“It is.” He wrinkled his nose. “But as I believe I’ve reminded you before, young lady, this is a gallery for those with the means to buy art. Those who simply want to gawk at paintings should proceed to this city’s great wealth of museums.”
Lucie could feel her cheeks burning, and she opened her mouth to reply, but Tommy beat her to it.
“Actually, she knew Olivier LeClair,” he said, giving her hand a comforting squeeze. “So I guess you could say she’s not simply gawking at paintings.”
The gallery owner’s eyebrows shot up, and he turned to stare at Lucie. “No. You’re much too young to have known him. He died in 1942.”
“I know. I was just a little girl,” she said. “His daughter was… She was my best friend.” Tommy’s eyes were on her now. She had never mentioned this to him, and she could feel his surprise. But she held the gallery owner’s gaze as she added, “Her name was Mathilde, and she came to live with us after he was killed and his wife had to go away.”
Recognition sparked in his eyes, along with something else Lucie couldn’t quite name. “Yes, I know the story.” He glanced at Tommy, who looked stunned, and then back at Lucie. “I’m Constant Bouet, the owner of this gallery,” he said, extending his hand.
“Lucie Foulon.”
“Foulon.” The blood had drained from his face. “The daughter of the woman who owns the bookstore on this block?”
“Yes.”
“Foulon,” he repeated, a haunted expression on his face. “I never put two and two together…” Constant Bouet looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he clamped his mouth shut.
“Do you know her? My mother?”
“Not exactly.”
The silence was awkward, so Lucie filled it. “And Madame LeClair? Did you ever meet her?”
“Of course. I was her husband’s art dealer.”
This was beginning to feel like pulling teeth. “And was she an artist as well?”
“She dabbled.” He hesitated. “She is not in touch with your mother?”
“No.” Lucie didn’t elaborate, and she could have sworn that Bouet looked relieved, but then his expression quickly cleared and returned to neutral. “Well, Lucie Foulon, you and your friend here may stay and look at the LeClairs. I hadn’t realized your connection.”
He scuttled away without another word, giving her one last suspicious glance over his shoulder. He said something to the man behind the counter, who was ruddy-cheeked and middle-aged, with sandy hair and blue eyes. He looked as incongruous in the gallery as Lucie felt. While Constant Bouet was polished, every hair in place, the other man’s hair was constantly mussed, his shirts rumpled and tucked into casual slacks. His fingers were always paint-stained, Lucie had noted more than once, a dead giveaway that he was an artist, too. She had seen him here several times before, so she knew he was associated with running the gallery in some way. She locked eyes with him now as Constant Bouet drifted away, and he gave her a friendly smile and then returned to jotting something down in a ledger.
“You were best friends with LeClair’s daughter?” Tommy asked in astonishment. “I mean, I knew your family knew the LeClairs, but how come you never told me the rest?”
“It’s complicated. Mathilde—she died a long time ago. My mother doesn’t like me to talk about it, and so I suppose I’ve gotten in the habit of never mentioning her.”
“Well, you’re full of surprises,” Tommy said, leaning in to steal a kiss. “What a city this is, where it turns out my girlfriend is practically related to one of my favorite artists! New York, huh? What a place.”
“What a place,” Lucie echoed, and with one last glance at the LeClair painting that looked over the rooftops of Paris, she grabbed Tommy’s hand and led him toward the door. “Let’s go paint.”
“Let’s go paint,” he echoed cheerfully, and as she turned to look back, she saw the man behind the counter, the one in the blue jeans with paint under his nails, watching her with a puzzled look on his face. He smiled and gave her a wave just as she exited the gallery, her hands itching to find a paintbrush to transfer to canvas the confusing feelings ping-ponging through her heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The knock on Elise’s door startled her and her hand slipped, taking a chunk out of the smooth blond limewood in front of her. She’d been working on the large sculpture all morning, a commission from a man opening a kitschy new bar on the Left Bank. Monsieur Vasseur had looked out for her these past fifteen years, selling a few of her original pieces in his gallery and suggesting her commissioned work to clients as often as he could. “She can carve anything except for little girls,” she had heard him tell a stone-faced banker one day as she slipped into the gallery unnoticed. “Girls remind her of her daughter. Killed in the war. Tragic, yes?” The banker had ordered a wooden peacock, and Elise had gone home in tears.
