“Do you have Laurent’s stick?”

Al looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “His stick?”

“He always had it with him but we couldn’t find it. We just wondered if you might have it.”

It seemed an eternity before Al answered. Armand quietly prayed that he’d say, Yes, yes I do. And then Armand and Reine-Marie could go home, and start the long process of remembering the boy alive and letting go of the boy dead.

“No.”

The large man didn’t meet Armand’s eyes, couldn’t. He stared straight ahead, his almond eyes hard with the effort of not going soft. But his lips trembled and his chin dimpled.

“It would be nice to have it back,” he managed to say.

“We’ll try to get it for you.”

“I made it for his birthday.”

“Oui.”

“Worked on it every night after he went to bed. He wanted an iPhone.”

“No he didn’t,” said Armand.

“He’s nine.”

Gamache nodded.

“Nine,” whispered Al Lepage.

And both men stared off, in opposite directions. Laurent’s father viewing a world where nine-year-old boys died in accidents. Gamache seeing a world where even worse things happened.

“It must be there,” Al said at last. “Where we found him. Or the cops picked it up.”

“No. We looked. And the police didn’t find it either. If it isn’t here at home, and it isn’t where Laurent was found, then we have to find it.”

“Why?”

Gamache didn’t hesitate. He knew there was never a good time for this.

“It could mean that Laurent might’ve been killed somewhere else, and put in that ditch.”

Al’s mouth formed the beginning of a word. Why, perhaps. Or, what. But it died there. And Gamache saw Laurent’s father pack up his home, take all his possessions, and move. To that other world. Where nine-year-old boys were killed. A world where nine-year-old boys were murdered.

Armand Gamache was the moving man, the ferryman, who took him there.

And once across there was no going back.

*   *   *

“A stick, patron?” Jean-Guy Beauvoir’s voice had grown shrill on the phone.

“Oui,” said Gamache. He stood in his living room and looked out the window, past their front porch to the village green.

He could see Clara and Myrna sitting on the bench chatting with Monsieur Béliveau.

“You want me to go to Chief Inspector Lacoste and say we have to reopen the investigation into Laurent Lepage’s death—an investigation we only did as a personal favor to you—because a stick is missing?”

“Oui.”

Armand Gamache understood how Laurent must have felt when trying to convince people he’d seen a monster. Gamache hadn’t yet seen the monster, but he knew it was out there. He just had to convince others.

“I know how ridiculous it sounds, Jean-Guy.”

“I don’t think you do, patron, or you’d never have said it.”