Starry Nights Read Online Free

look of true surprise wins the prize calf.”
    â€œThat does kind of sound like fun,” I concede.
    â€œYou should come. Bring friends if you want. Just don’t tell your mom, obviously, since I don’t want her telling mine.”
    Before I can commit, our mothers emerge from the kitchen. Introductions are made, and we all sit down at the table with the calves to eat the baked dessert.
    â€œI have the final paperwork,” Bonheur’s mother says, and they review his family’s ownership of the Renoir through the years, the forensic and fingerprint reports my mother commissioned to verify the authenticity of the painting, and even a pigment analysis because Renoir used a particular mix of chromium salts and boric acid to sign all his works. He’s said to have done this to ensure that fakes could never be made. As they continue on through the archival and forensic details that remind me far too much of school, I ask where the restroom is and Bonheur tells me it is down the hallway, the second door on the left.
    â€œBe sure to check out the art on the walls. We have a Jasper Johns, a Monet, and a Valadon.”
    â€œWill do,” I say and leave them behind.
    In the hallway, I linger on the paintings and the way Monet has captured the cobalt-blue morning light on the pond near his home, his Japanese bridge arcing over the dreamscape of water beneath it. What must it be like to craft such beauty with your own hands? I only wish I could make something worth looking at.
    I scan the rest of the walls for a Valadon, but I don’t see one, so I open the second door.
    It’s not the bathroom. It’s a modern room with bright-white walls, a long black leather couch, and a plasma screen hanging on the opposite wall. I look down to find a door in the middle of the floor. Perhaps a trapdoor to a basement? But how can there be a basement when they live on a steep hill? The door has a chain on it that is looped into an eyehook on the other side. A chalk drawing covers half the door. I step around to check it out right side up.
    A woman in a pale-pink dress, so light it’s the color of the inside of a seashell, dances with a man she looks away from. But the man’s not here; he’s not been rendered in chalk. It’s half a reproduction. It’s half of a Renoir, his
Dance at Bougival
. The dancing woman is Suzanne Valadon, who was an artist’s model and an artist herself, not to mention the first female painter admitted into art school in France.
    Is this chalk drawing what he meant by the Valadon he wanted me to see? Valadon and Renoir were contemporaries, both artists in Montmartre. But is there some greater connection Bonheur is trying to hint at?
    I hear the voices down the hall. Methodical, detailed. They’re still reviewing the documents.
    I kneel down and unhook the latch, expecting a creak or a moan of hinges. But the door opens without a sound. Beneath it I see a set of stairs that wind round and round, until they descend into total darkness. There must be a cellar far below. I bet that’s where Bonheur’s family hid their art during the Nazi occupation to keep paintings safe from plundering. I close the door and shut the latch.
    A chair’s legs scratch across the living room floor.
    Quickly, I leave this room and pop into the bathroom down the hall. I step in, turn on the water, turn it off, and head out as the cross-dressing teenage ceramist who uses a woman’s surname as his first name walks by.
    â€œFound it,” I announce stupidly. I want to kick myself. Of course, I found the bathroom. But saying “found it” implies I stumbled across something else. Bonheur tips his forehead ever so slightly to the second door as he says, “Good.”
    He wanted me to see the trapdoor. He sent me to that chalk drawing. What’s at the bottom of all those stairs?
    â€œThey’re still talking about all that pigment, blah, blah,