Unbecoming (2 page)

When Grace had started at Zanuso, she’d hoped that her humble beginnings would appeal to Hanna’s arrogance, which had been obvious from the start. She’d thought maybe Hanna would help her, out of either pity or some sense of big-sister altruism. But Hanna had no such inclinations. She was one of six daughters of a rural Polish grocer and she hadn’t seen her family in more than a decade. No one, Grace gathered, had ever helped Hanna do a goddamn thing. Grace and Hanna’s friendship was an often crabby by-product of professional respect: Grace had done well at Zanuso without asking for help, and
that
Hanna noticed. Grace envied Hanna’s unfiltered confidence, her clipped and precise judgments. Grace struggled to calculate the probable reactions to nearly everything she said before she said it, looking for risk and reward and hidden pits she might trip in. She’d never met a woman who cared so little about causing offense.

Now Grace pulled her stool around to Hanna’s table, where a long row of wires was arranged by size. She pulled a ruler from Hanna’s cup and saw Hanna flinch a little. She would have preferred that Grace use her own tools. Grace took the first of the hundred wires, set it against the ruler, and recorded the measurement on the list Hanna had laid out on a sheet of graph paper. Nineteen centimeters. She placed the wire back in the row, just to the left so she wouldn’t accidentally measure it again, and picked up another. Eighteen and three-quarters centimeters.

 • • • 

Grace had met Riley when she was in sixth grade, just turned twelve. He was a year older. At her first middle school dance, he had plucked her from a gaggle of girls she wanted badly to impress, and she and Riley had swayed, arm’s length apart, to the ballad over the loudspeaker. He’d invited her to his house for dinner, where Mrs. Graham gently chatted to Grace about school while her husband and four sons stripped three roast chickens in ten minutes. Riley, the youngest, was the worst, lunging for the last of the potatoes while Grace was still figuring out how to cut her chicken breast with her fork and not make so much noise against the plate. Mrs. Graham reached to still Riley’s hand and suggested he save seconds for his friend before he helped himself to thirds. “Some chivalry, please,” she had said. Grace had read the word in books, but she’d never heard anyone say it out loud.

Grace tried not to stare at her, but Mrs. Graham pulled at her attention whenever Grace looked away. Mrs. Graham was thin and tan and freckled, with sleepy green eyes that turned down slightly at the outside. She had a slow blink; Grace thought she could feel it herself, as though a light had briefly dimmed. Her cool, feathery brown hair curled under where it hit her collar. Grace admired the light shimmer on her high cheekbones, her sea-glass earrings, her low and tender voice. Her fingers were long and delicate, nails polished with a milky, translucent pink, knuckles unfairly swollen from arthritis. That Grace’s own nails were bitten to the quick had never bothered her before.

At the end of the week, Riley had kissed her in the school hallway between bells, so quickly that she wondered later if she had imagined it. Within a month he had bought her a necklace, a gold dolphin on a thin chain, and pledged his love. She felt as if she were in the movies.

What she wouldn’t give to see herself and Riley like that, from above—to watch a flickering reel of Riley, his hair still victory red (it hadn’t yet begun to fade), pulling her toward him on the sweaty, squeaking floor of the gym. Had she been scared, excited, smug? She’d been just a child, and then she had entered a
we.
An
us-
ness. She and Riley had seemed cute to his parents and their teachers, something from
Our Gang
, but Riley had three older brothers and the precocity that came with them, and Grace had no one else.

Tomorrow, Riley and Alls would be released.

She felt as if she had been standing in a road at night, watching a car’s distant headlights approaching so slowly that she had forever to step out of the way. Now the car was upon her, and still she had not moved. She imagined what tomorrow would look like: Riley’s parents, or maybe just his father, going to pick him up at the prison. Dr. Graham would bring him a change of clothes. Riley had worn a thirty-two-thirty-two. Did he still? He would look different. He would be paler, less freckled, from lack of sun. And he would be older, of course. Twenty-three. She kept thinking of them as boys, but they weren’t boys anymore.

