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“Oh, right.” The tech looked closely at what Isabelle had collected, then turned to the gravestone. “Difficult to say. What’s in your bag looks dead.”

They all brought out their phones to look up a picture of the plant.

“I had reception a few minutes ago,” said the technician. “Very fragile here. Gordon, go find internet reception and look up rosemary.”

“Rosemary who?”

Four women heaved a sigh.

“Rosemary the herb,” said Isabelle.

“‘Herb’ as in plant,” said Clara. “Not ‘herb’ as in—”

“Me?” Another technician stood up and brushed his knees off.

“Herb?” Isabelle asked and Katrina nodded.

Myrna had been silent through most of this. Now she turned to Isabelle and indicated the gravestone.

“That date. I know it.”

“What do you mean, you know it?”

“May 29, 1914? You don’t?”

“I wouldn’t ask if I did.”

At the same time, a few kilometers away, Reine-Marie was staring at the photographs on the corkboard.

Her brows were drawn together. This was the first time she’d seen the pictures up close. She averted her eyes from the ones with the body. Not because she was squeamish, but out of a sense of propriety. It felt like an intrusion on that poor man and his family.

Besides, what she’d come to look at was the gravestone, in hopes she could see what others, including her husband, could not. Maybe she could make out the name. It was worth a try.

Whoever it was, they were an outlier, the last body in Lost Nation.

Until the murdered man, that was.

It could not be a coincidence that he was found on that plot. Surrounded by a plant long thought extinct.

Why was the date so clear but the name obscured? It was almost as though it was meant to be hidden. But maybe, maybe … maybe the opposite was true. Maybe they were looking at it the wrong way around.

The archivist in Reine-Marie Gamache kicked in. Maybe what mattered wasn’t the name they were trying so hard to uncover, but the date.

She focused on it for the first time. It had been mentioned, she was pretty sure, in their meeting. But if it had, she hadn’t taken it in.

But now, staring at it, her eyes widened.

Surely not.

She put on her glasses and leaned closer. It couldn’t be. Could it?

And yet the stone was clearly, and deeply, engraved with that unmistakable and infamous date.

May 29, 1914.

“Dad! Come on.” Even to his own ears, Agent Ferdinand sounded like a whiny ten-year-old as he complained to his father over the phone. “You promised.”

“All I did was plug the date into the site, and up it came. Do you want to know why May 29, 1914, appears in so many conspiracy sites or not?”