Unbecoming

by Rebecca Scherm

Genres: Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL

On the grubby outskirts of Paris, Grace restores bric-a-brac, mends teapots, re-sets gems. She calls herself Julie, says she's from California, and slips back to a rented room at night. Regularly, furtively, she checks the hometown paper on the Internet. Home is Garland, Tennessee, and there, two young men have just been paroled. One, she married; the other, she's in love with. Both were jailed for a crime that Grace herself planned in exacting detail. The heist went bad-but not before she was on a plane to Prague with a stolen canvas rolled in her bag. And so, in Paris, begins a cat-and-mouse waiting game as Grace's web of deception and lies unravels--and she becomes another young woman entirely.

Unbecoming is an intricately plotted and psychologically nuanced heist novel that turns on suspense and slippery identity. With echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, Rebecca Scherm's mesmerizing debut is sure to entrance fans of Gillian Flynn, Marisha Pessl, and Donna Tartt.

Release date: January 22, 2015

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

I

 

Paris

1

The first lie Grace had told Hanna was her name. “Bonjour, je m’appelle Julie,” Grace had said. She’d been in Paris for only a month, and her French was still new and stiff. She’d chosen the name Julie because it was sweet and easy on the French tongue—much more so than Grace was. The best lies were the simplest and made the most sense, in the mind and in the mouth. These lies were the easiest to swallow.

Jacqueline, the boss, had shown Grace to her worktable, abutting Hanna’s, and where to store her tools in the jars along the center crack, what she could borrow and what she would need to procure herself. Hanna had reached out to cover a jar of picks and pliers. “I don’t share these,” she’d said with a taut smile, like someone forced to apologize.

When Grace sat down on her spinning stool a few minutes later, Hanna asked where she was from. Grace was so obviously American.

“California,” Grace said, because most people already had ideas about California. They didn’t ask you to explain it to them. Grace hated lying, got no joy from it, and this was how she knew she wasn’t pathological. But California satisfied people so easily, even in Paris. Garland, Tennessee, where Grace was really from, was a confusing answer that only led to more questions. “Tennessee?” Hanna might have started. “Elvis? Péquenauds?” Hillbillies? When Grace had lived in New York, everyone who asked her where she was from followed her answer with the same question: “What’s that like?”

As if her journey from somewhere as tiny and undistinguished as Garland had required a laborious transformation. As if getting from Garland to New York City had been some kind of pilgrimage to the first world.

Grace had been in Paris for two years now, and she had been Julie from California since her arrival. Her life was conducted entirely in French, another kind of disguise. She and Hanna seldom discussed anything deep in the past, and when the conversation took an unwelcome turn, they quickly righted themselves. Facing each other across their tables, they hunched over their antiques and talked of busted hinges and gouged veneer, not sorrow or worry, not home.

The boys would be paroled tomorrow, released from Lacombe and sent home to Garland with their families. It was three o’clock in Paris now, morning in Tennessee. Riley and Alls would be eating their last breakfast of powdered eggs and sausage patties, doughy-faced guards planted behind them. Grace had always imagined them together, but she’d begun to imagine their lives without her so long ago that she often forgot how little she really knew. She didn’t know a thing about their lives anymore. She hadn’t spoken to them in more than three years, since before they were arrested for robbing the Wynne House: three years of imagined sausage breakfasts.

He wouldn’t come for her, she told herself. It had been too long.

Grace had often felt like two people, always at odds, but when the boys had gone to prison, one Grace had stopped her life’s clock. Now it had begun to tick again. She had no control of Riley now, what he would do and where he would go, and these unknowns bred in her a private, shapeless dread. She’d left lies unleashed in Garland and now she couldn’t mind them.

Riley and Alls were twenty years old when they were sentenced to eight years each in Lacombe. This was the minimum: it was their first offense, they were unarmed, and, more important to Judge Meyer, they were “not your typical criminals,” and Riley’s family was a nice family. The Grahams had lived in Garland for seven generations, and Alls benefitted from the association—as had Grace, when she’d been associated. Grace often thought that if Alls alone had been charged with the crime, he would not have gotten off as easy, and that if only Riley had been charged, he probably would have gotten off altogether. Greg had pled guilty too, but his parents had won him a plea bargain for turning in his friends. He was released in a year.

