Page 9 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Then, finally, the crowd subsided and Vivi was left alone withBlue Mirror. The painting’s smallness elicited an inner vigilance in her. But now she couldn’t separate her professional interest inBlue Mirrorfrom the contents of the manila folder. She tried to see the painting the wayTu?nwould have. Was he compelled by the portrait because its artist was Vietnamese? Had he ever seen it in person? She couldn’t imagine her father traveling in the same circles asBlue Mirror. And yet—Van Gogh’sElimarhad allegedly resurfaced at a garage sale in Minnetonka. Art had a habit of hitching along enigmatic highways.

Up close, the blues in the painting were astoundingly varied. There were umbras of lapis, the joyous powder of a spring sky, a skate of ice, all colliding with verve on the canvas.Lý’s paint had a tactile, almost gluttonous quality. The brushstrokes stacked like clay, each layer casting another shadow of meaning onto the one before.

But it was the tapering red streak down the middle of the painting that drew her eye. Its tail ended at the exact center point, dividing the women neatly apart. That streak snagged at her mind. There was a destructive quality to it, like lava cutting through rocks.

When my body is gone, the art is all that is left.What had the author of the letter meant? Was it K. P.Lýwho’d written such an inscrutable message? Vivi thought of the spot-the-difference spreads she and Calla used to pore over at the public library in Deer Creek. There was an anomaly in this painting, she was sure of it, but that difference hovered somewhere just out of reach.

Vivi leaned until her breath touched the surface of the painting. For a moment, the women’s faces seemed to shift, as if they were moving in water.

“Oh.”

It was then that she saw what her mind had been circling around. Thecraquelure on the faces was less pronounced than that of the rest of the painting. Where the varnish in the background contained deep breakages, the varnish atop the faces was smoother and lighter in color. Vivi used an air blower to remove the dust from the surface. Then, when she stepped back and squinted, she noticed that the paint atop the women’s faces was ever so slightly thicker too. It was the difference of a micrometer, thinner than a baby’s eyelash. But to a conservator, that difference was enough to open a new pathway.

For an hour, more, she sat on a stool in front ofBlue Mirror, running her loupe across every inch. The accumulation of brushstrokes became ridges and valleys, endless and obfuscating terrain. Her study felt nearly erotic; how long had it been since she stared so intently at anything? If looking was an act of love, she was already in deep withBlue Mirror. As each second ticked by, she became more convinced that something hid under this painting.

Calla was right: the tie between their father andBlue Mirrorhad to be more than coincidence. For all her caprice and meandering habits, Calla had instincts like no other.

Vivi texted Samuel.Soon, he was striding back into the lab, tapping a Visconti against his chin. His tall frame sometimes reminded her of a Giacometti statue, that striking attenuation, the whip-like efficiency of limbs.

“What’s another word for ‘artistic hubris’?” he was asking. “And why am I always talking about hubris in these catalogues?”

“Pentimento.”

“No, that’s not right. ‘Ego’ feels too strong; ‘confidence’ doesn’t hit the right note—”

“Samuel.” She pulled him to the easel. “I’m saying that I see pentimento here. On the painting.”

He blinked for a moment. She could see him fighting to erase a quirk of a smile. It’d become a sort of good-natured drinking game at the Forster: How many times would Vivi saypentimentoin one week? She pronounced it in a slightly exaggerated manner, with a balletic elongation of the first syllable and a jaunty uplift at the last, declaring herself in on the joke. But she was not the only conservator obsessed with the idea of pentimento.

When artists wanted to change an aspect of an existing painting—a gesture of the hand, the color of a hat—they would simply paint over the canvas again. Oil paint, opaque and slow-drying, was the matrix that made this transposition possible. Overpainting was a common practice, especially with Old Masters, who worked at a time when materials were precious. In one of the more prominent examples, da Vinci’sSalvator Mundireveals clear signs of an altered thumb.

Over time, the overlaying paint would become slightly transparent and the faint impression of the original would appear. Traces of pentimento, the ghost of the painting, often became an indication of the painting’s authenticity. Copyists’ work rarely showed signs of pentimenti; they only needed to replicate what already existed, so there was no need for multiple drafts on a canvas. Those ghost marks became evidence of the artist’s deliberation, an example of showing one’s work, the way a child might scribble over problem sets in her homework.

In pentimento lay the prospect of groundbreaking discoveries in the field. Some art historians tailed pentimento the way storm chasers scour the country for meteorological disturbances. Hoping, hoping.

“I’m not making it up, Sam.” She jerked her head towardBlue Mirror. “Justlook.”

He complied in silence. His forehead wrinkled, then smoothed. He pushed his glasses up his nose and began to circle the painting, examining the surface from different angles. Finally, he turned back to Vivi. The pitying expression on his face shattered her completely.

“You don’t see it?”

“Maybe,” he said slowly. “But it’s such a slight difference. You’re the expert, of course, but I can’t say this feels especially compelling.”

“It is, though. Look at how flat the faces are. How nondescript.” Shepulled up images on her laptop of otherLýpaintings,Midnight FeastandJungle Escape,landscapes patterned with mythological monsters. “For an artist whose beasts ripple with so much agency, isn’t it strange that his humans would not have been portrayed with a similarly vivid brush?”

“Not everyone does portraits well.”

She shoved herself away from the desk. He didn’t understand, and why would he, when he only had half the information? But she was loath to share what Calla had left for her. To draw him into the mess of it all—her father’s obsessions, her sister’s misguided hope. Their family suddenly seemed pathetic, wobbly and unsustainable, like a table missing half its legs.

But she couldn’t ignore the faces in the mirror, that line of red, a flaw that begged investigation. The vortex of the mystery was pulling her in. And this was Samuel, the most trustworthy person she knew. He would handle her questions with care and discretion.

Finally, decision reached, Vivi handed him the manila folder. She explained everything Calla had told her. He nodded slowly as she pointed out the similarities between the handwriting in the letter toLý’s signature onBlue Mirror. The sure lines of the sketch. Afterward, he set both down and ran his hand up his nape.

“So you think that this sketch is somehow related to the painting? ThatLýdid it?”

“Yes. And he likely wrote the letter, too. I think the faces on the sketch are blank because the painting is hiding something. I need to know why my father had this sketch. Whythisone?”

“I understand, Viv.” His sympathy was honey on her skin, too thick, too cloying. She wanted to scrub it away.