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Carl Tracey was afraid of losing his home, his studio, his pottery.

If Vivienne lived.

“But how would they set up the meeting?” said Beauvoir. “There’s no record of a call between Cloutier and Vivienne.”

“True,” said Lacoste.

They’d checked all the calls into and out of the farmhouse, going back months. It was not as arduous as it sounded. There were hardly any, and those there were, were easily traced.

“One of the things I don’t understand,” said Gamache, “is why Vivienne didn’t leave earlier.”

“She had to get up courage,” said Lacoste, a little surprised by the question. “We’ve talked about this. Lots of abused women never leave—” Her phone buzzed. “Sorry. Allô?”

“A message just came in,” said Agent Cloutier. “I’d asked the forensic accountants to look into the bank accounts of all the people involved.”

“Yes? And?” asked Lacoste.

“I’ve forwarded it to you.”

Lacoste went to her emails. “Got it.” She clicked on it. “What’m I looking at?”

She waved the others over to her laptop.

Gamache and Beauvoir bent and stared at the screen while Lacoste put Cloutier on speaker.

“Scroll down,” said Cloutier. “To the bottom link.”

Lacoste did, and clicked. “But this’s Monsieur Godin’s bank account.”

“I didn’t ask for it to be part of the search,” explained Cloutier. “But his name must’ve been on the list of people involved in the case. So the forensic accountant included him, I guess.”

They looked at the numbers. Twenty thousand dollars had been transferred into Homer Godin’s bank account on Friday. And taken out in cash that afternoon.

“It’s a mortgage loan,” said Cloutier. “You can tell by the code attached to the transfer. He must’ve taken it out against his house.”

“Why?” asked Beauvoir.

“I don’t know,” said Cloutier. “But I thought you should see it.”

“Anything in the other accounts?” asked Lacoste.

“Tracey’s massively overdrawn, and Pauline’s credit cards are maxed out.”

“And Vivienne was sitting with eighteen thousand dollars in her account,” said Beauvoir.

“And twenty thousand in cash with Homer,” said Lacoste. “Merci.”

Lacoste hung up, and Beauvoir looked at Gamache, who’d cocked his head to one side. Considering.

“Must’ve been for Vivienne,” said Lacoste. “Don’t you think? She knew she was leaving Carl and asked her father for more money.”

“When? And wasn’t the eighteen thousand enough?” asked Beauvoir. “This would give her almost forty thousand. Why would she need that much? And in cash? And why didn’t he tell us about it?”

“He had other things on his mind,” said Lacoste.

“And he just forgot about the twenty thousand?”

“Maybe he did tell us,” said Gamache. “Well, not us exactly, but Lysette Cloutier. She says they hadn’t kept in touch since he broke it off, but that might not be true. Homer didn’t say they’d lost touch. Maybe he asked her advice on how to raise the money.”