Unbecoming (28 page)

Grace felt Alls looking at her. She couldn’t believe Riley had told them.

“What a freaky morning,” Greg said. “But for real? It’d be awesome.”

Alls groaned and looked down into the pipe they were handing back and forth, his thumb on his lighter.

“Think about it,” Riley said. “There is a house that belongs to no one. It is full of very, very valuable antiques. They belonged to someone who died a century ago. There is only one person in this uninhabited house at a time, someone with trifocals, hearing aids, and an absolute
absence
of suspicion. We could go in there and take whatever we wanted, and it would have no effect whatsoever on
anyone
.”

“But it’s stealing,” Grace said.

Greg dropped his head back on the couch, gaping.

“Is it still stealing,” asked Riley, “when the things don’t belong to anyone?”

“Is the stuff even worth that much?” Alls asked.

“If only we knew someone who could help us with that,” Riley said.

“You are
not
using my research like that,” Grace said prissily.

“Sure, it was a joke,” he said to Grace. “But maybe it shouldn’t be.”

“Oh, man.” Alls laughed now. “Man oh man oh man.”

“We’d be millionaires,” Riley said.

“No one would ever suspect us,” Greg said. “Not in a million years.”

21

I
t took Grace thirty-four days in all to track down every interesting item smaller than a breadbox from the snapshots she had taken of the Wynne House. She’d also observed the house itself: who the docents were and how able they seemed, what days and times it was visited least, and which windows were visible from the office and the parking lot.

One person would take the tour, and once the docent had led the visitor upstairs, the others would enter and quietly fill up the shopping bags. They would rob the Wynne House in broad daylight, early summer: leaves on the trees for cover, the office windows shut and the air conditioners running full blast, and no school groups to interfere. Alls listened to Greg and Riley’s plans absently, as if they were telling him unbelievable stories about someone he didn’t know. Grace let Greg spin his wheels. When the time came, the plan would be hers, even if she had to feed it to the others through Riley. She hated that Greg and Alls were involved at all, but she would work with what she had.

She and Riley pored over the photos at night, his eyes racing over Grace’s careful, typed notes. They knew they couldn’t take everything, not without five hours and a moving truck. They prioritized portable items of exceptional value. The maple highboy with shell-carved apron and birdlike ankles—a similar example had fetched twenty-two thousand dollars at Sotheby’s last year—would have to stay behind. The brass-bound oak cider jug, however, while worth only thirty-four hundred, was smaller than a loaf of bread. Grace evaluated each room for its value-to-risk ratio. Some rooms they would not even bother with.

They would take nothing that appeared to be one of a kind or even close. If Grace couldn’t find at least two comps for something, she crossed the item off the list. She narrowed each room down to ten to twelve pieces, which they marked carefully on their maps with a number, a highly simplified checklist at the side:

Front Parlor

1. cider jug

2. flat-face doll

3. copper bucket

4. red bowl with white inside

5. three blue vases

6. andirons

7. horse weather vane ($26K!)

8. eagle wall sconce

9. green needlepoint pillow

10. porcelain clock

Only Grace knew what these crude nicknames really meant. The three blue vases were Mdina, the pillow made from a seventeenth-century Flemish verdure tapestry. With everything she had learned about the riches within the Wynne House, she became convinced that she almost had a right to them. There was so much, after all, that they
wouldn’t
take. The highboy. The chandeliers. The tall clock. The Wynne House wouldn’t disappear. The occasional tours could continue, unchanged.

Greg didn’t want her to get a full cut. “Like hell,” he said one day. “If you’re not going in with us, you’re not taking on the same risk as we are.”

“I can’t go in,” Grace reminded him, “because I’ve already been in too much.”

“Look, we can cut you in for ten percent,” he said.

“Who is this ‘we’? You don’t even know what this stuff is worth.”

“That’s why I’m willing to pay you a finder’s fee. For all the reading and clicking.”

