It certainly looked like the picture had been snapped long ago. It was black and white and shades of gray, and seemed frayed at the edges.

“What is it?” Reine-Marie asked.

Stare as she might, Reine-Marie couldn’t quite make out what she was seeing. And she sure couldn’t see a connection between the information they’d asked for from the officer in Dumfries and this.

Armand had sent pictures of Peter’s paintings to Scotland, suspecting they were indeed landscapes. In hopes the constable would recognize where they were painted.

And in response, Constable Stuart had sent this.

Had he misunderstood the request? Reine-Marie wondered.

Then a finger, Jean-Guy’s finger, lightly touched the screen. There, along the contours of a small hill, snaking in and out of the mist, was a vague checkerboard pattern. It wove along the shape of the ground as though the fabric of the earth had torn, to reveal the black and white checks in the wound.

Reine-Marie felt herself drawn into the image. It looked like a place not quite of this world, and not quite of the next.

She looked away, into Armand’s eyes, and in them she saw a reflection of the otherworldly image on the screen. Then she looked over to Jean-Guy. Both men were staring, transfixed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jean-Guy whispered.

“One of Peter’s paintings has this checkerboard pattern,” said Gamache. “We thought he was just fooling around with an old art school exercise. But he wasn’t.”

“He was painting what he saw,” said Reine-Marie.

“But what is it?” Jean-Guy asked.

“And where is it?” Gamache added. “May I?”

Reine-Marie stood up and Armand sat in front of the computer. He tapped out an email to Constable Stuart, asking for more specifics.

“May I?” Jean-Guy replaced Gamache in front of the computer and brought up a search engine. He put in key words. Dumfries. Checkerboard.

But nothing useful appeared.

“Try Dumfries, Scotland, checkerboard,” Gamache suggested.

Still nothing.

“May I?” Reine-Marie replaced Beauvoir and added one word to his search. Then hit enter.

And up flashed the answer as though it had been waiting for the magic word.

Cosmic.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” whispered Reine-Marie.

*   *   *

“The Garden of Cosmic Speculation?” Clara asked. “Are you kidding me?”

But their faces told her this was probably not a joke.

Her phone had rung ten minutes earlier and she’d bolted upright, answering on the first ring and looking at the clock. Not yet 6 a.m.

It was Armand. They wanted to come over.

“Now?”

“Now.”

Now four people in dressing gowns, and a dog, stood in Clara’s kitchen. Jean-Guy placed the laptop on the pine table next to Peter’s early paintings.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Clara.

She looked at Peter’s paintings. Then back to the laptop.

Then back to the paintings. One in particular.