It didn’t make sense. He was a friend of her family. He had once painted her aunt, long before she was born. She had never met him. I had assumed the visit had been a courtesy call. So why had she returned on the day he died, and why, in heaven’s name, had the housekeeper heard her say, “I don’t want your money.” It sounded almost like a threat or a case of blackmail. I had come to suspect that Ellie was not the angelic being she appeared. She had shown herself to be a devious little miss. She had misled both her family and her fiancé about her journey to Paris. Was it possible she had uncovered some kind of scandal about Reynold Bryce and had confronted him with it? And he was trying to pay her off? So why then didn’t she want his money?

I stopped to watch some children playing by the river. They were dancing around barefoot, in ragged clothing, squealing in delight as a bigger boy tried to splash them. And slowly an idea took shape in my head. Why had Reynold Bryce suddenly forsaken a country where he enjoyed considerable success and fled to Paris and never once returned home? Why had his wife not come with him? “Eighteen years” ago, the housekeeper had said. Eighteen years. And what had one of the men at the Steins’ party said about Reynold Bryce? He had thrown Pauline over because she was too old. And hadn’t one of the men at the Nouvelle Athènes said, “lock up your daughters”?

Reynold Bryce liked to have the young and the beautiful around him. The housekeeper had acknowledged that. But what if it went further? I stopped, frowning into the distance at the sturdy buildings on the Île de la Cité, because I hardly dared to form the thought, let alone say it out loud. What if the Angela in the paintings wasn’t Ellie’s aunt at all?

I turned away from the river at the impressive Orsay train station and found the hotel on the Boulevard Saint-Germain nearby. It seemed to be a pleasant and not too pretentious hotel, one that I would have enjoyed staying in myself. I realized as I approached the front desk that I still did not know Ellie’s last name.

“You have a young lady from America staying here,” I began slowly. “Her first name is Ellie and she has beautiful blonde hair, but I’m afraid she never told me her last name.”

The clerk had obviously been impressed by Ellie and her hair. His face lit up. “You mean Mademoiselle Hatcher. Eleanor Hatcher.”

“That’s right. Is she available at the moment?”

The face clouded again. “Oh, no, madame. She has left us, only this morning. She is to join her family members at the Ritz.”

“I see,” I sighed. “Thank you.”