47 pages • 1-hour read
Still Life
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Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
On Thursday, the exhibition sees a large turnout, including media attention on Jane’s painting. When Fair Day is revealed, Peter tells Gamache that the piece seems changed somehow. As various people identify themselves and others in the painting, Clara concludes that it was intended as a tribute to Timmer. Eager to contradict her, Nichol points to a blond woman in the midst of the painting and asks why Jane would include Yolande in a tribute to Jane. Frustrated at her rudeness, Gamache tells Nichol to take the morning train to Montreal. In her mind, Nichol blames Gamache for her dismissal.
An hour later, guests arrive at Jane’s home for the party and look for themselves on the walls. Clara finds Jane’s depiction of her looking out of a rosebush, while Peter appears in the shadow of Ben, who is shown looking at his mother’s home. At Gamache’s request, the curator of the exhibit displays Fair Day in Jane’s living room alongside her other art. Clara realizes that the blond woman Nichol pointed out isn’t Yolande, whose depiction on the wall differs. Looking closely, she explains to the group that someone must have modified Fair Day between the time it was judged and the time Gamache saw it on Thanksgiving Monday, painting the blond face in place of the face that was there before. The party breaks up as a powerful storm strikes. Before separating, they transport Fair Day to the bed and breakfast, where Gamache asks who saw the painting before it was displayed, but the answer is inconclusive. Gamache and Beauvoir talk through their list of suspects. From behind a magazine, Nichol asserts that Peter is guilty.
Confident that she figured out who the murderer is but unsure what to do, Clara returns to Jane’s house to think. After a while, she goes to see Ben. She explains that she came to make sure she was correct, and Ben admits to killing Jane, then knocks Clara out. She wakes up to find herself tied up Timmer’s basement. Ben taunts her, asking whether she can hear the snakes. He describes his plan to pass off her death as an accident or else to frame Peter. As Ben prepares the scene, Clara breaks free and tries to evade Ben and the snakes. When Ben drops his flashlight, the room goes dark. Clara throws a snake across the room, and Ben makes his way toward the sound. As Clara feels her way around, her hand activates a mousetrap. She flings the mousetrap away, and Ben charges in the direction of the sound, running into the wall.
In bed, Gamache has an epiphany, recognizing that something is missing from Fair Day. Gamache wakes Beauvoir and hurries to the Morrows’ house, where Peter tells them that Clara is not home. After quickly checking at Jane’s home, they make their way to Ben’s house, which is also empty. Arriving at Timmer’s house, they follow a trail of wet footsteps. Hearing a cry, they race down the basement stairs, which break.
Chapter 14 Summary
Gamache, Beauvoir, and Peter fall in a heap, and Gamache’s leg breaks. When he wakes up, he sees Clara, who continues to scan for snakes, and Beauvoir, who tells him that help is on the way.
A week later, Gamache and Beauvoir enjoy lunch in Jane’s home with Peter, Clara, and their friends. Myrna asks how Clara recognized Ben, now in custody, as the murderer, and she explains that she grew suspicious when she realized that Ben’s face was missing from Fair Day, a tribute to his mother. Together, Gamache and Clara explain that Ben grew fearful when Jane looked at him and said that the painting had a special meaning. Jane’s quotation of W. H. Auden about the nature of evil added to his fears. He went to see the painting before the exhibit and concluded that Jane’s inclusion of his face showed that she knew he killed Timmer, even though he told police he was in Ottawa that day. In fact, Ben did go to Ottawa to establish an alibi, then hurried home to give Timmer a lethal dose of morphine when Ruth, Timmer’s caretaker for the day, went to see the parade. Fearing that Fair Day would give him away, he took and modified it on Saturday, then asked Jane to meet him near the deer trail on Sunday morning so he could kill her before she noticed the change. On the day after Jane’s death, he cooked onions to cover up the scent of the paint solvent, which Clara mistook for cleaning chemicals, until Nellie told her that she last cleaned Ben’s house before Jane’s death.
