Page 39 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Vivi hadn’t expected to be so moved by the artist’s entries. The emotional echo drummed in her ears with a familiarity she didn’t understand. As she read, she’d becomeLý; saw the swoop of falcons, the tumble of grass around the estate, the celestial fire of Justine’s curls. Justine Allard could have been the second woman inBlue Mirror. The descriptions matched. But then, who was the other woman, the muse? When did she come into the story? Perhaps she wasNg?c, the sisterLýhad written about. MaybeLýwanted to paint the two women he loved most.

“We wereright,” Calla said. She reached over and stroked the binding of the journal.

“You were.” Vivi didn’t begrudge giving Calla credit where it was due. “I don’t know that I really ever believed until we found the box under the bench.”

“Maybe I didn’t either. But now we know.Lýlived here. He walked the same ground we did. Breathed the same air.”

“For a summer.”

“Maybe longer. They could have had an entire life at the Maison de Notre Rêve.”

Calla was laying on her belly, her ankles crossed as she listened, tracing shapes onto the comforter of the bed. Hearts and stars and lips that gaped with feeling. Despite it all, Calla had remained a romantic. She might not have believed in marriage anymore, but she believed in love. That streak of idealism, dim as it was, could not be fully extinguished. She set her head on her hands and closed her eyes.

“He loved her,” Vivi conceded. “Completely.”

“And she felt the same way, I just know it. I wish I could hear it straight from his lips. Don’t you just feel so—justified—in all of it? None of this would have happened if you hadn’t noticed the overpainting.”

“Or if you hadn’t broken into Dad’s shed.”

“Speaking of Dad.” Calla lifted her head. “I remembered the story he told me about his grandmother. Her name wasTâm.”

“What made you think of it?”

Calla sketched a shape into the comforter again. “All those goofy hearts you keep drawing in the steamed glass. ‘Tâm’means ‘heart,’ doesn’t it?”

“It does, yeah,” Vivi said, a flint of surprise lighting the underside of her words.

“I remember more than you think I do,” Calla said, defensively now. “I’ll tell you the story sometime. Gruesome drowning situation. We should get to sleep.”

Vivi opened the journal and began paging through it.Lý’s words continued to draw her back. She’d felt this same pull in her lab when she encountered some degradation she knew how to fix or recognized the distinctive brushstroke of an artist on an unsigned painting. Even though it was late, much too late, to do anything aboutLý’s story, she was locked into it, as much a participant as a witness, her hands mud-deep in the mystery.

“Oh, call it quits, Bee.” Calla yawned, then headed toward her room. “I don’t think I’d be able to concentrate on one more word tonight.”

“You get some sleep. I’ll let you know if I come across anything else.”

“Don’t read further without me.”

“I won’t.”

Within minutes, Calla’s low snores began to hum across the suite. A thought continued to nudge inside Vivi’s brain, growing more insistent with each passing moment. That rolling sensation of revelation surrounded and eluded her, like a bank of fog she couldn’t clutch. She reread each entry, more slowly this time, still unsure of what she was looking for.

Then, all at once, her mind, a step behind her roving eyes, snagged on a sentence. A word.

It’s as if we’re priestesses at moonlight—

Priestesses.

Not one woman twirling in the aqueducts, but two.

Vivi dropped the journal softly onto her lap.

That was when it made perfect sense. The swift intimacy betweenLýand Justine, their frequent physical touches and public meetings that would have been inappropriate for a single man and a married woman. Those affectionate nicknames that felt like those schoolgirls might give one another. Most of all, the allusion of secrets that Emil Blanc had kept for his friend.

Lýwas a woman. She was her own muse.

Every ion of Vivi’s body jumped in vindication. Of course, she thought. Of courseLýwas a woman.

Vivi drew from her scholarship to complete the picture. In the mid-1920s, André Breton had been both founder and kingpin of the Surrealist movement. While he spoke about liberation for women, his practices often revealed a darker and more complicated attitude toward the female role in art and in the home. In his second manifesto, published only a handful of years beforeLýfled from Paris, Breton had written of “the problem of woman.” Additionally, Breton had been vocal about his intolerance of homosexuality and his wary tolerance of women. One was a freakish anomaly, while the other had to earn her place in the realm of Surrealism. And he wasn’t alone.