“Your first originals? Does that mean you’ve made fakes?”

I looked around the studio, full of half-finished canvases. Could they all be the output of a single artist—the frail old woman sitting before me? What about all the works upstairs that made up the Duchess’s priceless collection?

The Duchess dropped two brushes into the can of water and looked directly at me. Her honey-colored eyes twinkled merrily in her wrinkled face. She didn’t seem angry that I’d found her out—far from it. She pressed a button on the arm of her high-tech chair, and with a whir, the seat descended from its elevated position and swiveled to face me.

“You see, I’m quite the chameleon. It won’t be long before everyone knows. But for now … welcome to my studio,” she said.

“Um, thank you for having me. You know, forgery’s a crime—”

“Before you accuse me, know this: my husband was a failure. Poor, sweet, foolish Duke. He had many good ideas, but never a great one. The lace-making machine he invented made a small fortune, but it was soon replaced by faster machines and bigger factories. Then we found out the cat toys he created were a choking hazard, and his bottled tea recipes made people sick. He lost money on other investments too and landed himself in deep debt with bad people.”

“But my dad told me Duke was River Heights’s very own Thomas Edison.”

“That’s what my husband wanted everyone to think. All along, it was me keeping his businesses afloat by selling my work. If I hadn’t done so, we would’ve lost our home, our daughter’s college savings, everything.”

“But how did you know selling forgeries would work? How did you avoid getting caught all these years?”

“I didn’t know it would work, but I had no choice. When Duke’s money troubles were at their worst, I had just given birth to our daughter and couldn’t go to work. Instead I pored over art history textbooks and spent hours in museums, sketching from the masters, painting pictures over and over again until I got them exactly right.” The Duchess gestured to the stacks of unfinished canvases around her. “It was an expensive hobby, but selling replicas paid off in the end.”

“When did you start passing your work off as the real thing?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. I had taken one of my paintings to the city to be framed. A little something in the style of the Dutch masters, a still life of tulips and a dead hare, I think it was. The woman at the framing shop was so taken with the piece. She said she knew someone who would pay good money for it. Duke and I were drowning in debt at the time, so I let her sell the piece for me. Anonymously, of course.”

“That woman—was it Angelica Velvet?”

The Duchess nodded solemnly. “She was convinced the painting was genuine, and I suppose I never corrected her. Before I knew it, we were in business together.”