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“I think you can guess,” she said, lowering her voice and looking at the other guests, too far away to hear.

“You think she killed her friend?” he also whispered.

“I’d rather not say, but before I speak with her yet again, I’m wondering if you know anything that could be helpful?”

“Like?”

“Like anything about her father, for instance.”

Now the brows drew together. “Her father? Don’t you mean her mother? And Cameron?”

“No, we already know about that. I mean her father and her sister.”

“She had a sister?”

Lacoste smiled tightly, “Yes. Badly disabled. She died under strange circumstances.”

“Poor one,” he said, by rote.

“And then the father, it seems, might have taken his own life.”

“Really? A tragic family.”

“Yes. It all seems to go back to the mother being in treatment with Cameron and her own suicide.”

“That seems a bit of a leap.”

“A spurious correlation?”

He studied her. “Yes, I suppose so. Why’re you telling me this?”

“I just wondered if Abigail said anything to you,” said Lacoste. “Accused you of being responsible for the deaths of her sister and father, as well as her mother.”

Now he glared at her. “She did not. Are you?”

“Blaming you, sir? No, of course not. You can’t be held responsible for what someone does decades later and thousands of kilometers away. And all you really did at the Allan Memorial was look after the monkeys, is that right?”

“All the animals, yes. I was never involved in the actual experiments.”

“But you knew what was happening.”

“What’s this got to do with your suspicions about Professor Robinson and the death of her friend?”

She got up. “You’ve been very helpful, sir. Merci.”

Isabelle Lacoste left Vincent Gilbert looking far less smug than when she’d arrived.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir found it an hour later. Not in the basement of the Roberge home. Not in the boxes in the attic.

It was in plain sight and, as a result, completely overlooked.

When he realized what it was, he placed it in a plastic cover and took it to Gamache, who was in the process of opening and shaking out the thousands of books in the Roberges’ collection.

It was something he’d learned early on in his career with the Sûreté. Not from his first Chief and mentor. He’d learned it from his fiancée, Reine-Marie Cloutier.

The trainee librarian had told him that people put all sorts of things between the leaves of books. Stashes of money. Dried and pressed flowers. Letters.

Some they want to keep. Some they want to hide.