Brushing off the dirt, he saw that it was a ring. Thin, iron, with worn facets where the edge had been pounded.
It was an engineer’s ring.
He stood there very quietly, then heard a sound behind him. Turning quickly and raising the bat, he saw it was Fred. The old dog had followed him down. He was standing in front of the shelf with the large bag of dog food, his tail slowly swishing from side to side.
Armand placed the ring in his dressing gown pocket, leaned the bat against the cinder block wall, and picked Fred up in both arms. He knew that while Fred could make it down the stairs, he could not make it back up.
After rechecking the windows and doors, he went back to bed. Picking up his book, he read for a while, then turned off the light and fell asleep, wondering what if …
CHAPTER 15
“Well,” said Olivier. “I’ll be damned.”
A small delegation stood on the landing just outside the church and stared across the village to the rooflines of the interconnected shops below. Monsieur Béliveau’s General Store, Sarah’s Boulangerie, the bistro, and finally the bookstore.
A very light rain had started falling, more like a fine mist. Low clouds shrouded the hills, surrounding and enclosing the village.
“You were right,” said Myrna, looking at Fiona.
A roof, just visible, was jutting out at right angles from Myrna’s loft.
“How could we not have seen it before?” asked Clara.
“We weren’t looking,” said Myrna.
“Well, we would have found it eventually,” said Gabri. “As soon as we fixed the roof.”
“In about twenty years,” said Billy.
“Can I get my sledgehammer now?” Clara asked Olivier.
“You might want to wait.” But it wasn’t Olivier who’d spoken. It was Billy.
“What’s wrong?” asked Myrna.
“What’s wrong, Armand?” asked Reine-Marie.
They were sitting in their kitchen. He’d waited for Fiona to leave before bringing out the ring and placing it on the table. And then he told Reine-Marie what had happened the night before.
When he’d finished, she picked the ring up, turning it over and around. “An engineer’s ring, for sure. It’s pretty worn. Old. Looks to me like it might’ve been there for a while.”
She replaced it on the table.
“True. Fiona still has her ring, I checked. And I’ll check out Harriet, just to be sure. The ring aside, someone was here last night.”
“You think it was Sam, don’t you.”
“Who else could it have been?”
“Fiona.” She raised her hand slightly, to indicate she had more to say, but needed a moment. Which he gave her. “It’s possible none of this is threatening. She might’ve just been curious and bored. Wandering around the house, picking things up. Snooping more than spying.”
She studied him, holding his eyes.
“It’s possible,” he admitted.
Reine-Marie admired Fiona’s spirit, but, if she was honest, she was never completely comfortable with the young woman. Never totally trusted her.
In fact, neither Reine-Marie nor Jean-Guy could understand Armand’s support for Fiona and his enmity bordering on hostility toward Sam.
Jean-Guy had even, albeit at Armand’s suggestion, kept in touch with Sam for a few years after the trial, eventually losing track of him in his late teens.
But Armand had not lost track. He’d kept a close eye on Sam, as he’d grown from a child, to a teen, to a young man. Sam had not committed another crime. Not that Armand could see. Though crimes had been committed around him.
Assaults. B&Es. There was a murder in Saskatoon, in the building where Sam worked as a janitor. Sam had not been implicated.
Armand had flown out and gone over the evidence. Making sure.
Two other murders happened in other parts of Canada where Sam lived. It was, Armand knew, rare for anyone to have one murder in their life, never mind a series of them.
A serial.
But he never could connect Sam Arsenault to any of them.
As for Fiona, Reine-Marie had agreed to join him in sponsoring her parole. But there was always a membrane, a very thin barrier Reine-Marie had put up between herself and the young woman. The one thing she’d said to Armand when he’d first broached the idea of Fiona’s parole was that she was not to be around the grandchildren.
Armand had no trouble agreeing to that.
“Why would Sam want to snoop around our house?” Reine-Marie now asked.
“I don’t know,” Armand admitted. “But someone did. And they didn’t just snoop. They turned the family photo around. They moved items. They sprayed cologne. They lay on our bed.”
If it sounded to Reine-Marie like the Three Bears, she did not say anything. But for the first time, after reading that story to their children and now the grandchildren countless times, she stopped to think how frightened the three bears must have been.
“There was no effort to hide it,” Armand was saying. “In fact, whoever was here wanted us to see. To know. There was an intimacy about what they did. Can you see Fiona lying on our bed? Picking up my book and moving the bookmark?”
“No, but I can’t see Sam doing it either. You think there’s more to it, don’t you? You think it was a deliberate message.”
He nodded.
“To say what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I suspect it’s just a mind game. Nothing sinister.”
He looked down at the ring on the old pine table, then picked it up. “But I am just going to make a call.”
Going into his study, he called Nathalie Provost. After brief pleasantries she asked what he wanted.
“I’ve found an engineer’s ring in our basement. It looks old. Can you tell me something about them?”
“Well, I think you know that they were originally made from the metal remains of the first Québec Bridge. It collapsed in 1907, killing eighty-six workers. It was a catastrophic failure of engineering. The rings were made to remind engineers of that disaster, and the consequences of what they, what we, do.”
“I don’t see a name inside,” he said, holding it up to the light. “Is there any way of knowing whose it is, or was?”
“I don’t really know. I’ll have to check. The rings are supposed to be returned to the Société when the person retires or dies, so no name would be engraved. They’re given out over and over again. A sort of thread that connects us to each other.”
She looked down at her own. Few were so hard-won.
“If you can make some inquiries, I’d appreciate it.”
“Consider it done.”
“Merci,” he said and hung up just as there was a shout from the living room.
“Bonjour?” It was Clara. “You two home?”
“I’m in here,” Reine-Marie called from the kitchen.
Clara appeared at the door and Armand arrived right behind her.
“Can you come to the bistro?” Clara asked. “Billy wants to show us something. Something to do with the hidden room.”
“It’s there?” asked Reine-Marie.
“Looks like it. Billy’s gone to get Ruth to bring her along too.”
“Why Ruth?”
“Oh, how often have we asked that question,” said Clara.
“So, Billy,” said Olivier when they’d all assembled in the bistro. “What’s this all about?”
They were sitting around the huge fieldstone hearth. The fire had been lit, as much for comfort on the gray morning as warmth, and Gabri had brought over rich cafés au lait and lemon loaf.
Armand glanced at Harriet’s hand, where a freshly polished engineer’s ring sat snug on the little finger of her right hand. A tiny memento of a huge tragedy.
He shifted his focus to Fiona. He’d suggested to Reine-Marie that they say nothing about the night before. Better to pretend they hadn’t noticed anything and see what happened next. If anything.