Tallchief wept in the courtroom, but she did not beg. “I want you to understand that it’s not in my nature to steal or to plot intricate thefts,” she said. “I am not a thief. I am not a lifelong criminal.”
Her lawyer showed video of her loved ones in Amsterdam, offering testimonials. They wept as they remembered Tallchief coming to them with the truth, one by one, and begging their forgiveness. Forgive her, they pleaded. She is not who she was then. Her ten-year-old son wore a sweater and necktie, the knot too large above his narrow chest. He said he hoped that he would see his mother again soon, that he missed her so much.
The prosecutor asked the judge to think of the armored car company whose business was destroyed by the burglary, and of the casino whose money they had stolen. The judge sentenced Tallchief to five years in prison and ordered her to repay the three million dollars—the entire amount, since Solis was still at large. She was led from the courtroom in leg irons.
“I’d like to believe he actually loved me,” Tallchief said after the trial. “I loved him. I feel foolish and hurt now, but that’s the past.”
? ? ?
“What an idiot,” Hanna said when Grace had finished.
“Hardly,” Grace said. “I don’t think she was an idiot. What good would it do her now, to believe he never loved her?”
“What good would it do her? It’s not a choice; it’s a belief. She got conned and she should have stayed gone.”
Grace agreed with that part. Some people watched the parade of faces on America’s Most Wanted and fantasized about catching one of them at the local gas station, buying cigarettes and SunChips. They wanted the watchdog’s glory, holding tight to the burglar’s pant leg with their teeth. But there were other people who didn’t want them punished. There were other people who looked into the blurry eyes of the same faces and breathed Go, go, go.
“They’re gone,” Grace told Hanna, her voice catching in her throat. “The boys.”
“They can do that? No.”
Grace shook her head. “They absconded. Together.”
“Where do you think they’ve gone? Mexico?”
Grace was exhausted enough to be confused; it took her a split second to remember that Hanna thought she was from California.
“I hope so,” she said.
“Why, where do you think they went?”
Grace could only shake her head.
“What, you think they’ll come here?” Hanna stabbed her index finger at the table. “Do they even know you live here?”
“They shouldn’t,” Grace said.
“Why would they—what do you think is going to happen?”
A hair had fallen into the silver paint on her Mont box. Grace no longer bothered to hide it from Jacqueline. She reached for the tweezers, but she knew she’d have to sand off the whole layer. The paint was too dry already.
Grace scraped at the wood, gathering the metal paste under her fingernail. She pulled the hair out. It was hers, fallen from her clip.
Hanna was staring at her. “Julie, what did you do?”
Grace opened her mouth and closed it again. They were coming for her; she knew it.
“Well,” she began. “I stole from the Wynne House first.”
VI
Garland
16
What do you mean, not going back?” Riley had asked her.
They were lying on his single bed at his parents’ house. Downstairs, the Grahams’ annual holiday open house was in full swing. All three leaves were needed in the dining room table to make room for the food: sausage balls, country ham biscuits, pepper jelly, hot crab dip. Grace had rolled the cheese straws with Mrs. Graham in the kitchen that afternoon. “Oh, my Gracie, how we all missed you,” she had said. “I’m so glad to have my girl back for a few days.”
Grace had wept, inexplicably, into her shoulder. “I missed you too,” she said. She’d only been gone two weeks. Grace had flown home, frantic and despairing, the day after Alls left. She needed to be with Riley, safe, and that was as far as she could think. She hadn’t turned in any final papers and she would miss the exams. Grace hadn’t had a B since sixth grade and now she would flunk her first semester of college, but that didn’t matter a tenth as much as her other failure did.
At the party, Dr. Graham ladled whiskey sours from the punch bowl, none for himself. An ice ring full of holly leaves bobbed in the middle. Riley’s great-uncle Gil had eaten most of the rum-soaked maraschino cherries already; Grace had seen him furtively replenish the bowl. Grace and Riley had made their rounds as a couple, hands clasped, to let the guests look Grace over and remark on how she had changed after just a few months in New York City. Sometimes they said, very satisfied, that she had not changed at all. His aunt Holly, she of the agate cameo bracelet, treated Grace like a riddle to be solved. Was she thinner? Had she changed her hair? Were her clothes different, because something was. Grace shifted uncomfortably, remembering an inanity she’d heard as a girl about virgins walking one way and not-a-virgins another. Grace hadn’t been a virgin for many years, but she felt sure she knew what the something was. Maybe, Aunt Holly concluded with a wistful smile, the change was in Grace’s attitude: She was coming into her own as a young woman. Grace felt as though she were auditioning all over again, this time to stay.
She and Riley had snuck upstairs when the guests coaxed Mrs. Graham to the piano, where she was now banging out carols, speeding them up with each verse until the singers were breathless trying to keep up. Always, these carols collapsed into tipsy giggling. The last singer standing received a peppermint pig, tied with ribbon to a tiny hammer. Riley and his brothers were never allowed to win, but the Graham boys always sang in the contest anyway, pushing the tempo, like false bidders driving up an auction price. Grace could hear Jim and Colin now rushing through a tongue-twisting “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”
She and Riley stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling.
“I’m not going back,” she said. “I want to stay here, with you.”
“And drop out of school?
“I can start at Garland in the fall. I hate it there. It’s snotty, and the people aren’t even that smart. Everyone’s faking something; you just have to figure out what their thing is. I’m not learning anything there that I couldn’t learn here.”
“Well, that’s not true. I go here, and I can tell you—”
“Fine. Nothing that I couldn’t teach myself.”
“You’re not making friends,” he said. “Everybody who goes away to school without knowing people has a hard time the first semester. You just need to put yourself out there more, join clubs or something.”
“Clubs? You want me to join clubs?” She pulled her hand from his hip. “Do you not want me here, or what?”
“You know I want you. But you worked hard for this, and I don’t want you to give up—”
“Giving up would be staying there, for fifty grand a year, miserable, just because people expect me to.”
He groaned. “This is my fault. You’re on the phone with me every night instead of meeting people.”
“I don’t want to meet people,” she said. “What, like you’re meeting new people? Are you meeting new people?”
“This is Garland. There are no new people.” He grimaced a little. “Did something happen?”
She hadn’t seen Alls since she’d gotten home.
“No, nothing happened. But everything I want to happen to me is here, not there.”
“I knew you were having a harder time than you were saying,” he said. “But I didn’t know you were, like, depressed.”
“I’m not depressed! I just want to be with you, not with a bunch of snotty posers talking about the aristocratic diaspora.”