Armand ran down the steep hill, skidding a little on the loose gravel. In the distance he saw Gabri and Olivier arriving from the opposite direction. Converging on the man.

From the underbrush he heard moaning and rhythmic rustling.

“Al?” Armand said, slowing down to stop a few paces from the large, immobile man.

Lepage gestured behind him but kept his face turned away.

Even before he looked, Gamache knew what he’d see.

Behind him he heard Reine-Marie’s footsteps slow to a stop. And then he heard her moan. As one mother looked at another’s nightmare. At every mother’s nightmare.

And Armand looked at Al. Every father’s nightmare.

In a swift, practiced glance, Armand took in the position of the bike, the ruts in the road, the broken bushes and bent grass. The placement of rocks. The stark detail imprinted itself forever in his mind.

Then Armand slid down the ditch, through the long grass and bushes that had hidden Laurent and his bike. Behind him he could hear Olivier and Gabri speaking to Al. Offering comfort.

But Laurent’s father was beyond comfort. Beyond hearing or seeing. He was senseless in a senseless world.

Evie was clinging to Laurent, her body enfolding his. Rocking him. Her mousy brown hair had escaped the elastic and fell in strands in front of her face, forming a veil. Hiding her face. Hiding his.

“Evie?” Armand whispered, kneeling beside her. “Evelyn?”

He gently, slowly, pulled back the curtain.

Gamache had been at the scene of enough accidents to know when someone was beyond help. But still he reached out and felt the boy’s cold neck.

Evie’s keening turned into a hum, and for a moment he thought it was Laurent. It was the same tune the boy had hummed two days earlier when Armand had driven him home.

Old man look at my life, twenty-four and there’s so much more.

From behind them, up the embankment and on the road, came a gasp so loud it drowned out the humming.

One gasp, then a heave. And another heave. As Al Lepage fought for breath through a throat clogged with grief.

Under the wretched sounds, Armand heard Olivier calling for an ambulance. Others had arrived, forming a semicircle around Al. Unsure what to do with such overwhelming grief.

And then Al dropped to his knees and slowly lowered his forehead to the dirt. He brought his thick arms up over his gray head and locked his hands together until he looked like a stone, a boulder in the road.

Armand turned back to Evie. The rocking had stopped. She too had petrified. She looked like one of the bodies excavated from the ruins of Pompeii, trapped forever in the moment of horror.