“If you do this, I’m going to leave you. I’m serious.”
“The fuck you will,” he said. “Just try. You can’t.” She recoiled, and his face became pitiful. “I’m not asking you for help, just some faith in me. When have I let you down?”
If she told Riley that she didn’t love him anymore, he would certainly rob the Wynne House, just to show her what he could do, like a little boy having a tantrum with a real knife. Had this Riley always been there? How much of him had she created? Telling him the truth would make him crazy, she told herself. It would only destabilize him further.
Also, she didn’t want him to cancel her plane ticket.
Alls would follow her as soon as he could switch the paintings. He said it was best that they weren’t leaving at the same time. “Leaving a few days apart is the kindest thing to do,” he said, calling her on his cigarette break at the drugstore. “He can choose not to put it together this way, and he will. You know him. He only ever sees what he wants to.”
“You will come,” she pressed. “How do I know you’ll come?”
“I’m coming,” he said. “I promise.”
That was what Riley said too.
If only she had believed! Instead she felt a seed of distrust that she couldn’t ignore: that Greg could still fuck it all up somehow or that Riley would, even that Alls was setting her up.
It was nine o’clock. She knew that Riley was with Greg now—he had said they were going to Target with strange, ominous vagueness—and that Alls was at work.
Grace slipped on her backpack and went over to the house on Orange Street, letting herself in the back door. She stood on Alls’s bed to lift the ceiling tile and pulled out the painting. The canvas was so slight in her hands—it might have been a vinyl place mat. She just couldn’t take any chances.
? ? ?
Riley borrowed Greg’s car to drive her to the airport, mistaking Grace’s worry for a different kind. He didn’t know that he would never see her again. He thought he was comforting her, and that was intolerable.
“I’ll be there soon,” he said. “So soon!”
“How soon?” she asked.
“You’re going to love it! Old buildings, cheap liquor, that one poet you love. Sites of historic terror! What are you crying for?”
“I can’t believe you did this for me.”
“Well, I can,” he said. “I’m almost insulted that you would say that.”
“Please don’t do it,” she said. “Just forget it.”
“Do what?”
“Rob the Wynne House!”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay, I won’t.”
She knew, of course, that he didn’t mean it. She had lost her control over him. Whatever he did now was for an idea of her. For that, she could not be responsible.
? ? ?
Grace spent her first day in Prague searching, lost and sweaty, for an Ethernet cord to plug in to her computer. The Communist-era dorms didn’t have wireless and she was anxious to talk to Alls. When she finally saw his face flicker at her on her laptop screen, she thought she might pass out from relief. She had shut herself in the tiny WC for privacy and was sitting on the toilet. The long blue Ethernet cord stretched under the door and back to her desk.
“You made it,” he said, almost shy.
“I made it,” she said.
Her roommate was doing the same thing on the other side of the door, and for a moment Grace felt that they were the same, just two girls lovesick and homesick and talking to their boyfriends on the Internet.
But her joy at seeing him was short-lived. Greg and Riley’s plan, Alls told her, was now in motion. Riley had just been waiting for her to leave.
“Wait, why are they still doing the antiques?” Grace asked when Alls told her. “That’s insane, if he has the painting.”
“Yeah, I know,” Alls said. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Whitwell Starbucks. They had Wi-Fi there and no one from Garland would see him. “It’s Greg, I think. I’m trying to derail the whole thing, since I can’t exactly tell them to focus on the painting.”
Greg had told his parents that they were going to spend a few days at the house on Norris Lake. It was only an hour and ten minutes away. They would drive up in the afternoon and be seen: eating ribs at Hale’s, buying beer and whiskey at the liquor store, filling up the gas tank. They needed Alls to come with them, Riley said, even if he was going to puss out on the rest. At the end of the evening, they would park Greg’s car in the garage next to their second car, untitled and anonymous, already there waiting for them.
The next day, they would drive together in the second car to the Walmart in Pitchfield, where their third car, also untitled and anonymous, waited in the parking lot. Greg had been moving it between Walmarts every three to four days. They would switch cars and drive to Garland, arriving at the Wynne House at nine in the morning. If there were no unexpected cars in the lot, Riley would go in for the tour. When they got upstairs, he would lock the docent in the windowless study, and then meet Greg and Alls—Riley was sure Alls would come around—downstairs.
“Lock her?” Grace was incredulous. “She’s an old woman. She’ll have a heart attack.”
When the boys were done, they would calmly walk out with their sacks to their car. They would drive together back to the Walmart, where they would switch cars again, transferring their Walmart bags of Confederate antiquities, and return to the lake house. They’d spend the evening goofing off at the lake, shouting over the water to annoy the neighbors. The next morning, Riley would head to New York, leaving Greg at the lake for appearances. In New York, Riley would liquidate everything over the next week, using a list of vendors he had compiled.
“It’s my list,” Grace told Alls mournfully. “I made that fucking list.”
“Just come,” she said. “Just leave the other one and come. Get out of there.”
“It’s almost dry, I heard him say it. They need longer than that to tie up their loose ends. I bought a ticket for Saturday, okay? He says next Thursday is the day. But by then, his painting will be gone, and he won’t be able to do a goddamn thing about it. Their whole machine will fall apart, and I will be with you.”
? ? ?
The summer study program itself was just an excuse for rich college kids to drink beer that was cheaper than water and get school credit for it. Grace went to the classes without knowing why—for show, she supposed. Her roommate was a whiny communications major from Connecticut, the kind of girl Kendall and Lana would have eaten alive. She found herself missing them. God, what would they think of her now?
After a few false starts, the other students gave up on talking to her. She saw in their reactions that she was giving off something both scared and scary, as if she were contaminated. Not that it mattered. The dorm was just a place to stay until Alls came. She could hardly imagine. When she started to—the sight of him, in the lobby downstairs, or the sunlight through the window on his bare back—she tried to wipe away the picture, suddenly superstitious. She waited through the next three days half present in a sort of anxious purgatory, waiting for him, for her real life to begin. The past year had been just a bad dream.
Once a day, she e-mailed with Riley. He didn’t mention the plan and she didn’t ask. She told him her webcam was broken so she wouldn’t have to see him, but she otherwise went through the motions. Now that she was away forever, she could afford to be what he wanted again, for just a few more days. She’d learned how to speak the truth, or part of it, to the wrong person, so that it didn’t even feel wrong, just misplaced. When she told Riley she loved him, she was talking to Alls.