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“So what did Charles mean by these?” Isabelle asked.

She used her fork, speared with a potato dripping butter, to indicate the series of numbers and symbols the dead biologist had written on only this lake.

Vivienne shook her head. They’d both hoped that, once there, the sequence might make more sense. Some sense. But still they were baffled.

The fire was crackling and throwing nice heat, warming their fronts, though their backs, like the dark side of the moon, were chilled. Isabelle ran over to the tent and brought back their sleeping bags, handing one to Vivienne.

“Merci.”

Now wrapped up warmly, Isabelle poured them each another tumbler of wine while Vivienne placed another piece of driftwood on the fire and looked out across the still lake. Above them the sky was strewn with stars. Great swaths of them, their light millions of years old.

Both women were solemn now. Isabelle had never actually met Charles. Had only seen him across the crowded café when he’d had the rendezvous with Gamache at Open Da Night.

And she’d seen, a few minutes later, Armand’s torn and bloody jacket placed over the young man’s broken body as he lay in the middle of the road.

Vivienne knew even less about Charles Langlois. Had never seen him, not even a photo. All she knew was what she’d been told. He’d been a drug addict in recovery, a biologist, who’d stumbled onto a conspiracy and been murdered. But over the course of the day, she’d begun to feel a closeness to him. He could have been one of her students.

What she did know, had been told, was that he was a lost young man who’d found himself, found a passion, found a direction and purpose. And was killed when he’d found something else. And now they were trying to retrace his steps.

They were, it seemed, camping on the same site he’d chosen. Sitting around the very same campfire, on stones he’d rolled into place. Were looking out at the same view. At the same ancient light in the sky. So what had he seen that they could not?

Vivienne looked at the map again, then out across the lake. The moon had risen, its silver light reflected in the dark water. “It’s beautiful. But really? It’s like every other remote lake I’ve visited. There’s nothing unusual about this place. Not that I can see.”

Silence again enveloped them. Except for the far-off bark of a coyote, and the howl, even farther away, of a wolf.

“I wonder if it’s what we can’t see,” Vivienne said at last.

“I can understand why you and the Chief are friends,” said Isabelle, with a laugh. “He can also say some pretty vague things. Turns out they’re just train of thought, but they can sure sound odd.”

“Did I sound odd? I didn’t mean to, and I wasn’t being vague.” She’d turned to look at Isabelle. “I’m serious. Maybe that’s what’s different about this lake, and why we haven’t found it yet. Because what Charles found isn’t on the shores of the lake, it’s in it.”

Isabelle had a sudden vision of a submarine. Surely not. Then her thoughts, lubricated by wine, slid over to the Chief Inspector telling her that as a unilingual Francophone about to go to university in England, he’d watched reruns of the old TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, to learn some English.

“You’d be surprised,” he’d said in all earnestness, “how little use ‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ ‘There’s a monster from outer space, Admiral,’ and ‘Fire all missiles’ are at Cambridge.”

“Or anywhere, I hope.”

“Il y a un monstre,” she now muttered and got such a strange look from Vivienne that she put down her tumbler, suspecting the wine was doing her no favors.

In vino babbling …

“What do you mean by in the water?” Isabelle asked, drawing herself up and trying to look completely sober.

“The elevated pH.”

“Could that be what he wrote? A chemical sequence?”

Vivienne returned to the photo of Charles’s map on the laptop while Isabelle held her breath. This could be the breakthrough they were looking for.

But Vivienne was shaking her head. “Désolée. It’s not that. I’d have recognized that. Still, he must’ve thought we’d understand.”

“Or at least another biologist would.” Isabelle hated to say it, but it was the truth, and honestly the main reason, the only reason, Gamache had asked Dr. LaPierre to come along.

Vivienne knew it too. And knew she was failing in her assignment.

Come on, come on, Charles. What’re you saying?

The unidentified sequence of numbers and symbols was on the map for a reason. The map was hidden for a reason. In case …