Greg had always seemed so silly to her, relentlessly stupid. She had asked Riley once how he could even stand Greg, and he had replied, shrugging, that Greg was “fun.” But since she had come home, she had grown to truly loathe him. She was about to tell him exactly how much of this plan she was responsible for, but his arrogance stopped her. If they failed, their failure would be Greg’s fault, most likely. His condescension made her queasy. He was going to fuck it up.

 • • • 

That night, she and Riley walked to the playground of their old elementary school. He sat on a swing and she sat in his lap. She tried to tell him her concerns about Greg, but Riley was distracted by the news that Ginny’s Ice Cream was going out of business for unpaid back taxes.

“Too many people,” Grace said. “I don’t trust
him
.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s perfect. You trust me, right? And I trust them. I’ve known them even longer than I’ve known you.” He squeezed her sides.

This was not comforting in the least.

“I’m going to save Ginny’s,” he said. “All the same flavors. We’ll be local heroes.”

Grace had imagined that she and Riley would leave together, as soon as they had liquidated their new assets. That was the whole point, to shoot out of Garland with no option to ever return. Now she realized he meant to stay there, with his friends, forever, idly drawing on a secret checking account.

The plan was doomed unless Riley gave something up. He would have to choose: her or them. If he didn’t choose now, he would later, when Grace fell off the wagon again, as she surely would if she was made to stay around Alls. Next year or in a decade, in the house on Orange Street or at a birthday party for their future children. She would always want him.

“Hey,” Riley said, nudging her with his shoulder. “Where’d you go?”

She tried to shake off the fear that this wouldn’t be an easy choice for him. She knew she was the stray cat. He had a life without her, but she had never made one without him.

“I’m just surprised,” she said. “I thought we were making our big move. Together, away from here.”

“We can’t, Grace. We won’t be able to leave right away, maybe not for a long time. It would be too obvious. I mean, think about it—”

“I have thought about it,” she snapped, still, absurdly, on his lap. “So what’s the point, then? So you can make your car payments?”

“I didn’t know you—”

“No, you didn’t. You want your life to be just like it is now, but with nicer beer. You don’t want anything different.” He didn’t even know
how
to want something different. But she still wanted him, so maybe she didn’t either. Without his mother’s love, Grace’s love for Riley was wearing thin, but it was all she had to wear.

 • • • 

Grace and Riley began to argue, at first about what seemed like only safe, little things: whose turn it was to pay for groceries, her getting tired of his tired jokes, he smoked too much, she drank too much.
Of course I didn’t mean it
, they reassured each other at night. She hated herself for fighting with Riley, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

Greg had always been oblivious to Grace and Riley as a couple, the way he behaved toward his parents. Now he left the room when one of them began to pick on the other. In the past, he would have laughed lazily, perhaps even taken sides.
You
do
do that
, he might say. Not anymore.

One afternoon when Riley was at school, Alls asked her if everything was okay with her and Riley. He was worried.

“Sure, I guess,” Grace said, reddening as if he’d discovered some secret. “We’re just—we’re going through some stuff. It happens.”

“So it’s not serious,” he said. “I mean, you’re not thinking of—”

She was. She was thinking of him all the time.

“No,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

“You can’t tell him,” he said. “Even if you ever leave him, you can’t tell him.”

He didn’t feel what she did and probably never had. Instead, they shared mutually assured destruction—a refusal to lose Riley. That was how she knew their secret was safe.

“I will never tell him, ever,” she said. “Even if he leaves
me.”

“He’ll never leave you,” Alls said.

 • • • 

Grace was rooting through their closet looking for missing socks when she came across Riley’s “Future Lens,” the deadly earnest series of drawings of them he had made at sixteen that he later insisted was a joke. They had always taken the long view, picking out houses, naming children. They’d gone through Seamus and Tigerlily as kids, Vincent and Aurora by high school, later Casper and Annette. Annette would be quiet and clever, well bred and well tended. Casper would be adored and popular, but more elusive and subtle than people thought him.

