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“Witches.”

“Right. It’s possible there’s something in the painting—maybe the ladybug, maybe something else—that made it dangerous for the artist to be associated with it. It might be something lost to our modern eyes. There’re other oddities about the original, like why it was painted. Is it meant as a statement of wealth and prestige? Or perhaps a memento mori.”

“A remembrance after death?”

“Yes. Something that would immortalize the Pastons. But that’s another mystery. We don’t know if it was the father, William, who commissioned the work, or the son, Robert. This might interest you, Armand. Robert was an alchemist.”

Thérèse was rattling off other secrets, other mysteries, contained in the painting and, so far, unreleased. Like who the figures were. The humans but also those carved into the chair and the head of the cello.

“It seems the painting, or painter, was trying to say something. I wonder if those lines and symbols are in the original, but we just never noticed. I’ll have a look.”

And that brought Armand back to the main purpose of his call. “Is Jérôme there?”

“I’ll get him. Jérôme? Où es-tu?”

Thérèse’s husband had been an emergency room physician, but his hobby and passion were codes. He’d solved at least one for Gamache in the past and was on the team of volunteers trying to crack Dickens’s Tavistock letter and other literary works written, for reasons that might never be known, in coded markings.

While waiting, Gamache sent them pictures of the painting and the elephant. Overviews, but mostly close-ups of the markings and other details, including the bug. The bishop-that-burneth.

When Jérôme Brunel got on the phone, Armand explained.

“Oui, Armand, I’m looking at what you sent. Fascinating. Let me get back to you. Can I consult my group?”

“Other decoders? Not yet. Thérèse knows, of course, but otherwise, please keep this to yourself.”

“Tell Armand there are no markings on the original,” Thérèse shouted in the background.

“I heard,” he said.

Jérôme laughed. “So did all of Vancouver.”

After he’d hung up, Armand put on a pot of coffee. As the room filled with the welcome aroma of the rich, strong drink, he stood at the window, one hand clasping the other behind his back.

It was a beautiful, bright morning, sun gleaming off the moisture from the rain the day before. It would soon evaporate, but for now, it gave an otherworldly look to a village that already appeared out of time and place.

He saw Harriet leave the B&B and wondered if she’d been home last night. And wondered what Myrna would say to her niece.

Then he saw Fiona leave their home. As he watched, he realized that over the years of visiting her in prison, of trying to soften the judicial blow he’d helped land, he’d come to think of her as a sort of niece. Not, of course, with the depth of love he felt for his real nieces, but a member of the extended family nevertheless.

And now, after Amelia’s report the night before and other evidence, he was forced to confront something else.

Matthew 10:36.

It was something his first mentor, his first chief in homicide, had told him.

“Oh, one other thing, Armand.” He’d stopped the young agent as he was leaving a meeting with the other officers. This was shortly after he’d joined homicide. Shortly after the shootings at the Polytechnique that were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

“Matthew 10:36.”

Agent Gamache had stood at the door waiting for more. But that was it. He was dismissed. A week or so passed before Armand, in a quiet moment, remembered and looked up the reference in the family Bible.

A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

Agent Gamache hadn’t believed it. Had dismissed it as the sad perception of a highly effective officer who’d grown cynical with age.

But Matthew 10:36 had proven true. If the definition of “household” included the wider extended family of colleagues within the force. That was what his first boss had been trying to tell him. To warn him.

Almost too late, Gamache, by then the head of homicide himself, had seen it.