As his car descended, the signal on his device disappeared. No phone reception, no emails. It was as though he and Henri, asleep on the backseat, had fallen off the face of the earth.

He parked in front of Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore and noted the lights still on upstairs. So often he’d come here to find death. This time he’d brought it with him.

EIGHT

Clara Morrow was the first to notice the car arrive.

She and Myrna had had a simple dinner of reheated stew and a salad, then she’d gotten up to do the dishes, but Myrna soon joined her.

“I can do them,” said Clara, squirting the dishwashing liquid into the hot water and watching it foam. It was always strangely satisfying. It made Clara feel like a magician, or a witch, or an alchemist. Not, perhaps, as valuable as turning lead into gold, but useful all the same.

Clara Morrow was not someone who liked housework. What she liked was magic. Water into foam. Dirty dishes into clean. A blank canvas into a work of art.

It wasn’t change she liked so much as metamorphosis.

“You sit down,” she said, but Myrna took the tea towel and reached for a warm, clean dish.

“It helps take my mind off things.”

They both knew drying the dinner dishes was a fragile raft on a rough sea, but if it kept Myrna afloat for a while Clara was all for it.

They fell into a reassuring rhythm. She washed and Myrna dried.

When Clara was finished she drained the water, wiped the sink, and turned to face the room. It hadn’t changed in the years since Myrna had given up her psychologist’s practice in Montréal and packed her tiny car with all her worldly possessions. When she rolled into Three Pines she looked like someone who’d run away from the circus.

Out she climbed, an immense black woman, surely larger than the car itself. She’d gotten lost on the back roads, and when she found the unexpected village she’d stopped for a coffee, a pastry, a bathroom break. A pit stop on her way somewhere else. Somewhere more exciting, more promising. But Myrna Landers never left.

Over café au lait and patisserie in the bistro, she realized that she was fine where she was.

Myrna had unpacked, leased the empty shop next to Olivier’s Bistro, and opened a new and used bookstore. She’d moved upstairs, into the loft space.

That’s how Clara had first really gotten to know Myrna. She’d dropped by to check out how the new bookstore was going and heard sweeping and swearing from above. Climbing the stairs at the back of the shop, Clara had found Myrna.

Sweeping and swearing.

They’d been friends ever since.

She’d watched Myrna work her magic, turning an empty store into a bookshop. Turning an empty space into a meeting place. Turning a disused loft into a home. Turning an unhappy life into contentment.

Three Pines might be stable but it was never still.

When Clara surveyed the room, seeing the Christmas lights through the windows, she wasn’t sure she’d seen that brief flash. Headlights.

But then she heard the car engine. She turned to Myrna, who’d also heard it.

They were both thinking the same thing.

Constance.

Clara tried to stomp down the relief, knowing it was premature, but found it bubbled up and around her caution.

There was the tinkle of the door downstairs. And steps. They could hear a person, one person, walking across the floor below them.

Myrna grabbed Clara’s hand and called out, “Hello?”

There was a pause. And then a familiar voice.

“Myrna?”

Clara felt Myrna’s hand grow cold. It wasn’t Constance. It was the messenger. The telegraph man, pulled up on his bicycle.

It was the head of homicide for the Sûreté.

*   *   *

Myrna held the mug of tea, untouched, in both hands. The purpose was to warm, not to drink.

She stared into the window of the woodstove, at the flames and embers. They reflected off her face, giving it more animation than it actually held.

Clara was on the sofa and Armand sat in the armchair across from Myrna. He too held a cup of tea in his large hands. But he watched Myrna, not the fire.

Henri, after sniffing around the loft, had come to rest on the rug in front of the hearth.

“Do you think she suffered?” Myrna asked, her eyes not leaving the fire.

“I don’t.”

“And you don’t know who did it?”

It. It. Myrna couldn’t yet bring herself to say out loud what “it” was.

When a day had gone by and Constance hadn’t shown up, hadn’t even called, Myrna had prepared herself for the worst. That Constance had had a heart attack. A stroke. An accident.