Grace pulled out the first sketch. She hadn’t seen the drawings in years, and the sight of this one startled her, both with its technical skill and with its eerie accuracy. He’d drawn them in their early twenties, and the Grace in the drawing looked like Grace now. Riley hadn’t aged himself as accurately. He probably wouldn’t look like the drawing for a few years yet—with a jaw that had lost its baby fat and shoulders that were broad and square. She knew the wedding drawing was after this one; guiltily, she skipped it. In the drawing after, Grace held an infant wrapped in a blanket. She remembered the first time she’d seen it.

“I’m fat?” she’d said, peering at her lumpy stomach, her blocky hips.

“You just had a baby,” he’d said. “You’ll bounce back.”

There were two more. In the last, their children were the ages they’d been when he’d made the drawings. Grace and Riley themselves looked sexless and decayed. Grace had asked him not to do any more. She didn’t want to see his vision of them in wheelchairs, tubes taped to their noses, waiting for the children to visit.

She sat down on the bed, staring at her husband’s too-perfect vision of their future. She had lost her faith in him, true, and she blamed herself for that. But maybe her faith had been misplaced all along. Her husband had an impeccable eye for detail and a rare gift for translating it—no, reflecting it—onto the page. He could probably copy anyone, anything. He had no imagination. Admitting it, finally, made her feel a little bit free. She felt as though she’d been staring at a beloved family heirloom for hours, struggling to evaluate it, and suddenly, she understood its worth.

Grace hadn’t researched the paintings hanging in the Wynne House. Selling a stolen antique was no different from selling one she’d come by honestly, but she didn’t know how to sell a stolen painting. Now she found herself returning to a photograph she had taken of the study. Among the many boring portraits and landscapes hung the possible exception to her rule: the most boring, forgettable painting imaginable, a funereal still life of flowers and a bowl in shades of flax and mauve. There were Styrofoam peanuts with more character.

Naturally, these qualities made the painting difficult to identify. The style, milky-eyed botanical photo-realism, suggested that the still life was very old and probably northern European. She zoomed in on the image until she could just make out the initials AB, or AH, or AS. She told herself this was innocent curiosity, but she didn’t believe herself for a moment. She narrowed down the style to Dutch Golden Age. The only painter of note who matched these criteria was Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder
,
Antwerp, 1573–1621.

A yawning cornucopia of Bosschaert fruit had fetched $2.3 million at Christie’s three years before.

Two million dollars was enough to make up any kind of life they wanted. The four hundred thousand she’d estimated they could pull with the best decorative arts in the Wynne House now seemed insufficient. Riley was right: Split four ways, or even three as Greg wished, was
staying
money. Grace wanted enough money to leave forever.

Riley would paint a fake Bosschaert. He would take the guided tour and they would swap it out, put it right into the original frame. They would go to Paris or Barcelona. She could see the scene in black and white—she and Riley zipping around Monte Carlo in a convertible, her stupid mistakes all left across an ocean—and felt light-headed at the romance of this future. Not only would she never have to see Alls again; Riley couldn’t either. His friends would never forgive him for leaving, and neither would his family. They would be gone, all the way gone, forever.

 • • • 

She went into the basement the next time he was painting. He had hardly painted at all since they had begun their plan, and now she found him listlessly dabbing at the courthouse lawn. She showed him the photograph of the Bosschaert she had just printed out.

“What is that?” he asked, wrinkling his nose.

“Two million dollars,” she said.

She knelt on the floor in front of him.

“It’s in the study, at the back of the house, surrounded by other paintings, all of them more interesting and noticeable.”

“Christ,” he said. “I’ve never copied anything.”

She felt the briefest impulse to argue that point. All of his paintings were copies, in a sense: of the buildings themselves, of all the paintings he had painted before.

“You could paint this,” she said. “You could paint this better than he did.”

“Who is it?”

She told him what she knew. He was listening carefully. When he asked about selling the painting, she paused. She needed to get this perfectly, exactly right.