What he didn’t know was that she had actually been sculpting Mathilde all along. Her apartment was overflowing with renderings of her lost daughter, imaginings of how she would look if she had continued to grow up. She would have lips like Elise’s were in her youth, full and rounded, and a high forehead like Olivier. Her cheekbones would be sharp and defined, as they had been even when she was a toddler, and her chin would be narrow, giving one the impression of a heart.
At night, Elise lay in bed for hours until sleep came for her, tracing the imagined lines of her daughter’s face at seven, ten, fifteen, and now twenty. It was almost inconceivable that her tiny child would be a woman now. The wood beneath her knife had once been alive, too, but Elise’s tools could resuscitate it, to give it a second chance at being. She was doing the same for the daughter she would never see again.
And yes, in the past few years, it had gotten out of control. On some level, Elise knew this, and she had taken to hiding the busts of Mathilde—under beds, behind curtains, in boxes—so no one would try to make her stop. Not that anyone other than Monsieur Vasseur came by her apartment anyhow, but she suspected he would worry if he realized what she was doing. She was worried, too, about her own sanity, but it wasn’t as though she could stop.
Now, jolted by the knock on the door, she frowned. Monsieur Vasseur had gone to London on business this week, as he did the first week of October every year, and there wasn’t another soul in Paris who knew her well enough to turn up out of the blue. Perhaps it was an error, someone at the wrong apartment door, but then the rapping came again, and Elise put down her gouge. “I’m coming!”
She pulled the door open and then blinked into the hallway for a second, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “Ruth!” she exclaimed, leaning forward to kiss her old friend on both cheeks. “What a surprise to see you! What on earth are you doing here in Paris?”
“I’ll explain,” Ruth said, her voice tinged with sadness. “Elise, may I come in?”
Elise glanced over her shoulder. The only Mathilde carving on display was one she’d done years ago, what she’d imagined Mathilde would have looked like at the age of four, her face tilted up as she laughed. It was sitting on the coffee table just beside the sofa, where Elise talked to it most nights. The other Mathildes—the embodiment of Elise’s inability to move on—were all hidden away. “Certainly.” She opened the door a bit wider, perplexed by the tears in Ruth’s eyes as she walked into the apartment. “Ruth? Are Georges and Suzanne okay?”
Ruth looked startled. “Yes, they’re fine.”
“Then what is it?” Elise asked as she closed the door behind Ruth and gestured toward the sofa. “What are you doing here?”
Ruth took a seat and tapped her foot repeatedly against the floor as Elise sat across from her.
“Ruth, you’re making me nervous,” Elise said.
“I’ve found Juliette,” Ruth blurted out.
Suddenly, Elise’s vision felt blurry. “Juliette Foulon? Where?”
“In New York. She has been living there all along, and I—” She stopped abruptly. “She owns a bookstore there.” Ruth seemed to be saying the words carefully, unsure how to begin. “It is very similar to the one she and Monsieur Foulon owned in Boulogne.”
“She bought another bookstore?” Elise could hardly imagine it.
Ruth frowned. “Not exactly. It seems she married someone wealthy, who encouraged her to rebuild the exact same bookstore she had here. It was strange, Elise. It was nearly an exact replica.”
Elise’s eyes drifted to the sculpture of the young Mathilde that sat beside Ruth, and she swallowed a lump of shame as Ruth glanced at it. Was it obvious to Ruth that Elise, too, was guilty of trying to seize a past that was gone forever?
“It’s different, Elise,” Ruth said quietly, reading her mind. “You are trying to find peace. Juliette seems to be trying to find… something else.”
“What do you mean?”