“Well met,” Stephenson said, but without sincerity. “I had an emergency delivery, and I’m still too excited to go to bed. Touch and go, but mother and son are going to be all right. What’s your excuse?”

Rutledge thought, I could tell you I’ve been tormenting two women—at least they feel I have. Instead he answered, “I have a liking for the marshes, I suppose.”

Stephenson grunted. “What’s the news about Walsh?”

“Among other issues, Inspector Blevins has been trying to find out if Walsh had encountered Father James in France.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think that was likely. Besides, what difference would it make? The fact that they’d met wouldn’t change what happened in the rectory, or why.”

“Blevins has learned that Father James had written a letter from France to his sister Judith. He made some remark in passing about a story she’d liked as a child. About Jack and the Giant. But Judith is dead, and the letter hasn’t survived.”

Stephenson began to chuckle, deep in his throat. “Sometimes I don’t pretend to understand the policeman’s mind! Jack the Giant, you say?”

“We can’t leave anything to chance—”

But Stephenson cut him short. “You’re fools, the lot of you! It wasn’t Jack, it was Jacques. And he was tall and thin as a rail, looked like a beanpole—but he was hardly a giant! Father James told me about this man—felt that I’d be interested in the way he treated wounds. Jacques Lamieux was his name, and he was a French Canadian medical man. He came to France for firsthand experience, and he got his fill of it. We still correspond. He has a practice in Quebec, and a reputation for being the best there is at amputations—a very high percentage of his patients live.”

Still chuckling, Dr. Stephenson walked away. Then over his shoulder, he said, “You can tell Blevins for me that I can produce letters from Lamieux dated this month. Hard to bash a man’s brains in, from that distance!”

Rutledge lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, his eyes following the pale ripples of light that clouds threw across the beautifully plastered finish as they moved in front of the half-moon.