As I drove to Renaissance White, I thought through what I knew.
Oberon was the one who found Willow. He would have been the one to find the painting with April when she died. That’s why it went into the safe. Not that they were worried about theft, but because it had been damaged.
Pigment from Perenelle’s painting The Apothecary’s Cabinet was the shortcut necessary to make the temporarily beautiful Renaissance White paint. An ingredient from the painting itself had been the last element in April’s recipe that killed her. The sulfur in the painting was stable, but mixed with their other and backward intent ingredients, had released a toxic gas in the enclosed space. By the time April was found, it had dissipated.
Oberon knew there was something wrong with April’s death. He wanted revenge. But… revenge against who? Adam and Willow? He hadn’t framed them, and he’d continued to work for Renaissance White. Why steal my painting? Why kidnap Max and Perenelle? Was that was had happened, or could I have been wrong about why Max hadn’t opened his shop and the two of them were offline?
I didn’t have all the answers. But that’s why I was headed to Renaissance White.
My tires screeched as I pulled to a stop. I checked my phone. The detective and agent hadn’t called me back. They must have still been questioning Willow. I hurried from my truck so quickly that I didn’t shut the door behind me. I was prepared to bang on the front door, but it was ajar. Maybe because the police had arrested Willow here, and nobody had locked up afterward?
“Hello?” I called out.
Silence.
Taking a step further inside the lobby, I was again struck by the beauty of the painting that Adam had made of his beloved sister. Her angelic face in the foreground, the forest setting of the trees, cabin, and lake in the distance. It was an act of love and a beautiful memory, like my painting of Thomas. I understood his desire to have the colors he believed could give a true representation of his sister he’d loved so much. But it didn’t matter that the oil paint used here was slightly different than a paint Perenelle would make. Adam’s love for his sister came through in his execution.
“Hey, Zoe.”
I spun around and faced the person who’d spoken. I’d been so absorbed in Adam’s painting I hadn’t heard Oberon approaching.
Oberon wasn’t pointing a gun or any other weapon at me. He stood with slumped shoulders, his thumbs looped around the belt loops of jeans that hung loosely on his thin frame.
“Now’s not a really good time,” he said. “There’s some screw-up with the police and they think Willow was involved in killing that thief.”
“Did Adam go with her?” I asked as I backed away slowly, towards the door.
“Nah. Haven’t seen him this morning. He’s been working so hard in the lab that I thought he crashed here, because he wasn’t at home when the detective took Willow. That’s what I came to check. But he’s not here.”
I stared at Oberon. He was grieving, but this didn’t look like a man seeking revenge. I had so many unanswered questions about Oberon as the killer because it was entirely possible I was mistaken about him.
“I won’t take up much of your time,” I said, “but I have a couple of important questions. Difficult questions.” Life or death questions.
“Um, sure? But then I really need to find Adam.”
“When your wife died, did you find anything surprising next to her?”
“Stop victim-blaming!” he erupted. “I know she drank too many energy drinks. That doesn’t mean it was her fault.”
Even as he lashed out verbally, he didn’t lash out physically.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I assured him. I didn’t want to lead his answer, so I tried to think of how I could ask him about the painting without referencing it. I needed to know if I was right that April was using pigment from The Apothecary’s Cabinet as her last ingredient.
“Oh,” he said. “Do you mean the ashes?”
Ashes? “Like ashes from a heating source, or from something that was burned for a chemical reaction?”
“Ashes with fragments of paint.”
“Next to a painting?”
He shook his head. “We don’t bring any of our artwork into the lab. There was no painting with her.”
I was wrong about April using a sample of the painting. She needed the whole thing. That’s why they needed another painting. The Brother and Sisters painting was my last connection to Thomas. At another time, I would have been devastated knowing that my painting was about to be destroyed, if it hadn’t been already, but right now all I cared about was getting Max and Perenelle back safely.
“The whole painting was destroyed,” I repeated aloud. I knew that fact told me something else important, but I was so distracted by my worry that I was having trouble grasping it.
“What?” Oberon said, shaking me from my worry.
“When was The Apothecary’s Cabinet moved into your safe?”
“Why does—”
“Please. It’s important.”
“Sometime right around when I lost April. That period of my life is a haze, so I don’t know exactly. Adam was taking care of everything then, since Willow and I were so messed up with grief.”
“Did you or Willow ever see the painting again?”
He blinked at me. “I don’t think we ever took it out. If you don’t have any more weird questions for me, I need to find Adam.”
“So do I.” Because Oberon had given me the last pieces of the puzzle. So many pieces of my theory hadn’t fit Oberon being the killer, because he wasn’t.
Adam was attacked by Betty Kubiak when she supposedly stole The Apothecary’s Cabinet. But with her dead, we only had Adam’s word for it that the painting still existed.
There was more that pointed to Adam. It could have been any of them who pretended to be Arthur Finder. Except for one thing. Adam was the only one of the Renaissance White team who was an artist. The only one who would have known Betty Kubiak.
I doubted “Arthur” was looking everywhere for a painting he believed had similar colors to their destroyed painting, The Apothecary’s Cabinet. He’d invested his money into his company and wouldn’t have the time or resources to fly around the world seeking out similar artwork, but as a member of the local art community, he would have seen Perenelle’s work and known the artistic style that inspired her. Local artists knew her name, and it was public record that one “Nicolas Flamel” had purchased Brother and Sister in France. Adam pieced together that the Flamels were the ones who bought Brother and Sister.
Adam wouldn’t understand that backward alchemy had created the paint. But as a scientist and artist, he could have easily believed that adding a unique pigment from the old painting had been the missing ingredient they’d needed. He needed another painting with the same pigments.
I didn’t yet know why he’d killed Betty, or what he’d done with Max and Perenelle. I needed to find him.
“Where are you looking next?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “There’s a café he likes not far from here.”
Adam wasn’t at a café. My eyes fell again to his painting of his sister. The painting born of love that had twisted his ideas about how important it was to recreate lost color.
“The cabin at the lake in the background,” I said. “Is it real?”
“Sure. It’s his family’s cabin. The four of us went up there for a cheap honeymoon after our dual wedding. April fell into some poison oak.”
“I need the address.”