The Talented Miss Farwell Read online

  Becky’s lawyers glanced at each other. The government’s lawyers bent toward each other to confer in whispers. Judge Merida had a slight frown, looking down at the monitor. Becky alone understood. These were all the works Tracy had made during the years of their patron agreement. She recognized many of them, had owned several. They were in museums and collections around the world.

  Tracy Moncton paused, blinked several times at the page in her hand. “I offer this list in lieu of what I was asked to prepare, that is, a more traditional statement of character. In lieu of a description of a longtime business arrangement whose origins were more important to me than I could explain within these circumstances. And in lieu of my gratitude for her patronage, and my misgivings about that now. I hope this list might be useful to Ms. Farwell in the coming years.” Tracy raised her face then, and Becky watched intently as the artist’s gaze blindly swept past her on the screen. With a quick motion, Tracy took off her reading glasses. “Thank you for including this statement into the proceedings.” She nodded at someone off-camera, and the screen blacked out.

  Warmth in her limbs, a tingle of energy. The first feelings of well-being she’d had all day. Becky tried to hold on to it, this inner strength, tried not to hear the lawyers and judge talking around and above her.

  “Does the defense call any further witnesses as to character?”

  “No, your honor. At this time, we’d like to allow Ms. Farwell to give her statement.”

  At the witness stand, Becky faced the courtroom audience for the first time all day. She brushed at her blouse, smoothing and tucking it, with fingers that felt thick and clumsy. In a surreal haze she saw suddenly that what she’d taken for an abstract print on the cheap fabric was actually tiny repeated ducks. Or loons, maybe. Hundreds of little black water birds cascading down her chest and stomach.

  She realized she was delaying the inevitable: looking up at the people assembled to watch her be sent to prison. When she did, and felt the blunt force of their collective hatred, her will curdled.

  “You may speak now, Ms. Farwell,” Judge Merida told her.

  “Yes. Thank you.” She lightly touched the microphone to judge the right distance, a gesture she’d performed a hundred times before. For so many weeks and months, she had dreamed of this moment. Imagined giving a fully prepared performance: penitent, but eager to explain. She would weave in stories about all the times she had brought Pierson back from the brink—not just with money, but with her ideas, her efforts, her devotion. She wouldn’t get into the weeds of art collecting, but would describe her perspective on everything they had heard up to now. She’d won Pierson over to her way of thinking so many times before, why couldn’t she do it one last time? Make them see.

  What a fool, she thought now. To think she still held that power. All her prepared rhetorical flourishes emptied out. She could no longer delude herself about the pain she had caused.

  “Ms. Farwell. Do you have anything you wish to say to the court at this time?”

  “No. I mean, yes.” Her throat tight, her hands heavy weights. “I would just like to say that I’m sorry. I apologize to those I’ve hurt.” She said it quickly and sat back.

  Judge Merida denied the motion for self-surrender, denied the defense’s motion for clemency based on cooperation with authorities, and explained why the upward variance in his sentencing was more than warranted by the scope of the fraud. She would serve twenty years. Bond was revoked and the defendant was to be placed in custody immediately.

  Stifled gasps ran through the courtroom, a smatter of applause. Becky held on to the table’s edge, shaking. From here to prison. One of her lawyers put a hand on her arm.

  Judge Merida pushed his glasses up into his hair again, rested his forearms on the bench. He spoke to Becky and his tone changed, as if they were the only two people in the room. “The Bureau of Prisons will provide you with church, with classes if you desire. You’ll get the chance to think about what you’ve done to this place. To your people. You will be incarcerated for most of the rest of your life, but—” Here the judge swept his gaze fiercely around the courtroom before coming back to Becky. “Your lifelong sense of civic responsibility and the efforts you made for Pierson—when you did make them—do not go unnoticed by this court. Good luck to you, Ms. Farwell.” He banged his gavel. “Adjourned.”

  34

  After

  After the sentencing, people from Pierson—especially those who’d driven in for the hearing and got hit with bad traffic on the way home—talked about Becky and prison. Prison would be different for Becky Farwell than it would be for pretty much anyone else, they knew. The ones who hated her the most delighted in imagining the hardships awaiting her: Where’s all your fancy pictures now, Becky? And: How’d you like them prison PJs? Crueler jokes were about her getting beat up, and about how she’d be someone’s bitch by the end of the first week. But those were few, and no one took real pleasure in them. For all that had come out, all she’d done, too many people had memories of Becky Farwell at the first Planting for the Future day, clipboard in hand, of her running lap after lap around the track at 3 am, of the DJ she’d finagled for the high school prom. Also no one could possibly imagine Becky Farwell, prison bitch.

