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Gamache stepped forward and shone his flashlight on it and begin to laugh, not in amusement but in relief.
“Empress of Ireland,” he read out loud. “Property of Professor Abraham Russell, Macdonald College.”
He stepped back, shaking his head in wonderment, and watched while others slapped each other’s backs in celebration. In jubilation.
All except Jean-Guy and Isabelle. They stared at their find, and Armand knew they were thinking the same thing as him. All the men, women, and children who never made it to shore. Who never again sat in a pleasant garden on a warm summer’s evening.
What a journey Miss Wolcott’s documents had been on. Only to find themselves far from home. In this peaceful little village.
Spotting Reine-Marie on the periphery, he walked quickly over and hugged her tight.
CHAPTER 66
It was midafternoon in mid-July, and the sun was beating down on Three Pines.
Children were jumping through sprinklers on lawns around the village green. Henri was trying to put his mouth to the nozzles and getting water up his nose, while wise Fred sat under the bench beside Rosa the duck, who seemed to hate water.
Now, if the sprinklers were dispensing scotch …
Parents, grandparents, and a poet had pulled lawn chairs into the shade thrown by the three huge pine trees.
Honoré, bathing suit sagging, was holding his sister’s hand and reassuring her it would be fun. He’d wheeled Idola in her chair within range of the sprinkler. When its lazy arc came around and soaked her, she looked up at him, momentarily shocked. Then, as Honoré was about to comfort her, she began to laugh.
Long and loud and clear. So robust and infectious was her laughter that everyone else began to laugh.
Idola knew no fear. Or anger. Her feelings were never hurt. She accepted everything that happened. She loved everyone and was profoundly loved.
Annie and Jean-Guy knew that while they would take care of her for the rest of their lives, their daughter was by far the most evolved of all of them. Especially Honoré. Who seemed pretty thick-skulled. Which was a good thing because he kept doing stupid things. Annie once stopped him just before he ran full speed into a wall, just to see what would happen.
Though the boy had a big heart, and in it, he placed everyone he’d ever loved, and none more than his sister.
Annie watched from the bench on the green, then looked over and saw Jean-Guy also watching, and smiling, from the veranda of her parents’ home. Drawn there by their children’s laughter.
Then he returned to the back garden and the two visitors.
“So that’s Miss Wolcott’s Ghost.”
Professor Mustafa Agrawal stared at what was now an immense plant, reaching over five feet tall, with an oblong pod at the end, covered in spikes. Its greyish, bluish leaves looked like the flesh of a cadaver.
“It is,” said Armand.
He stood between Agrawal and the other visitor. Professor Lamontagne, from the Université Laval.
“It’s astonishing,” whispered the Cambridge prof.
Armand had been more than a little disconcerted when he’d heard that the senior member of the Royal Society of Botanists was traveling all the way from Cambridge to the little village of Three Pines. He wanted to be there when his Québec colleague, Lamontagne, revealed their findings to the Sûreté officers.
Agrawal leaned in, his nose practically touching the pod. Then he quickly stepped back. “It smells.”
“Stinks, you mean,” said Jean-Guy.
And stink it did. Like the recently dead. Another reason Miss Wolcott’s neighbors thought this must be an attack. No one would choose to have this ugly, smelly growth in their garden. It would be like planting corpses. It didn’t help that the seeds looked like tiny demons.
“They were right, of course,” said the Cambridge prof. “Miss Wolcott’s findings would have been worth millions, eventually billions, had anyone back in 1914 taken her seriously.”
“Still is worth a fortune,” said Lamontagne. “To anyone who understood what she wrote. What she found. There’s your motive, Chief Inspector.”
“But what makes it so valuable?” asked Armand. “What do we have growing in our garden?”
