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He felt along the hem. Nothing. He felt the sleeves. Nothing. He felt the neckline. Nothing. Until. Until he came to the short line at the bottom of the semi-plunging neckline. Where it squared off.

He took the scissors Villeneuve offered and carefully unpicked the seam. This was not machine-stitched like the rest of the dress, but done by hand with great care.Advertisement

He folded back the material and found a memory stick.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Jean-Guy Beauvoir turned off the highway onto the secondary road. In the backseat Chief Superintendent Francoeur and Inspector Tessier were conferring. Beauvoir hadn’t asked why they wanted to go to Three Pines, or why the unmarked Sûreté van was following them.

He didn’t care.

He was just a chauffeur. He’d do as he was told. No more debate. He’d learned that when he cared, he got hurt, and he couldn’t take any more pain. Even the pills couldn’t dull it anymore.

So Jean-Guy Beauvoir did the only thing left. He gave up.

* * *

“But Constance was the last Quint,” said Ruth. “How could she have been killed by one of her sisters?”

“What do we really know about their deaths?” Myrna asked Ruth. “You yourself suspected the first one to die—”

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“Virginie,” said Ruth.

“—hadn’t fallen down those stairs by accident. You suspected suicide.”

“But it was just a guess,” said the old poet. “I was young and thought despair was romantic.” She paused, stroking Rosa’s head. “I might’ve confused Virginie with myself.”

“Who hurt you once / so far beyond repair,” Clara quoted.

Ruth opened her mouth and for a moment the friends thought she might actually answer that question. But then her thin lips clamped shut.

“Suppose you were wrong about Virginie?” Myrna asked.

“How can it matter now?” Ruth asked.

Gabri jumped in. “It would matter if Virginie didn’t really fall down the stairs. Was that their secret?” he asked Myrna. “She wasn’t dead?”

Thérèse Brunel turned back to the window. She’d allowed herself to glance into the room, toward the tight circle and the ghost story. But a sound drew her eyes back outside. A car was approaching.

Everyone heard it. Olivier was the first to move, walking swiftly across the wooden floor. He stood at Thérèse’s shoulder and looked out.

“It’s only Billy Williams,” he reported. “Come for his lunch.”

They relaxed, but not completely. The tension, pushed aside by the story, was back.

Gabri shoved another couple of logs into the woodstove. They all felt slightly chilled, though the room was warm.

“Constance was trying to tell me something,” said Myrna, picking up the thread. “And she did. She told us everything, but we just didn’t know how to put it together.”

“What did she tell us?” Ruth demanded.

“Well, she told you and me that she loved to play hockey,” said Myrna. “That it was Brother André’s favorite sport. They had a team and would get up a game with the neighborhood kids.”

“So?” asked Ruth, and Rosa, in her arms, quacked quietly as though mimicking her mother. “So, so, so,” the duck muttered.

Myrna turned to Olivier, Gabri, and Clara. “She gave you mitts and a scarf that she’d knitted, with symbols of your lives. Paintbrushes for Clara—”

“I don’t want to know what your symbol was,” Nichol said to Gabri and Olivier.

“She was practically leaking clues,” said Myrna. “It must’ve been so frustrating for her.”

“For her?” said Clara. “It’s really not that obvious, you know.”

“Not to you,” said Myrna. “Not to me. Not to anyone here. But to someone unused to talking about herself and her life, it must’ve seemed like she was screaming her secrets at us. You know what it’s like. When we know something, and hint, those hints seem so obvious. She must’ve thought we were a bunch of idiots not to pick up on what she was saying.”

“But what was she saying?” Olivier asked. “That Virginie was still alive?”

“She left her final clue under my tree, thinking that she wouldn’t be back,” said Myrna. “Her card said it was the key to her home. It would unlock all the secrets.”

“Her albatross,” said Ruth.

“She gave you an albatross?” asked Nichol. Nothing about this village or these people surprised her anymore. pqdm.com