  “No visitors on family day,” someone mentioned, in satisfaction.

  “Doesn’t have any anyway,” someone else pointed out.

  At some level, all of them understood that Becky was prepared for life in prison. It’d hurt her, of course—she was human. God knew she liked her creature comforts. But she’d always lived alone. And hadn’t she overcome tough times before? Made the best of a bad situation? These were characteristics the town had always admired in her, after all. Everyone admitted that Becky’s signature sturdiness would serve her well, incarcerated.

  As it turned out, the first two years at West Virginia’s Hazelton Federal were as hard on Becky as her most ruthless detractors could have wished. In later years she gave that period a name—Orientation—and then she tried never to think about it at all.

  But in year three she answered a few questions about a fine installment schedule for an inmate unclear on her restitution agreement. She settled a debate between two women about whether prison accounts bore interest, and which was a better deal for phone charges, postal money order or personal check. Soon she was helping people fill out dependent forms and asset forfeiture paperwork; she sketched out a monthly budget for a woman to send to her granddaughter; she did the math on Social Security reinstatement for a woman set to be released in 2028.

  By year four, tired of overhearing idiotic opinions about money, Becky designed and taught a twelve-week extracurricular called Personal Finance 100. She’d originally named it 101 but quickly realized she needed to downshift into a more remedial mode. She illustrated what a pay stub looked like, detailed how to fill out a check, explained what kind of numbers appeared on a bank statement. This class—held once a week after dinner—was so popular that fights broke out over who would get the first row. Many of those enrolled had never held traditional employment, and they hung on Becky’s every word and copied numbers laboriously into well-paged notebooks.

  From there Becky branched out into Stock Market Basics, Retirement 101, and independent study projects for those who wanted to compare and contrast mutual funds.

  She built a life in this way.

  Whether or not people in Pierson learned about what she’d been doing in prison, they wouldn’t have been surprised by it. Becky always had to be in charge, always had to be organizing people, bossing them. She’d done it for them for years. They’d wanted her to.

  Becky never returned to art. She didn’t open any mail from that part of her past; once, when a wealthy collector colleague applied to visit, she rejected the paperwork. Unclear on the exact nature of art’s connection to her crime, other inmates called her “Picasso” for a while, which she tolerated with no visible reaction. To all appearances, Becky had easily given up her obsession for ar
t—for chasing it, buying it, for being in its presence. The mania had released her.

  At least that’s what someone might think.

  Becky was so good at lying. She could lie persuasively enough to confuse even herself about what was true and what was not. Over the years to come she built a lie strong enough to feel like belief.

  I’m free, now. I’m free of all that.

  When Becky did think about the past—because you had to, every once in a while; prison meant down time, hours of boredom—she went way back in time. Before all of that.

  One day she returned to again and again was a trip Hank had taken her on when she was about eight. This would have been after her mother died, so Becky guessed that he wanted to get out of the house as much as possible. Get away from the sadness and also the reminder of their financial strain.

  Why that day’s outing included the school bus park, she could never figure out. All Becky remembered was running wild with another kid, either a girl or boy about her age, all around the property by themselves. Maybe Hank had a friend who worked there? Was having coffee in an office somewhere while she scampered around?

  The day had been windy. Cold enough that she’d had on a jacket but she ran so much she heated herself up, shed the jacket, and kept running. They played tag, she and this other child, darted around and around the school buses. In her memory it seemed like hundreds but actually it was probably fifty or sixty, row after row of neatly lined-up mammoth yellow blocks. All empty, all impassive.

  The magic strangeness of that space made them joyful, deranged, wild with freedom. Sprinting up and down the rows, a flash of a sneaker, a shout from up ahead. Becky could remember the exact pounding of her heart, the jumpy sensation of never knowing where the kid would pop out—right next to her, or dozens of buses up ahead. Hank not there but nearby. The way the wind ricocheted in and around the heavy vehicles, the way the sun’s glare bounced off the chrome and metal. And her own happiness. Her shrieking, racing happiness.

  If she thought about it enough, that day, she could let herself float around in the memory, and then she could pull up to an aerial view, see the school buses from on high: inch-long lozenges of that singular yellow-orange, row upon row of them, unending. The tops of the heads of two small figures flashing in and out of sight among the sameness.

