The wall came down. Though it took more swings from Billy’s sledgehammer than expected.
“Your ancestor did a good job,” said Olivier, as Billy wiped the sweat from his face.
“Looks like he wanted to make sure whatever was in there stayed in there,” said Ruth.
Armand had gone home briefly, with instructions to those gathered not to go into the room until he returned.
“I think we can promise that,” said Clara.
He returned a few minutes later, holding a worn satchel. His scene-of-crime kit, Reine-Marie knew, though she suspected the others did not. At least, she hoped they didn’t.
“Can you do the rest by hand?” Armand asked when the opening was almost big enough to climb through.
Billy put down the sledgehammer and pulled at the loosened bricks.
They crowded around the opening, craning and jostling for position, trying to see in. But it was still too dark to make anything out.
“I think it might be better if you stepped back.” Armand’s voice was calm, his tone pleasant, as though suggesting they might want to wait for the next bus.
They stepped back.
“This enough?” asked Billy, dragging his sleeve across his forehead again and leaving a streak of dirt.
“Parfait.”
Armand had put on latex gloves and slung the satchel over his shoulder. Where some might carry a briefcase to work, Chief Inspector Gamache carried the tools of his trade. Gloves. Evidence bags. Fingerprint kits. Swabs. Tweezers.
“Stay here.” Though it really didn’t need to be said.
Holding his phone in front of him, he pressed record and stepped over the low brick threshold and into the room.
Then stopped. There in front of him were bright eyes staring back.
He was prepared, having seen this a few minutes earlier, but still he felt his heart leap in his chest.
“What is it?” Reine-Marie asked from the other side. “What do you see?”
There was silence. It lasted just a second, but seemed to go on forever before he spoke.
“It’s a painting. Huge.”
He shone the light over it, taking in the detail, though there was so much of it, the only impression he was left with was one of a certain chaos. As though someone had thrown all their possessions at a canvas and they stuck. Including two children.
He stared at them for a moment. One, the little girl, looked familiar, and he wondered if he’d seen this painting, or a reproduction of it in a book, before.
“Can we come in now?” Olivier asked.
“In a moment.”
After staring at the extraordinary work for a few moments, he moved on, deeper into the hidden room.
“You okay?” Reine-Marie asked, leaning toward the hole.
“Just fine,” said Armand, and he heard Ruth chuckle and say something he couldn’t hear but could imagine.
“What do you see?” Myrna asked.
Armand was walking the perimeter of the room, ducking his head so as not to hit the eaves and shining the light over the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Into the corners. The room was small, about twelve feet by twelve feet, with wide plank wooden floors, and exposed beams in the ceiling.
There was no sign of life. Or death.
“Nothing alarming.”
His eyes fell on an assortment of items behind the painting. It looked like a small pile of junk, like most attics had. He moved on. His only interest was making sure the evidence kit could stay on his shoulder.
Finally he said, “It’s okay. You can come in.”
They stepped through, flashlights bobbing. And then the lights coalesced.
“Holy shit,” whispered Olivier.
The attic room seemed packed, jam-packed with conch shells and sculptures, clocks and chairs and musical instruments. And faces, people.
The friends stared, slack-jawed.
“Holy shit,” said Myrna.
It took a moment, but a long one, to realize what they were staring at.
The dots of their phone flashlights played over the painting, picking up details but not the entirety.
Billy had brought up construction lights, and now, with a flick of a switch, the place was bathed in blinding light.
And then the whole painting burst out at them.
There was a little girl and an adolescent boy dressed in a fashion from hundreds of years earlier. They sat at a table that was piled full of items. All jumbled together. It looked not so much like a painting as a portal into another time. Another world.
Leaving them to marvel, Armand walked around the other side of the painting to examine the things back there. An old leather-bound book. A bronze sculpture of an elephant. A jigsaw puzzle. A teddy bear.
“The sorts of things people throw into attics, when they don’t know what else to do with them,” said Reine-Marie, joining her husband. “I see it all the time.”
Now retired as Chief Archivist at the National Library and Archives of Québec, Reine-Marie had decided to use her skills to help people sort through their own, often inherited collections.
