“Can you do the rest by hand?” Armand asked when the opening was almost big enough to climb through.
Billy put down the sledgehammer and pulled at the loosened bricks.
They crowded around the opening, craning and jostling for position, trying to see in. But it was still too dark to make anything out.
“I think it might be better if you stepped back.” Armand’s voice was calm, his tone pleasant, as though suggesting they might want to wait for the next bus.
They stepped back.
“This enough?” asked Billy, dragging his sleeve across his forehead again and leaving a streak of dirt.
“Parfait.”
Armand had put on latex gloves and slung the satchel over his shoulder. Where some might carry a briefcase to work, Chief Inspector Gamache carried the tools of his trade. Gloves. Evidence bags. Fingerprint kits. Swabs. Tweezers.
“Stay here.” Though it really didn’t need to be said.
Holding his phone in front of him, he pressed record and stepped over the low brick threshold and into the room.
Then stopped. There in front of him were bright eyes staring back.
He was prepared, having seen this a few minutes earlier, but still he felt his heart leap in his chest.
“What is it?” Reine-Marie asked from the other side. “What do you see?”
There was silence. It lasted just a second, but seemed to go on forever before he spoke.
“It’s a painting. Huge.”
He shone the light over it, taking in the detail, though there was so much of it, the only impression he was left with was one of a certain chaos. As though someone had thrown all their possessions at a canvas and they stuck. Including two children.
He stared at them for a moment. One, the little girl, looked familiar, and he wondered if he’d seen this painting, or a reproduction of it in a book, before.
“Can we come in now?” Olivier asked.
“In a moment.”
After staring at the extraordinary work for a few moments, he moved on, deeper into the hidden room.
“You okay?” Reine-Marie asked, leaning toward the hole.
“Just fine,” said Armand, and he heard Ruth chuckle and say something he couldn’t hear but could imagine.
“What do you see?” Myrna asked.
Armand was walking the perimeter of the room, ducking his head so as not to hit the eaves and shining the light over the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Into the corners. The room was small, about twelve feet by twelve feet, with wide plank wooden floors, and exposed beams in the ceiling.
There was no sign of life. Or death.
“Nothing alarming.”
His eyes fell on an assortment of items behind the painting. It looked like a small pile of junk, like most attics had. He moved on. His only interest was making sure the evidence kit could stay on his shoulder.
Finally he said, “It’s okay. You can come in.”
They stepped through, flashlights bobbing. And then the lights coalesced.
“Holy shit,” whispered Olivier.
The attic room seemed packed, jam-packed with conch shells and sculptures, clocks and chairs and musical instruments. And faces, people.
The friends stared, slack-jawed.
“Holy shit,” said Myrna.
It took a moment, but a long one, to realize what they were staring at.
The dots of their phone flashlights played over the painting, picking up details but not the entirety.
Billy had brought up construction lights, and now, with a flick of a switch, the place was bathed in blinding light.
And then the whole painting burst out at them.
There was a little girl and an adolescent boy dressed in a fashion from hundreds of years earlier. They sat at a table that was piled full of items. All jumbled together. It looked not so much like a painting as a portal into another time. Another world.
Leaving them to marvel, Armand walked around the other side of the painting to examine the things back there. An old leather-bound book. A bronze sculpture of an elephant. A jigsaw puzzle. A teddy bear.
“The sorts of things people throw into attics, when they don’t know what else to do with them,” said Reine-Marie, joining her husband. “I see it all the time.”
Now retired as Chief Archivist at the National Library and Archives of Québec, Reine-Marie had decided to use her skills to help people sort through their own, often inherited collections.
“Except,” she said, “most are not walled up.”
Armand nodded.
Reine-Marie was about to pick up the book when she and Armand heard Clara’s voice from the other side of the painting.
“Holy shit. It’s A World of Curiosities.”
“It is that,” agreed Ruth.
“No, it’s what the painting’s called.”
Armand came around from the back of it. “You recognize it?”
“It’s The Paston Treasure.”
“Now,” said Olivier. “Did you say ‘treasure’?”
They’d gone back to Myrna’s living room, though every now and then one of them would get up and wander over to the gaping hole in her wall and stare in, muttering, “Holy shit.”
“The Paston Treasure,” agreed Clara. “Yes.”
“And is it worth anything?” asked Gabri, casually.
“It’s priceless,” said Clara. “Except that it’s in a museum in Norfolk. In the UK.”
“Well, what’s that then?” asked Ruth, slopping scotch out of her glass as she gestured toward the hole. This time it really was scotch.
“A reproduction,” said Clara. “Maybe a study the artist made before working on the final painting.”
“Here?” said Harriet. “Why’s it here? Was he a Québec artist? I don’t understand.”
“Got it,” said Myrna, and brought over her laptop.
She’d looked up The Paston Treasure. They crowded around, pushing and shoving each other for a better view. Harriet and Fiona had brought it up on their phones. The image was too small to get a sense of the detail, but they could read the text.
“Says here it was painted in about 1670,” said Fiona. “Commissioned by one of the Pastons.”
“Big surprise,” muttered Ruth. “It’s called The Paston Treasure.”
“They lived in Norfolk, in England,” said Fiona, continuing to read the internet page. “No one knows who the artist was.”
Ruth walked over to the hole. “Ours isn’t signed either.”
“Clara’s right,” said Myrna. “It was nicknamed A World of Curiosities.”
“Looks like a world of junk to me,” said Ruth.
And it did. To the modern eye. It was a pile of stuff most people wouldn’t buy in a garage sale nowadays.
Reine-Marie joined the old poet. “Ahhh, but in the mid-1600s? This would’ve been amazing. Most people rarely got more than a couple of miles from their homes. They’d see the same things every day. Cows, pigs, sheep. Imagine coming face-to-face with a parrot? A monkey? Look, there’s a lobster. Almost no one in England had ever seen those things. These would be exotic, amazing. Maybe even frightening. Evidence that there were mysteries beyond the known world. Yes, this collection would be remarkable. Treasures.”
“There’s a young Black man,” said Myrna, joining them. The revulsion apparent in her voice. “Barely more than a boy. Just part of a collection.”
She looked at her niece. The young man in the painting could be their ancestor.
“Yes.” Reine-Marie sighed, shaking her head.
“Says here that there were at least two hundred items in the Paston collection,” said Fiona, continuing to read the page. “Brought back from around the world by explorers.”
“And slave traders,” said Myrna.
She wanted to look away in disgust, but found herself drawn back to the painting. There was something about it. The young man, yes. But something else.