Read Chapter 9: The Vanished Restorer

The address on Julien’s list led to a fifth-floor walk-up in the Marais, a building so quiet Camille could hear her own pulse. She’d told herself this was about the backlog—the lab’s files were a maze of incomplete entries, and Élodie’s name had surfaced on a restoration project dated a month prior, then simply stopped. No completion report. No invoice. No forwarding address.

The door to apartment 5B was unlocked. Not forced, not ajar—deliberately open, the way you’d leave a door when you were coming right back. A month ago, apparently, Élodie never did.

Camille stepped inside and inhaled dust and turpentine. The apartment was a warren of canvases: some stacked against peeling wallpaper, others propped on mismatched easels. A single window faced a blank courtyard wall, and the afternoon light fell in a tired gray sheet across a worktable crowded with brushes, pigment tubes, and a magnifier lamp switched on, though no one had used it in weeks.

She moved slowly, cataloging. A restorer who walked away didn’t leave a half-cleaned palette with the paint still wet in the wells. But here, the ochre had cracked into river deltas, long dry. Whatever Élodie had been doing, she’d abandoned it mid-stroke.

On the central easel sat a small canvas, roughly sixty by eighty centimeters. Camille’s breath caught at the sprightly curves, the froth of cherubs and pink silk clouds. A Fragonard—or a good copy. The top left quadrant was cleaned to a luminous glow; the rest lay under a dusky layer of oxidized varnish. Élodie had been stripping centuries of grime, one careful square inch at a time.

Camille leaned closer. The exposed section revealed a brushwork bravura that made her chest tighten. If this was a fake, it was a masterpiece in its own right. But what was a Fragonard, even a suspected one, doing in a restorer’s cramped apartment without security, without climate control, without an owner’s name anywhere?

She checked the back of the frame. Nothing but a faint sticker residue and a penciled inventory code: *LV-AF-17*. The same format as the lab’s entries. The same format as the Monet that had been certified and subsequently insured by Auvray, then reported stolen by Marc Ellison before he vanished.

Camille pulled out her phone and photographed everything: the painting, the palette, the state of the room. She was reaching for the magnifier lamp to examine the Fragonard’s signature when her foot brushed something on the floor. A small spiral notebook, half-hidden under the worktable’s shadow. She crouched and picked it up.

The first pages were restoration notes, neat and technical. But the last entry was different—fast, sloping, written in a hand that had been in a hurry.

*He was here again. Watches from the café across the street. Says he’s a collector but asks about varnish formulas. Left. I locked the door. Called the number on the verification seal—the one from lab dossier 214. Man said he’d send someone to check. That was three days ago. I should not have called.*

Camille flipped the page. A single line, underlined twice:

*The locket. Why is he asking about the locket?*

The floor tilted under her. The locket. Her locket. She hadn’t worn it at the gallery—she’d left it home, paranoid after finding her calendar disturbed. But Le Fantôme had referenced it at the storage facility. Now some unknown man had been asking a restorer about the same object weeks before.

She slid the notebook into her bag and walked the apartment again, looking with fresh eyes. The café across the street—a shabby little place with crooked blinds. She crossed to the window and peered out. A man sat at a table by the glass, reading a newspaper. He was angled toward the building. As she watched, he lowered the paper a fraction, looked directly at the window, and returned to his reading.

Camille’s phone buzled. A text from an unknown number:

*You’re standing in the wrong apartment. Élodie’s work was a decoy. Check the storage unit you baited. You’ll find her answer. Come alone. If you bring Auvray, you’ll find her the way she wanted to be found—in pieces.*

The cold settled into her bones. The bait painting. She’d left the trap in that storage facility days ago, unvisited. If Le Fantôme had been using it as a drop point, she hadn’t checked. She was slipping, and someone knew it.

She typed back: *You keep promising answers. You keep giving me riddles. Who are you?*

The reply came fast, almost eager: *The only one who didn’t burn your father’s records. Hurry, Camille. The storage lease expires in two hours.*

The screen went dark. Camille looked out the window. The café table was empty, the newspaper folded neatly beside a half-drunk espresso. The man was gone.

She should call Auvray. She should call Delacroix’s office and report the Fragonard. But Auvray would ask why she was at the authentication lab, and the lie she’d told her boss would unravel. Delacroix was a suspect, not a resource. And the sender knew where she’d baited the trap, which meant the storage facility was compromised—and possibly the painting was, too.

Camille exited the apartment, pulling the door shut until the latch clicked, then jogged down the stairs and out onto the street. The café waiter was wiping down the empty table.

“The man who was sitting here,” she said, flashing a badge. “Police. Did he leave anything?”

The waiter shrugged, unimpressed. “He paid, then walked that way.” He gestured toward the river. “He said something strange on his way out. Told me to tell the lady in 5B that the paint doesn’t lie. Even when its owner does.”

Camille walked to the Métro, the notebook burning in her bag. The paint doesn’t lie. Even when its owner does. She considered the Fragonard, propped on its easel. The half-cleaned quadrant had revealed a brushwork too confident, too alive. If it was a forgery, someone had invested enormous skill in making it indistinguishable from the original. If it was authentic, Élodie had been restoring a painting worth millions in an unsecured apartment—which meant it must have been acquired off the books. Either way, it was leverage. And whoever had been watching Élodie knew it.

She stopped at a newsstand and bought a metro ticket, then hesitated. The storage unit was on the eastern edge of the eleventh, a twenty-minute ride. The lease expired in under two hours. She checked her phone. No more messages.

But a new notification had appeared—a calendar alert. She hadn’t set one. The text read:

*9:45. Café Le Corbeau. Rue Oberkampf. Ask for Étienne. Don’t bring the memo. You’d be disappointed in how fast it goes missing.*

The memo. The internal Auvray memo proving the payout on the suspected fake. No one knew she had it except her, her locked drawer, and now the person who’d just told her not to bring it.

Which meant someone had read her files. Or someone had access to her phone.

Camille took a breath, slid her phone into her pocket, and walked toward the Métro entrance. The storage unit would have to wait. There was a new player in the game—one who used dates instead of thefts, and who clearly expected her to come alone to a café named for a crow.

She had thirty minutes to decide if she was walking into a trap or a negotiation. Her father’s last words echoed, unbidden. *Trust no one.*

But Élodie had vanished, the Fragonard was sitting under a dead lamp, and the sender knew about the memo. She couldn’t afford to trust anyone. She also couldn’t afford to go alone.

For the first time in her career, Camille wasn’t sure which risk was worse. She took the stairs two at a time and let the Metro swallow her whole.