Grace had robbed the Wynne House too, and she could not go home again.

She remembered the moment—maybe it had lasted minutes or maybe days; she didn’t remember—after the judge had handed down the eight-year sentence, but before she’d learned that they could be paroled in only three. Eight years had seemed an incredible length of time. Eight years was longer than she had known Riley. Eight years seemed long enough for everyone to forget.

She gave the birdcage’s latch a final swipe with the chamois and called for Jacqueline. The filigree onion dome alone had taken her nine days to clean. The wire metalwork was so fine that from a distance, it might have been human hair. On the first day, she’d held the vacuum hose in her left hand and the hair dryer in her right, blowing off dust and sucking it up before it could land again. Then she’d spent more than a week swabbing the curlicues with dental tools wrapped in cotton and paintbrushes dipped in mineral spirits. This morning she’d finished scraping off centuries of songbird guano from the cage’s floor. It wasn’t a birdcage anymore, but a gilded aviary, orientaliste, late nineteenth century, nearly as tall as Grace was. Jacqueline would return it to the dealer who had purchased it from the flea market, and he would sell it for at least five thousand, maybe much more. Perhaps it would be wired for electricity and made into a chandelier. Maybe an orchid collector would use it to shield his best specimens from human hovering.

When Jacqueline emerged from her skinny office beneath the stairs, Grace stood apart from her work. She waited as her boss pulled a pair of white cotton gloves from the bin next to the tables. Jacqueline ran her gloved index finger lightly along the wires. She gently turned the latch on the door and bent close to listen to its movement. She craned to see the underside of the onion dome.

“Ça suffit,” she said.

That was as approving as Jacqueline got. She did little restoration herself, only the most basic things—regluing a horn handle to a letter opener, or cleaning larger metalwork—and only what she could do while on the phone. Now she clacked over to Amaury’s dark alcove, where he was slumped over an open watch. After decades in exactly that position, his shoulders had slid into his belly. Jacqueline reached for the watch, but Amaury grunted and swatted her hand away. He’d been at Zanuso et Filles the longest. He’d even worked for the original Zanuso, back when Jacqueline and her sister were the filles. Jacqueline had neither the head nor the hands for antiques restoration, but she was the senior Zanuso now. Grace supposed that made her and Hanna the filles.

Hanna cleared her throat, eager for their boss’s attention. Last week she’d begun a new project, and now she wanted to show off her progress.

“C’est parti,” Jacqueline said, squeezing the bridge of her nose. “Yes, Hanna?”

“My beaded centerpiece is Czech, 1750 to 1770,” Hanna said, though they all knew by now. “I will have it to the decade by the end of the week.”

Hanna was sitting in front of the shared computer, clicking through the hundreds of photographs she’d taken of her project. The centerpiece was the size of a card table and divided into four quadrants, each containing beaded miniatures of flora and fauna: spring blossoms, a summer peach orchard, an autumn crop harvest, and a snowy thicket with white wool sheep and shepherdesses. The centerpiece had clearly once been exquisite, if silly. Grace imagined it as a diorama that some young countess had hired palace artists to build for her. The trees, their leaves made of cut silk, were as detailed as real bonsai.

“The materials,” Hanna continued, “are linen and pinewood, glass, mica, copper, brass, steel, lead, tin, aluminum, beeswax, shellac, white lead, paper, and plaster of Paris. I have disassembled and numbered it into 832 parts, each corresponding to this diagram. You will see how the glass beads have been discolored by oil, no doubt applied by someone with limited knowledge of the period.”

Jacqueline rolled her eyes. “Julie will help you with this one. It’s a very big job.”

“I don’t want any help.”

Jacqueline put her finger to her lips. “Until something else comes in for her to do, she will assist you.”

