The Talented Miss Farwell Read online

  That was when it hit her, in the church, when her gaze slid across the aisle to Tim’s family’s side. His much more complicated family, sprouted along several divorce and remarriage lines, including his two stepmothers and his grudging father who had only recently come around to Tim’s “lifestyle choice.” Mrs. Fletcher had related the entire saga, the convoluted arrangements and reception politics, and what Becky had not paid attention to at the time but remembered now, looking at all the drama-causers, was one line: That man’s new wife gets all the attention but it’s Tim’s mother I’m going to give the best seat in the house.

  Tim’s mother. Heart pounding, Becky’s eyes sought her out, an older woman, unassuming, wiping her eyes. The first wife.

  As soon as she could, she excused herself from the festivities.

  It wasn’t Miles Green’s widow she needed access to, that imperious, well-guarded figure, it was his first wife. That’s who would have sold the portrait to American!

  Five weeks later, Tarek and Mrs. Green’s chauffeur helped Adaline Green Remington into the Barn. They carried her wheelchair in but it was Becky who steered her down the ramp and into the gallery.

  Mrs. Green—Becky knew that wasn’t her name anymore, but she couldn’t help thinking it—took her time settling herself. She was thin and straight-backed in her chair, a pale African American with dark speckles across her nose and cheeks, glossy hair neatly curled and pinned. Once she’d arranged her scarf and straightened her trousers, her hands lay heavy in her lap, pink palms up.

  Then she looked at the work. Tarek had rehung the four portraits at Becky’s precise measurements so they’d be at eye level for Mrs. Green in her wheelchair.

  “Well.”

  If the portraits unsettled her, this woman who’d been married to Miles Green for only four years, no children, before the boom of his fame and fortune, she didn’t show it. Becky knew she couldn’t have seen these paintings since they were made in the drafty railroad flat the two of them had shared in the 1930s.

  “So you really did. Get these together, almost all of them.”

  “I did.”

  “That one—” Mrs. Green pointed with her knuckles to Self-Portrait, Pool Hall. “You got it from that fellow in Canada?”

  “Maybe,” Becky said.

  “He bilked you.”

  Becky laughed. “Probably.”

  “Let me see that one. The third one.” Becky went to the painting and carefully lifted it off the wall, offering it to Mrs. Green with both hands. When it was on her lap, Mrs. Green breathed a long sigh. Becky crouched down and they both studied the exquisite little masterpiece.

  For a long time they were quiet. Becky wondered what these paintings looked like to Mrs. Green, all these young faces of the man who’d left her for another woman, after many other women. That was so long ago in her full life. A private investigator had found her, married and comfortable, surrounded by kids and grandkids, in a Houston suburb. Becky had expected to have to woo hard, but it had taken only one heartfelt handwritten letter to persuade Mrs. Green to come see these pieces (all expenses paid, of course). Becky had offered to pay for her husband or son or anyone else to accompany her, but aside from the chauffeur arrangements, Mrs. Green had wanted to come alone.

  At last Mrs. Green handed the frame back. “What does the Foundation say?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Your name is on the papers.”

  “And what’s the museum say?”

  “They wouldn’t say much to me, unfortunately.”

  “But you want it, the one of him at the docks.”

  “Very much.”

  Mrs. Green was nodding slow and heavy. “You’d keep it here, with the others?”

  “Right there.” Becky pointed at the space reserved for it.

  Mrs. Green laughed, a dry cough of a laugh. Becky didn’t understand, smiled uneasily. “I don’t mind,” the woman said eventually, still chuckling. “I don’t mind at all. Sure, put it here. Put him all the way down here.”

  Becky was afraid to clarify, but she stumbled through it anyway, the embarrassing need to confirm that it was happening, it was true, it was yes. Yes, yes, yes. She pushed Mrs. Green’s unwieldy chair back up the ramp herself. Floated them both up to the waiting chauffeur.