Dr. Graham would bring Riley’s old clothes, a pair of worn khakis and one of his paint-stained button-downs with holes in the elbows.
Here
, the bundle of clothes would say,
this is who you were and will be again
. Grace imagined Riley riding home in the passenger seat of the Grahams’ ancient blue Mercedes wagon, the diesel loud enough to bring the neighbors to the windows. Everyone would know today was the day. Mrs. Graham would have made barbecue, probably pork shoulder. And Riley’s brothers would be there. Grace didn’t know if all three still lived in Garland, but they probably did. The Grahams belonged to Garland as much as Garland belonged to them. She imagined Riley excusing himself from the cookout and going inside to sit on his bed in his old bedroom, which would be his room again, at least for a while. She wondered if he would go upstairs, to the attic bedroom Mrs. Graham had made up for when Grace stayed over.

Where would Alls go tomorrow? Did his father still live in Garland? He would have no welcome-home party. She imagined Alls and his dad driving through Burger King on the way home, unless he went home with Riley. He would have, before, but that meant nothing. The line between before and after couldn’t be sharper.

When people had read about the Wynne robbery as a footnote in a national newspaper, small-town folly picked up on the wire, they’d probably laughed or shaken their heads.
Listen to this one
, millions of people would have said over the breakfast table. But those stupid boys had been Grace’s. She used to think she knew Riley so well, she could peel off his skin and slip it over hers and no one would ever be the wiser.

They had gone to prison because of her, really. Grace longed to tell someone what she had done. She’d never had friends, just Riley and now Hanna. Grace could have only one friend at a time. Any more and it became harder to keep track of how they knew her, what she had told them, which pieces went where.

 • • • 

She had not been in Garland the day of the Wynne robbery. She was already in Prague then, at a summer study abroad program. Riley had paid for her tuition and ticket; Grace didn’t have that kind of money.

Grace had read of the robbery online the night it happened, on the home page of the
Albemarle Record
’s website: A young white male had entered the main house of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, in Garland, Tennessee, on Tuesday, June 2, between eight and ten in the morning, and locked the docent in an upstairs bedroom. The groundskeeper was found unconscious in the foyer; he was at Albemarle Hospital in critical condition.

She had not heard from Riley since the day before, but she knew he had done it. Four days later, he, Alls, and Greg were arrested in Tennessee. Greg was first, alone at his parents’ cabin on Norris Lake. Hours later Alls and Riley were arrested at the boys’ rental house on Orange Street, where Grace also had lived, until she went to Prague at the end of May. She was sure that Greg had turned them in.

She received just one call from the police, after the arrest. The front desk matron sent her son, a dull-eyed boy of about eleven, to knock on the door of Grace’s shared dorm room. She followed him downstairs, her heart beating so heavily that her chest cramped.

The American detective asked if she knew why he was calling. She said she did. He asked her to tell him. She said that her boyfriend had been accused of robbing the Wynne House.

“You mean your husband,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. She and Riley had never told anyone they had married.

He asked when she had last communicated with Riley. “A few days ago,” she said. “Five days. He e-mailed me, very normal, nothing strange. He said he was going to his friend’s house, on Norris Lake. He couldn’t have robbed the Wynne House.”

“How did you find out about the robbery?”

“I read it in the paper,” she said. “Online.”

“You’re reading the local paper while you’re in Prague?”

“I’ve been homesick.”

“You didn’t talk to your husband at all after you heard about the robbery?”

She had not. She told the detective that she knew Riley wouldn’t e-mail her from the lake. They always started drinking before they unhitched the boat, and they only dried out when it was time to drive home. Grace herself had just taken a trip to Kutná Hora, to the bone church underground, where the bones of fifty thousand people had been strung into altars and chandeliers by a half-blind monk. The bones belonged to victims of the Black Death and the Hussite Wars. That some idiot had stolen Josephus Wynne’s old silverware didn’t seem very important, she told the detective.

She shut up—too much.

He asked her half a dozen more questions, but they weren’t difficult ones. Grace told him that he’d made a mistake, that Riley could not have done that. He has such a good life, she said. We’re happy. He doesn’t need money. His parents help him. And besides, she said,
I
would have known. He couldn’t have kept anything like that from me. He tells me everything. Everything.