“You’ll have to measure all the old wires,” Hanna said to Grace. “The new ones will be steel, which won’t be historically correct, of course, but my primary objective is to preserve the integrity of the object’s intention.”

“Which is to be a centerpiece,” Grace said.

“Precisely.”

Hanna was Polish, thirty-four, twelve years older than Grace, whom she treated like an unexpected and unwanted little sister. Hanna was small and as thin as a young boy, with closely cropped blond hair and blond skin and pale gray eyes. Her crisp androgyny was so thorough that it sometimes distracted older Parisians, who wanted to peg her as one sex or the other before selling her a sandwich. “Sans fromage,” Hanna would say. “Pardon?” they would respond, still looking for clues. “Sans fromage, pas de fromage,” she would repeat, blinking, her frame as straight and pert as a parking meter. She wore silver-rimmed glasses and clothes only in shades of beige.

When Grace had started at Zanuso, she’d hoped that her humble beginnings would appeal to Hanna’s arrogance, which had been obvious from the start. She’d thought maybe Hanna would help her, out of either pity or some sense of big-sister altruism. But Hanna had no such inclinations. She was one of six daughters of a rural Polish grocer and she hadn’t seen her family in more than a decade. No one, Grace gathered, had ever helped Hanna do a goddamn thing. Grace and Hanna’s friendship was an often crabby by-product of professional respect: Grace had done well at Zanuso without asking for help, and that Hanna noticed. Grace envied Hanna’s unfiltered confidence, her clipped and precise judgments. Grace struggled to calculate the probable reactions to nearly everything she said before she said it, looking for risk and reward and hidden pits she might trip in. She’d never met a woman who cared so little about causing offense.

Now Grace pulled her stool around to Hanna’s table, where a long row of wires was arranged by size. She pulled a ruler from Hanna’s cup and saw Hanna flinch a little. She would have preferred that Grace use her own tools. Grace took the first of the hundred wires, set it against the ruler, and recorded the measurement on the list Hanna had laid out on a sheet of graph paper. Nineteen centimeters. She placed the wire back in the row, just to the left so she wouldn’t accidentally measure it again, and picked up another. Eighteen and three-quarters centimeters.

 • • • 

Grace had met Riley when she was in sixth grade, just turned twelve. He was a year older. At her first middle school dance, he had plucked her from a gaggle of girls she wanted badly to impress, and she and Riley had swayed, arm’s length apart, to the ballad over the loudspeaker. He’d invited her to his house for dinner, where Mrs. Graham gently chatted to Grace about school while her husband and four sons stripped three roast chickens in ten minutes. Riley, the youngest, was the worst, lunging for the last of the potatoes while Grace was still figuring out how to cut her chicken breast with her fork and not make so much noise against the plate. Mrs. Graham reached to still Riley’s hand and suggested he save seconds for his friend before he helped himself to thirds. “Some chivalry, please,” she had said. Grace had read the word in books, but she’d never heard anyone say it out loud.

Grace tried not to stare at her, but Mrs. Graham pulled at her attention whenever Grace looked away. Mrs. Graham was thin and tan and freckled, with sleepy green eyes that turned down slightly at the outside. She had a slow blink; Grace thought she could feel it herself, as though a light had briefly dimmed. Her cool, feathery brown hair curled under where it hit her collar. Grace admired the light shimmer on her high cheekbones, her sea-glass earrings, her low and tender voice. Her fingers were long and delicate, nails polished with a milky, translucent pink, knuckles unfairly swollen from arthritis. That Grace’s own nails were bitten to the quick had never bothered her before.

At the end of the week, Riley had kissed her in the school hallway between bells, so quickly that she wondered later if she had imagined it. Within a month he had bought her a necklace, a gold dolphin on a thin chain, and pledged his love. She felt as if she were in the movies.

What she wouldn’t give to see herself and Riley like that, from above—to watch a flickering reel of Riley, his hair still victory red (it hadn’t yet begun to fade), pulling her toward him on the sweaty, squeaking floor of the gym. Had she been scared, excited, smug? She’d been just a child, and then she had entered a we. An us-ness. She and Riley had seemed cute to his parents and their teachers, something from Our Gang, but Riley had three older brothers and the precocity that came with them, and Grace had no one else.