  The day Tarek hung Self-Portrait at the Docks didn’t arrive for nearly six long months, as American dragged out all the paperwork and legal proceedings for the sale. But when he did, Becky was frantic, barely contained, barely breathing until she could be left alone in the room.

  Miles Green, self-portraits in watercolor. A completed circle, completely perfected. Five strong faces, one face. Together for the first and only time.

  Look at what I did. Oh look. Look.

  Becky stayed down in the Art Barn with those portraits for as long as she could. She would make it last, this moment. As soon as she was up there again—out there again, in the world—she would have to think about the long strips of yellow caution tape strung along Pierson’s riverwalk on both sides of the banks. The boards nailed to block the stairs that led down to what had been deemed a public hazard. She’d have to think about the op-ed that displayed a photo of the ugly damaged walkways next to one from thirty years ago, kids holding balloons and dangling their feet off the still-pristine concrete. It’s a shame, everyone said. It did shame Becky, every time she drove across a bridge and had to glimpse the crumbled mess that ran the length of the town.

  She couldn’t fix the riverwalk now. The time to have done that was ten, maybe twenty years ago, according to the last surveyor team they’d had out. Their official recommendation was a complete tear-down, strip the banks and install blocks of mesh-wrapped rocks, a miserable low-cost retaining wall. Even all the money Becky had spent chasing these Miles Green portraits couldn’t bring back Pierson’s beautiful riverwalk. Time and the river’s endless flow had eroded the town’s shores irrevocably.

  “Crumbled things from the inside,” is how one of the engineers had put it.

  But in her subterranean gallery was this small piece of perfection, these portraits brought together for the first and maybe last time. Becky had done that, so she would stay down with them as long as she could.

  31

  Pierson

  2012

  It took a long time for Becky to recover after completing the Green portraits. In fact, she never did recover in time. Just after the Docks painting arrived she fell ill with the flu and a high fever, spending two days at the hospital for fluids and another week in bed—the first time she could remember taking time off work for anything other than art business.

  On a follow-up visit to her GP, the doctor took one look at Becky and ordered a full workup. She was visibly weakened and had lost almost twenty pounds from her already slight frame. There were sores in her throat and white lines on her fingernails she’d never noticed before. I’m fine, she insisted. Just need to eat more meat. She tossed the prescription for follow-up tests in the garbage on her way to the parking garage, but annoying health issues continued to plague her.

  All that summer she often had to work from home, constantly on speakerphone with the office, having the junior accountants drive to and from with folders and paperwork and the mail, of course. She insisted that the mail be brought to her as usual, and as usual everyone accommodated this eccentricity. Mrs. Bucaro—who was covering Mrs. Fletcher’s desk until Becky could figure out how to replace Mrs. Fletcher (no one could replace Mrs. Fletcher)—boxed up stack after stack of get-well cards that had been dropped off by residents and vendors. Everyone wondered when she would be back “for good.” Becky herself wondered. Some days she felt energy returning, but most mornings she couldn’t will herself out of bed. Would end up bringing her laptop and phone into bed and doing as much as she could from there.

  She couldn’t even begin to think about tackling plans for a giant sale, dismantling as much of her collection as she could, the recoup of capital that would let her pour all the money back into Pierson’s c
offers. Right now that was too much, too hard. But she would. She’d get it back.

  By the end of September Becky had made it into the office several days in a row. One morning Ken poked his head in first thing. “Hi,” he said, staying outside the door. She saw him try to hide his surprise at how she looked: pale, wobbly, lessened, no matter how hard she’d worked on her makeup and outfit this morning.

  “Thank god,” Becky said, pushing one of four fruit baskets toward him. “Someone to help me eat my way to a clear desk.”

  “Just wanted to say, um, how’re you feeling?”

  Becky wondered if they would ever find their way back to the easiness of the years before, when their visions for Pierson were so aligned and clear, their goals and methods so closely determined. Used to be that Becky had literally been unable to tell who had written a budget memo, because over the years her language had become entwined with Ken’s. All that had died with the Springfield trips.

