Gilles Sandon hugged a leg to him and began caressing it. Up and down his rough hand went, agonizingly slowly. With each pass his hand crept further up until finally he’d run out of leg.

‘You’re so smooth,’ he said, blowing on the leg and picking minute particles from it. ‘Wait until I oil you. Rich tung oil.’

‘Who’re you talking to?’

Odile slumped against the doorway. The contents of her glass and Gilles’s workroom both swirled. Normally she turned her anger into wine and swallowed it, but lately it hadn’t worked so well.

Gilles looked up, startled, as though caught in a humiliating and private act. The worn piece of fine sandpaper fluttered to the floor. He could smell the wine. Five o’clock. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Most people have a drink or two at five. After all, there was the fine Québécois tradition of the ‘cinq à sept’.

‘I was talking to the leg,’ he said, and for the first time the words sounded ridiculous.

‘Isn’t that sort of a silly thing to do?’

He looked at the leg, destined to be part of a fine table. It had honestly never before occurred to him it was silly. He wasn’t a stupid man and knew most people didn’t talk to trees but he figured that was their problem.

‘I’ve been working on another poem. Wanna hear it?’

Without waiting for an answer Odile rolled off the door jamb and walked slowly and with great care to the front counter of their store. She returned with her notebook.

‘Listen.

‘How prone is piebald man to mourn,

And make ado of nothing much,

To strew his rosy path with thorn,

And rusty nails, yea, plenty such.

‘Wait.’ She fell against the doorway as he turned his back. ‘There’s more. And you can drop that fucking thing.’

He looked down and realized he was strangling the leg, his fingers tight and white as though the blood had leached from him into the wood. After a moment’s hesitation he placed it carefully on the floor, making sure to put it on a bed of woodchips.

‘’Tis not for he the sparrow pipes,

Nor blows the bullfrog in the rill,

Ah, not for he the heron wipes,

His stately nose upon his quill.’

Odile lowered her book and gave Gilles a knowing look. Nodding a few times she closed her book and walked with great concentration back into the store. Gilles watched and wondered what she was trying to tell him. How was it he understood trees but not Odile?

He suddenly felt uneasy as though ants were crawling inside his skin. Bringing the wooden leg to his face he inhaled deeply and was transported to the forest. The tender, watchful forest. Safe. But even there his thoughts ran him to earth.

What did Odile know? Wasn’t a quill a type of pen? Was she planning to write something less abstruse about him? Was she warning him? If so, she had to be stopped.

He tapped his palm rhythmically with the exquisite wooden leg as he thought.

At his desk Armand Gamache smoothed the crumpled newspaper. Up until that moment he’d only had people read it to him and that had been shocking enough. But his heart gave a contraction as he looked at the picture. Daniel’s hand on the envelope he’d forced on him just yesterday morning. Daniel, beautiful Daniel, a big bear of a man. Couldn’t everyone see they were father and son? Were the editors deliberately blind? But Gamache knew the answer to that. Someone was blocking out their reason.

He reached for the phone and dialed Daniel.

Dr Sharon Harris pulled her car up to the kerb and was about to go into the bistro. Through its mullioned window she could see the Morrows and a few others she knew slightly. She could see the fire jumping in the grate and Gabri holding a tray of drinks and telling a story to an amused group of villagers. As she watched Olivier expertly took the tray from Gabri and delivered the drinks to another group. Gabri sat down, crossed his massive legs and continued the story. She thought she saw him take a sip from someone’s whiskey, but she wasn’t sure. She turned and looked at the village. Lights were beginning to appear and the sweet scent of log fires was in the air. The three massive pines on the village green threw long evening shadows now. She looked into the sky. More than night was closing in. She’d listened to the forecast in the car and even Environment Canada was surprised that such a mammoth system had suddenly appeared. But what did it contain? The forecasters didn’t know. Could be rain or sleet or even snow at this time of year.

Since she didn’t see Chief Inspector Gamache in the bistro Dr Harris decided to sit on the bench on the green and get some air. As she bent to sit down something beneath the bench caught her eye. She picked it up, examined it, and smiled.