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“The bricks,” he agreed. How she’d changed, he thought, as he regarded the self-possessed young woman. “But what he needed was the structure. Sylvie’s job was to find something that would act as a catalyst. It took a long time, but finally, on searching the local historical society archives, she came across the Stone letter. She recognized the potential.”

“But how did something that important go unnoticed for so long?” asked Gabri. “It’s been around for a hundred and fifty years.”

Reine-Marie sighed. “It’s our fault. Historians, archivists, researchers, professors, biographers. We look to the so-called important figures. We value the papers left behind by Premiers, Prime Ministers, Presidents—by the most prominent witnesses to history—and forget there are other witnesses. The people who actually lived it. The First Nations. The farmers. The cooks and cleaners and salespeople. The laborers. The immigrants, the minorities.”

“The women,” said Harriet.

“Yes. The Stone letter was among the papers of a stonemason. A bricklayer. No one thought they could be of value.” She shook her head. “It is a terrible flaw in written history.”

“We were also wrong to assume Pierre Stone was next to illiterate,” said Armand. “The fact is, he went to university, but had to drop out when his parents died. He needed to find a skill to support his family.”

“The most obvious one was as a stonemason,” said Billy. “Like his father and grandfather. He discovered he was not only good at it, but liked it.”

“Sylvie found the letter and gave it to the head guard to give to her husband,” said Armand.

“So they knew there was some hidden room,” said Olivier, “but how did they know where it was?”

“Sylvie had all Pierre Stone’s papers,” said Armand.

“There were more?” asked Myrna.

“Oh, yes. All his letters to his fiancée, who became his wife. Whenever they were separated, he wrote her. Every day. He told her everything, including where the room was. Sylvie stole the letters. We found them in their home.”

The “we” of it wasn’t completely accurate. The investigators, led by Inspector Lacoste, found them while Armand was cheating at cribbage with the children.

“As soon as he saw the Stone letter, Fleming recognized the potential,” Armand continued. “From there he built his plan. It sounds, when I talk about it now, as though it all fell into place easily. It didn’t. It took years to put together all the elements.”

He stopped and took a small breath, suddenly visited by that voice.

Time and patience. Time and patience, Armand.

His friends waited for him to recover.

“All right?” said Ruth.

“All right,” he said.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Rosa.

He looked at the duck, and the duck looked at him.

“You got that right,” said Armand, nodding. But then, he often did. “The next big breakthrough for Fleming was when Sylvie sent him a photo of The Paston Treasure. He knew he could use it as a sort of Trojan horse, hiding within it all the items designed to alert but also alarm me. The art conservator from the Musée called it offensive, and that’s what he wanted.”

“But, but,” sputtered Gabri. “The room. If the Stone letter is real, why was Pierre hired to brick it up?”

“He doesn’t say in his letters. I doubt he looked into the room. Probably frightened.” Armand turned to Ruth. “But I think you know what was in there.”

“I think I do. What was the one thing that didn’t really belong?”

“The book,” said Myrna.

“Yes,” said Reine-Marie. “The grimoire.”

“We’ll never know for sure,” said Ruth in a rare admission of uncertainty, “but I think it was dug up when they were first excavating for the building, back in the 1870s. The guy who was putting up the buildings realized what it was, and it scared him. As far as he knew, the grimoire was a book of the damned, designed to raise demons. He tried to destroy it. There’re burn marks on it. But then he changed his mind, either because the leather wouldn’t catch, or he was afraid of angering the evil spirits.”

“And bricking them up wouldn’t?” asked Gabri.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” said Olivier.