“If that andiron had hit him, that man would have died right then,” Alls said. “But no one knows Riley swung it except for me and Riley. Not even the groundskeeper. He couldn’t even pick Riley out of the lineup.”
Alls called for Greg, who came crashing down the hall with his bags and kicked the door open. He ran out to the car, jumping over the old man on the floor. Riley stood over the groundskeeper, staring at his slackened face, until Alls shouted at him to get moving. They drove to the Walmart and switched cars, but Riley was a wreck. He stayed glued to the TV at the lake house, certain that they were missing crucial details because their crime was only regional news at Norris Lake, not local news. He wouldn’t go to New York and he was in no shape to anyway. He had sorely overestimated his own nerve.
“When you left with the painting,” Alls said, “you left me with him.”
“You could have made the switch that night,” she said. “Or shredded his copy and left it all behind.”
“How was I supposed to believe in you at all, huh? You have me tear out the painting for you, you have Riley fake a copy for you. I’m sure there’s a real deep record of things you didn’t do.”
“I wanted you to come. I was just worried something else would go wrong—”
“And it did.”
Riley insisted on returning to Garland; he said it was less suspicious for him to be there, like everything was normal, even though he himself wasn’t normal at all. The groundskeeper didn’t improve and Riley started threatening to turn himself in. He listened to the people on the news describe the thugs who’d locked a frail volunteer in an airless room and couldn’t believe they meant him. He wouldn’t leave the house, and for three days he neither showered nor slept. He had glued himself to the TV and seemed to be praying to it, for the groundskeeper to pull through, for himself to wake up from a bad dream.
“And you were worried about the painting,” Grace said. She’d played out the scenarios in her mind thousands of times: They discovered the painting was missing and blamed the culprits of the second crime for the earlier one; or Alls was found out and then so was she.
“No,” he said. “Not that.”
“You weren’t?”
“You were so focused on the painting,” he said. “The days before you left—like you didn’t trust me with it. And I started to wonder if you really wanted me at all.” He stopped and looked at her. “I really wasn’t sure. And then you took it.”
I wanted you, she wished she could say.
They had reached Zanuso. “Stand here,” he said. He nodded to the brick wall, under the awning. “Watch,” he said, nodding first toward the street and then up at the building’s windows. He seemed comfortable; he knew where he was.
There was not a soul in sight. Alls got to his knees. When he moved his feet, his shoes made no scuffing sound against the pavement, as though he were barefoot. He reached under his shirttail and took from just inside the waistband of his jeans a leather case. He silently unzipped it and pulled out a small tension wrench and a steel pick. He wriggled the short end of the wrench into the keyhole and then slid the pick in next to it. She couldn’t tell him she had a key now. He pushed gently on the wrench, bobbing it clockwise, as he pushed and pulled the pick with his other hand, raking the inside of the lock. He frowned, and Grace looked nervously up and down the block. Still silent. Alls pulled the pick and wrench from the lock and slid the pick back into his case. He chose a small hooked one now, and, shifting his crouch to get even closer to the lock, he slipped the hook inside the keyhole and began to probe, pushing down on the handle, then pulling the pick out a bit and pushing down again.
She heard something inside the building and touched his shoulder, but he had already heard it. His tools were out of sight and he was on his feet, hustling her toward the corner. They made it just around when she heard the door burst open, a man muttering to himself as he hurried up the sidewalk in the other direction, the door falling shut behind him. She could hear Alls’s heartbeat against her, or maybe she could feel it through his clothes and his skin.
He worked on the lock for what felt like a very long time, but when Grace looked at her watch, only ten minutes had passed. She heard a car, probably two blocks away but getting closer. Alls pulled the pick from the lock and made one quick tug upward on the wrench. The lock clicked. He turned the doorknob and nodded for her to enter.
She let him close the door behind her. He was almost silent, and in the dark, with only her yellow dress as light, it seemed impossible that she was not alone. But she heard his voice behind her. “Go on,” he whispered.
She reached out for the wall to steady herself, and she followed it to the stairwell. She groped for the rail and stepped down, one two three, feeling the wall for the turn, and then the nine steps to the bottom. And then there was another door, and another lock.
This time, he used a flashlight. He had it open in two minutes.
Grace had spent hundreds of hours alone in the studio late at night, lights blazing. But now she was scared to touch the light switch.
“You know what they say,” he joked, his voice overwhelming the dark. “Weakest part of a lock is the keyhole.”
She felt him in the room, moving silently about. She stood still. In a moment he had turned on her desk lamp.
He looked over her table, the tools neatly grouped by form and by function in glass jars, the stack of folded cloths.
“You should pick locks,” he said, more to himself than to her. “You’d be great at it.”
He walked around to the Czech centerpiece. “What is this fairyland here?”
She took a deep breath. “You can’t take that. You’d never find a buyer for it.”
“I just asked what the hell it is,” he said. “It’s as big as a doghouse anyway.”
She toured the centerpiece for him, the silk cornstalks and beaded trees, the muslin shepherdesses and wax peaches. Hanna had done such beautiful work.
“The peaches are mine,” she said. “And these acorns, this beading.”
“What about the jewelry?” he asked. “Where is that?”
“In her office,” Grace said, glancing at Jacqueline’s doorway.
She followed him in.
“In here?” he asked, pulling open her desk.
“No, in there.” She pointed to the stack of magazines sitting in front of the safe.
He took a quick breath and flexed his hands.
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“You going to try to stop me?”
“Could I?”
“I haven’t done this much,” he said. “Could take a while.” He lay down on the floor, on his belly. His legs bent at the knee and his feet stuck up, shoes dangling. He didn’t fit on the floor.
Grace watched for a while as he spun the dial back and forth. “Are you listening to it?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “I wish. These wheels are too light to click.”
“What are you doing, then?”
“Not your problem, remember? Any guesses on the combination? Birth date, phone number, weird superstitions?”
“I’m not going to help you,” she said.
“Yeah, I got it. You would never.”
He asked for scrap paper and a pen, and Grace brought him the supplies from her desk. He began to try combinations and mark them down. What he was doing looked like a joke. Cracking a safe couldn’t possibly work this way and he couldn’t possibly believe it would.
“You can’t try every combination,” she said.
“You know, in some ways, you seem really different. Right off the bat. For one thing, you’re not trying to get everybody to fall in love with you all the time. Laughing and covering your mouth, telling little stories about how clumsy you are. But you’re still a know-it-all.”
“If I was so transparent,” she started, but he interrupted her.