Later, draped across the couch, Greg said it was fucked up that they could just come take your car like that, and he wanted to call his lawyer dad but Riley stopped him. He hadn’t made his last payment, he said, and the one before had been late. But he hadn’t realized they could just take the car back. Alls told Riley he was relatively lucky, that when his father’s car had been repoed, the repo man had followed him to work, at Hawkes’ Sports, and taken it from the parking lot without his dad knowing, and then he was stranded out there, and Alls didn’t have a car yet and couldn’t go get him, so he’d had to spend the night in the camping department. Riley’s was a pretty okay repo guy, as far as these things went. He’d even let Riley get his stuff out of the car.
“We should rob the Wynne House,” Riley said. “I’m serious.”
“I’m ninety-nine-point-nine that there’s no security,” Greg said, as if he’d given it real thought. “Not even a camera.”
“Your dad’s going to cave, right?” Riley asked Greg. “He always does.”
“Fuck him. I don’t want to go to fucking law school. Alls is poor as shit and bagging tampons. You don’t even have your ghetto Volvo anymore. And she flunked out of school.”
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
It 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.