Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Master by Ann Hood Read Free Book Online Page A

walk away, he saw it again. Felix reached his hand out and touched the photograph, almost expecting it to be warm.
    It wasn’t, of course. But what he saw was that around Great-Aunt Maisie’s neck, a shard from the vase hung on a long chain. Felix peered at it. The shard was smaller than the one he and Maisie had. Maybe only half as big. But both holes in the vase were of equal size; he was sure of that.
    Puzzled, Felix took a step back. His father always told him when he took him to museums to study the pictures up close and then from a distance to fully see everything.
    Yes, the photograph was definitely glowing. But not around Great-Aunt Maisie, Felix saw now. The light seemed to come from Great-Uncle Thorne.
    And there, around
his
neck, almost a blur, hung a shard the size of the one Great-Aunt Maisie wore.
    A slow grin spread across Felix’s face.
    One shard. Broken into two pieces.

    â€œYou’ve got to wake up!” Felix said to Maisie for about the millionth time.
    â€œGo. Away,” she mumbled for about the millionth time.
    â€œMaisie,” Felix said, shaking her a little harder than was polite, “I figured it out.”
    â€œHey!” Maisie said, and pushed him back.
    â€œThe shard,” Felix said. “There’s only one shard, but we need to cut it in half. You wear half and I wear the other half.”
    Maisie sighed, as loudly and dramatically as she could muster.
    â€œLike those dumb lockets Bitsy Beal and Avery Mason wear,” she muttered.
    They got them for Christmas, two halves of a big silver heart, split down the middle.
All BFFs wear them,
Bitsy had explained to Maisie when she caught her staring at the thing. It looked like the person wearing it had a broken heart, not a BFF. But apparently when the two halves were placed together, a perfect heart appeared.
    â€œI don’t know,” Felix said. “Maybe. All I do know is that once we break it in half and I get my own piece, we can go to Florence and find whoever should get the seal, and come home and save Great-Uncle Thorne.”
    Exhausted, he plopped down beside Maisie, who was frowning at him.
    â€œHow in the world are we going to cut the shard?” she asked. “It’s porcelain. It might shatter into a
thousand
pieces, not just one.”
    â€œWe’ll just get a hammer—”
    â€œA
hammer
?” Maisie said, disgusted. “That will definitely shatter it.”
    She was right. Hit the shard with a hammer and it would definitely break into bits.
    But Felix didn’t feel dejected for too long.
    â€œWait!” he said, sitting up. “How about one of Mom’s CUTCO knives?”
    In January, a college student named Samantha had come to Elm Medona selling knives.
To help me pay for my college tuition!
she’d explained brightly.
    Then Samantha had proceeded to cut all sorts of things in half with these supersharp knives: a tomato, a slab of raw steak, a piece of wood, and finally a shiny penny. Even though their mother had no need for knives at all since a very fancy set of French knives hung in the Kitchen, she was a sucker for someone with, as she called it,
gumption
.
I’ll take the deluxe set
, she’d told Samantha, who in a flash as quick as she’d sliced that penny produced a credit-card machine and had taken their mother’s American Express card. Samantha handed their mother a Y-shaped vegetable peeler and a complicated manual can opener as bonuses for buying the deluxe set. Then she was gone, and the knives had never left their polished wooden box lined with fake red velvet.
    Until now.

    One table in the Kitchen was lined with perfect circles of dough left by Cook to rise overnight. The air smelled yeasty but also of the strong cleaning solution that Great-Uncle Thorne insisted they use here. While Felix unearthed the knives, Maisie took the shard from her neck and wiped flour from the marble-topped counter before setting it down