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.
Grace hadn’t even known they could do that.
He’d probably been checking a sports score or something.
The police took the Kimbroughs into custody too, as the phone was technically theirs, and drove to the cabin with Greg’s parents in the backseat. Mr. Kimbrough was a criminal defense attorney. Greg wouldn’t have an opportunity to say anything without a lawyer present. At his parents’ urging, Greg rolled like a puppy. Alls and Riley were arrested hours later.
Grace watched the Wynne case through the foggy pinhole of the Albemarle Record and its local correspondent’s maddeningly elliptical reporting. Cy Helmers had been three years ahead of the boys in school and four ahead of her. He’d gone to Garland College and become the county paper’s cub reporter when he graduated. He reported the Wynne heist as if he were above gossip, as if he couldn’t stand to make his old schoolmates look worse than they already did.
The Czech front desk matron sent her son to fetch Grace twice more. No other student had received a phone call, and Grace felt conspicuous and exposed as she conducted these conversations, despite the fact that the woman spoke no English. There was a plastic window over the counter, through which students passing through the lobby could see her. Grace faced the wall.
The second phone call was from Grace’s mother, whose very voice seemed to go pale when Grace said that no, she would not come back in time for the sentencing; no, she did not know when she would come back at all. Her mother, whose maternal passions were seldom if ever directed at Grace, now implored her: How could she just abandon Riley like this?
“Abandon him?” Grace was incredulous on the line. “The person I built my life on, the last decade and my entire future, the one and only person I can call mine”—this was a dig—“just committed a whole parade of felonies with his idiot friends. And you think I should come home to support him?” She was shaking when she finished. Her mother had little to say after that.
The third and last call was from Riley’s father.
The boys had been released into their families’ custody, awaiting sentencing. It was evening in Prague, morning in Tennessee, and Dr. Graham was calling from his office at the college.
“I think I understand,” he began, “why you would not want to come back for this.”
Grace had nothing to say. It had not occurred to her that he would call. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. A truth.
“Us too. And him. He may be having the hardest time believing it.”
“I don’t think he knew what he was really doing,” she said. “He couldn’t have. People make mistakes without realizing—one bad decision can just carry you away. And the three of them together. You know.”
“We should have checked him more,” Dr. Graham said quietly. “I guess you seemed to keep him in line enough.” He laughed, a little drily. “Grace, you know we love you as our daughter.”
They had said this for years: not like a daughter but as our daughter, and Grace had bloomed under those words and their power to make her one of them. But it was Dr. Graham calling her, not Mrs. Graham, and he was calling her from his office, not from their home.
Grace remembered shooting skeet with the Grahams when she was fifteen, her first time. She had done well, as well as Riley and his brothers, and Dr. Graham had laughed with surprise and delight. “Goddammit, son,” he had said to Riley. “You’ll never do better.”
“If there’s anything you know that could help him,” he said now, “anything at all—”
“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Grace said.
? ? ?
Grace did not call. She did not write. Just before they went to Lacombe, she received a single letter from Garland.
Dear Grace,
Love,
Riley
She never knew whether to read it as an indictment of her silence or a promise of his.
What he must think of her, what his family must think of her—what they must say. She hated to think about it. She worried less about what Alls thought of her now. He had known long before Riley how bad Grace could really be.
2
Grace knew that a parolee had a keeper and a leash. They didn’t know where she was; they couldn’t. She knew these things, but that night, as she twisted under her sheet, her brain refused them. She took a sleeping pill at two but failed to submit. The night brain knew every trick.
What did she think, that Riley would murder her? That he was tracking her so he could throw lye in her face? Hanna had told her that story, from New York half a century ago. A man, Burt Pugach, had hired hit men to throw lye into the face of Linda Riss, his girlfriend, after she told him she wouldn’t see him anymore. He told her, “If I can’t have you, no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no one else will want you.” He went to prison for fourteen years, and he wrote her thousands of letters. He had blinded her in one eye. When he was released from prison, she married him.
It was the happy ending that most troubled Grace.
Tomorrow they’ll be out, the night brain taunted her. She took another pill at four and begged for defeat. She went down at six and slept through her alarm.
When Grace got to work the next morning, Jacqueline was on the phone in her office, picking at her cuticles and blowing smoke from the side of her mouth, her door wide open. Amaury was already stooped in his dark corner, cooing at the pocket watch under his yellow lamplight. His table was as far as possible from the basement studio’s high windows and the meager sunlight they let in from the narrow street. As far as Grace could tell, he lived his life underground: in this basement, on the metro, and in his basement apartment in Montreuil. Grace had seen him getting off the metro in the morning, blinking unhappily in the sun.
Hanna had tied a white smock over her clothes. She’d lined up Grace’s worktable end-to-end with the two extra tables that were left over from better times, when there had been more work and more staff. Grace counted ten bowls and containers arranged along the tables, largest to smallest.
“Tu es en retard,” Hanna scolded her. Hanna was never late, and her hands were never still. Whenever she and Grace had lunch together, Hanna bobbed her knee as she ate, always impatient to get back to work. “Are you ready?”
“As ever,” Grace said, tying a smock over her own clothes.
“I didn’t want to start and then have to stop again to explain it to you.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Grace said. “The train was late.”
“We’re cleaning the beads. As you know, they’ve discolored from someone’s shortsighted application of oil to their surface. But, as with hair spray or nail polish, this has only damaged them.” She looked at Grace from the side, through the gap between her face and her eyeglasses, and Grace ran her thumb over her own clear-polished fingernails.
She and Hanna seldom worked on a project together. Until recently, there had been enough to do so that they each stayed late, piecing parts back together and buffing out scratches in satisfying silence. But Grace hadn’t gotten anything after the birdcage, and she knew to worry. Jobs like this one were few and far between, and without a visa? She’d gotten lucky. If she were let go, she’d be a hotel maid again.