Read Chapter 27: Cold Trail

The sergeant’s boots crunched across the packed snow as he circled the shed, his flashlight beam cutting through the fading afternoon light. Sergeant Bouchard was a compact man with a gray beard trimmed close to his jaw, and he moved with the unhurried certainty of someone who had seen every kind of winter mischief a village could offer. But this wasn’t mischief. Camille stood at Antoine’s side, her arms folded tight against the cold, watching the officer’s methodical sweep.

He stopped at the broken window, ran a gloved finger along the splintered frame, then crouched to study the footprints that led away toward the empty snowmobile bay. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The silence said enough.

Antoine shifted beside her. She felt the tension in his shoulder, the way he held himself perfectly still, as if any movement might be mistaken for guilt. She wanted to reach for him, but the sergeant turned before she could.

“You keep the key for this shed under the flowerpot by the back door.” Bouchard said it flatly, a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” Antoine said. “I’ve always kept it there.”

“Convenient.”

The word landed like a dull blade. Camille felt her own jaw tighten.

Bouchard straightened and walked past them toward the house. He didn’t ask permission. He stepped inside the mudroom, stamped the snow off his boots, and began a slow circuit of Antoine’s home. Camille followed, Antoine a step behind her. She watched the sergeant’s eyes move over the shelves of photography books, the framed prints on the wall, the neat stack of mail on the counter. His gaze lingered on a pair of snowshoes leaning by the door.

“You were in town the night Luc disappeared?” Bouchard asked over his shoulder.

“I was at the bar,” Antoine said. “With Camille. People saw us.”

“So they did.” Bouchard opened a drawer in the kitchen, closed it again. “And after?”

“We came home.”

“Together?”

“Yes.” Camille’s voice came out sharper than she intended. Bouchard turned to face her, his expression unreadable.

“And you’re certain he didn’t leave again that night?”

“I would have known.”

Bouchard’s mouth twitched, neither smile nor frown. He resumed his circuit, moving down the hall toward the back bedrooms. Camille exchanged a look with Antoine. The fear in his eyes was barely concealed now, a thin film over something darker.

“Sergeant,” Camille said, stepping forward. “Do you have a warrant for this search?”

Bouchard paused. His hand rested on the doorframe of Antoine’s bedroom. He looked at her for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, Mademoiselle Moreau, I don’t. But I’m not searching for evidence against your friend. I’m looking for anything that might explain what happened to Luc Thibault, and I’d rather find it here than have it found by someone less sympathetic.” He glanced at Antoine. “You understand what I’m saying?”

Antoine nodded slowly. “You’re not the one I have to worry about.”

“There’s already talk in the village,” Bouchard said, his voice dropping. “People are scared. They want an answer. When people want an answer that fast, they don’t always care whose name gets attached to the wrong one.”

Camille felt the cold creep in through the mudroom door. It wasn’t the winter cold. It was the chill of implication.

The sergeant moved to the laundry room at the end of the hall. Camille heard him rustling through the contents of a plastic bin near the washer. A moment later, he went still.

“Antoine,” Bouchard said. “Come here.”

Antoine’s face drained. He walked down the hall, and Camille followed close behind, her heart thudding against her ribs. Bouchard stood beside the open dryer, and in his hand he held a worn flannel shirt. It was thick, plaid, dark red and black, the kind a man wore for cutting wood on a cold morning. A piece of duct-taped cardboard was folded into the sleeve like a marker, and the shirt smelled faintly of pine smoke.

“You recognize this?” Bouchard asked.

Antoine stared at the shirt. His mouth opened, closed. “No,” he said, but the word came out wrong, too high, uncertain. He swallowed and tried again. “No. I’ve never seen that before.”

Bouchard turned the shirt over. A name was written in faded marker on the collar tag: *Luc*.

“It was stuffed behind the dryer,” Bouchard said quietly. “Whoever put it there didn’t do a good job of hiding it. Almost like they wanted it found.”

Antoine’s breath came faster. “I didn’t put that there. I didn’t take anything from Luc. I haven’t been in his cabin in months.”

“I’m not accusing you,” Bouchard said. “But someone will. That shirt will be in my report.”

“Sergeant.” Camille stepped between them, her voice steady despite the panic flickering in her chest. “This shirt is staged. You said yourself it looks like it was meant to be found. Does that seem like a man trying to hide his involvement?”

Bouchard studied her for a long moment. “No. It doesn’t. But it’s not my job to decide what’s evidence and what isn’t. It’s my job to collect it.”

