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Sam knew it would be far more satisfying if it didn’t come as a complete surprise to the cop. If Gamache knew, for a while, what was going to happen.

Still, he could not help but be disappointed.

Armand returned Fred to the living room, lowering him onto his favorite place at the other end of the sofa from where Gracie lay snorting. Then he kissed Fred’s smelly head.

When he returned to his office, he found a message from Amelia.

She’d dropped off the items and was heading up to Lac Manitou. She’d be there in twenty minutes.

Armand then went back over the reports, the photographs, the conversations. He considered returning downstairs and consulting, yet again, the files in his private archive. But decided that wouldn’t get him anywhere.

He knew them by heart. Wished he didn’t. But did.

He sat back and stared out the window. Three Pines was going to sleep.

Time’s up.

He glanced at Myrna’s bookstore. Then lifted his eyes to her loft.

Gabri was right. It all started when they’d opened the wall and found the room. Found what was in there.

Found what Fleming wanted them, him, to see.

There is always another story / There is more than meets the eye.

There must be something he’d missed. And if that something was anywhere, it was in the painting.

He told Beauvoir he was returning, briefly, to the Incident Room. Then, just before he left, his phone buzzed with a message from Dr. Harris. The coroner had the results of the DNA tests.

Sam Arsenault’s DNA was not a match for either Godin or Boisfranc. But there was a clear match between the caretaker’s DNA off the glass and Fiona Arsenault.

There was no doubt. Claude Boisfranc was John Fleming. Fiona was his daughter.

CHAPTER 37

The worst had happened. Harriet was being eaten alive. Not by animals but from the inside out.

Fear, her lifelong companion, had finally consumed her.

Her body still functioned as she raced wildly through the woods, but she’d lost her mind. She’d become the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, all rolled into one.

And now even her body was giving up. Soon she’d stop running, stop walking, stop crawling, and just lie still. Waiting for death.

She did not have to wait long. A moment later, Harriet Landers ran right into it.

She fell to the forest floor and stared up.

Death hung suspended above her, arms out, wrists bound. The man’s feet slowly swinging like some gigantic clock pendulum signifying that time was up.

From deep inside Harriet Landers came every shriek she’d ever swallowed. All the fear, the frustrations, the anger and buried resentments. The wounds, the pain, the losses and humiliations. The times she’d been ignored, marginalized, diminished. Judged and found wanting. The parties not invited to, the boys who’d mocked her. The girls who’d left her out.

All her insecurities, loneliness, hurts, and rage from birth to this, her last moment, came rushing out.

Amelia Choquet had parked the car so as not to alert anyone of her presence and was creeping carefully along the dirt road when she heard a scream. It was deep in the woods. She’d never heard anything like it and couldn’t figure out if it was human or not.

But she couldn’t take the chance.

Checking the compass on her phone so she could get back and putting on the flashlight, Amelia ran into the forest.