“Except,” she said, “most are not walled up.”
Armand nodded.
Reine-Marie was about to pick up the book when she and Armand heard Clara’s voice from the other side of the painting.
“Holy shit. It’s A World of Curiosities.”
“It is that,” agreed Ruth.
“No, it’s what the painting’s called.”
Armand came around from the back of it. “You recognize it?”
“It’s The Paston Treasure.”
“Now,” said Olivier. “Did you say ‘treasure’?”
They’d gone back to Myrna’s living room, though every now and then one of them would get up and wander over to the gaping hole in her wall and stare in, muttering, “Holy shit.”
“The Paston Treasure,” agreed Clara. “Yes.”
“And is it worth anything?” asked Gabri, casually.
“It’s priceless,” said Clara. “Except that it’s in a museum in Norfolk. In the UK.”
“Well, what’s that then?” asked Ruth, slopping scotch out of her glass as she gestured toward the hole. This time it really was scotch.
“A reproduction,” said Clara. “Maybe a study the artist made before working on the final painting.”
“Here?” said Harriet. “Why’s it here? Was he a Québec artist? I don’t understand.”
“Got it,” said Myrna, and brought over her laptop.
She’d looked up The Paston Treasure. They crowded around, pushing and shoving each other for a better view. Harriet and Fiona had brought it up on their phones. The image was too small to get a sense of the detail, but they could read the text.
“Says here it was painted in about 1670,” said Fiona. “Commissioned by one of the Pastons.”
“Big surprise,” muttered Ruth. “It’s called The Paston Treasure.”
“They lived in Norfolk, in England,” said Fiona, continuing to read the internet page. “No one knows who the artist was.”
Ruth walked over to the hole. “Ours isn’t signed either.”
“Clara’s right,” said Myrna. “It was nicknamed A World of Curiosities.”
“Looks like a world of junk to me,” said Ruth.
And it did. To the modern eye. It was a pile of stuff most people wouldn’t buy in a garage sale nowadays.
Reine-Marie joined the old poet. “Ahhh, but in the mid-1600s? This would’ve been amazing. Most people rarely got more than a couple of miles from their homes. They’d see the same things every day. Cows, pigs, sheep. Imagine coming face-to-face with a parrot? A monkey? Look, there’s a lobster. Almost no one in England had ever seen those things. These would be exotic, amazing. Maybe even frightening. Evidence that there were mysteries beyond the known world. Yes, this collection would be remarkable. Treasures.”
“There’s a young Black man,” said Myrna, joining them. The revulsion apparent in her voice. “Barely more than a boy. Just part of a collection.”
She looked at her niece. The young man in the painting could be their ancestor.
“Yes.” Reine-Marie sighed, shaking her head.
“Says here that there were at least two hundred items in the Paston collection,” said Fiona, continuing to read the page. “Brought back from around the world by explorers.”
“And slave traders,” said Myrna.
She wanted to look away in disgust, but found herself drawn back to the painting. There was something about it. The young man, yes. But something else.
“It’s incredible,” said Clara. “I’d heard about the painting, but have never seen it.”
“Even if it is a copy or an early study,” said Harriet, “what’s it doing here in your loft, Auntie Myrna?”
“More to the point,” said Ruth, “why was it walled up?”
“May I see that letter again?” Armand asked. When Billy handed it over, Armand reread it, examining it more closely. “There’s Monsieur Stone’s return address on the envelope—”
“It’s my family home, though we no longer live there,” said Billy.
“—but we can’t see who he sent it to. Someplace in Québec City, but the address itself is smudged. All we have is the salutation. My dear Clémence. But no last name.”
“Does it matter?” Olivier asked.
“It would be interesting to know if Monsieur Stone wrote any more letters to this Clémence,” said Reine-Marie, the archivist kicking in. “Maybe with more explanation.”
“But he never spoke to his employer or looked into the room,” said Gabri. “So there’s not much more he could say.”
“We don’t know that,” said Armand. “We know the instructions Pierre was given, but not what he actually did.”
“He might’ve peeked,” said Clara. “Wouldn’t most people?”
“I always do,” agreed Gabri.