  “I’m back.” She smiled. “Want to come in?”

  “No. No, that’s okay. I’ve got the thing at eleven. Did you change things around in here?” He gestured at her office, where the quietly expensive furniture was arranged as usual. Only a familiar eye would have caught the difference: the art, almost all of it, was gone. Becky had pruned her collection down to the bone, first as a way of becoming a completist, and later in order to raise funds for the Green portraits.

  “Just a refresh,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Anyway—you’ll get me those edits? Any time this afternoon.” He tapped twice on the doorframe.

  “Listen, Ken?” Becky stood, but dizziness overtook her and she needed to press a hand against her desktop. “Whoa—”

  “Are you—” Ken started toward her.

  “Fine, fine.” Becky waved him away. “I just wanted to say that I—”

  “You should take care, Becky,” Ken said quietly. “Take it easy today.” Then he left.

  November 29, 2012. Almost two months since Ken stopped by her office alone. When Becky pulled into her spot behind Town Hall she instantly noticed the drab brown Toyota out of alignment in the parking lot, engine running. She’d driven in from Chicago where she’d spent a night at the horrible Hilton on State in order to hand-deliver a piece to a German gallerist who—surprisingly—sold her on three new Luc Tuymans he had brought for a private showing. Becky hadn’t been at all interested in Tuymans until she saw these in person. Two of the larger pieces were in her trunk now and one unframed sketch lay in the leather tote bag on the seat next to her.

  Becky observed the two women in their strange car, their eyes on her, their Illinois plates. When she shut off the engine and stepped into the cold dry air they did too. They followed her at a distance of fifty yards as she struggled to open the building’s rear door while balancing a box of yellow and pink frosted cupcakes. Padma Bedi was having twins and this afternoon was the office shower.

  Becky didn’t look back, although the women followed her up the stairwell, not saying a word. She felt them follow her into the long hall that led to her office, door open, no secretary in sight. Becky still didn’t look back, even though by now she knew.

  After that, things happened fast. Many people in her office. Men in FBI windbreakers, men in suits, uniformed police officers. Talking loud and hard to her or to each other. Her arms were relieved of cupcakes. Someone was very close, hands along her sides, her underarms, her thighs, the back of her neck. Her couch was tipped down and away from the wall, her bookcases emptied, her desk drawers broken open. She began to protest, not at the fact of what was being done, but its method. Couldn’t they slow down? Couldn’t they be more careful?

  And then at last, the moment she’d feared and dreaded and imagined for nearly thirty years: “Rebecca Farwell, this is a warrant for your arrest on charges of fraud. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right . . .”

  “I want to read it,” Becky broke in, stopping the man’s recitation. Close-cropped gray hair, unbuttoned suit jacket. “Can I—am I allowed to read it?”

  Her arms were released, and she took the papers into her hands. Everyone in the room got quiet. Becky ran her eyes over the text, the embossed seal, the government heading, but the pages shivered before her and she only wanted the stolen moment to gather herself, to try to breathe through and around the heartbeats hammering at her throat, lungs, skull.

  “All right.” She handed the warrant back. “Go ahead.” Becky could sense without seeing the consternation of a crowd building in the hall: assistants, secretaries, accountants.

  How had it finally happened? What was the detail that snagged, that gave it all away?

  Later she would learn that the cause had been her uterine biopsy, which her ob-gyn had insisted on when he discovered her erratic and often missing periods. Supposed to be a minor procedure but she’d had pain and a fair amount of bleeding, so she took two days off to recover. She hadn’t informed the office of anything—none of anyone’s business—but neither had she arranged for an assistant to get the mail; she’d assumed each day that she’d be strong enough to drive over to the post office at some point. But then the Norco made her sleepy and she put off calling someone to do it and eventually decided without actually deciding that she could skip that whole rigmarole. Just the once.

