Page 25 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“That junk will rot your teeth.”

Calla tossed a bag of chips at her head. “You’re welcome, you lout.”

On her bed, Vivi had spread articles and open books around her, forming a moat of secondary sources. The ink was faded and the low lights made it difficult to read, but she pressed on, circling a phrase here; underlining another there.

On the opposite bed, Calla was crunching loudly, teeth flashing asshe spoke. “Here’s what I think.Lýwas madly in love with one of our ancestors. Who wouldn’t be? TheNguy?nwomen are incontrovertibly hot. Maybe she was some childhood love of his that he couldn’t forget. He couldn’t help paying homage to her in the painting. But it was a secret—a Romeo and Juliet situation? Maybe she was already married?—and so he painted overBlue Mirror. Kept the affair hidden to the last. Then he mailed that letter that yougave away—”

“Negotiated away.”

“—to his ladylove. Because there was something else he was holding for her. A fortune! Jewels? A trove of paintings?”

“But what about the other woman inBlue Mirror? The white one with curly hair?”

“Who knows. Who cares!” Calla threw the plastic bag in the trash, missed, and flopped back onto a pillow without picking it up. “First we need to figure out which ancestorLýwas madly in love with.”

Vivi tongued her canine tooth, a thinking habit she’d held since she was a kid. “The letter was written in 1945, which would have been five years after Dad was born. So, if your romantic theory holds water,Lýcould have meant the letter for our grandmother. But sinceBlue Mirrorwas likely painted in the 1930s, it might have been more plausible that our great-grandmother was the subject. What was her name?”

“I can’t remember. Starts with a T? Or a D? Duyên or Tiên or something. Vietnamese names are hard for me, those guttural sounds. After we started talking again, Dad told me some rambling story about our great-grandmother. But I was stoned at the time—”

“You were high?”

“Pot doesn’tcount. Anyway, I was stoned and I wasn’t really listening. It’ll come to me eventually.”

“Did she have a freckle below her eye?”

“How should I know? I never paid attention to any of that.”

Vivi thought of the shrine in their kitchen in Deer Creek, one she and Calla largely ignored, because what were these ancestors to them? Outsidetheir disjointed quartet, the sisters had never met any other family members; most were dead, some simply lost in the world, addresses and fates unknown. By the time the sisters were born, all they had to claim were grim faces staring out in palpable disappointment from yellowing photographs.

Under those unsmiling visages,Tu?ntried to teach them Vietnamese, hammering the phonetics into their skulls with militaristic rigor.Now that your mother is gone—He stumbled over the word:gone, not left. As if her disappearance hadn’t been a choice. In the moment, his silence carved an unfillable space into the air between them.

Vivi picked up the language easily, but Calla struggled over the intonations. The more Calla wrestled with the Vietnamese words, the more they shut her out, so that her halting sentences flattened and spread like the fields of oats they passed on the way to school each day.Tu?nbecame frustrated at his youngest daughter’s Americanness, her unavoidable distance from his homeland. There was a fist on the table, apple juice all over the floors. Snow gathered like dandruff on the windowsills. Calla cried and Vivi stared at the twisting flames of the fireplace, wanting so badly to loan whatever parcel of knowledge she could to her sister.

“I really don’t remember,” Calla finally admitted. “But the altar is still there. We could go to Deer Creek and look.”

Vivi ignored the suggestion. Deer Creek was out of the question. “But then how do the Allards and Blancs fit into this? There’s too much we don’t know. Maybe we just need to let Samuel figure it out. Maybe we’re in over our head.”

What she didn’t say was that while they were at Rathmore, an email came in from Abel, calling for a disciplinary meeting the following week. The Forster board would be there. The lawyers too. Separately, Abel called her and left a message, more affable in tone but no less firm. He said he’d always liked her; he thought highly of her work. He agreed that the overpainting was a landmark discovery, but there was due process to consider. You couldn’t just do what you wanted with a painting on ahunch. In the end, Abel wanted to make this right. But that could only happen if Vivi returned to face the consequences.

Vivi had written Abel back, stating in no uncertain terms that she had deliberately flouted Samuel’s instructions, along with museum procedure. She was the only one to blame. She was putting herself on administrative leave and would return soon. They could decide her fate without her. Then she silenced her phone and threw it deep in her purse.

After all that, Vivi could understand why her sister had launched her own phone into the lake. Disappearing was one tool of survival.

Calla jumped onto Vivi’s bed, upsetting her moat of paperwork. “Bee, don’t do that. This mystery doesn’t belong tothem. It’s ours.”

“Just because Dad was in possession of some old artifacts? AndBlue Mirrorhappened to be in my lab?”

“The universe wants us to find the offering,” Calla said stubbornly.

“How are you so sure?”

“Because, unlike you, I believe there is still magic out there, things we can’t explain. And we don’t need to. We just need to seize the opportunities we’re handed. Easy as that.” Maybe that was the problem. Vivi still flinched from the world, as if it were doling out punishments, while Calla stood with her arms open, ready to accept its gifts. Calla squeezed Vivi around the shoulders in affectionate exasperation. “Stop thinking so hard. I’ll have enough faith for both of us. Show me what you found.”

Vivi’s laptop was open to the booking website for Maison de Notre Rêve. In the 1950s, the estate had been sold by the Allards, then converted into a luxury inn that catered to retirees hoping to fulfill their slumbering artistic dreams amid Arles’s legendary sunrises. The tagline of the inn read:Never too late.Most of the exterior pictures had been taken from a distance in an attempt to capture the impressive Provençal backdrop. The interior photos relayed polished wood floors with thick rugs and gigantic stone hearths, from which fires crackled and snapped, as in a BBC period piece. Each suite boasted a balcony towering over gardens abloom with primroses and lavender. There were, however, no photos of the servants’ cottage that Justine Allard mentioned.

“Maybe there’d be something in their archives,” Vivi mused. “Something about time or light. Or even a sundial on the property.”

“So let’s justgoand look for ourselves. France and fancy-free, like we’ve always wanted!”