The Talented Miss Farwell Page 26

  “Go.”

  “But I—”

  “You have thirty seconds to urinate.”

  Shaking, stymied, Becky gave up hope. What a foolish plan, to somehow get in here alone with her bag and have time enough to take out the Tuymans, unwrap it, and hold that small beauty in quiet, in private.

  When she wept, it was for her own stupidity and because she felt the full loss of that impossible last moment and because she had to hike up her skirt and lower her underwear in front of two strangers with guns, had to crouch, trembling, as they watched, had to piss with both doors open, the stall and the restroom, had to piss in full view of the hallway where her coworkers had gathered, and she did, with wet cheeks and bare thighs, she cried and pissed and the agents were right there, impassive, unconcerned, and Becky understood for the first time what life would be like from now on.

  32

  Pierson

  2012—2014

  The vehicles came and went every day to the Farwell property—to what was still then, technically, the Farwell property: local and state police cars, SUVs with the US Marshals Service logo on the door, and unmarked sedans driven by FBI agents. They parked on the paved walkway, out back on the grass, anywhere outside the cones and stakes set up around the barn.

  The police set up a barricade at each corner of County Road M and kept all media vans back a quarter mile. They turned away any curious onlooker, local or not.

  They took the doors off the barn. Set up enormous light fixtures and power cords and plastic cones. Used ribbons of tape to mark off an entrance and an exit; carried boxes in, carried boxes out. Talked seriously in small groups: measuring, photographing, recording. Set up tarps, a folding table, a sort of staging area. Moved cars out of the way for a forklift.

  After many months, the main operation was complete. FBI and federal marshals had removed all the art. Sometime after that, surveyors finished assessing the Art Barn itself—how it had been modified, the amount of construction work it had taken to build out the sublevel. Someone took away the tarp and pulled up the stakes.

  What bothered Becky was that they’d never replaced one of the barn doors. It stayed propped against the opening, not attached back onto its top sliding hinge, giving the barn a caved-in look, like a mouth with its dentures removed. How Hank would have hated to see his good strong door now bowed in and weakening against the frame. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was people who didn’t take care of their tools and their property.

  Becky had many long hours to think about this, looking out at the now-emptied structure: the same red, the same wood, the same size as it had always been. If she was tired enough she could trick herself into thinking nothing had changed about her father’s barn. If you ignored the ever-present cop car—and the tilted door—it was the same old place out of which they’d once run Farwell Agriculture Inc.

  One morning toward the end time of house arrest, Becky sat up in bed, quietly but instantly awake. Thinking she must have heard something. She crept to the shades and looked down onto the front yard, the empty road: nothing. Except—there. Someone walking slowly toward the house. Becky gasped and flew to the stairs, her robe trailing open behind her.

  She flung open her front door. “Ingrid!”

  Ingrid came up the walkway. She put a hand up to shade her eyes and saw Becky there in the door. She stopped and put a hand on her back, looked over her shoulder.

  “Please,” Becky said.

  Ingrid nodded, after a moment, and came inside. Becky hadn’t seen or spoken to her in twenty-two months.

  “Did anyone follow you or . . . bother you?”

  “No.” Her tone was uninviting so Becky didn’t explain about the cars that swept up and down the street at odd hours. Sometimes it was just to gawk. But sometimes it was to scream curses or dump garbage on the lawn or, once, heave bags of dog shit onto her front steps.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Becky said quickly. “Did you get my messages, my letters? I didn’t know if you wanted to see me.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t, really.” Ingrid’s voice was calm and dry. She walked a little farther into the living room, taking it in. Agents had combed through the house and taken anything of value. The carpet was ghost-lightened where furniture had stood. Bookcases were gone, and the dining set. Most of the cabinets and closets were empty.

