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Amid the crunch of potato chips and salty pretzels and her friends, Clara exhaled. While behind her in the house the door to Peter’s studio had been left open. To let the light in and the ghosts out.

Now Peter’s studio was just another room in the home. She sometimes went in there and just sat. Visiting.

She’d kept the partly finished canvas on the easel. No reason to take it down.

It was nice in there. Calm. Peaceful. She even, sometimes, talked to Peter, telling him about the events of the day. That rarely took long since not much seemed to happen in Three Pines. Though when it did, it was often quite shocking and took some telling.

Now she stood in the middle of the soft light and wondered what she’d missed.

“What’s in here?” she asked the scent of turpentine and oil paint and sunlight. “Were you hiding something, Peter? Did you even know it? Were they looking for something?”

And had one of them found it?

She was more and more convinced that Brian had been leaving the studio when she’d surprised him. Not entering.

A week or so later, she’d found Jeanette in there.

With the discovery of the body. The discovery of the cemetery. The discovery of Lost Nation. The fact whoever had called Armand had used a phone registered to her. Clara realized she must have missed something.

And now that she thought about it, they’d each asked about Peter. Since she was always happy to talk him up, it hadn’t struck her as odd. But now, now it did.

Clara stepped toward Peter’s well-ordered desk. She’d been through his papers once, but that was a long time ago. Maybe she missed something.

Partway across the floor, she stopped.

She shouldn’t disturb anything. Backing out of the room, Clara sensed someone behind her. Turning quickly, her heart leaped when she saw a figure watching her. A split second later, she recognized Isabelle Lacoste.

A few minutes earlier, Armand had gotten both Isabelle and Beauvoir on a call, telling them what Charles Fillmore had said about the Receiver of Wrecks. And the Morrow family.

“You need to search Clara’s house again,” he said to Isabelle.

They now knew why both the attic and the crawl space had been entered recently. Either Brian or Jeanette or both were looking for something brought up from a wreck.

And it could still be in the house.

“Maybe Brian found it,” said Beauvoir. “And whoever killed him took it.”

“Maybe,” said Isabelle. “But if he found it, what was he doing in that graveyard? I’ll get a team and go to Clara’s.”

Not long later, Isabelle knocked at Clara’s door. Getting no answer, she entered with the team behind her.

She found Clara just coming out of Peter’s studio.

“We need to talk,” both women said at once.

CHAPTER 33

While the search of the Morrow home was underway in Three Pines, in Montréal, another Sûreté team was going through the Réunion offices. It would take hours.

After assigning an agent to watch Charles, and telling Fillmore not to leave Montréal, Armand himself did just that. Getting an unmarked car from Sûreté headquarters, he drove to Ottawa.

“Armand.”

The elderly man, shrunken, wizened, a hundred now, struggled to his feet.

It was no use telling him not to, Armand knew. Stephen Horowitz would always do whatever he wanted.

As the two men embraced, Armand felt the knobby bones of his godfather’s back through the jacket. Immaculately dressed as always in shirt and tie, Stephen took Armand’s arm and together they walked slowly outside into the garden of the assisted living residence.