The Murder Stone by Louise Penny

phone calls. Even as a child Pierre knew he was being groomed. Trimmed and shaped, buffed and burnished.
    Would his father be disappointed in him? Being just a maitre d’? But he thought not. His father had wanted only one thing for him. To be happy.
    He turned out the light and walked through the empty dining room and into the garden to look once again at the marble cube.
    Mariana unwrapped herself, veil after veil, humming. Every now and then she looked over to the single bed next to hers. Bean was either asleep or pretending to be.
    ‘Bean?’ she whispered. ‘Bean, kiss Mommy goodnight.’
    The child was silent. Though the room itself wasn’t. Clocks filled almost every surface. Ticking clocks and digital clocks, electric clocks and wind-up ones. All set to go off at seven a.m. All moving towards that time, as they had every morning for months. There seemed to be more of them than ever.
    Mariana wondered if it had gone too far. Whether she should do something. Surely it wasn’t normal for a ten year old to do this? What had started as one alarm clock a year ago had blossomed and spread like an invasive weed until Bean’s room at home was choked with them. The riot each morning was beyond belief. From her own bedroom she could hear her strange child clicking them all off, until the last tinny call to the day was silenced.
    Surely this wasn’t normal?
    But then so much about Bean wasn’t normal. To call in a psychologist now, well, it felt a bit like trying to outrun a tidal wave of odd, thought Mariana. She lifted Bean’s hand off the book and smiled as she laid it on the floor. It’d been her own favourite book as a child and she wondered which story Bean liked the most. Ulysses? Pandora? Hercules?
    Leaning down to kiss Bean Mariana noticed the chandelier and its old corded electrical wire. In her mind she saw a spark leap in a brilliant arc onto the bedding, smouldering at first then bursting into flames as they slept.
    She stepped back, closed her eyes, and placed the invisible wall round Bean.
    There, safe.
    She turned off the light and lay in bed, her body feeling sticky and flabby. The closer she got to her mother the heavier her body felt, as though her mother had her own atmosphere and gravity. Tomorrow Spot would arrive, and it would begin. And end.
    She tried to get comfortable, but the night was close and the covers collapsed and stuck to her. She kicked them off. But what really stood between her and sleep wasn’t the stinking heat, the snoring child, the clinging bedclothes.
    It was a banana.
    Why did they always goad her? And why, at the age of forty-seven, did she still care?
    She turned over, trying to find a cool place on the now damp bedding.
    Banana. And she heard again their laughter. And saw their mocking looks.
    Let it go, she begged herself. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the banana and the clocks tsk, tsk, tsking in her head.
    Julia Martin sat at the vanity and took off her single string of pearls. Simple, elegant, a gift from her father for her eighteenth birthday.
    ‘A lady is always understated, Julia,’ he’d said. ‘A lady never shows off. She always puts others at ease. Remember that.’
    And she had. As soon as he’d said it she knew the truth of it. And all the stumbling and bumbling she’d done, all the uncertainties and solitude of her teen years, had fallen away. Ahead of her stretched a clear path. Narrow, yes, but clear. The relief she felt was absolute. She had a purpose, a direction. She knew who she was and what she had to do. Put others at ease.
    As she undressed she went over the events of the day, making a list of all the people she might have hurt, all the people who might dislike her because of her words, her inflection, her manner.
    And she thought of the nice French man and their conversation in the garden. He’d seen her smoking. What must he think of her? And then she’d flirted with the young waiter and accepted a drink. Drinking, smoking,