“Bernadine Fouchard, what the hell are you doing here?”

“But I have come to help, of course. I took the bus, twelve hours—horrible, ma foi, crying babies, men imagining I want a career as a whore—but here I am. You are doing nothing to find August. You are only looking for old women who are dying in rivers.”

“Tomorrow you will get on the bus to go back to Chicago, horrible or not. It’s hard enough to conduct an investigation in a strange city with a hostile sheriff and a host of other obstacles, but you, my little tornado, will make things a thousand times worse.”

Bernie’s mouth set in a mulish line. “You are not my mother. You cannot make me do anything.”

“Right you are. However, I’m sure Arlette agrees with me.”

I opened the door to my room and took my phone out of its cage. Seven messages from Bernie popped up on the screen: she’d been here half an hour, or at least she’d been phoning me for half an hour.

It was almost two in the morning in Quebec, and it took Arlette a moment or two to understand what I was saying, but as soon as she did, she was furious. I handed the phone to Bernie

Her conversation with her mother was in French, which I don’t understand; I could tell that Bernie was annoyed, waving her free arm angrily but able to speak only in fragments because her mother kept cutting her off. Finally Bernie handed the phone back to me.

Arlette said, “I will be buying an airplane ticket for her. The nearest airport is Kansas City? Bien. I will text you the details in the morning. This child is more trouble than a busful of hockey players. What Pierre will say . . . He is in California this week—the Canadiens are playing the Sharks. Maybe he will stop in Kansas City on his way home and put her in a . . . I don’t know the English word. Une camisole de force.”

“Whatever it is, I hope he can,” I said. “She can sleep on the foldout bed in my room tonight, and we’ll deal with things in the morning.”

Bernie was completely unchastened. “Since Mama is so strict, I will of course go back to Chicago, but until then I will make sure that you are doing everything possible to find August. By the way, I watched all those videos you gave Angela and me, the ones you found in August’s apartment. There’s one where he interviewed Emerald about her career. There’s nothing on it about why she wanted to come here, just old stuff about Hollywood and being an African-American actor in the seventies and eighties. I brought a copy for you.”

She fished a data stick from her backpack.

“This isn’t a justification for your trip,” I said. “You could have e-mailed it to me.”