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of stone and wishful thinking:

That the deity that kills for pleasure will also heal,

He could, even now, from what felt like an impossible distance, see through the mullioned windows of the bistro to the thick forests, and the leaves that would already be changing.

As everything eventually did.

Except in the picture tossed so casually on the floor.

That in the midst of your nightmare,

the final one, a kind lion will pick your soul up gently

by the nape of the neck,

Home. Home. He wanted to go home. And sit by the fire. And listen to their friends talking and laughing. To hold Reine-Marie’s hand and watch their grandchildren play.

And caress you into darkness and paradise.

But not quite yet.

Gamache went over to the tiny painting and replaced it safely on the screw in the wall. Where it belonged.

But before he did, he noticed, written on the back, For Armand.

CHAPTER 11

Reine-Marie Gamache sat in the Hôtel Lutetia’s bar Joséphine, her hand resting on the box beside her.

She stared past the elegant patrons, through the huge windows of the Lutetia, at the chic men and women of Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement.

They strolled by on rue de Sèvres. Many holding shopping bags from the nearby Le Bon Marché.

Reine-Marie was aware of the activity around her in the magnificent Belle Époque brasserie, but all she saw was the body on the floor and blood on a carpet where her children had played.

And she tried to recapture that scent. Would she ever be able to identify it again?

She could still, to this day, identify her mother’s scent. Not perfume, but ammonia cleanser. Clinging to her, ingrained in her very pores, from her job cleaning houses.

And Reine-Marie knew she’d go to her grave with Armand’s scent of sandalwood. At least, she hoped she would. That she’d go first. In his arms.

It was selfish of her. To make him go through that. To leave him behind. But she wasn’t sure if she could go on without him. If he …

She refocused her mind. Back to the events. The facts. The body.

As a trained librarian and archivist, she was used to not just sorting and cataloguing information but also making connections. What had made her so good at her job, and led to her rise within Québec’s Bibliothèque et Archives nationales, was that her mind worked on many levels.

Where others might see facts, Madame Gamache could see the relationship between them. She could connect two, three, many apparently disparate events.

Between the aboriginal name for “the Stargazer,” an account of a dinner party in 1820 with the geologist Bigsby, and a pauper’s grave in Montréal.

She’d put all that together and come up with David Thompson. An explorer and mapmaker who turned out to be possibly the greatest cartographer who ever lived. An extraordinary human who’d disappeared into history.

Until the librarian and archivist Madame Gamache had found him.

And now she was presented with a whole different set of facts, of events. Not safely residing in history, these had a pulse. And blood all over them.

She pulled the box closer and narrowed her eyes. Trying to see …