He came back up twenty minutes later, shaking his head. “Just old scripts and crap. When’s the team getting here from Montréal? It’s a real rat’s nest down there with costumes and props.” He looked out into the body of the theater. “It’ll take hours to go through this place. Maybe days.”

A few minutes later the forensics team arrived and began the arduous task of searching the theater.

*   *   *

Gamache drove through what was now drizzle. The dramatic dawn with its broken clouds and shafts of light had made way for the storm, which in turn became just a dreary, cold, rainy early autumn afternoon.

Now the wipers made a lazy, rhythmic motion as he drove south from the Knowlton Playhouse toward the Vermont border, listening to Neil Young on CD sing about the place his memory went when he needed comfort. All his changes were there.

Helpless …

Gamache had left Lacoste and Beauvoir and the forensics team at the theater and was following his GPS along the route Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme had taken two days before. Just south of Mansonville, he turned right and drove into Highwater.

Bounded by a hill on one side and a river on the other, it should have been a picturesque little village. Could have been. Would have been. Almost certainly had been a pretty little village, once. But now it felt abandoned, forgotten. Not even a memory.

… helpless.

It was far from the first run-down little community Armand Gamache had arrived in. He looked around and saw the old train station, shuttered. The transport link, like an artery, was severed and the once vital community had died. Slowly. The young people seeping away for jobs elsewhere, leaving aging parents and grandparents.

Gamache looked at his GPS. He was in Highwater, but the CSIS agents seemed to have traveled slightly beyond it. Turning right again, then left, he came to a line of high chain-link fencing and a gate with a rusty chain and a new lock.

Without compunction, or hesitation, Gamache reached into his glove compartment, brought out a small pouch of tools, and within moments the lock was open. He drove in, parked the car behind an old building, then taking the GPS and an umbrella with him, he started to walk.

Up.

The walk turned into a trudge along a narrow, muddy path. He tried not to slip but twice he lost his footing, dropped the GPS, and a knee, into the mud. On the second tumble, as he reached for the wet and soiled GPS, hoping it wasn’t broken, he noticed tracks. Rails. Uncovering them, he realized he was walking in the middle of a set of railway tracks. Narrower than the ones used by passenger or freight trains. These were abandoned, overgrown, all but invisible to everyone except a man on his knees.