  Becky had waited weeks, months, for a letter back, before understanding it wouldn’t come. Every day mail flooded into the house, letters and letters, infuriated townspeople, dismayed people from her past, anyone and everyone she’d ever met, or so it seemed. Becky rarely opened an envelope from the heavy piles, although one day a plain business-sized envelope with “D. Marner” written above the return address squeezed at her chest. Diana Marner, Becky’s math teacher from so many years ago. The one who’d driven her to math tournaments, who’d smoked Slims, who thought Becky could have followed in her own path. Becky stood in the foyer and held that unopened letter for a long, long time before dropping it down to the floor with the rest of them.

  “So,” Ingrid said. She turned to gaze directly into Becky’s eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh sure. I’m okay. Let me get you a glass of water, let me—”

  “It’s fine.”

  Becky hurried to fill one even though Ingrid waved her off. “Why did you walk, it’s hot out already, it’s—”

  “Neil didn’t want me to come, so I didn’t want to take the car.” Ingrid ignored the glass Becky held out to her. Becky wavered, then set it down on the kitchen counter.

  “How have you been? How are the kids? Okay, Neil, too. See? Here I am, asking about Neil.” Why was she joking around, for god’s sake? “We can sit—here, I have these chairs.” She dragged two plastic folding chairs from the utility closet and opened them facing each other where the dining room table used to be.

  Surprisingly, Ingrid sat down at once. She was so much heavier than Becky had expected. She’d gained, it seemed, thirty or more pounds. The area around her eyes was swollen in the way it always was when she had cried. She wasn’t crying now, though. “You have no idea, do you. Of how much harm you did. You think it’s just about you.”

  “Of course I don’t! It’s not just about me—it was never just about me! The whole time, I was putting money back in. I was planning to put it all back! And I would have, if I’d just had more time.”

  Ingrid laughed, short and mean. “Oh please.”

  “I did things for the town that never could have happened if I hadn’t taken some money. It’s complicated to explain, but whatever money I used made more money, when I—”

  “When you flipped the criminal goods you’d bought using stolen funds?” Ingrid slapped her hands against her thighs, once, hard. “Let me have that water.”

  Becky, caught off guard by the propulsion of Ingrid’s words, hurried to get it and sat back down.

  Ingrid gulped and wiped her mouth. “You did what was right for you. What made you feel good, so you could tell yourself you were the town hero. Instead of a fucking vampire, sucking us dry.”

  “I took care of you,” Becky blurted out. “I did my best to help you out, didn’t I? Every one of your needs, everything you’d let me do, was taken care of.”

  “Well, that’s the worst part, isn’t it?” Ingrid’s eyes glittered, and her smile was horrible. “I know you did. So does everyone else. They all believed I was in on it.”

  “No!” Becky said, truly surprised. Not possible that anyone would see Ingrid in that way. “No one would think you—”

  “You should have seen what it was like. Women shunning me at church, so I stopped going. Rachel got so many hate messages we had to close her accounts. Friends I’d had for thirty years wouldn’t return my calls.”

  “Ingrid,” Becky breathed.

  But Ingrid was on a roll. “Neil left me. He’s back now, but yeah, we separated for a year. We fought all the time, because he’d never liked my friendship with you, he never tru
sted you, and he didn’t hold up well through the investigations. Rachel dropped out of school for a bit because she was worried about me.”

  Becky curved into herself, hands over her mouth. She could handle this only if Ingrid would stop using that bright hard voice. “I never—”

  “What was worse than what everyone said, though, was what everyone was thinking. That I knew. What you were doing.” Ingrid stood up, walked around the empty room. “And you know what? I did. I didn’t know that you were stealing millions of dollars from Pierson—from me, and every other taxpayer you’ve lived with your whole life—so you could buy yourself some fancy art collection. I didn’t know the specifics. But I knew.” She was nodding to herself, her back to Becky. “So many times I thought, this is fishy. Or, this can’t be right. But did I listen to myself?”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Did I stop you, all those times you paid for things? Did I ever really make myself look at what felt off? No. I took money from you not just for me but for my kids. Which means I let them . . . I let them benefit from—” Now she was crying, and Becky was also. Ingrid stood and cried into her hands and Becky wanted to get up from her plastic lawn chair but she was afraid to go to her. How could she not have known how this would have played out? How Ingrid would take it on herself, absorb Becky’s crimes as if they were her own?

