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“Who else could it have been?”

“Fiona.” She raised her hand slightly, to indicate she had more to say, but needed a moment. Which he gave her. “It’s possible none of this is threatening. She might’ve just been curious and bored. Wandering around the house, picking things up. Snooping more than spying.”

She studied him, holding his eyes.

“It’s possible,” he admitted.

Reine-Marie admired Fiona’s spirit, but, if she was honest, she was never completely comfortable with the young woman. Never totally trusted her.

In fact, neither Reine-Marie nor Jean-Guy could understand Armand’s support for Fiona and his enmity bordering on hostility toward Sam.

Jean-Guy had even, albeit at Armand’s suggestion, kept in touch with Sam for a few years after the trial, eventually losing track of him in his late teens.

But Armand had not lost track. He’d kept a close eye on Sam, as he’d grown from a child, to a teen, to a young man. Sam had not committed another crime. Not that Armand could see. Though crimes had been committed around him.

Assaults. B&Es. There was a murder in Saskatoon, in the building where Sam worked as a janitor. Sam had not been implicated.

Armand had flown out and gone over the evidence. Making sure.

Two other murders happened in other parts of Canada where Sam lived. It was, Armand knew, rare for anyone to have one murder in their life, never mind a series of them.

A serial.

But he never could connect Sam Arsenault to any of them.

As for Fiona, Reine-Marie had agreed to join him in sponsoring her parole. But there was always a membrane, a very thin barrier Reine-Marie had put up between herself and the young woman. The one thing she’d said to Armand when he’d first broached the idea of Fiona’s parole was that she was not to be around the grandchildren.

Armand had no trouble agreeing to that.

“Why would Sam want to snoop around our house?” Reine-Marie now asked.

“I don’t know,” Armand admitted. “But someone did. And they didn’t just snoop. They turned the family photo around. They moved items. They sprayed cologne. They lay on our bed.”

If it sounded to Reine-Marie like the Three Bears, she did not say anything. But for the first time, after reading that story to their children and now the grandchildren countless times, she stopped to think how frightened the three bears must have been.

“There was no effort to hide it,” Armand was saying. “In fact, whoever was here wanted us to see. To know. There was an intimacy about what they did. Can you see Fiona lying on our bed? Picking up my book and moving the bookmark?”

“No, but I can’t see Sam doing it either. You think there’s more to it, don’t you? You think it was a deliberate message.”

He nodded.

“To say what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I suspect it’s just a mind game. Nothing sinister.”

He looked down at the ring on the old pine table, then picked it up. “But I am just going to make a call.”

Going into his study, he called Nathalie Provost. After brief pleasantries she asked what he wanted.

“I’ve found an engineer’s ring in our basement. It looks old. Can you tell me something about them?”

“Well, I think you know that they were originally made from the metal remains of the first Québec Bridge. It collapsed in 1907, killing eighty-six workers. It was a catastrophic failure of engineering. The rings were made to remind engineers of that disaster, and the consequences of what they, what we, do.”

“I don’t see a name inside,” he said, holding it up to the light. “Is there any way of knowing whose it is, or was?”

“I don’t really know. I’ll have to check. The rings are supposed to be returned to the Société when the person retires or dies, so no name would be engraved. They’re given out over and over again. A sort of thread that connects us to each other.”

She looked down at her own. Few were so hard-won.