Page 19 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

No matter where I go, you will be at my side, my dearest, most forgiving friend.

The note was unsigned, dated for the spring of 1943, the year ofLý’s disappearance. A rectangular patch had been excised from the center of the page.

She peered closer. “It looks like there was once an address. Or a town?”

“I tried to find the missing piece. See how it was extracted, though: precise, expurgated, as if it’d been sliced out with a penknife. It’s not accidental, this omission.”

“Definitely not,” she agreed. “What’s Château des Miroirs?”

“I looked into it once. There’s no such place with that name. It must have been a private joke between them. Maybe Blanc is the ‘most beloved’ thatLýwas writing to in your letter. Maybe the offering is the same as whateverLýleft at the Château des Miroirs.”

It felt unlikely to her, since the letter was written in Vietnamese, but she probed. “You think they were in love,Lýand Blanc?”

Paul shrugged. “Their relationship seemed intimate. Blanc liked men; it was one of those open secrets of the time. But there’s nothing known aboutLý’s romantic entanglements, so it’s all conjecture without evidence.”

He gingerly handed her letter back to her. Vivi felt a rush of triumph in observing the reverent, covetous way he gazed at it. He saw the letter’s value. The highest hurdle, that of disbelief, had been scaled.

As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Say I believe this is fromLý. What then?”

“You read it yourself. There’s an offering out there, somethingLý wanted found.”

“Buried treasure?” he snorted.

“Why not? What if there is another painting, hidden in some pocket of history? Wouldn’t you give anything to study it? If we could figure out where this Château des Miroirs is, we could find it. A missingLý. One lastLý.It’d be a landmark discovery, even more than the restoredBlue Mirror.”

“You stake a lot on this hunch of yours.”

“Let me look in your files. If I can’t find anything in Blanc’s correspondence, then what have you lost?”

A lock of hair fell over his eye as he shook his head. “You ask for trust, with nothing in return. What’s to stop you from stealing my work and giving it to one of the upstart curators at your museum?”

“You have my word.”

“You’ll have to do better than that. I’ve met too many mercenary scholars in my time.”

A long pause. The deep-seated wriggle of reluctance, along with a desperation so sharp she felt she was choking on it. She wanted Calla next to her, helping her make the decision, but as usual, her sister had eluded responsibility.

Finally, she burst out, “You can haveLý’s letter. The original. Even if I don’t find anything in Blanc’s correspondence.”

“What about the sketch?”

That was too much for Vivi. Words, she might relinquish. But not the art, never the art. “No. The letter will have to be enough.”

She saw the way his gaze hooked ontoLý’s letter. A rare find, and one that no scholar could resist. Wrongness spiked through her. The letter had become a sort of companion for the sisters, patiently waiting for their understanding. It was, in an oblique way, a final gift from their father.

But she shook off her compunction. They needed to move forward, before the public realized that there was another painting underneath theBlue Mirrorthey’d known. Before the scholars began swarming. She knew how Calla could be, once thwarted. If she lost the offering, whatever it was, she might fall headlong into another bender. Each time, it’d become harder for Vivi to pull her out.

All or nothing—that had always been the game. She held Paul’s gaze, hoping he couldn’t see how close she’d come to snatching the letter back from him.

Finally, he nodded. “You have until the end of the day. I won’t miss my dinner for you.”

He cleared a space on the floor for her. She sat in front of his thick files, vibrating with expectation. While she had access to many archival documents at the Forster, she’d never seen the breadth of correspondence that lay in front of her. A mountain of unpublished primary sources, a scholar’s feast. No wonder that Paul didn’t want to share it.

There were dozens of letters with crumbling seals, along with scrawled missives on hotel stationery. She came across a handful of photographs of unsmiling young men sitting on the steps of a stone building in Paris. There were postcards and signed sketches, all given as gifts to Blanc. It must have taken decades—a fortune—for Paul to assemble this trove.

While the letters were imminently interesting from a scholarly standpoint, the clock pressed against her. She skimmed Blanc’s letter of introduction to August Bazin—the painter who’d later bemoanLý’s excessive use of blue—and Blanc’s scathing tirades to Breton, with whom he could not reconcile his ideas of art.Lý’s name appeared once or twice in passing, but aside from the note she’d already examined, there seemed to be few direct exchanges between the two.

But when she lifted the last folder, full of Blanc’s correspondence with his sister, Justine Allard, her fingertips began to warm.