“I knew he would. You’re not like the flighty socialites and debutantes he typically dates. Getting him to invite you out to the château will be easy. There should also be a significant amount of cash in the safe, perhaps some bonds as well, but I don’t know if we can cash those in. I should have kept better track of it all. My mother and grandmother would have been horrified with how little I knew about the family’s finances. But money can make you soft in some ways and hard in others. You reach a point where it feels limitless and you stop paying attention. I hate that I reached that point. And in the end Maxwell needed so much care that it became my full-time job. Besides, I never thought I would be locked out of my own home.”
I feel like I have to interject. “To be fair, you weren’t tossed out on the street. You were locked out of a château but still got to stay in a penthouse apartment in Paris.”
“Only because the Parisians have excellent laws favoring squatters. But I’m not interested in checking my privilege right now, dear,” she says with a second raised eyebrow, the other one this time. “Matthew is grieving. He will be happy to hear from you. I know that you can find a way to obtain an invite. Tell him you’re dying to see one of the original water lilies up close. We have one in the upstairs bathroom.”
“That’s exactly where I’d keep it,” Lucie scoffs.
“Never discount how much time you spend staring at a bathroom wall,” Stella counters with her screwball heroine timing.
“And then I break open the safe?”
She interrupts. “There’s no breaking. You will have a code.”
“I open the safe, empty it, and return to, where? Paris?”
“Yes.” Stella looks pleased.
“And what then?”
“Lucie will find a way to turn the contents of the safe into cash,” she says firmly, and then turns her gaze on Colette. “At that point you will have enough money to hire an attorney and tell them you believe you discovered an old Vincent van Gogh painting.”
“Where?” Colette asks.
Stella smiles. “The basement of your family’s home.”
“Myhome? My family’s cottage in the country?”
“It is old, yes? And who owned it before you?”
“It was built in the middle of the eighteenth century. My family has always owned it.”
“Excellent.” Stella claps. “The house has always been your family’s. And what about during the war? Was it occupied?”
“Our village was spared.”
Colette is obviously repeating things that Stella already knows.
“So it is the perfect story. With the perfect single line of provenance for a painting. There have been things stored in that house by each generation. You have never cleaned it all out until now. It has piled up. And you are finally going through all your family’s possessions. Lo and behold you find a dusty old painting, relegated to the basement. Perhaps to protect it during the war, and then forgotten by the next generation. It happens all the time.”
Colette is wary of new people, particularly those who might want something from her. I don’t know what she’s going to say next.
“The application for the scholarship was sent to me at that house,” she says slowly. “You knew my address.”
“I did some due diligence about artists and art scholars in particular areas,” she confirms.
Colette surprises me with a wide smile. “You’re a genius, Stella.”
“An underappreciated one, but at least someone is recognizing it in my lifetime. Vincent never had that luxury.” She nods to our painting.
“I think you’ve thought of everything.”
“Surely not everything. That’s why the three of you are here. I need your young, brilliant minds. I need all of your talents. None of us can pull this offalone.”
20
Claire
Jo and Isaacare through.
