Maybe she’s right. Perhaps Stella doesn’t deserve anything from me. Nothing makes any sense.
Caroline tries another tactic. “Actually, let me make this easier for you. I know she’s alive. I’ve been watching you and I saw you all check into Hotel Montalembert and two of you go into the Musée d’Orsay after hours.”
She stands and walks over to the bulletproof glass. She taps her fingers on a keypad hidden in the wall and it slides open. She expertly works on one of the crates and then removes the painting and places it in front of me.
“You know this one well?”
La Chambre.Just an empty bedroom with a wooden bed and two chairs, simple if it were not for the colors. Pale lilac walls, the uneven, faded brown of the floor, the pumpkin-colored washstand, and the olive-green window. It’s the colors that always make Vincent’s work so remarkable. This is probably the real one, but I cannot tell the difference between this, the one that I painted, and the one I took off the wall of the Orsay. Perhaps once a thing is created and beloved it doesn’t matter if it is reproduced over and over again. Don’t people admire prints of great paintings in their homes and offices every single day all over the world?
Which version is authentic? These impossible-to-answer questions remind me of my mother. Some days she was completely herself—brilliant, funny, sharp. Other days she was someone else entirely. I spent my childhood trying to determine which version was real, which was the authentic woman who gave birth to me. I had to constantly hope that her real self would emerge again from whatever darkness had swallowed her.
Ithasswallowed her. My grief comes rushing back to me and I close my eyes.
“Do you think this one is real?” Caroline asks me. “And does it matter if it is?”
“Your entire business is built on it mattering,” I say.
“Our entire business is built on greed,” she retorts.
It’s true, but I had assumed, based on what Matthew and Stella had told me about Caroline, that greed was also her business.
“What is Stella up to, Emma? What’s her endgame?”
I’m wavering. I don’t want to die in this dungeon. And while I can’t imagine betraying Stella, Colette, and Lucie, I also don’t think they’d want me to give up my life for this. And besides, Stella’s been lying to me all along. All this time, the person we’ve been trusting with our lives has been playing a more complicated game than any of us realized. What will Caroline do to me if I stay silent? Or worse, what will her father do?
“You could have just kept following us.”
“I like to have more leverage than that. I need information before I decide how I want to proceed.”
As if she can read my mind, she lies down on the floor next to me so that we are eye to eye. “My father doesn’t know anything about this. Pascal told me and only me. He said I could decide what to do with the information, for a price, of course. He always had a price.”
“What will you do with Stella?”
“Will you believe me if I tell you?”
“Probably not.”
She pulls me up and closer to the bulletproof glass so that my nose is pushed against it.
“What do you see in there?”
“Art.” I defiantly give the most basic of answers.
“And what else?”
“Beauty. Pain. Life. Honor. Dignity. The future and the past.”My cheeks are wet with tears now. If I squint at the Matisse I can see my mother’s face in the water of Monet’sSunriseand this chokes me up, sends the tears rolling down my cheeks. “I see everything.”
“Me too,” she whispers hotly in my ear. “My father only sees money. But maybe, if you choose to help me, we can set them free.”
“How?”
“You won’t know unless you trust me.” She stands, brushing dust from her immaculate clothing. At the door, she turns back.
“One more thing. Your mother isn’t dead. I needed you alone and vulnerable, so I had a friend make that call. She’s alive and remains in a psychiatric facility in Philadelphia.” Caroline watches my face carefully as she reveals this. “Help me, and I’ll make sure she stays safe.”
36
Claire
