It was a shame. Lepage’s ideas, his voice, his music were powerful. His lyrics, on the other hand, were merde. They should never have been shared. Beauvoir wondered how the record had fared.

Jean-Guy was having fun finding words that rhymed with merde, when Ruth reappeared. And glared.

“Had enough?” she asked. “If you keep listening, your brain will turn into something soft and smelly.”

“How do you know? Have you heard it before?”

The mad old poet walked over to her stereo and returned to the sofa holding Al’s record. Her own copy.

“How’d you get this?” Beauvoir asked, taking it from her.

“It’s self-produced. I bought one and listened to it once to be polite, but it’s crap.”

And yet, thought Jean-Guy, she’d kept it. The record didn’t end up in the church rummage sale. Or the dump. And since when was Ruth polite? Or perhaps the question should be, when did she become impolite?

“He used to busk on the street in Cowansville, when he first arrived,” said Ruth. “Sometimes he’d play in the boîtes à chansons in Montréal, but mostly he sang in the coffeehouses around here. That was before Gabri and Olivier opened the bistro.”

“He doesn’t play there now, though, does he?” asked Beauvoir.

“No,” said Ruth. “He stopped singing, thank God.”

Jean-Guy put the album facedown. He didn’t want to look at the smiling young man with the bushy red beard, who had no idea what heartbreak was waiting for him a few decades down the road.

“How did Al Lepage get across the border?” Jean-Guy asked.

“He ran, I guess. Probably chased by a gang of music lovers.”

“Lepage claims he walked across the border from Vermont. But how’d he find Three Pines? He didn’t just stumble into it, did he? He had to have had help.”

“Maybe he was meant to find Three Pines,” she said, getting up again and gathering Rosa in her arms.

“You don’t believe that.”

“You have no idea what I believe,” she snapped, then softened her expression as she made for the stairs to her bedroom. “Turn off the lights when you leave.”

“Are you going upstairs to heave?” he called after her and heard, out of the darkness, a chuckle.

Jean-Guy leaned back and listened to the music, trying not to hear the lyrics. Something about—

Buy, buy this good apple pie.

Oh no, thought Beauvoir, surely not.

Drove my Honda, which I’m fonda …

He tuned out the lyrics and replaced them with the conversation after dinner, when he and Isabelle had walked to the Gamaches’ from Clara’s so he could pick up the record and they could have a brief discussion about the evening.