The Incident Room had been sorted out. The evidence sent to the lab in Montréal. The local Sûreté detachment had agreed to provide protection for the huge gun, though no one had been very taken with the quality of agent they’d sent.

“Fresh out of the academy,” Isabelle Lacoste had remarked. “They’ll learn.”

“Perhaps.”

“We were like that once.”

“We were never like that,” Beauvoir had said. “It’s not hard to do the math, Isabelle. The Sûreté Academy has them for three years. That means these two, and everyone in their class, were recruited at the height of the corruption.”

“You think they’re corrupt?”

“I think they were looking for different qualities in recruits at that time,” he’d said.

And now there’s a whole class of them, he thought, opening the window and feeling the cool breeze. Several classes of them. Scattered throughout the Sûreté. Scattered through the forest.

That monstrosity was being guarded by, at best, incompetents and, at worst, agents chosen because they could be easily corrupted.

He picked up the Bible he’d found in the bookcase of his room, and flipping through it he found Ecclesiastes. He was curious about the lyrics of that Pete Seeger song.

Out the window he saw lights on at the Gamache home and imagined them sitting by the fireplace, reading.

To everything there is a season, he read.

And across the village green, at Clara’s place, there was a single light.

A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

He saw the three tall spires of the pines swaying slightly in the autumn breeze. He saw two dark figures leave the bistro.

One was tall, stooped. The other had a cane and was cradling something to her chest.

The two walked slowly across the village green, past the bench, past the pond, past the trees.

As he watched, Jean-Guy saw Monsieur Béliveau accompany Ruth up to her front door. But then the grocer did something almost unheard of. He went inside.

It was getting late, but Beauvoir wasn’t tired.

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

He called home and spoke to Annie. They discussed buying a home, someplace with a backyard, close to schools and a park. And then they just chatted about their day. He lay on the familiar bed in the B and B and knew she was lying on their bed, her feet up.

He could hear sleep in her voice and, reluctantly, he wished her bonne nuit, and hung up.

A time to be born, and a time to die.

His hand lingered on the receiver, and he thought about Laurent. And the Lepages. And what it must be like to have a child and then lose that child.

Putting on his dressing gown, he went downstairs and plugged his laptop into the phone lines.