  After some time, Ingrid wiped her face, came back over to drink the rest of the water. But she didn’t sit down.

  “Ingrid.” Becky’s voice wobbled. If only she could make this better. “I’m so sorry, so sorry for . . . You are the best person I know, and I never ever wanted anything to happen to you.”

  Ingrid shrugged. “You know, the other night we were watching TV and something about you came on.” Ingrid smiled, her old smile, and it pierced Becky. “Neil was about to change the channel but I heard the news guy say that you didn’t get arrested for so long after they found out— It was a month, right?”

  “Right.”

  “For a whole month, you didn’t get arrested because the FBI said there had to be someone else involved. A man. They thought a woman could never pull off that level of fraud by herself.”

  Becky smiled thinly. She’d heard this, too, from her lawyers.

  “Neil switched it right off but I thought, She’d get a kick out of that.” She hesitated, then said, “I came today to tell you that I’m going to testify for the government. Next week.”

  The sentencing trial was to be held at a federal court in downtown Chicago. Becky had thought it would have come sooner, given her immediate guilty plea and complete cooperation—she provided information about the art, detailed specs on artist, price, provenance. Through her court-appointed lawyers she did as much as possible to aid with the seizure of assets for resale. The higher the auction prices, the better it would be for Pierson. Of course with the feds in charge of assets forfeiture it was sure to be a mess. She knew the art world must be in a frenzy, terrified of Becky’s tainted pieces flooding the market all at once, dragging down prices and scaring away buyers.

  “All right,” Becky said. “I mean . . . I’m glad you are. If it will help at all, like . . . help you prove once and for all you didn’t have anything to do with—”

  “You think I’m doing this for me?” Ingrid said, her voice sharp again. “I’m doing it for TJ.” She waited, and Becky’s confused silence seemed to confirm something. “For TJ and all the others. Everyone who could have benefited from the Sunrise Program.”

  “The what?” Even as she said it, Becky knew it was the wrong word to say. But she didn’t know what Ingrid was talking about.

  “You honestly have no idea, do you. The Sunrise Program, the proposal you shot down, how many times? Winter 2002, and then summer 2003. Then again in a totally new format in 2005—”

  “Okay, I’m sorry, I’m trying to . . . Remind me.”

  “The special-needs program! For the school! We had the lawyers, we had the specialists, we got the grant from NIH and all Pierson had to do was match the funds. Plus our group covered half of that with fundraising so really all Pierson had to do was take care of the other twenty-five percent.” Ingrid paused, still gazing down at Becky in her chair. “We did so much research. The stuff I used to tell you about. That integrating forms of treatment, neural, sensory, psychological—all in one group setting—works best. The kids learn from each other. They practice social interaction, they get prepared to be in the world. A program like Sunrise transitions them to assisted living, so they can be independent but still near family.”

  Becky only vaguely remembered the proposal, the discussion, something to do with social support for kids in the area, not even necessarily in the Pierson area. She’d shot it down easily, without much thought. What little money they had for the schools barely funded the basics. But she had never known how much the project meant to Ingrid. She hadn’t paid attention, of course, figuring that what she gave for TJ’s care was all that mattered. She closed her eyes, unable to look at Ingrid.

  “I have to go.” Ingrid came close and Becky breathed in her scent, baby powder and lemon. She felt one feather touch along her temple as Ingrid tucked her hair back behind her ear.

  Then Ingrid moved away. The front door opened and closed. By the time Becky composed herself, got herself up, and went after her, Ingrid was past the yard and walking fast along the road, head down and arms holding each other. If Becky had had the strength to run, the ankle monitor wouldn’t have let her. And if she’d had the strength to call out to Ingrid, it was too late.

