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He could imagine her sitting at the kitchen table, beside her husband. They were his and Reine-Marie’s best friends. The Gamaches had followed the ups and downs of her career as she’d fought the system from her tiny office without a view. Such had been the respect given to anyone who studied the environment when offices at the university were assigned decades ago.

But now biologists were the superheroes. The ones who could see what others would not. Who understood that even the smallest change in the ecosystem could be catastrophic.

They were also the ones who could prevent the catastrophe. Biologists led the way, and Vivienne LaPierre was at the sharp end of that stick.

But even she struggled to absorb what Armand had written.

Go over your text pls. Are there any typos? Did you mean to write “thirty times”? Maybe it’s “thirty percent.”

Which would, she knew, be bad enough. That whole tar sands fiasco was a case in point, the government allowing it to pollute well beyond acceptable or admitted levels. It was unconscionable. But now to allow mines and pulp mills and oil refineries and other processing plants across the country to exceed the pollution limits, already weak, by thirty times would be a disaster. Criminal.

Unforgivable.

No typos.

“Merde,” she muttered and reread what Armand had written.

Marcus Lauzon was not just behind the poisoning plot. Part of his plan involved agreeing to sell controlling interest in primary industries to Americans, and allowing certain industries to exceed pollution limits by thirty times. The young biologist who was murdered was investigating. He visited one lake in particular, several times. We need to know why. There’s something up there. We need someone we can trust. We need you.

Dr. Vivienne LaPierre typed her reply, then told her husband she would not be home for dinner. Or probably breakfast. And that the avocados were becoming overripe and should be eaten.

Reine-Marie stared at the map, and Armand stared at her staring.

And waited.

They were very alike in many ways and quite different in others, which made for a strong partnership. Each filled in the other’s gaps. Each saw what the other missed.

He hoped and prayed that was true now.

Finally, she turned around. “Where did you find this?”

He’d realized soon after his return from the hospital that he could read Reine-Marie’s lips better than anyone else’s. No doubt because he knew them best.

“It was hidden in the monastery among a collection of old documents. Jean-Guy found it.”

“How did you know it was there?”

“We didn’t. We were looking for something, anything, that could tell us where the Abbot had gone. The biologist’s map was a surprise.”

“But this has nothing to do with the plot to poison the drinking water. There’s something else. Something important in the map itself.”

It was a shame, and then some, that they could not ask either the Abbot or the biologist. Young Langlois had been mowed down by a vehicle, which narrowly missed Armand.

Armand tilted his head back and stared at the mottled acoustic tiles of the basement ceiling. Above them was the church itself. They were almost directly under the spot where Dom Philippe, the Abbot, had been murdered.

Not in the cathedral, like Thomas à Becket, but close enough.

Some malady. Dom Philippe had scrawled that quote from T. S. Eliot on the back of a scrap of paper and left it in this little village church for Armand to find, knowing he’d connect the quote to the person who had left it, and make the connection with the Abbot’s monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.

When the dignified old Abbot had sat upstairs in the pew by the soldier boys and written those two simple words from Murder in the Cathedral, he could not have known that just a few days later he himself would be murdered. In the church.

“Agreed. Both Dom Philippe and Charles Langlois wanted us to find it. And they both wanted to make sure no one else found this map. But what does it contain? We’ve stared at it, studied it. Nothing. Isabelle is flying to the lake today. I asked Vivienne to go with her.”

“LaPierre?”

“Oui.”

Reine-Marie, though surprised, considered. Then nodded. “Smart. We can trust her.”