Jacqueline’s office was neater than usual. Grace started with her desk drawers. Cigarettes, pens, hair ties, a melted lipstick, busted sunglasses, mints, dozens of crumpled receipts, dirty centimes. In the filing cabinets, Grace peered over the papers for bulges. She rummaged in the pockets of the silk jacket draped over the chair. She checked behind the books, lifting them by the spines to check for false compartments. She ran her hand under the desk in case anything was taped there. When she was done, there was only the safe, but that was hopeless.
Grace sat in her boss’s chair. Hanna would be back from lunch soon; she didn’t have much longer. The clock ticked. The chair creaked. The inkjet printer was unplugged. Grace leaned forward and lifted the lid, and there, as goofy and bright as a little girl’s bead set, was a plastic bag half-full of cheap stones. There were hundreds, all zirconia or something like it, all on the small side, pencil-eraser size or less. No, Jacqueline wouldn’t risk the big central stones of a piece; she’d just swap the smaller ones. Grace raked through the bag. There were cuts in every style—round, square, emerald, baguette. An impostor ready for every role.
She went back to her desk to retrieve one of the replacement diamonds Jacqueline had given her. From the plastic bag, she took three more just like it.
And now to work: She blew out the eight empty sockets and emptied three more, leaving the little rocks loose on the table. When she heard Hanna at the door, Grace brushed the three diamonds into her lap with her forearm. She spent the next hour popping the zirconia into the eleven sockets and clamping them shut.
She picked up the clasp, now filled and glittering, and banged it against the table. Hanna yelped and jumped.
“Do you mind?”
“I’m testing the settings,” Grace said. Nothing trembled, nothing budged. She inspected the clasp under the lamp, looking for differences in luster or color or sparkle.
“Looks good,” she murmured to herself.
“Watch yourself,” Hanna said. “It’s a slippery slope, petite voleuse.”
When Hanna left at seven, Grace worked on the Mont box for an hour, listening for the door in case Hanna came back and surprised her. When the box was dry enough to put back in the paper bag, she pulled the three diamonds from her skirt pocket and arranged them under her magnifier. Incredible, that some speck of mineral could command so many hearts and wallets, just because it threw the light around and made a rainbow on the wall. So did the face of her Timex.
She hadn’t stolen anything since the painting and now she’d stolen diamonds.
They were just chips, really. Very small and not worth much. And Jacqueline deserved it. Stealing from her was hardly stealing.
Grace pulled her hair back and started up the computer to run her daily check on the Albemarle Record. The computer took ages to boot up, and Grace was impatient, freezing the screen by clicking too fast. She waited restlessly for the Record’s page to load.
And there, the day’s update: Riley and Alls had vanished from Garland.
Riley had last been seen by his family on Saturday; Alls, by his parole officer. Greg refused to comment. Where they had gone, the Record did not speculate.
? ? ?
Grace had a bad night. She blinked right through the pills’ attempted shutdown like a trick birthday candle. She counted backward from a thousand, twice. She got out of bed and did a hundred sit-ups, trying to tire herself. She drank another glass of wine and read about marquetry from a ten-pound text that was usually as soothing as a lullaby. She thought about calling Hanna, but she didn’t.
This wasn’t exactly what she had feared, but twice what she had feared.
At four in the morning, she gave up. She startled Mme Freindametz in the kitchen when she went down to make tea; she had been working nights before her break and now she couldn’t sleep either. They exchanged a look of grudging sympathy.
She was gilding another layer on her James Mont box when Hanna came in at eight. Grace was in no hurry to revisit the watch, though Jacqueline would be waiting for her to do the strap. She had locked up the watch itself before she left. Grace knew that she would not scrutinize it in front of her.
She and Hanna worked on the centerpiece in silence, threading the leaves onto the branches. Grace was lost in the brambles of her thoughts, and perhaps Hanna was too, but she didn’t show it. “Tighter,” she said to Grace. “Softer angles.”
“I’ve read about this woman,” Grace said. “Heather Tallchief.”
“I don’t know her,” Hanna said.
“She and her boyfriend stole an armored truck together. Three million dollars inside. The truck company hired her as a driver.”
“Go on.”
“She was only twenty years old. She’d run away from home a few years before, and she was working at an AIDS hospice and then going to dance clubs at night. She met this guy, Solis. He was forty-six. He was a poet.”
“First love,” Hanna said drily.
“He’d gone to prison decades before, for killing an armored truck driver. But she didn’t know that yet, not until she’d moved in with him, and by then, she believed anything he told her. That it was all a misunderstanding. You know.”
Hanna nodded.
Grace told her the rest of the story: Solis planned the Loomis heist stitch by stitch, Tallchief later said, so slowly that she didn’t know what she was doing until she was doing it. She said that Solis hypnotized her every day, and not until she drove the truck off route, to the abandoned warehouse where he was waiting for her, did she realize what she had just done. When she climbed out of the truck, she was terrified. No one had any idea where she was. When he threatened to kill her unless she stayed with him, she did as she was told.
They fled Las Vegas on a plane Solis had chartered. He pushed Tallchief onboard in a wheelchair, disguised as an old woman in a wig and dark glasses. She had a crocheted blanket draped over her lap. But when the plane landed, she stood up and walked off, tall, strong, and young. The pilots remembered that, when police questioned them later. But she and Solis were long gone.
He shipped the money overseas in unmarked freight containers. In a few months she was pregnant, and as soon as she had the baby, she bundled him up and ran away.
Grace had watched the interview over and over. “Were you afraid he’d try to find you?” the reporter asked.
“Yeah,” Tallchief said.
“And did he?”
“No.”
Tallchief faked an English accent and made up a new name, and she found work first as a prostitute and then as a hotel maid in Amsterdam. She brought up her son there. She went to work every day, volunteered at her son’s school, and became someone else.
When her son was ten years old, she came back to the United States. She stated her true name and turned herself in so that her son would have citizenship somewhere, some legal identity. She’d been hiding for twelve years.
In the courtroom, the judge likened Tallchief to the hundreds of girls who’d stood before him. Grace imagined all the women who carried drugs in diaper bags, screened phone calls, drew the blinds, smashed the cameras, lied, lied, and lied some more but who forgot to look both ways when they walked their own bodies across the street. They took the fall for their boyfriends and husbands and men they wished were their boyfriends or husbands. The judge invoked that tired sex-work cliché: A bad childhood, a bad father, and bad boyfriends created a woman who was doomed to be a shadow of all her experiences. Women, the argument implied, were weak: They would do anything for what they believed was love.