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Armand joined him. The two sat in silence for a few moments before Armand whispered, “Désolé.”

At Heathrow Airport, awaiting their return flight, Reine-Marie got a call from the museum.

“Oui, allô,” she said.

“Madame Cloutier? It’s Cecil Clarke. I just was looking at The Paston Treasure and I noticed something.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not sure how long they’ve been there, but there are markings on the clockface.”

“Words?”

“No, just lines, not even pictures. Squiggles. You didn’t…”

“Put them there? Of course not. We were never alone with it, even if we’d wanted to. Can you take a photo of them, please?”

“Why?”

“Please, just do it.” As soon as it arrived, she forwarded it, with shaking fingers, to Armand, Jean-Guy, and Amelia. Then she studied it herself. The doodles of a madman.

CHAPTER 33

The two men sat quietly. One silenced by grief, the other by knowing there were no words.

Armand could not even offer companionship. The man beside him was alone. Standing on an island in some vast ocean, no mainland in sight.

And so Armand sat quietly, also bathed in the brilliant boys. He’d have to leave soon to meet Jean-Guy, but for another few minutes Armand could sit with his friend. And hope and pray that a bridge, or a boat, might one day appear that would take Robert to a place of peace.

“She’s gone.” The words caused the dust caught in the sunshine to swirl about.

“Oui.” Armand waited a moment. Two. Before saying, “Would you like to talk?”

Armand assumed the silence was the answer, but then …

“She was fine when we went to bed.” Robert spoke to the Bible in his hand. “I gave her her meds, then I read to her until she fell asleep.” He continued to stare straight ahead. “We weren’t even halfway through the book.”

It seemed a non sequitur, but Armand understood. It was no longer a book, it had become a symbol.

He remembered finding, at the age of nine, the book his father had been reading. It was on the bedside table with a bookmark where he’d stopped. Where he’d expected to continue. But never did.

Young Armand took the book into his own bedroom and placed it in a drawer. Safe for when they came back. So that his father could pick up the story where he left off.

It had taken Armand more than forty years to finally open the book. He’d sat on the bench above Three Pines, day after day, holding it but not yet daring. And then, one day, he dared.

Armand, a grandfather by then, read to the end, finishing what his father had started. He hoped that one day Robert would too. But the minister did not have forty years to wait for the bridge, or the boat.

Jean-Guy got to the rendezvous location much earlier than planned and pulled into a small opening where Monsieur Godin, or Fleming, could not see him.

After confirming that Annie, Honoré, and Idola, along with Daniel and his family, were safely at the lake house, he opened an email from Reine-Marie.

Attached was a photo of the clock from the original Paston Treasure. All around the face there were lines, markings.

“Oh, merde,” he said. His heart was beating fast, in excitement or dread or both.

Curator just found this on original painting. Not there before.

Beauvoir forwarded it to Dr. Brunel to decode, copying Gamache.