“But all he’d see is what we see,” said Olivier. “So any letter wouldn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know.”
“Not true,” said Armand. “It might tell us why those things had to be walled up and hidden. You say you received this a few weeks ago,” he said to Billy. “How?”
“Through the mail.”
“Yes, but how did it find you? Monsieur Stone’s return address is on his letter, not yours.”
“The new owners of the family home found it and forwarded it to me.”
He’d said “new” owners, but Myrna knew they’d lived there now for more than ten years. But they would always, in Billy’s mind, be new.
It was the home Pierre Stone himself built. It had been in the family for generations. Billy’s parents had sold the place when it got beyond them.
Times change. You had to roll with it. But it was impossible to roll without getting bruised.
Armand, now standing by the hole in the wall, looked up from the letter and at the painting. It seemed stuck in time. But it actually was a testament to a changing world. A larger, more wonderous, in many ways more wicked world. One where lobsters existed. And so did the slave trade.
“I guess someone found the letter and decided to send it back,” said Billy. “All they had was the old address.”
“It’s curious. I wonder why,” said Armand.
“Why what?” asked Myrna.
“Why send it back to an address obviously more than a century and a half old?”
“Why not?” said Clara. “Old documents pop up all the time, right?”
“True,” said Reine-Marie. “The descendants of this Clémence must’ve been clearing out an old home and came across it.”
“It’s strange,” said Gabri. “Wouldn’t you just toss it out? Why go through the trouble of mailing back some letter between two long-dead people you’d never heard of? To an address that’s more than a hundred years old?”
“I agree with Monsieur Gamache,” said Fiona. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“I didn’t say it didn’t make sense,” said Armand, looking at her.
He’d tried not to make eye contact with Fiona all day. He was used to hiding things from suspects. But what she’d done wasn’t criminal, it was personal. In letting Sam into their home, Fiona had betrayed his trust.
He didn’t want her to see that he knew. And he didn’t want her to see his hurt.
But as he looked at her now, all he saw was the young woman who’d worked so hard to put her life back together.
“I just said I was curious.” Armand held her eyes for a moment before turning to Billy. “When your family sold the house, were there old letters and things you had to go through?”
“I don’t know,” said Billy. “My sisters and I offered to help our parents sort through things, but they preferred to do it themselves. I think they threw a lot away, and anything else went to charity jumble sales.”
“What’s bothering you, Armand?” Reine-Marie asked.
He shook his head. “It just seems”—he looked at Fiona and smiled—“curious.”
She smiled back.
Harriet had wandered away from the dissection of an old letter, by old people, and was looking at the painting.
“Have you noticed that this isn’t exactly The Paston Treasure? At least, not the one we see online.”
“Well, we already know that,” said Ruth. “The real one’s someplace in England. This’s just a copy.”
“That’s not what I mean,” said Harriet. “Come see. It’s made to look like the other one, but it’s different. Look.”
Reine-Marie leaned closer, then pulled back as though given an electric jolt. “Is the girl in the painting wearing—”
“A digital watch,” said Harriet.
“You’re kidding,” said Olivier. He and the others crowded around.
Now that they examined it more closely, they could see other anomalies. Oddities.
The boy held a small model airplane. A straight-back chair was upholstered in a William Morris print.
What had looked like a rolled-up scroll was actually a tourist poster. They could just make out the lettering. It featured the Manneken Pis and the Atomium, in Brussels. Armand knew that because he’d been there.
Something stirred in him. Something deep and dark and disconcerting.
This painting was strange, there was no denying that. How did it get here? Why reimagine The Paston Treasure? And if the room had been bricked up more than a century ago, how did these modern elements get into the painting?
And why?
Why?
Why?
And who?
Yes, it was definitely strange, but not necessarily alarming.
So why was he alarmed?
“Oh, my God.” Reine-Marie’s voice came from the other side of the painting.
“What?” said Armand, hurrying around. “What’s wrong?”
She was holding, grasping, the dust-covered book and looking down at it. Then she raised her eyes to his.
“Look.” She held it out.
“What is it?”
“It’s a grimoire.”
And now his alarm spiked.