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But she stopped herself. They weren’t on everything. Only certain documents. And it wasn’t an elderly woman who’d drawn them. Not all, anyway. She’d been a young woman, a young mother, when it had started.

As Reine-Marie had gone through the boxes, a picture had emerged of an absolutely normal woman of her generation. A woman who’d married young. Raised a family in the sixties and seventies. Who’d prepared Christmas and Thanksgiving meals, kept recipes and school report cards and gifts her children had made, that only a mother could find precious.

A woman who’d volunteered at the local hospital and had gone home, closed the door, and drawn monkeys on random letters and bills. Though Reine-Marie now wondered just how random they were.

“We also have to consider that the attack last night is connected to the shooting at the gymnasium,” Armand was saying.

“You mean someone at the party tried to finish the job?”

“Could be. But I don’t see how. The most likely accomplice was miles away in police custody. They’re interviewing him this morning. The connection might be more nebulous. The first attack might have given someone the idea for the second. Emboldened them.”

After he left, Reine-Marie decided to sort the papers, putting those with the odd drawings in one pile. Those without in another.

As she looked at the growing pile, Reine-Marie thought there might be one hundred monkeys after all.

Armand stopped in at Ruth’s cottage on his way up to the Inn.

In summer the old home looked almost abandoned, with its rickety front porch and wobbly railing and the shutters half falling off. The paint was chipping, and her lawn was mostly crabgrass.

If Ruth had tried to make her home uninviting, she could not have done a better job. And there was a fairly good chance she did try.

Friends in the village had, more than once, offered to repair and repaint and weed, but she’d have none of that. Her home, it seemed, was a reflection of herself. Ramshackle. A little wonky. Definitely askew. She had no need of repair. And neither did her home.

“And for your information,” she told Gabri when he’d shown up with gardening gloves and a trowel, “I like weed.”

“Weeds, you mean,” he said.

“Maybe,” said the old poet.

He looked more closely at her garden and the healthy growth.

Armand was consulted and assured Gabri it was not marijuana. “Though that doesn’t mean she doesn’t smoke it.”

Now he stood on the same spot and looked at the same little cottage.

In winter it was transformed. Covered in snow, with icicles dangling like crystals from the eaves, it looked like a gingerbread house. Made by happy children.

It went from the least attractive to the most attractive home in the village.

Such, Armand thought as he shoveled his way up the path, was the power of perception.

When he’d finished, and plunged the shovel deep into a drift, the front door opened a crack. “What do you want?”

“I need to speak with you, Ruth, about last night.”

There was a hesitation. Then the door was opened wide, and he stepped quickly inside.

A fire was lit in the living room, fortunately in the fireplace. Almost everywhere he looked were books. It was the literary equivalent of a blizzard. They were stacked up against the walls, as though blown there. In some places they were four, five feet deep.

Books served as side tables next to the worn sofa, and stacks of books held up a plywood plank, creating a coffee table. Though in Ruth’s home it was a scotch table.

Many of the volumes, Armand suspected, had been “borrowed” from Myrna’s bookstore.

Ruth shoved a few off the sofa and pointed.

He was hot from his exertions and took off his parka and boots. Then he sat, slowly, carefully. Executing a controlled deep knee-bend, until he felt the cushion sag beneath him. He’d made the mistake, only once, of letting himself collapse into the sofa as he did at home. But this sofa had almost no springs, so he had hit the wood floor with a bruising bang and felt one lone spring where no spring should be. He’d leaped up. And never made that mistake again.

Rosa was nestled into a small dog bed by the fireplace, muttering in her sleep. It sounded, to Armand, like “Merde, merde, merde”—breath—“merde, merde, merde.”