  Becky held that vision in her mind as long as she could. It would have made a good painting.

  Author’s Note

  Driving north on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive one day in 2012, I found myself captivated by a radio news report about the arrest of Rita Crundwell in a town named Dixon, Illinois. I wasn’t alone. As more details of Crundwell’s epic crime came out, the wider public was riveted by the fact that a government employee had managed to embezzle $54 million over 20 years—by herself—from a small township. But while news teams and investigators scrambled to find out and explain how Crundwell had pulled off what would turn out to be the largest municipal fraud in US history, I was more interested in imagining what it might have felt like for someone to do what she did. What kind of mentality does one need to show up to work every day, to interact with colleagues and neighbors and friends, while stealing from them year after year? What impact does sustaining a double life have on one’s psyche? I was curious about how such a person might deceive others and how she might necessarily deceive herself.

  From there my focus moved away from Rita Crundwell toward a main character I began to see in my mind: a woman with significant gifts of intelligence and drive, who lives in a tight-knit rural community, and is astonished by a sudden—and not entirely welcome—obsession with art. Becky Farwell came together as soon as I understood the nature of her all-encompassing desire: the way she has no context for loving art and for her ability to instantly suss out a good painting, growing up as she did without exposure to serious art. The way Becky craves paintings is inborn, as much of a surprise to her as to anyone else. As Crash Davis tells Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, “When you were a baby, the gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt.” Once I developed this part of her character, I saw that the world of contemporary art collecting—with its inherent high stakes, big money, and class conflict—was a perfect arena for Becky to play out her complex relationship with the truth.

  Beyond knowing the basic facts of Rita Crundwell’s crime, I purposely learned little about the person herself. In making up the fictional world of The Talented Miss Farwell, I left myself plenty of space to create characters and a place I could develop from scratch.

  My fictional town of Pierson shares topographical features with Dixon, but isn’t meant to stand in for the people or businesses of the actual place. In the same way, Becky Farwell is not Rita Crundwell. What often happens for novelists is that the bare circumstances of a real situation quickly give way to an entirely different imagined story, and this was the case for me with The Talented Miss Farwell.

  To those who are interested in learning more about Rita Crundwell, I recommend the documentary All the Queen’s Horses. For background on the art world, I found the following books to be both helpful and engrossing: Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton; I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) by Richard Polsky; and Collecting Art for Love, Money and More by Ethan Wagner and Thea Westreich Wagner.

  My title is, of course, in homage to the late great Patricia Highsmith, whose brilliant book was one source of inspiration for the life and crimes of Becky Farwell.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you first and always to Alice Tasman, for believing in me and my work. Kate Nintzel made this a better book and me a better writer. Thank you to the amazing team at Morrow.

  Carol Johns generously answered my questions about 1980s-era Illinois accounting office practices, and Nico Commandeur helped me understand more about white collar criminal prosecution. I’m grateful for their time and effort; all remaining errors are mine alone.

  Special thanks to the good people and books of the Lincoln Park branch of the Chicago Public Library.

  As ever, my writers group is indispensable when it comes to wisdom, enthusiasm, and laughter: Rachel DeWoskin, Gina Frangello, Thea Goodman, Dika Lam, Rebecca Makkai, Zoe Zolbrod. I’m thankful for skilled readers Liam Callanan and Valerie Laken. I couldn’t be happier for the friendship of Lauryn Gouldin, Jenny Mercein, and Caroline Hand Romita. And thanks to the witches, who know who they are.

  Most of all, thank you to my family—Alan and Betsy, Lowrey, Jocelyn, Malcolm. And to Courtney, Samuel, and Wendy, with all my love.

  About the Author

  EMILY GRAY TEDROWE is the author of two previous novels, Blue Stars and Commuters. She earned a PhD in English literature from New York University and a BA from Princeton University. She has received an Illinois Arts Council award as well as fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A frequent book reviewer for USA Today and other publications, Tedrowe also writes essays, interviews, and short stories. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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  Copyright

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, art works, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author's imagination.

  the talented miss farwell. Copyright © 2020 by Emily Gray Tedrowe. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval sy
stem, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Cover photographs © Ysbrand Cosijn/Trevillion Images (woman); © your/Shutterstock (torn paper); © Tomekbudujedomek/Getty Images (frame); © Laura Hanifin (paper pieces)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-289773-2

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-289772-5

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