Page 174 of The Madness of Crowds

Then he noticed something else. “What’s the photograph sitting on?”

Isabelle bent closer. “Looks like the agenda that the inventory mentioned. It must be Debbie’s.”

“No. She had her agenda on her phone,” said Beauvoir. “Why would she need another one? Especially a book. That’s pretty old school.”

He gave a sly glance at Gamache, who still used a handwritten agenda. He had reminders on his phone, but kept his daily appointments in a book.

Isabelle smiled, recalling the last time Beauvoir had teased the Chief about his ring-binder agenda. They’d been in a meeting at Sûreté headquarters, not long after the lockdown lifted but before the vaccine. They were sitting six feet apart and were masked.

“Less likely to be hacked,” Gamache had said, laying a hand on the open book on his desk.

“Thank God,” said Beauvoir. “Because your dentist appointment is of national interest.”

“Maybe not the dentist, but the barber?” Gamache said. “What the Russians wouldn’t do . . .”

“Your hair did look a little Soviet era, during the lockdown.”

“Ohhh, Einstein,” Isabelle had said to Jean-Guy. “Are you sure you want to bring up the subject of Covid hair?”

She herself had been shocked by the amount of gray that had come in. At thirty-three she felt she was still far too young. But a bullet in the head left more than a scar.

“Why would Debbie have two agendas?” said Gamache. “And why not bring it with her? Why leave it behind, locked in a drawer?”

“Are you saying she had a hidden agenda?” asked Isabelle, proud of the double entendre.

While the men groaned, she called Nanaimo with yet another request. After verbally prostrating herself, she hung up. Grimacing.

“He’ll go back down to shipping and find the agenda. He says the box might’ve left already.” She put her phone down on the table and focused on the Chief. “Even if Debbie did kill Maria, which can never be proven now, where does this lead us?”

“It leads us,” said Jean-Guy, “to Debbie Schneider being the intended victim all along, and Abigail Robinson the murderer.”

“How do you figure that?” asked Isabelle.

“Revenge. Abigail finally realized what Debbie had done.”

Isabelle stared at him. “Really? Forty years later? And even if that’s true, why murder her at a party? Abigail could hardly have chosen a worse place. I think we’ve gotten way off track. We need to go back to our first, most likely suspect, victim, and motive. Vincent Gilbert killed Debbie mistaking her for Abigail Robinson. He had any number of motives.” She lifted a finger as she counted them off. “He despised her campaign. He realized she knew about his work with Ewen Cameron and was blackmailing him. He was making up for failures of the past. Any one of those would be enough.”

Gamache was nodding, deep in thought, then he came to a decision. “The fact is, we don’t know. So we follow all lines of inquiry. D’accord?”