Tomorrow, Riley and Alls would be released.

She felt as if she had been standing in a road at night, watching a car’s distant headlights approaching so slowly that she had forever to step out of the way. Now the car was upon her, and still she had not moved. She imagined what tomorrow would look like: Riley’s parents, or maybe just his father, going to pick him up at the prison. Dr. Graham would bring him a change of clothes. Riley had worn a thirty-two-thirty-two. Did he still? He would look different. He would be paler, less freckled, from lack of sun. And he would be older, of course. Twenty-three. She kept thinking of them as boys, but they weren’t boys anymore.

Dr. Graham would bring Riley’s old clothes, a pair of worn khakis and one of his paint-stained button-downs with holes in the elbows. Here, the bundle of clothes would say, this is who you were and will be again. Grace imagined Riley riding home in the passenger seat of the Grahams’ ancient blue Mercedes wagon, the diesel loud enough to bring the neighbors to the windows. Everyone would know today was the day. Mrs. Graham would have made barbecue, probably pork shoulder. And Riley’s brothers would be there. Grace didn’t know if all three still lived in Garland, but they probably did. The Grahams belonged to Garland as much as Garland belonged to them. She imagined Riley excusing himself from the cookout and going inside to sit on his bed in his old bedroom, which would be his room again, at least for a while. She wondered if he would go upstairs, to the attic bedroom Mrs. Graham had made up for when Grace stayed over.

Where would Alls go tomorrow? Did his father still live in Garland? He would have no welcome-home party. She imagined Alls and his dad driving through Burger King on the way home, unless he went home with Riley. He would have, before, but that meant nothing. The line between before and after couldn’t be sharper.

When people had read about the Wynne robbery as a footnote in a national newspaper, small-town folly picked up on the wire, they’d probably laughed or shaken their heads. Listen to this one, millions of people would have said over the breakfast table. But those stupid boys had been Grace’s. She used to think she knew Riley so well, she could peel off his skin and slip it over hers and no one would ever be the wiser.

They had gone to prison because of her, really. Grace longed to tell someone what she had done. She’d never had friends, just Riley and now Hanna. Grace could have only one friend at a time. Any more and it became harder to keep track of how they knew her, what she had told them, which pieces went where.

 • • • 

She had not been in Garland the day of the Wynne robbery. She was already in Prague then, at a summer study abroad program. Riley had paid for her tuition and ticket; Grace didn’t have that kind of money.

Grace had read of the robbery online the night it happened, on the home page of the Albemarle Record’s website: A young white male had entered the main house of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, in Garland, Tennessee, on Tuesday, June 2, between eight and ten in the morning, and locked the docent in an upstairs bedroom. The groundskeeper was found unconscious in the foyer; he was at Albemarle Hospital in critical condition.

She had not heard from Riley since the day before, but she knew he had done it. Four days later, he, Alls, and Greg were arrested in Tennessee. Greg was first, alone at his parents’ cabin on Norris Lake. Hours later Alls and Riley were arrested at the boys’ rental house on Orange Street, where Grace also had lived, until she went to Prague at the end of May. She was sure that Greg had turned them in.

She received just one call from the police, after the arrest. The front desk matron sent her son, a dull-eyed boy of about eleven, to knock on the door of Grace’s shared dorm room. She followed him downstairs, her heart beating so heavily that her chest cramped.

The American detective asked if she knew why he was calling. She said she did. He asked her to tell him. She said that her boyfriend had been accused of robbing the Wynne House.

“You mean your husband,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. She and Riley had never told anyone they had married.

He asked when she had last communicated with Riley. “A few days ago,” she said. “Five days. He e-mailed me, very normal, nothing strange. He said he was going to his friend’s house, on Norris Lake. He couldn’t have robbed the Wynne House.”

“How did you find out about the robbery?”

“I read it in the paper,” she said. “Online.”

“You’re reading the local paper while you’re in Prague?”

“I’ve been homesick.”

