taking others’ opinions of her to heart. Clara solemnly insists that she met God.

Myrna wonders if CC will be responsible for shattering the peace of their wonderful village because: “Since CC de Poitiers had arrived there’d been a gathering gloom over their little community. She’d brought something unsavory to Three Pines, in time for Christmas” (48). 

Clara loves watching the village go through its annual Christmas preparation. She is thankful that her inheritance makes decent gifts possible this year.

On Christmas Eve, everyone in Three Pines goes to St. Thomas’ Catholic Church because of its splendid decorations. As the congregation is singing “Silent Night,” the listeners are struck by the heavenly voice of a child singing. They all turn to see Crie. She’s dressed in a way that accentuates her rolls of fat, but her face is beautiful:

Clara had seen this child before, but only from a distance and only with a sullen unhappy face. But now that face was tilted toward the glowing rafters and held a look Clara knew to be bliss” (52-53).

After the service, everyone hears CC viciously berating her daughter for drawing attention to herself: “The congregation stood speechless […] They’d evaded the monster. Instead, it had devoured a frightened child” (54). 

Clara and Peter attend a Christmas party at the house of their elegant friend, Émilie Longpré. “Em,” along with two other village matriarchs, Kaye Thompson and Mother Bea, owns the meditation center. Clara refers to these women as the “Three Graces.”

The party is joyful, although when it breaks up, each of the three women has sad thoughts: Em mourns her dead family. Kaye feels guilty for not coming to Crie’s aid when her mother bullied her. And Mother Bea is disturbed that CC, “that horrible, twisted grotesque” woman (63), stole her “be calm” mantra; she feels CC’s coopting of the phrase has sullied and emptied it of “its power to heal” (63).

On Christmas morning, Clara and Peter exchange gifts. Peter gives Clara an unusual Christmas ornament with three pines painted inside a blown glass ball. They wander over to the local bistro where they spy a stranger at a nearby table. Myrna invites him to the community breakfast the following day.

The stranger is Saul. He’s in town to take photos for CC’s catalog, but he also wants to track down the photographer whose portfolio he saw to “[t]alk about things creative instead of the dark places he went with CC” (70). 

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec is enjoying a Boxing Day tradition with his wife, Reine-Marie. Each year Gamache swaps a box of unsolved cases with his colleague on the police force, Marc Brault. Gamache and his wife are going through cold case files, hoping to find clues that no one has noticed before.

Reine-Marie finds a case filed only a few days earlier: a beggar in front of Ogilvy’s department store was found strangled. A copy of Ruth’s new poetry book was found in her possession. Gamache is a fan of Ruth’s work and is familiar with Three Pines because he solved a murder there once.

Reine-Marie discovers a wooden box containing capital letters among the beggar’s meager possessions. Gamache and his wife can’t figure out what the letters mean. While the two form a theory about the crime, Gamache receives an unexpected phone call telling him that another murder has just occurred in Three Pines.