  At the moment of her arrest, Ken was in his house. He had two FBI agents standing in his foyer, off and on their phones, plus a couple more in an unmarked car parked out front.

  Ken sat at his kitchen table, doing nothing. Marie had taken the kids to her sister’s in St. Louis. They wanted to make sure that the twins had as much peace as possible before the town exploded with the news.

  Three weeks ago, Rosalind McInterye from Accounting had tapped on his door: worried, uncertain. He listened to her story with a sinking feeling. Earlier in the day Ros had gotten a call from her assistant who’d gotten a call from a temp, a floating temp they all liked named Trevor. Trevor had been on Becky’s floor for the past few days, answering calls, filing, responding to letters. So he happened to be there when the postman called, surprised that Ms. Farwell hadn’t stopped by that day, or the one before, to get the mail.

  No problem, Trevor said. I got it. He carried the two plastic tote boxes into Town Hall and settled in to open and sort the mail. He used the wide empty surface of Mrs. Fletcher’s old desk to open the bills and letters, arranging them into neat piles. Make yourself necessary, his mom always told him. So he organized the mail by department and delivered most of it to the right in-boxes. All well and good.

  Except all the different bank statements were confusing. Some were obvious, but what about this Midwest Credit Union account, for example? Should that statement get filed with all the others, or should he put it on Ms. Farwell’s desk? On her desk, he thought. But maybe he should check first.

  So Trevor asked one of the accounting assistants to take a look. She asked her boss. Soon that woman came over and took away more of the statements—messing up my piles, Trevor thought—for further study.

  Ken didn’t leave the office until nearly three the next morning. At eight am, with two lawyers behind closed doors, Ken called the police. By the time Becky returned to the office two days later, the FBI had opened a case. For the next seventeen days they tracked her every move, meticulously uncovered her money trail, bugged her phone. And all the while Ken had to smile and joke and run meetings with her, and never let on.

  His refrigerator had a cycle of noise about one minute long: hum, rattle, hiss, back to humming. Ken listened to it churn, unable to move, unable to ask the agents if it was over.

  In the agony of the past twenty-something days he’d said the same thing over and over to the investigators: I’ll do anything. He had no choice, of course. I’ll do whatever you need me to do. I just can’t be there when it happens.

  Even though Becky Farwell had ruined his career and most probably was about to ruin his life, Ken Brennan recognized what was true about himself in his kitchen
: it was him, failing her, right now.

  Becky realized Ken wasn’t there, even though she would have had a hard time sighting him through the melee of agents and police crowded in her office. She could feel that he wasn’t there, even as she called his name. He wouldn’t have been able to take this, she thought, as her arms were positioned for the cuffs.

  Trapped, unable to move. Rising panic.

  But maybe she still had time? For one last stolen moment?

  “I have to go to the bathroom.” Politely, clearly. Though they all still ignored her, preparing to move.

  “Excuse me,” she said, twisting to direct this at the female agent who held her arms. “I need to go.”

  It took a few exchanges between the agents and their boss, the gray-haired man who’d shown her the warrant, but eventually it was cleared. The female agent—Becky recognized her as one of the two who’d followed her in from the parking lot—took off the cuffs and led her out of the office. Her own personal restroom was across the hall.

  “But I need my bag,” Becky said, voice wobbling. That was the point!

  “You’re going to use the toilet,” the woman said, not unkindly.

  “Could you get it for me? The brown one, the leather tote?”

  No answer. Step by step, she was being forced toward the bathroom. Wrong, all wrong! Now Becky became aware of others in the hall, office workers gathered by the west stairs. Some dropped their eyes when she saw them. One was crying. Most stood motionless in utter shock.

  “Wait, please!” Becky cried. “Could you get my—ow—Wait!” Someone else had taken hold of her arm, not gently, and together the agents pushed her into the small powder room. One held the stall door open, the other stood in the main doorway.