“Wait until you see the store.”
A moment later, they were standing in front of the darkened windows of Juliette’s bookshop, and Elise couldn’t breathe. Ruth had told her that Juliette had somehow created a replica of her Boulogne-Billancourt shop here, a continent away, but she had assumed that it was an exaggeration.
But Ruth hadn’t stretched the truth at all. Even in shadow, lit only by the streetlamps outside, the store looked like it had been pulled whole from Elise’s memories. The shelves were all spaced exactly as they had been in the old location, and even the spines of the books—or at least the ones Elise could see from the window—looked familiar. If she pressed her face against the glass, she could just make out, in the far corner, the children’s area where Mathilde had spent so many hours playing with the others, and before she knew it, there were tears coursing down her face. When she pulled away to stare at Ruth in horror, the other woman’s eyes were shining with tears of sympathy.
“But it’s… exactly the same,” Elise said haltingly.
“Didn’t I tell you it was?”
“I—I thought you meant it was similar. But she has re-created the past down to the last detail.”
“You can see now why I am so worried.”
Elise turned back to the window and choked back a sob as she gazed into the darkness. People passing by on the sidewalk created ghosts of movement inside. The real store had been reduced nearly to dust—Elise had seen it with her own eyes—but here, one could almost imagine that terrible day had never happened, that there hadn’t been a war, that a bomb hadn’t fallen far from its target, taking her daughter with it into the ground. “How did she do this?”
“Her husband is very wealthy.”
Elise pulled back from the window. “I still cannot believe she remarried. Paul was the love her of life.”
Ruth smiled sadly. “I believe he still is.” When Elise gave her a questioning look, Ruth sighed. “She talks to him, you see. I went into the store once to check on her, and she was so immersed in the conversation she was having—with the thin air, Elise—that she didn’t even know I was there.”
Elise put her hand to her aching heart. “Ruth, it sounds like she’s in a terrible state.”
Ruth held her gaze. “I hope she will listen to you.”
As they walked away from the store, Elise shook her head. She’d been cut from Juliette’s life long ago; Juliette’s single letter to her had proven it. What chance was there that she’d answer any questions now, or that Elise could do anything to help pull Juliette back from the edge? But if not Elise, then who?
She was so caught up in thinking about how to fix her friend that she almost didn’t notice the gallery across the street as they approached the corner of Fifty-Sixth and Lexington. But at the last moment, a flash of bright color in a painting in the window caught her eye, and she looked up. She stopped short with a gasp.
“What is it?” Ruth asked, stopping alongside Elise and looking at her with concern.
Elise didn’t say a word. Heart hammering, she took Ruth’s hand and, looking both ways, pulled her across Fifty-Sixth Street. “That piece,” she said when they were standing before the window of the gallery on the northeast corner of the intersection. “It is one of Olivier’s. I—I remember him painting it.”
They both stared at the canvas, lit by the streetlights. It was an image, filled with color, of a couple dancing in a brightly lit room, the woman’s dress a brilliant blue, the tables of diners around them dotted with candles and fading into a blur as the man gazed down at the woman. She was laughing, her face upturned, her eyes closed. The expression on the man’s face was one of pure adoration, and for a second, Elise had to look away. She remembered, suddenly, when Olivier used to look at her that way, like the moon and the stars lived within her and she held the key to the universe. She had gotten so frustrated with him at the end that she had almost forgotten that what had existed between them had once been so pure.
“Is that you?” Ruth asked after a moment.
Elise forced her gaze back to the picture. “Olivier took me dancing in Spain once, just after we married. It is one of my favorite memories of him, of us. But this painting, it was ours. He didn’t sell this one. It was one of the things stolen from our attic by the Germans when I was… away.”
“The Germans stole it?” Ruth asked, and when Elise nodded, she added, “But how did it end up here?”
Suddenly, Elise had a purpose. She looked up at the name of the gallery: The French Collective. The sign said it opened at ten the next morning, an hour before the bookstore. “I don’t know,” Elise said, her throat dry. “But I intend to find out.”
* * *
The next morning, Elise passed by the gallery and approached the closed bookstore just past 10 a.m., pausing to peer inside. It was still and quiet, but in the light of day, the store’s troubling similarities to the original bookshop in Boulogne were even more staggering than they’d been the night before. She blinked, a headache already coming on; she would deal with that in an hour. First, she needed to figure out how her husband’s stolen painting had ended up here in New York.
The bell above the gallery’s door tinkled as she entered, and a tall, slender woman with a blond Marilyn Monroe hairdo and stacked-heel calfskin pumps strode over with a tight-lipped smile. “Can I help you?” she asked, looking Elise up and down.
Elise knew she didn’t look like the typical art collector who wandered into a high-priced gallery like this one; she was dressed in a narrow wool skirt with seamed nylons and a simple V-neck lambswool sweater, her old wool coat over it. She hadn’t bothered to do more that morning than run a brush through her hair and swipe on red lipstick, and she imagined she looked like a bit of a disaster, as she had barely slept the night before. But how could she, knowing that the day would hold a reunion with Juliette and a confrontation here at the gallery? She took a breath, drawing herself a little taller. “Yes, you can. I’d like to know the provenance of that Olivier LeClair painting in your window.”
The woman squinted at her as if she’d been speaking another language, though she was quite sure she’d said the words in English. “The provenance?” she repeated.
“Yes,” Elise said. “I’d like to know how you came to have that painting. You see, it is mine, and it was stolen by the Germans during the war. If you’re doing business with former Nazis…”
The woman’s eyes narrowed further. “The painting belongs to the gallery, ma’am.”
Elise recognized the tone in her voice as the one people used with those they suspected of minor lunacy. Monsieur Vasseur sometimes spoke to her that way, a now-familiar mix of skepticism and pity. But Elise had no time for that today, and her patience had run out years ago. So much had been stolen from her, but here, like a gift from God, was something that she could take back.
“Actually, it does not,” Elise said calmly. “Now, I’d like to speak to the gallery’s owner, please, or I’ll be forced to make a scene.”
The woman looked her up and down once more and then, seeming to assess that she was serious, turned on her heel and walked away. Elise figured there was a fifty-fifty chance that she was calling the police rather than fetching the owner, so she moved toward the smaller second room in the back of the gallery to buy herself some time. She was muttering to herself, but then she stopped short in the doorway as she saw the four limewood sculptures, each of them lit by a single light from the ceiling, spaced around the center of the room.
The air rushed from Elise’s lungs and she reached for the wall as she wobbled on her feet. Surely she was mistaken. Surely these were simply works that looked eerily like hers.
But no. As she moved closer to the statue nearest the door, she knew every curve, could remember every stroke of her chisel, every sinewy scrap of wood shaving that had peeled away to reveal the shapes and turns on display here. She could remember sculpting the curve of an arm, chiseling the plump little legs, the tiny fingers, the wide eyes of her infant daughter. She could almost hear Mathilde’s tiny coos from the bassinet as she slept beside her, oblivious as her mother finalized the finite angles of her own little face.