“You didn’t talk to your husband at all after you heard about the robbery?”

She had not. She told the detective that she knew Riley wouldn’t e-mail her from the lake. They always started drinking before they unhitched the boat, and they only dried out when it was time to drive home. Grace herself had just taken a trip to Kutná Hora, to the bone church underground, where the bones of fifty thousand people had been strung into altars and chandeliers by a half-blind monk. The bones belonged to victims of the Black Death and the Hussite Wars. That some idiot had stolen Josephus Wynne’s old silverware didn’t seem very important, she told the detective.

She shut up—too much.

He asked her half a dozen more questions, but they weren’t difficult ones. Grace told him that he’d made a mistake, that Riley could not have done that. He has such a good life, she said. We’re happy. He doesn’t need money. His parents help him. And besides, she said, I would have known. He couldn’t have kept anything like that from me. He tells me everything. Everything.

Perhaps the detective was a man whose own wife believed that he told her everything.

What the detective did not tell Grace, what she learned days later in the news, was that Riley, Alls, and Greg had already confessed. The detective was crossing off his to-do list. He’d needed nothing from her.

 • • • 

This was how she imagined the robbery: Riley slipping a sweaty five-dollar bill into the recommended donation box and smiling at the tiny old docent on duty, following her through the downstairs rooms as she recited footnotes of Tennessee history. Riley had been through the house half a dozen times over the years; they all had. The Wynne House was the closest and cheapest school field trip. But on a summer Tuesday, the place was dead.

He stopped hearing the docent’s voice clearly, as though he were underwater. He followed her upstairs. Her legs, ninety and blue and veiny in her whitish stockings, shook less than his did. At the top of the stairs she turned back and moved her mouth, looked at him expectantly. A question? She had asked him a question.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yes, ma’am.” He hoped it was the right answer.

He followed her from room to room, nodding and scrawling gibberish in his notebook. Outside the door to the tiny windowless study, he rolled his notebook and stuck it and his pen in his baggy front pocket. She opened the door outward and he followed her inside. He pointed with a trembling finger at the tiny print over the toilet table.

“Can you tell me who the artist is who made that?”

“That one? I don’t remember. Let me get a better look.”

She stepped forward and peered at the signature, which he already knew to be indecipherable. He held his breath and tried to back quietly out of the room. The edge of the rug caught under his heel and he stumbled.

She turned around. “Are you all right, hon?”

He jerked his foot free and made for the door, slamming it behind him. He grabbed the ladder-back chair that sat next to the door and wedged the top rung under the doorknob. He breathed.

Now that she was safely penned, he could hear her voice leaking under the door. Not screaming. Asking. She was asking again, something; he didn’t know what—just the sensation of her tinny voice from far away, like a house cat trapped in a basement.

He went downstairs and opened the front door. Alls and Greg came in quietly with scrunched-up nylon grocery bags and three pairs of gloves. They dispersed into the rooms, filling their bags with needlework samplers, old desk clocks, a silver-hilted hunting knife. They had a carefully made list of treasures: nothing large or cumbersome, nothing one of a kind. They did not expect the front door to open. A man they had never seen before stepped in with a garbage bag to empty the small wastebasket by the door. He was the groundskeeper, and he always came on Mondays, never Tuesdays. But here he was, seeing them.

The groundskeeper, who was past seventy, fell to the floor.

The boys grabbed the bags they had filled and fled.

 • • • 

Because the groundskeeper was too long returning to the mobile home that served as the Wynne House’s office, where he was supposed to leave his keys, the administrator who worked there came out looking for him. She found him sprawled on the foyer floor, and then she heard the warbling cries of the docent, still locked in the windowless upstairs study.

The prosecutor later said that the boys had intended to fence the goods in New York, but they had not even left the state. Grace watched the headlines change from her concrete dorm room in Prague: NO SUSPECTS IN WYNNE HEIST; WITNESS SUFFERED STROKE AT SCENE; GROUNDSKEEPER’S CONDITION STILL CRITICAL. There was a police sketch from the docent’s nearsighted description, but Grace was relieved to see that the drawing looked nothing like Riley. It could have been anyone, really.

