you guys have been so patient & lovely & gracious & cool & fun about what a nightmare about deadlines i am so here is the second (and final!!) snippet from the art thieves novel which is FINISHED and sitting with my agent, who has the patience of the saint. i hope she likes it and i hope you guys like it!!! it’s ok if you don’t though. we’re now going back to our regularly scheduled programming.
if at any point you’re like “why do you give everybody such weird names” you are not alone. everyone has asked me this. the answer is very simple: because i wanted to & i’m in charge of my word processor. anyways love u guys, mean it, xoxoxo.
Murray Hill grew up far away from Agnes St Cloud and the delicate house she had been born to break to pieces. He grew up surrounded by his mother’s thriving houseplants, and he had hands softer than the dirt they grew in. He had gotten his name from his grandfather, Murray Gerkin, who had doted on Geraldine and paid for her education. She had worried, briefly, that people would laugh at the name — but the Hills lived in Chicago, not New York City, and no one ever did.
The Hills made bread, the best you have ever tasted. Some people said when you took a bite you could taste your sweetest memory: the warmest day, the brightest night. Murray couldn’t; he tasted bread.
At night Murray combed through his books and copied paintings onto canvases he got for free at school. He painted them so well that the naked eye couldn’t tell the difference between a Murray Hill and an original. After a while, he painted them so well that even the unnaked eye couldn’t tell.
Then one day, a man hungry for bread came into the bakery and saw a Paul Henry dupe that Murray had privately been calling Not In Connemara hanging above the register.
“Where did you get that?” he asked Murray, eyes wide.
Murray looked at the painting. There was a tiny imperfection in the corner, a smudge of paint that hadn’t been on the original. It drove Murray nuts. “I made it,” he said.
“You made it?”
“Oil on canvas,” Murray said. “The hardest part was finding the right mix. I don’t know if you know this, but he was actually colorblind, so even though most of his brushstrokes are so light that you can almost see the canvas through them, whenever he used reds they tended to be super heavy-handed because he didn’t always mix them first. Cool, right?”
The man offered Murray $2,000 to give the painting to him and never say anything about it to anybody ever again. Murray accepted. He had never seen that much money in one place before. He cut a hole in his mattress and shoved the wad in and didn’t look at it again for weeks, afraid the other shoe would drop.
Murray read in the Chicago Tribune six months later that a new painting by Paul Henry, In Connemara, had been found in a storage unit by a retiree cleaning out his parents’ estate. It had been authenticated by one of the best in the business, a Gabrielle St Cloud. Its estimated value was $170,000.
The image showed a little smudge in the corner of the painting.
“. . ..Well, huh,” said Murray thoughtfully, and that was the beginning of his collection.
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