  33

  Chicago

  Dirksen Federal Courthouse

  2014

  When the judge entered the courtroom, the packed room stood up with audible anticipation. Hundreds of people had crowded in behind Becky, and although she willed herself not to turn around she could feel their presence like a furnace of fury at her back. So many faces, so many voices she would recognize if she allowed herself to look or listen.

  Judge Merida was in his late fifties, Latino, a pair of spectacles pushed up onto the top of his head as if they were sunglasses. He spoke to the lawyers, both hers and the prosecutors (all men), about motions and countermotions, exhibits, notices of intent. Becky concentrated on breathing slowly. She wouldn’t break down. She’d let the process unfold.

  Her hands, though, twisted violently against each other in her lap.

  Witnesses for the government began to appear in the witness box. FBI agents testified to her method—writing fraudulent checks—and the numbers, which produced actual gasps from those in the pews: For example, between April 2011 and July 2011, the defendant wrote thirty-two checks to total three million nine hundred fourteen thousand, which as you can see only sixty-nine thousand of which was for legitimate town business. A worker from Pierson Streets and San—Callum Briggs, who smiled hugely at her before he remembered to look away—testified that the town pool went dry for three summers, that she’d denied funds for playground maintenance, tree pruning by the riverwalk, and cemetery repairs. Town council member after council member got up to testify to her malfeasance. The librarian wiped away tears while reporting how many fewer kids and seniors they’d been able to accommodate because of shortened hours. Ingrid testified, quietly and calmly, not looking at Becky. Becky held herself still during each person’s testimony, kept her gaze steady. She had to work not to swallow too much; the dryness in her throat was a constant danger.

  Those in the courtroom who were out for blood had a real disappointment when it became clear that Mayor Ken Brennan would not be appearing. Literal boos rippled through the room when one of the attorneys for the government began to read into the record Ken’s pat statement, causing Judge Merida to call for order. Becky knew what they were thinking: Can’t show his face. He was in on it, how could he not be. All those years, he just left her with the keys to the candy store.

  In the years since her arrest, Ken had hung on to his job, but in name only. Editorial after editoria
l raked him over the coals. He was charged, then the charges were dropped. In May the town council unanimously voted to reverse-engineer the government structure to a “management plan,” executed by a group of hired consultants. After Ken’s term was up at the end of the year, he was out. From what little Becky had found out, at home in her ankle bracelet, he had put his house on the market and moved the kids to Rockford to live with his sister. No word on where Marie Brennan was.

  Becky had waited to hear from him all those sleepless months, and no message ever came. She realized in her courtroom seat that she’d even been hoping to hear from him today, in some way. But the bland statement that disparaged her conduct and praised Pierson for its fortitude sounded nothing like Ken. Nothing like how he used to talk with her.

  After that, the proceedings picked up speed. The government concluded its case. The only person willing to speak on Becky’s behalf—of hundreds pursued by her lawyers, or so they told her—was Tracy Moncton, although she too declined to attend in person. Instead, she sent a video.

  When Tracy’s face and upright posture came on the screen of the monitor that was wheeled to the front of the courtroom, the place buzzed with murmurs and whispers. Over the past ten years Tracy Moncton had become a director of movies the audience had heard of, if not actually seen. Independent films with name actors, including one that took the big award in France.

  “My name is Tracy Moncton. I’m a visual artist and a filmmaker. I understand that I don’t need to take an oath for a sentencing hearing. I’m going to read a prepared statement.” Tracy put on a pair of yellow reading glasses, low on the nose, and lifted one typewritten page. Her height made it easy to see most of her torso in the camera’s frame: thin, long-limbed, in a loose black jacket over a black blouse. Her hair seemed the only undisciplined part of her: a wild and frizzy soft halo, shades of gray and blond. “Boy with flag (version one),” she read aloud. “Boy with flag (version two). Emily in her kitchen (editioned series). Hero Lake (artist proof). Mika’s yarn (editioned series). Going Underground (film and print). Going Underground (installation).” Several minutes passed. Tracy read a dozen titles, twenty, fifty, more—no context, only the bare essentials of title and medium.