He opened it to the bookmark and deliberately turned the page. He read the first sentence. Words Constance Ouellet would never get to.
As a man who loved books, a bookmark placed by the recently dead always left him sad. He had two books like that in his possession. They were in the bookcase in his study. They’d been found by his grandmother, on the bedside table of his parents’ room, after they’d been killed in a car accident when Armand was a child.
Every now and then he pulled the books out and touched the bookmarks, but hadn’t yet found the strength to pick up where they left off. To read the rest of the story.
Now he lowered Constance’s book and looked out the window into the small backyard. He suspected that, beneath the snow, there was a small vegetable garden. And in the summer the three sisters would sit on the cheap plastic chairs in the shade of the large maple and sip iced tea. And read. Or talk. Or just be quiet.
He wondered if they ever talked about their days as the Ouellet Quints. Did they reminisce? He doubted it.
The home felt like a sanctuary, and that was what they were hiding from.
Then he turned back to look at the stain on the carpet, and the police tape. And the book in his hand.
Soon he’d know the full story.
“So, I can understand why the Ouellet sisters might not want everyone to know they were the Quints,” said Lacoste, when they were ready to leave. “But why not have personal photographs and cards and letters in the privacy of their own home? Does that strike you as strange?”
Gamache stepped off the porch. “I think we’ll find that very little about their life could be considered normal.”
They walked slowly down the snow-packed path, squinting against the brilliant sun bouncing off the snow.
“Something else was missing,” the Chief said. “Did you notice?”
Lacoste thought about that. She knew this wasn’t a test. The Chief Inspector was beyond that, and so was she. But her mind was drawing a blank.
She shook her head.
“No parents,” he said.
Damn, thought Lacoste. No parents. She’d missed that. In the crowd of Quints, or missing Quints, she’d missed something else.
Monsieur et Madame Ouellet. It was one thing to blank out a part of your own past, but why also erase your parents?
“What do you think it means?” she asked.
“Perhaps nothing.”
“Do you think that’s what the killer took?”
Gamache thought about that. “Photographs of the parents?”
“Family photographs. Of the parents and the sisters.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” he said.
“I’m just wondering…” she said when they reached her car.
“Go on.”
“No, it’s really too stupid.”
He raised his brows, but said nothing. Just stared at her.
“What do we really know about the Ouellet Quints?” she asked. “They deliberately dropped from view, became the Pineault sisters. They were private in the extreme…”
“Just say it, Inspector,” said Gamache.
“Maybe Constance wasn’t the last.”
“Pardon?”
“How do we know the others are dead? Maybe one isn’t. Who else could get into the house? Who else even knew where they lived? Who else might take family photographs?”
“We don’t know if the killer even realized she was a Quint,” the Chief Inspector pointed out. “And we don’t know that family photos were stolen.”
But as he drove away, Lacoste’s statement grew in his mind.
Maybe Constance wasn’t the last.