Ruth asks why Ben killed Timmer, and Gamache explains that Ben led a “still” life of the kind Myrna described earlier. Gamache references Jane’s drawing of Ben, showing him in a childlike outfit, set in stone, facing his mother’s home and casting a shadow over Peter, who failed to see Ben as he was. Timmer’s conversations with Myrna helped her realize how problematic Ben’s behavior was, and she planned to reduce his inheritance. Ben killed Timmer when he learned of her plans. Clara’s negative impression of Timmer came from the lies Ben told her. Even the snakes turned out to be a lie, which Clara’s imagination brought to life. Gamache admits that he mistook Ben’s interest in Clara for a romantic one. In reality, Ben was keeping an eye on her since he expected her to recognize him as the murderer.
Ruth takes Ben’s dog, now under her care, on a walk. As she passes the prayer stick, she looks again at the photograph she attached of Jane, Jane’s lover, and Timmer and decides to let go of the past. She opens an envelope Jane left for her with the notary and finds a depiction of her and Jane embracing as elderly women, mirroring an image on Jane’s wall of their embrace as children. She reads from a book, implied to be C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, that she selected as a keepsake from Jane’s home.
Gamache stop by the bistro, which doubles as an antiques store, to find Olivier and Gabri moving a dresser that Olivier selected from Jane’s possessions. Myrna asks Gamache why Philippe treated his father so poorly. Gamache hesitates to reveal what he knows: upon realizing he was gay, Philippe experienced confusion and shame. Lacoste found a suggestive magazine in Bernard’s room, covered with Philippe’s fingerprints, which Bernard was using to blackmail Philippe. Though Gamache says nothing, Gabri and Olivier guess the truth, and Gamache discreetly confirms it.
Clara presents her latest work to Peter, who remains distant since finding out about Ben: a stylized photo of the wooden box on stilts, spinning, with a rock or egg inside. Peter doesn’t appear to understand, but Clara maintains hope that he will emerge from his depression. Clara sends a letter to the local reverend with an inscription for Jane’s headstone: Matthew 10:36 is crossed out, replaced with the phrase “Surprised by Joy” (312), the title of a C. S. Lewis book Jane liked to read. On his way home, Gamache looks back fondly over Three Pines.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
Throughout the novel’s concluding chapters, Penny’s stylistic choices heighten suspense. When Clara first goes to confront Ben, he is referred to by pronoun only, leaving open that possibility that Clara went to see Peter or someone else. Only at the end of the scene does Penny reveal Clara’s adversary to be Ben. Penny also ratchets up the tension in Chapter 13 by switching frequently between Clara’s perspective and that of Gamache and his companions as they solve the case, then track her down. Setting the climax during a severe storm, while somewhat cliché, also adds urgency.
These chapters resolve the novel’s main storylines. Nichol’s failure to become a functional agent is completed, despite Gamache’s best efforts, when he orders her to leave. Despite her dismissal, Nichol’s observation about the face that she takes to be Yolande’s does spark a turning point in the case, as it starts Clara’s train of thought that leads her to solve the mystery. The incident epitomizes Nichol’s strengths and weaknesses: She is a gifted thinker who lacks interpersonal awareness and skills, and, most importantly, she is unwilling to change or accept responsibility.
Ruth and Philippe’s character arcs are clarified as well. Ruth’s suppressed guilt at her role in the breakup of Jane’s engagement is finally acknowledged and released. The reason for Philippe’s angry behavior comes to light, and while his challenges are far from over, it’s implied that Gabri and Olivier will help him.
Penny’s characterization of Gamache also comes to a fitting conclusion. Gamache’s role in the novel’s climax exposes his vulnerability, since he is not the first one to solve the case, and when he does arrive in Timmer’s basement, his rescue attempt falls flat as he, Beauvoir, and Peter are injured. Far from being an action hero, Gamache instead impresses readers as a well-meaning, intelligent, principled officer of the law.
The revelation of Ben as the murderer, as well as his reasons for acting as he did, fit into larger themes of personal growth, or the lack thereof, as well as the differences between appearance and reality. Here, the emphasis is on the importance of seeing people as they are, unlike Peter and Clara, who are deceived by Ben’s surface goodness, which prevents them from seeing Timmer accurately as well.
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