He folded the shirt carefully and placed it in a plastic evidence bag from his coat. Antoine watched him do it, his hands clenched at his sides. Camille could see the effort it took for him not to speak, not to fight.

Bouchard zipped the bag and looked at Antoine, his expression softening just slightly. “I’m going to write this up as found objects on the property. Nothing more. But if the inquiry doesn’t resolve soon, that report will be read by people who don’t know you. People who will see a man with a motive and a missing snowmobile signed in his name.”

“I don’t have a motive,” Antoine said. His voice cracked. “I haven’t spoken to Luc in months. He did repairs for me sometimes, but that isn’t—that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.” Bouchard clipped the bag to his belt and turned toward the door. “Stay in the village. Don’t leave without telling me. And Antoine—if you know anything about where Luc is, now’s the time to say it. Before the storm seals everything up and the cold decides for everyone.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him, leaving a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.

The quiet that followed was heavy. Camille turned to Antoine. He stood in the hall, staring at the empty space where the dryer was, his breathing shallow.

“Antoine.” She reached for his hand. His fingers were cold, stiff. He didn’t respond for a long moment. Then he squeezed hers back, too hard, like a man gripping a railing in a storm.

“He thinks I did it,” Antoine said. His voice was barely above a whisper. “Not Bouchard. But he’s already imagining what the others will think. And he’s not wrong. They’ve been waiting for an excuse to believe the worst of me.”

“They don’t know you like I do.”

He finally looked at her, and his eyes were rimmed with red. “That’s the thing. You came here three weeks ago as a stranger. And in three weeks, you’ve seen me more clearly than anyone in this village has in thirty years. What does that say about me, Camille? That I’m only understood when someone doesn’t have a lifetime of stories weighing me down?”

“It says you let me in,” she said. “That’s not small. That’s everything.”

He let out a shaky breath and pulled her into his arms. She felt the tension still coiled in his back, the fine tremor running through his shoulders. He didn’t cry. She didn’t expect him to. But he held her like she was the only anchor in the storm that was pressing down on them from all sides.

And then he pulled back, and something shifted in his eyes. A hardening. A resolve.

“I can’t just wait here,” Antoine said. “The police are looking at me. They’re not looking at the truth. They’re looking for a simple answer, and I’m the easiest one they’ll find.”

Camille nodded slowly. “So we don’t wait.”

“We?” He looked at her, surprised.

“You’re not facing this alone,” she said. She meant it, and the words felt truer than anything she’d said since arriving in this frozen corner of the world. “Not anymore.”

Antoine was quiet, studying her face. Finally, he nodded. He crossed to the mudroom and pulled open a drawer beneath the phone, rummaging through its contents: a screwdriver, a pair of wool mittens, an old set of keys. At the bottom, he withdrew a tattered leather notebook.

“Luc kept his records in these,” Antoine said, flipping through the pages. “He was meticulous about logging his repairs and deliveries. Dates, distances, estimated times. He kept the latest one in a case strapped to his snowmobile.”

Camille moved closer, looking over his shoulder. The pages were dense, written in Luc’s cramped hand. Names, addresses, notes scrawled next to each entry. She reached out and turned a page, revealing a small folded square of paper tucked inside the spine. She pulled it out and unfolded it.

It was a photocopy of an old map, hand-annotated with a red X marking a location deep in the forest, far beyond the marked trails. A pencil arrow indicated a route from the Thibault cabin, and a note in the margin read: *winter access only*.

“What is this?” she asked.

Antoine took the paper from her, studied it, and shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen that cabin. It’s not on any of the local trail maps.” He looked up, meeting her eyes. “But if Luc kept this hidden in his log, he was planning to go there. Or he didn’t want anyone else to know about it.”

Camille looked out the kitchen window at the snow falling beyond the glass. The storm was still hours away, the sky low and heavy with the promise of more.

“Then we go there,” she said. “Before the storm closes the trails.”

“Camille.” Antoine’s tone was caution, but there was something else in it now too: relief. “If we’re wrong, if we find nothing, we’ll be out there in the dark with a storm coming in.”

“Then we’d better not be wrong.”

She said it with a certainty she didn’t entirely feel, but she held his gaze until he finally smiled—a small, tired smile, but a real one.

“You know,” he said, tucking the map into his coat pocket, “when I met you, I thought you’d be gone before the first snowfall. I told myself it was easier that way.”

“And now?”

He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Now I can’t imagine doing this any other way.”

The warmth of his hand lingered on her cheek. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windows. The storm was coming, but it wasn’t here yet.

And they still had time.