Perhaps the detective was a man whose own wife believed that he told her everything.

What the detective did not tell Grace, what she learned days later in the news, was that Riley, Alls, and Greg had already confessed. The detective was crossing off his to-do list. He’d needed nothing from her.

 • • • 

This was how she imagined the robbery: Riley slipping a sweaty five-dollar bill into the recommended donation box and smiling at the tiny old docent on duty, following her through the downstairs rooms as she recited footnotes of Tennessee history. Riley had been through the house half a dozen times over the years; they all had. The Wynne House was the closest and cheapest school field trip. But on a summer Tuesday, the place was dead.

He stopped hearing the docent’s voice clearly, as though he were underwater. He followed her upstairs. Her legs, ninety and blue and veiny in her whitish stockings, shook less than his did. At the top of the stairs she turned back and moved her mouth, looked at him expectantly. A question? She had asked him a question.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yes, ma’am.” He hoped it was the right answer.

He followed her from room to room, nodding and scrawling gibberish in his notebook. Outside the door to the tiny windowless study, he rolled his notebook and stuck it and his pen in his baggy front pocket. She opened the door outward and he followed her inside. He pointed with a trembling finger at the tiny print over the toilet table.

“Can you tell me who the artist is who made that?”

“That one? I don’t remember. Let me get a better look.”

She stepped forward and peered at the signature, which he already knew to be indecipherable. He held his breath and tried to back quietly out of the room. The edge of the rug caught under his heel and he stumbled.

She turned around. “Are you all right, hon?”

He jerked his foot free and made for the door, slamming it behind him. He grabbed the ladder-back chair that sat next to the door and wedged the top rung under the doorknob. He breathed.

Now that she was safely penned, he could hear her voice leaking under the door. Not screaming. Asking. She was asking again, something; he didn’t know what—just the sensation of her tinny voice from far away, like a house cat trapped in a basement.

He went downstairs and opened the front door. Alls and Greg came in quietly with scrunched-up nylon grocery bags and three pairs of gloves. They dispersed into the rooms, filling their bags with needlework samplers, old desk clocks, a silver-hilted hunting knife. They had a carefully made list of treasures: nothing large or cumbersome, nothing one of a kind. They did not expect the front door to open. A man they had never seen before stepped in with a garbage bag to empty the small wastebasket by the door. He was the groundskeeper, and he always came on Mondays, never Tuesdays. But here he was, seeing them.

The groundskeeper, who was past seventy, fell to the floor.

The boys grabbed the bags they had filled and fled.

 • • • 

Because the groundskeeper was too long returning to the mobile home that served as the Wynne House’s office, where he was supposed to leave his keys, the administrator who worked there came out looking for him. She found him sprawled on the foyer floor, and then she heard the warbling cries of the docent, still locked in the windowless upstairs study.

The prosecutor later said that the boys had intended to fence the goods in New York, but they had not even left the state. Grace watched the headlines change from her concrete dorm room in Prague:
NO SUSPECTS IN WYNNE HEIST; WITNESS SUFFERED STROKE AT SCENE; GROUNDSKEEPER’S CONDITION STILL CRITICAL
. There was a police sketch from the docent’s nearsighted description, but Grace was relieved to see that the drawing looked nothing like Riley. It could have been anyone, really.

Grace knew that Riley would worry about the groundskeeper. She could imagine him pacing, holding his fist against his mouth. That the man could die would have shaken Riley from his fantasy: the rakish glamour of a small-town antiques heist by a gang of wild boys, an intricate prank. But they had scared an old man to near-death. If he lived, he would surely identify them. But if he died, was that manslaughter? Could they call it murder, even? Grace imagined Riley’s spinning thoughts as though they were her own.

She was right to be worried. When the police found a suspect in Gregory Kimbrough, twenty, of Garland, Greg’s parents said that was impossible because he had been at the family cabin on Norris Lake for the past several days. There was one cell phone with network activity on the Wynne property at the time, the police told them, and it’s yours.