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“Oui.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Where are all the others? Why would he keep only this one? Especially if there’d been a falling-out and they hadn’t seen each other in years?”

Isabelle and Jean-Guy considered the question, then Isabelle’s eyes opened. “He got rid of them because he wanted us to focus on only this one. He wanted us to see him and Charles together and to let us know they knew each other. Were once friends—”

“Best friends,” murmured Gamache.

“And make the connection. He told his sister in his last communication to essentially guard the box.”

“He wanted to warn us, and to tell us whose side he really was on,” said Jean-Guy. “But when you first met him, patron, on Parliament Hill, when you went to confront Caron, why didn’t he say something then?”

Gamache nodded, remembering that encounter. “It’s possible he didn’t know whose side we were on. We now know there were plotters inside the Sûreté. High up. Castonguay must’ve been terrified when we showed up and pretty much kidnapped him. Put him in the car and drove him out into the country.”

He looked down at that mischievous face.

Frederick Castonguay was caught up in something far beyond his understanding. And yet he’d persevered, long after he could have just walked away and gotten on with his life. Done nothing.

Instead, he’d done something. Frederick had gone to that remote lake, almost certainly because his friend Charles had directed him there. And, like his friend, Frederick had been murdered.

Before or after he’d found what Charles had hidden?

“Animal House?” asked Myrna.

“Oui, that’s what Ruth suggested. She seemed amazed I hadn’t yet read it.”

“Animal House?” Myrna repeated.

“Yes. Why? You seem surprised too.”

“For a whole other reason. I’m not at all surprised you haven’t read Animal House. Ruth must’ve been pulling your leg.”

“She seemed in earnest, even annoyed I didn’t know it.”

“How can you tell if Ruth’s annoyed?” Myrna picked up the phone to call the cranky old poet, but had barely hit the icon when she hung up, with a hearty laugh, having figured it out.

A minute later, after disappearing down one of the aisles of her bookshop, she reappeared and handed a slim worn volume, essentially a novella, to Reine-Marie.

“You’ve never read this? I guess when it comes to literature there really are Two Solitudes.”

Reine-Marie looked at the title and let out a roar of laughter. “Damn it, of course this’s what Ruth said. Am I blushing?”

“You are and should be.”

She paid for the used book and went into the bistro, catching Armand’s eyes but not joining them. Instead, she found a comfortable armchair, ordered a white wine, and began to read about Snowball and Boxer, Old Major and—she put it on her lap and stared out the window—Napoleon.

Then, once again, Reine-Marie picked it up and lost herself in the story of revolution and tyranny and the creation of a common enemy.

“What’re you reading?”

Reine-Marie looked over her glasses at her husband as he took the chair opposite her in the bistro.

“Animal House.”

“Animal House? Are all students created equal, but some more equal than others?”