Page 5 of Canvas of Lies
With him crouching over me, brow furrowed and mouth tight with worry, I couldn’t remember why I’d tried to make him go away in the first place. This felt like every teenage fantasy come true, aside from the ominous van and the broken phone—like Nico was a white knight riding to my rescue instead of the reason I was on the cold, hard ground in the first place.
I stared up at him as the strength of our childhood bond flared in my chest. The boy who’d meant the world to me was now a man asking for my help.
Maybe an adventure was just what we needed to rekindle that friendship.
“Okay,” I said with another sigh, but as Nico took my arm to help me to my feet, a wave of dizziness almost sent me tumbling back to the asphalt. Before I realized what was happening, he swept me into his arms and carried me toward the van.
Maybe he wasn’t so bad at playing white knight, after all.
Chapter Two
Nico
Gumbyshotmeanaccusatory look as I buckled in, but he said nothing. His only role in this mess had been to drive—maybe I was paranoid, but I didn’t want to risk my car being spotted anywhere near Kat’s place of work. I especially didn’t want anyone reporting to her father that they saw us chatting.
While I might not be big news in Spruce Hill myself, anything pertaining to Aidan Willoughby, including his beautiful, slightly eccentric daughter, would definitely make waves.
Now that she was safely ensconced in the back seat of the van, my tension should’ve lessened, but it raged inside me still. I’d tried to sit back there with her, but she insisted she wanted room to put her feet up and that my “stupidly long legs” werein her way. Sometime during the forty minutes it took to reach the cabin, she dozed off.
Anxiety churned in my gut at seeing her so still, especially after the tumble she’d taken, but she’d developed a vehement distaste for doctors when she was seven years old and bit through her bottom lip after falling off some monkey bars. I couldn’t even count the number of times she’d hidden childhood injuries from both her father and mine. Eventually, when I was old enough to recognize the severity and insist on telling an adult, she started hiding them from me, too.
Convincing her to do anything she didn’t want to do was virtually impossible. Hauling her ass to a doctor when she insisted she was fine? Not the hill I wanted to die on, not now.
Literally, maybe. I would put nothing past her when she was truly pissed.
“Your girlfriend doesn’t seem too happy to be here,” Gumby muttered.
“Not my girlfriend,” I reminded him, “and I think your van made a bad first impression.”
“Chicks dig the Gumby-mobile, my friend. The bad impression was all you. Are you sure this is the right move?”
“This is my only move.”
He snorted. “My plan was better and you know it. Besides, then you could’ve swept the lady off her feet in style, instead of creeping her out with my van.”
Gumby’s view of the law was a bit more flexible than most. When I told him about the painting Kat’s father had stolenfrom my family, Gumby offered to simply steal it back. Given that he had a criminal record and I couldn’t let my only friend go to prison because of me, I’d turned him down.
He still didn’t agree with my methods, but he’d let it slide—until now.
The artwork had hung in our little cottage on the Willoughby property for as long as I could remember. I grew up hearing stories about the woman depicted in it, Céleste Bicardeau, my father’s grandmother several generations over.
Céleste had been barely eighteen when Hugo Clément, a famous Impressionist who traveled in the same circles as Renoir and Monet, arrived in Avignon in the 1870s and asked her to pose for his work. The man had given Céleste the finished product, Woman in Lavender, as a gift, a tribute to her beauty. She was barely identifiable in the Impressionist oil painting—just the back of a lovely, lonely figure against the fields of lavender—but the family breathed the tale like oxygen, soaked up every textured brush stroke like part of our very bloodline.
All my life, my father told me the painting would be mine one day. Only those close to our family knew of its emotional significance, but my father warned me time and again that the piece would be worth a great deal of money if anyone discovered the artist’s identity. That kind of monetary value would glow like a beacon to those who wanted to profit from the art instead of appreciating it for its history.
It didn’t have Clément’s usual signature on it, but he’d scrawled a note of appreciation across the back of the canvas, invisible to anyone looking at the painting from the front.
That wasn’t the only thing hidden, though.
When I was in my final year of college, I’d come home after midnight once to find my father carefully smoothing his finger over the back of the frame.
“What are you doing?”
His expression shifted, though I couldn’t quite read it back then. “Listen to me, Nicolas. If anything ever happens to me, anything strange, you take this painting and disappear.”
“Disappear?”
“Leave Spruce Hill. Go back to France, if you like. Anywhere. Just take it and get far away from this place, from the Willoughby family.”
