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He could see from the first few frames that this video would be different.

“Little shit,” he muttered.

It was taken from the back balcony of the auditorium. Recorded, Beauvoir knew, by the lighting technician who’d sworn he’d done no such thing.

Armand turned off the engine and sat in his warm car in the driveway of Colette Roberge’s home.

Light flurries were just beginning. They drifted, nonchalant, from the clouds, landed on his windshield, and lived there for just a moment before melting.

Bringing out his phone, he read messages, replied, then made his way to the front door.

Reine-Marie placed the archival box on the living room floor.

Most of the furniture had been removed. Cardboard boxes sat on the worn carpet, some taped up, some waiting to be filled.

Susan Horton dragged her sleeve across her face, pushing loose hair back from her forehead.

“Did you hear the news?” she asked Reine-Marie.

“No, what?”

“About the murder, over in Three Pines. Mom used to go there, to the church.”

Reine-Marie did not say that she lived in the village and had been at the party.

“I found something among your mother’s things,” she said instead. She heard moving about below them, in the basement.

“Something valuable?” There was no mistaking the hope in the weary voice.

“Well, no, not really. More puzzling.”

“Puzzling how?”

“Can we sit down?”

They found two boxes of books, sturdy enough to sit on, then Reine-Marie took the lid off the box she’d brought.

Susan looked in, then leaned back. “Dolls?”

“Monkeys. Lots of them.” Maybe a hundred, she thought but didn’t say. “Do you have any idea why your mother might have so many?”

“Monkeys? Well, she probably liked them. People collect things all the time.”

“This wasn’t a hobby.” Reine-Marie brought some papers out of the box and showed the daughter. “You see? She didn’t just collect monkeys, she drew them.”

Susan seemed genuinely perplexed. “Does it matter?”

“Probably not, but you did ask me to go through her things and try to bring some order to them. This is something that seemed important to your mother.”

“Maybe. It is strange, but she did get strange in the end.”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. This didn’t start in old age, it started when she was quite a young woman. So far, the earliest I’ve found is from the mid-sixties. She’d have been quite young. It was on a bill for a hotel in Montréal. Did something happen around about then?”

“I was a baby,” said Susan. “I have no idea if something happened. Maybe she went to a zoo and fell in love with monkeys.”

Reine-Marie considered the woman in front of her, just slightly older, she thought, than herself. “Did your mother ever read Curious George to you?”

“What? No. It’s a book?”