Grace knew that Riley would worry about the groundskeeper. She could imagine him pacing, holding his fist against his mouth. That the man could die would have shaken Riley from his fantasy: the rakish glamour of a small-town antiques heist by a gang of wild boys, an intricate prank. But they had scared an old man to near-death. If he lived, he would surely identify them. But if he died, was that manslaughter? Could they call it murder, even? Grace imagined Riley’s spinning thoughts as though they were her own.

She was right to be worried. When the police found a suspect in Gregory Kimbrough, twenty, of Garland, Greg’s parents said that was impossible because he had been at the family cabin on Norris Lake for the past several days. There was one cell phone with network activity on the Wynne property at the time, the police told them, and it’s yours.

Grace hadn’t even known they could do that.

He’d probably been checking a sports score or something.

The police took the Kimbroughs into custody too, as the phone was technically theirs, and drove to the cabin with Greg’s parents in the backseat. Mr. Kimbrough was a criminal defense attorney. Greg wouldn’t have an opportunity to say anything without a lawyer present. At his parents’ urging, Greg rolled like a puppy. Alls and Riley were arrested hours later.

Grace watched the Wynne case through the foggy pinhole of the Albemarle Record and its local correspondent’s maddeningly elliptical reporting. Cy Helmers had been three years ahead of the boys in school and four ahead of her. He’d gone to Garland College and become the county paper’s cub reporter when he graduated. He reported the Wynne heist as if he were above gossip, as if he couldn’t stand to make his old schoolmates look worse than they already did.

The Czech front desk matron sent her son to fetch Grace twice more. No other student had received a phone call, and Grace felt conspicuous and exposed as she conducted these conversations, despite the fact that the woman spoke no English. There was a plastic window over the counter, through which students passing through the lobby could see her. Grace faced the wall.

The second phone call was from Grace’s mother, whose very voice seemed to go pale when Grace said that no, she would not come back in time for the sentencing; no, she did not know when she would come back at all. Her mother, whose maternal passions were seldom if ever directed at Grace, now implored her: How could she just abandon Riley like this?

“Abandon him?” Grace was incredulous on the line. “The person I built my life on, the last decade and my entire future, the one and only person I can call mine”—this was a dig—“just committed a whole parade of felonies with his idiot friends. And you think I should come home to support him?” She was shaking when she finished. Her mother had little to say after that.

The third and last call was from Riley’s father.

The boys had been released into their families’ custody, awaiting sentencing. It was evening in Prague, morning in Tennessee, and Dr. Graham was calling from his office at the college.

“I think I understand,” he began, “why you would not want to come back for this.”

Grace had nothing to say. It had not occurred to her that he would call. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. A truth.

“Us too. And him. He may be having the hardest time believing it.”

“I don’t think he knew what he was really doing,” she said. “He couldn’t have. People make mistakes without realizing—one bad decision can just carry you away. And the three of them together. You know.”

“We should have checked him more,” Dr. Graham said quietly. “I guess you seemed to keep him in line enough.” He laughed, a little drily. “Grace, you know we love you as our daughter.”

They had said this for years: not like a daughter but as our daughter, and Grace had bloomed under those words and their power to make her one of them. But it was Dr. Graham calling her, not Mrs. Graham, and he was calling her from his office, not from their home.

Grace remembered shooting skeet with the Grahams when she was fifteen, her first time. She had done well, as well as Riley and his brothers, and Dr. Graham had laughed with surprise and delight. “Goddammit, son,” he had said to Riley. “You’ll never do better.”

“If there’s anything you know that could help him,” he said now, “anything at all—”

“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Grace said.

 • • • 

Grace did not call. She did not write. Just before they went to Lacombe, she received a single letter from Garland.

Dear Grace,

Love,

Riley

She never knew whether to read it as an indictment of her silence or a promise of his.

What he must think of her, what his family must think of her—what they must say. She hated to think about it. She worried less about what Alls thought of her now. He had known long before Riley how bad Grace could really be.