When she saw Alls on her screen, a thrill ran through her like ice water, bracing and aching. The universe would give you whatever you wanted if you twisted its arm hard enough.
She knew she needed to tell him she had the painting. It wouldn’t change anything; it shouldn’t, as long as she told him before he stood on his bed to make a cursory check in the ceiling tiles and found out himself. If she’d had the painting all along, she would have checked it every day, probably twice a day. Her mother probably would have seen and thought she was hiding drugs or something. Alls had been right to keep it with him.
She needed to tell him that night.
? ? ?
“Where are you?” Grace asked him that night. His face floated fuzzily against a gray wall. “Are you at home?”
“There’s no one here,” he said. “Listen, they’re going to the lake tomorrow.”
“You said—”
“Greg’s parents want the cabin then, so he and Riley are going up early.” Alls had clenched his jaw and kept looking toward the window. “He baked the painting to dry it faster. It was in the oven when I got home.”
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
“I think I have to break in tonight,” he said.
“No,” she said. “No way.”
“I can pick the lock,” he said. “It’s an old one, shouldn’t be too bad.” He raked his hand through his hair. “There is no good way out of this anymore.”
“Listen, I have the Bosschaert,” she said. “I took it. Cut Riley’s up and throw it in the Dumpster and come.”
She watched him absorbing what she had said. She saw the moment it registered in his eyes: stunned, disbelieving.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was too worried about Greg—”
The window where his face had been went black. And of course, he never came.
The next day, Riley, Greg, and Alls robbed the Wynne House. Riley locked Dorothea in the upstairs bedroom so they could ransack the rooms of all Grace’s little red dots. Then the groundskeeper, who Grace herself knew was not supposed to be there that day, walked in and saw them and collapsed.
The plan fell apart. Grace imagined that Riley, awakened to the reality of the crumpling old man and himself as the one who’d hurt him, would not go to New York. He and Alls left the lake house and returned to the house on Orange Street, where they were arrested on Greg’s information four days later. The groundskeeper went home from the hospital, and the boys went to prison. All of the stolen antiques were recovered from Greg’s car at the lake house before investigators had completed their inventory of what was missing.
No one noticed the missing painting. Grace watched and waited from four thousand miles away as her fate sputtered out in two-hundred-word updates on the Albemarle Record. But no one ever said her name.
VII
Paris
24
It was dark now outside the studio’s high windows. Grace had helped Hanna finish beading the snow onto the branches of the winter trees, but they had set down their tools now.
“Where is the painting?” Hanna asked.
Grace shrugged sadly. “I sold it to a collector in Berlin. Some creep. I was too scared to go to a dealer or an auction house—scared that I wouldn’t be able to keep my name out of it. And I wanted cash.”
In Prague, Grace had not looked at the painting, which was the size of a wrapping paper roll and hidden, even from her, along the inside edge of her suitcase, until the trial had concluded in August. She tried to will it into invisibility. When the summer program ended, she moved to a hostel for two days, where her laptop and raincoat were stolen from her luggage, but not the painting tucked beneath her suitcase’s lining. She went back to the dorm. The desk matron agreed to a price of $210 per month for a single on the fourth floor. The room was the size of a car and hadn’t been repainted in decades, but Grace flipped off the buzzing overhead light and sank down onto the cool floor, relieved to be alone.
She bought a used laptop and then had little money left. She found work tutoring easily at first, then less so. She hard-boiled eggs in the lobby’s microwave and ate them with bread and pickles in the beginning, without pickles later on, as she trolled the European auction records for sales of paintings with questionable or nonexistent papers. They were easy to spot; these were the “discoveries” people had made in sheds and attics. The laptop died after three weeks, and she moved to the college’s computer lab. Her swipe card still worked. She hated using those machines, leaving traces of her plans on them, but there was no longer any other choice.
In the second week of September, after several weeks of dead ends and hang-ups, Grace tracked down the original owner of a dubious Corot and inquired if he collected Dutch Golden Age. He’d given her the phone number for a woman, Katrin, who’d in turn sent her to Wyss.
Wyss had given her a date and an address in East Berlin. She had lived in New York, she told herself—she could do this. She packed up what little she had and went, via bus. People had romantic ideas about European trains, but the bus was cheaper, and this trip was not at all romantic. She didn’t want to sell the painting anymore, but what else could she do?
When the bus dropped Grace at Sch?nefeld, she badly wanted to scrap her directions and take a taxi. What if she screwed up now and missed the meeting? But she had enough for a night in a hostel and a return bus ticket, with little margin for error. She followed the crowd out of the bus station to the train. She had to make only one transfer, at Ostkreuz, and when she got off at Alexanderplatz she could not believe that this part, at least, had been easy, that she was not lost. She walked up the street until she found a place calling itself an Irish pub, and there she waited until four, when she walked outside to watch to see how someone hailed a taxi in Berlin, and then she did it herself. When the driver pulled up to the address, she gave him twenty euros and asked him to wait half an hour. She didn’t know if he would, but there was no one around for him to pick up instead.
She never knew whether she had met Wyss or not. There were two men. The one Grace would remember was the one who was waiting when she pulled her rolling suitcase up to the building, the last concrete block in a tight row of ten-story concrete blocks the same color as the sky. He’d shown her to the elevator, and she had noticed the grime that arced beneath his gums. In the elevator he was closer to her, and when he smiled, she was startled to realize that it was not dirt under his gums, but shadow. His gums were loose, hanging over his teeth.
He had shown her to a bright, empty office, big water stains on the carpet but no desks or chairs. She’d unrolled the painting on the floor, where a second man, stout and spectacled, looked closely at it, but only for a few minutes. He asked her where she’d gotten it. “My grandfather,” she said, knowing it didn’t matter. He sent the first man away. Grace didn’t understand the German. When the man returned, he opened Grace’s suitcase and emptied a garbage bag of cash into it.
“How much did you get?” Hanna asked her now.
“Seven hundred thousand euros,” Grace said, and Hanna gasped. “Maybe. I didn’t have time to count it. He had me followed, and the next morning, I heard a key in the lock, and I thought it was the hotel maid, and I shouted that I didn’t need anything.” Without thinking, she reached to run her fingers over the rough patch on her crown where the hair was still sparse. She wore her hair back now, to cover it. “But it was not the hotel maid,” she said. She tried to laugh, but she still couldn’t manage it.