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the fire.
    ‘You did look very stately this morning,’ said Ben Hadley, Peter’s best friend.
    ‘Don’t you mean estately?’
    ‘More like the back forty, it’s true.’
    In the kitchen, Clara was greeting Myrna Landers.
    ‘The table looks wonderful,’ said Myrna, peeling off her coat and revealing a bright purple kaftan. Clara wondered how she squeezed through doorways. Myrna then dragged in her contribution to the evening, a flower arrangement. ‘Where would you like it, child?’
    Clara gawked. Like Myrna herself, her bouquets were huge, effusive and unexpected. This one contained oak and maple branches, bulrushes from the Riviere Bella Bella which ran behind Myrna’s bookshop, apple branches with a couple of McIntoshes still on them, and great armfuls of herbs.
    ‘What’s this?’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Here, in the middle of the arrangement.’
    ‘A kielbassa.’
    ‘A sausage?’
    ‘Hummuh, and look in there,’ Myrna pointed into the tangle.
    ‘The Collected Works of W. H. Auden,’
Clara read. ‘You’re kidding.’
    ‘It’s for the boys.’
    ‘What else is in there?’ Clara scanned the immense arrangement.
    ‘Denzel Washington. But don’t tell Gabri.’
    In the living room, Jane continued the story: ‘… then Gabri said to me, “I have your mulch. This is just the way Vita Sackville West always wore it.”’
    Olivier whispered in Gabri’s ear, ‘You are queer.’
    ‘Aren’t you glad one of us is?’ a well-worn and comfortable jest.
    ‘How are you?’ Myrna came in from the kitchen, followed by Clara, and hugged Gabri and Olivier while Peter poured her Scotch.
    ‘I think we’re all right,’ Olivier kissed Myrna on both cheeks. ‘It’s probably surprising this didn’t happen sooner. We’ve been here for what? Twelve years?’ Gabri nodded, his mouth full of Camembert. ‘And this is the first time we’ve been bashed. I was gay bashed in Montreal when I was a kid, by a group of grown men. That was terrifying.’ They’d grown silent, and there was just the crackling and muttering of the fire in the background as Olivier spoke.
    ‘They hit me with sticks. It’s funny, but when I think back that’s the most painful part. Not the scrapes and bruises, but before they hit me they kind of poked, you know?’ Hejabbed with one arm to mimic their movements. ‘It was as though I wasn’t human.’
    ‘That’s the necessary first step,’ said Myrna. ‘They dehumanise their victim. You’ve put it well.’
    She spoke from experience. Before coming to Three Pines she’d been a psychologist in Montreal. And, being black, she knew that singular expression when people saw her as furniture.
    Ruth turned to Olivier, changing the subject. ‘I was in the basement and came across a few things I thought you could sell for me.’ Ruth’s basement was her bank.
    ‘Great. What?’
    ‘There’s some cranberry glass—’
    ‘Oh, wonderful.’ Olivier adored colored glass. ‘Hand blown?’
    ‘Do you take me for an idiot? Of course they’re hand blown.’
    ‘Are you sure you don’t want them?’ he always asked this of his friends.
    ‘Stop asking me that. Do you think I’d mention them if there was a doubt?’
    ‘Bitch.’
    ‘Slut.’
    ‘OK, tell me more,’ said Olivier. The stuff Ruth hauled up from her basement was incredible. It was as though she had a porthole to the past. Some of it was junk, like the old broken-down coffee makers and burned-out toasters. But most made him tremble with pleasure. The greedy antique dealer in him, which composed a larger part of his make-up than he’d ever admit, was thrilled to have exclusive access to Ruth’s treasures. He’d sometimes daydream about that basement.
    If he was excited by Ruth’s possessions, he was positively beside himself with lust after Jane’s home. He’d kill to see beyond her kitchen door. Her kitchen alone was worth tensof thousands of dollars in antiques. When he’d first come to Three Pines, at the Drama Queen’s