“I married her.”

“She was even more alone then!” Ben felt his frustration reaching a peak, but at the next table, it snuffed itself out.

“Forgive your father, mon coeur.” His mother’s dry lips moved, her decaying flesh peeling away from bone. She wasn’t anything like the portrait hanging above the mantelpiece, not anymore. Time had eaten away at her, though he knew she was ashes in their mausoleum.

A white sheet moved beside his mother and Soleil peeled it back to reveal herself—twisted and broken from her fall, covered in a thin layer of sand and slick from the water. She sang, “Yes. Papa meant well.”

Fear gripped him. “He was wrong! He made a mistake.”

A hand slid over his shoulder, a gentle squeeze. He turned to face his father—a moth like the display in his study clinging to his chest. There was blood caked around his ears and neck.

“Forgive me, Ben,” he rasped between blue lips. “I should have brought you home.”

Ben choked on a sob.

“I should have brought you home,” his father repeated, his hand tightening on his shoulder. “I should have brought you home.”

Red tears rolled from the corners of his white eyes and blood dribbled down his chin from where it spilled over his bottom lip. He sputtered, “Come home, Ben. Come home.”

He blinked, forced to the ground with his father on top of him. He fought, but he could not escape. His father’s weight pressed down on him, his blood raining on Ben’s face. Two more bodies crawled on top and held him down from either side—his mother and Soleil. They smiled. “Come home, Ben. Come home.”

The ground at his back shifted, suddenly sinking as it enveloped them. He gasped amid their chanting.

“Ben,” a distant voice shouted, “wake up.”

REMI

“The gens d’armes are here,” Remi said. Ben was covered in sweat and tangled on the floor among papers she’d only glanced at. He was shaking and hard to wake, which she prescribed to the tray of coffee on the side table nearby.

“The what?” he groaned.

“Les gens d’armes,” she hissed. “Inspector Marceau is here, asking for you.”

That got his attention. He woke with eyes as wide as she’d ever seen them, and the concern she felt worsened. “Where’s Jacques?”

“I don’t know.”

Ben scrambled to his knees, collecting the papers and stacking them neatly. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

“Is everything alright?” Feeling uneasy, she gripped her skirt.

Ben glanced up, and seeing how she white-knuckled her dress, he sat the papers to one side and stood. He brought her hands to his lips. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I struggle to believe you, especially when I almost tripped over you. Why were you sleeping on the floor?”

“Later,” he said, kissing her fingers again. “I’ll explain later. First I need to change.”

“He’s in the parlor,” Elise said from the doorway. “I offered him tea.”

Ben nodded and took off for his bedroom, a flash of dark hair and wrinkled clothes.

Remi chanced a look at the papers he’d forgotten but decided to leave them behind. Her nerves had been too tightly wound since they’d been woken by the raucous pounding at the door. She and Elise had had precious little time to ready themselves before being shocked by the sight of gens d’armes at the door.

“Ben is upstairs changing,” Remi told the inspector as she entered the parlor. “He’ll be down in a moment.” She took the seat across from him. “Might I ask what this is about?”

“Well, you see,” he started, putting away his teacup, “there was a fire last night.”

A fire? Remi’s memory flashed with the image of the raging fireplace from last night. Could it be?

“There was a casualty,” he continued. “I believe you know the victim in question.”

The burning specter had shared his countenance, but it couldn’t have been him. Please, not Lamotte.

“I’m here.” Ben appeared in the doorway before the inspector could finish.

Remi noticed his grim expression, and made to ask after him, but noticed her tante and oncle following close behind.

“Get rid of them, Arnaud. It’s much too early for this.” Remi heard her tante hiss to her oncle. Arnaud was watching the inspector, though, uninterested in what Beline had to say.

Marceau’s eyes followed Ben as he rounded Remi’s chair, stopping beside her. “Monsieur Benoît Leone.”

From the corner of her eye, Remi saw the gens d’armes enter the room one at a time. They blended into the wall, their expressions unreadable. The atmosphere in the room shifted drastically. Between the space in which they stood, packed with her onlooking family and the austere gens d’armes, Remi almost felt sick. Her stomach turned as the ominous silence dragged on.

“Welcome,” Marceau said, not a note about him having changed. He remained calm. “We were just discussing the fire.”

Ben paled.

“So it has been made known to you?” Marceau asked.

“I saw it last night.”

Remi’s throat compressed and she grasped at her collar.

“What’s this about?” Ben asked.

“The home belonged to Lamotte, your father’s lawyer.” Marceau waved his hand and the gens d’armes against the wall marched to Ben’s side. “I was told that you had been spotted in the area before the fire. A witness puts you at the scene.”

“What?” Ben and Remi said in unison.

Elise shot her a look of warning.

“Yes,” Marceau paused, producing a small notebook from his breast pocket. He flipped through it and stopped on a few pages. “Leading up to this event, people in town described you as hysterical and unhinged. You were searching for a young woman named Sylvie. Did you know she was going to see your father’s lawyer last night?”

Ben looked conflicted, but he said, “Yes, I knew.”

“Well, it seems that whoever was after her set the house on fire.” Marceau leaned back in his chair. “They ended up killing an unintended target. Monsieur Lamotte is dead, and the young woman in question is still missing.”

Remi gasped and covered her mouth with both hands. The specter she’d seen, what thing she’d seen in the study—it had been real. The fire had been Lamotte the whole time, and he’d appeared to her the same way that Leith and Edgar had.