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He was leaning forward, toward his laptop on the coffee table, his forearms on his knees. He felt himself being sucked into the screen, tumbling into the artist’s rendering of that terrible night.

He resisted. Fought to escape. This foundering ship was the very last place he wanted to be.

But despite all his efforts, the pull was too great. The description, the drawings, too vivid, too compelling. They propelled Jean-Guy into a tiny cabin.

Jolted awake by the collision, he fell out of his bunk onto the floor and discovered, to his horror, that it was wet.

Frigid water was pouring through the open porthole.

There was not a sound in the office of the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec. Not breathing. Not the ticking of a clock. Time hadn’t so much stopped as rewound. To 1:56 a.m. on the morning of May 29, 1914.

Isabelle Lacoste had returned to Three Pines and her desk in the Incident Room. The little evidence bag with the dead posy was at her elbow as she stared at her computer screen. The rosemary was forgotten.

Her mouth was partly open. Her lips pale. Her heart picking up speed, beating quicker, quicker as she looked at the grainy photographs that had appeared.

They weren’t of the sinking—none of those existed, of course. What she was looking at were black-and-white photographs of some of the passengers as they boarded the luxury liner in Québec City. And never left. Just hours later, these smiling, waving families went down with the ship and, like the Empress, were still on the muddy bottom of the St. Lawrence River, more than a hundred years later.

No, no, Isabelle’s mind screamed. Don’t do it. Don’t get on …

But they did.

Reine-Marie had joined Clara and Ruth in the bookstore.

Myrna had let her in, then locked the door. Their rattled nerves could not take any jangling of the little bell above the door as customers arrived.

How, Reine-Marie asked herself. How could Armand not have known? A passionate student of history, especially Québec history, and yet he’d never even heard of this disaster?

Myrna had. Not from school. Not from films. Not from popular culture. A secondhand book had come into her shop, and she’d read it. A British memoir in which the Empress of Ireland was mentioned, in passing. A footnote.

As for the other two? Neither Clara nor Ruth had heard of the grand passenger liner. But from this day forth, they would never forget.

While Inspector Eidinger waited for word that she should join the Chief Inspector in his office to continue her report, she passed the time by looking up “Empress of Ireland.”

The name had appeared in their investigations into the company, Réunion. But it had been just a name. Incidental. She’d thought.

She’d frankly assumed it was a person, an original client of the founder of Réunion, perhaps. Though she’d never heard that Ireland had had an empress. Or not recently, anyway.

Perhaps it was like when people called their children “Sergeant” or “King” or “Prince.” But would anyone really name their newborn “Empress”? And what? Her middle name was “of”? Last name Ireland? It was ridiculous.

When Eidinger plugged the words into her database, up came not the picture of a dowager in a crown but hundreds of photos. Picture after black-and-white picture. Men, women, children.

Most smiling. Ready for the adventure ahead as they boarded the ocean liner in Québec City and headed for Liverpool.

In less than twelve hours, most, if not all, of the people the accountant was looking at were dead. Sucked down and drowned in the frigid waters of the St. Lawrence.

Jean-Guy raised his eyes from the laptop and found Armand staring straight ahead.

He almost asked him what he was thinking. Seeing. Imagining.

But he did not. By the grim look on the Chief’s face, he could guess.

“More passengers died in the sinking of the Empress of Ireland than died in the Titanic,” whispered Jean-Guy, unsure if he was speaking to the Chief or himself. “The ship went down in fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes.”

Fourteen minutes.

By the time the sun rose on May 29, 1914, 1,012 people were dead.

And he’d never even heard of the tragedy. In Canadian, in Québec waters. He knew all about the Titanic, but knew nothing, nothing of the Empress of Ireland.