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.