A Fatal Grace

While Gamache is interviewing Em, Beauvoir talks with Mother Bea. The two detectives are able to piece together L’s whole story. Her real name was Eleanor Allaire, or “El” for short. El was a close friend of Em, Kaye, and Mother Bea. The capital letters in her wooden box stood for their initials. El became convinced that she was Eleanor of Aquitaine. Em made her a necklace using the queen’s heraldic symbol—a screaming eagle.

When she was young, El:

[…] was one of those children who seemed to bring out the best in others. She was bright, in every way. A shining child. When she walked into a room the lights went on and the sun rose (352).

However, as El got older, she grew emotionally unstable. “Be Calm” became a mantra the others used to try to keep El grounded. Thinking meditation might help, Mother Bea took El to India. El returned on her own and lost touch with the rest of her friends. She had a daughter out of wedlock and eventually descended into emotional illness. CC was placed in foster care. When CC turned up in Three Pines, the friends knew who she was. They tried to welcome her, but CC was the opposite of her mother:

She was unlikable in the extreme. El was like sunshine, bright and loving and kind. But she gave birth to darkness. CC didn’t live in her mother’s shadow, she was her mother’s shadow (364).

The three friends found El living on the streets in Montreal, but they weren’t able to help her. They had intended to visit her on December 23 and give her a Christmas gift, but she was dead by then.

Later that evening, as Beauvoir and Lemieux watch a hockey game, Gamache receives a call from his wife. He tells her his theory of how El died. Gamache believes that CC went searching for her mother in Three Pines, thinking she was Kaye, Em, or Mother Bea. Meanwhile, El had seen posters in Montreal advertising CC’s new product line, so she stationed herself outside Ogilvy’s, hoping to run into CC there. CC was planning to show her mother that she had become a success. She still wanted maternal approval. Instead, CC finds that her mother is a filthy, crazy beggar. CC’s one goal is to make this new embarrassment disappear, 

[…] CC’s instincts were always to get rid of anything unpleasant. To erase and disappear them. As she had her soft and indolent husband and her immense and silent daughter (372).

Gamache asks his wife if he did the right thing by arresting Arnot and his accomplices in the past case. He’s convinced the superintendent would never have committed suicide like the other two. He would have run away. Gamache is now viewed as a pariah within the Sûreté for going public with Arnot’s crimes. His wife understands his self-doubt but reassures him that he did the right thing. She changes the subject and asks who killed CC. Gamache knows and tells her.

The following morning a snowstorm hits Three Pines. As the detectives are beginning their daily routine, Lemieux finds a letter shoved under the door of the Incident Room. It’s a confession written by Em. Gamache rushes outside in time to see the three elderly women, the Three Graces, making their way across the frozen lake. All are guilty of murdering CC, and they want to kill themselves by freezing to death.

Gamache watches from the shore, thinking about the details of the crime, which no single person could have committed. Mother Bea spiked CC’s tea with niacin to cause her to flush and remove her gloves. Em poured wiper fluid on the ground beneath the chair and sat in it to prevent CC from taking the seat too early. Mother Bea gave a signal when she was about to create a diversion during the curling match. Kaye knocked the chair askew, tempting CC to adjust it, and attached the cables from the generator on Billy’s truck. During the confusion after CC’s electrocution, Kaye detached the cables, and Em threw them back onto the truck. Their motive was Crie. They wanted to save the girl before CC had a chance to murder her spirit completely.

Gamache runs to his car, trying to figure out a way to rescue the women even though he feels it’s too late.

Gamache races to the nearest town. He enlists Billy Williams and other snowmobilers to search for the elderly women on the ice. The trio are found and taken to a nearby hospital. Em dies, but Kaye and Mother Bea survive.

Gamache tells Beauvoir that the three friends were trying to save Crie for a reason different from what everyone supposes. The detectives go to the Hadley home to see Crie. Gamache observes her in light of all he has learned:

She’s the end of the line […] the final repository of all the fears and fantasies of her mother and grandmother. This was what they’d created. Like Frankenstein’s monster. A patchwork of their own horrors (394).

Gamache gently asks Crie why she killed her mother.

Gamache and his wife visit the Morrows and their usual guests on New Year’s Day. Gamache gives the group an update on the case. Kaye and Mother Bea are recovering. Crie has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. She will probably never stand trial.

The three elderly women saw Crie set up the wiring that would kill her mother. They wrote a confession to Gamache to draw suspicion away from Crie. The reason Gamache knows they didn’t commit the crime is because of CC’s baby seal boots with metal claws. They were the key. The only people who knew about the boots were Crie and Lyon, and electrocution wouldn’t have killed CC if she wasn’t wearing them. Plus, Crie had all the necessary technical knowledge to set up the crime.

Crie finally snapped after CC criticized her singing on Christmas Eve. Gamache describes the murder as “self-defense”.

She was finally so hurt she couldn’t take it any more. It happens with children sometimes. They either kill themselves, or they kill their abuser’ (398).

As Gamache and his wife leave the village, he stops the car to take a final, satisfied look back at Three Pines.