Twenty-five
By the time Frances was feeling better and dressed, she emerged from her room to find everyone gone. Except Marcy.
That one was lying on her side on the couch, her back to the room.
When Aaron was a moody teenager, he’d do the same when he didn’t want to talk.
Frances walked over to Marcy and roughly pushed her onto her back.
Surprised, Marcy blinked up at her with big, light green eyes. “Hi,” she said uncertainly.
“You’ve caused a lot of problems today, missy.”
“Yeah, I am getting that vibe.”
“What are you thinking, chasing your grandma everywhere like she’s some guy you want to catch cheating?”
“I don’t know. It’s just … none of it made sense.”
“Well, obviously it didn’t make sense because we were trying to keep it a damn secret.” Frances sat on the edge of the couch. “What did you find out today, anyway?”
“That my Nana is a thief. You’re all a bunch of common thieves.”
“Common! We prefer to think of ourselves as extraordinary,” Frances said. “Most people our age have put their feet up, but not us. Also, we’re more like thievery adjacent—we’ve always had a good reason.”
Marcy snorted. “The worst of it is, Nana doesn’t know what would happen if she got caught. She’s acting like she doesn’t have a family or anyone who needs her.”
“Mmm,” Frances said, nodding.
“She’s not like this. She’s always been so big on knowing right from wrong. Once, she made me apologize to Tamara Villanova because I was rude to her. How did we go from prim and proper garden society to this?”
“Well, that’s a bit of a long story,” Frances said.
With a huff of frustration, Marcy threw an arm over her eyes.
Youth. Beautiful and free and, often, a colossal pain in the ass.
Frances moved to sit on the coffee table so she could really get in Marcy’s face.
“You could say it was four young women, about your age, with too much time on their hands. Or you could say it was four young women, about your age, with no one to care about them or love them. Or four young women, about your age, who decided to control their own destiny. There are any number of things you might say.”
“Right,” Marcy said with a snort. “Classic Charles Dickens tale.”
“You want a little Charles Dickens?” Frances said sweetly.
“For starters, my family was all dead. Edie’s was …
well, we’ll never know what Edie’s was, will we?
Joan was the black sheep in her family because she was gay at the wrong time in history, and Irene …
” She had to pause to think about Irene.
“I’m honestly not sure what happened there, but I suspect she was too mean for her family and was asked to leave. We can ask her later.”
Beneath that arm across her eyes, a tiny hint of a smile appeared on Marcy’s lips. “Does my grandpa know about you guys?”
“He knows some, but not all. And he doesn’t know who the rest of us are. Not anymore, anyway. He just knows that he has something to hold over your grandmother’s head.”
Marcy removed her arm and opened her eyes. “That tracks.” She pushed herself up so that she was sitting directly across from Frances.
“Here’s the thing, Marcy. You know you can’t tell anyone about this. Because if you did, it would be disastrous for Edie.”
“And the rest of you,” Marcy said.
“True. We all have varying degrees of disaster ahead of us. But it would be especially bad for Edie. She has a lot more to lose.”
Marcy folded her arms across her and averted her gaze. “What about my dad? Does he know?”
Frances shook her head. “No one knows. Certainly not our kids—it’s not the sort of thing you want them to aspire to. Or to resent you for, you know?”
“I don’t resent her. I wish I knew her. Tell me about my grandmother.”
“Let’s see. She can crack a safe.”
Marcy laughed.
“Not a joke,” Frances said calmly. “She was the best in the business. That we knew of, anyway. It’s not like we were running around with other safecrackers, but occasionally, we’d hear about this ‘girl gang’ who could crack safes like no one else.
We were pretty sure we were the only girl gang around.
Edie had a great ear and a great eye for detail.
Oh, and she was also our femme fatale. If we ever needed a lure, she was it.
She’s beautiful now … but you should have seen her then. ”
“She doesn’t have any pictures,” Marcy said glumly.
“You look a lot like she did then.” Marcy didn’t have that killer look that Edie had had at her age, but she was a beautiful young woman.
“Wait here,” Frances said. She went into her room and dug in her bag until she found the picture of the four of them against the stone wall at her family’s house in Southampton.
She returned to the living room and handed it to Marcy.
Marcy’s brows rose. She studied the picture a long moment, using the tip of one finger to trace the outline of Edie. “Wow,” she said softly. “You were all so …”
“Young. I know,” Frances said.
“You said you had a reason. Why did you do it?” Marcy asked.
“To right wrongs. We always did it to right a wrong. Well, except for that one time in the convenience store, but mostly to right wrongs.”
Marcy’s finger stilled on the photo. “Is that why you’re here? To right a wrong done to me?”
“You’re a clever little cookie,” Frances said. “But I think only Edie is here to right a wrong this time. Me? I’m here on a last gasp of fun before old age takes me. And Joan and Irene? I’m pretty sure they are here to be together.”
“Yeah, I noticed that,” Marcy said absently, her gaze on the picture.
How did everyone but Frances notice that? “Okay, kiddo,” she said, and put her hands on her hips. “You look like you can move. Get up, clean yourself up. We have things to do.”
“We do?”
“Nana said to keep an eye on you, and I don’t trust you to go chasing after her again, so you’re coming with me. I admire your tenacity and your talent, but you’re being very annoying with the chasing. I would suggest you cut it out.”
Marcy looked as if she wanted to argue, but Frances shook her head. “Come on. Let’s get going.”
Marcy dutifully stood up and walked into the bathroom.
While Frances was waiting for Marcy to get her game face on, she mapped out a couple of used car lots nearby, pulled on a wig, donned a sensible cardigan and shoes that fastened with Velcro.
When Marcy at last emerged, her dark hair slicked back, Frances handed her a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses that would cover most of her face.
Frances was under strict instructions from Joan not to use any app that could be traced back to her—such as Uber—so Frances told Marcy they would walk to the Strip and get a cab.
On the way there, Marcy perked up. She had questions. Lots of questions. “Did you ever get caught?” she asked as they stood on the street corner waiting for a cab.
“No,” Frances said. She would not count Edie’s betrayal as getting caught.
“If I googled you, would anything come up?” she asked as Frances hailed a cab.
“My pickleball scores,” Frances said. “We were very good at what we did, and that meant keeping our anonymity. The trick was to get away from a heist as quickly as possible without anyone knowing we’d even been there.”
“‘Heist,’” Marcy repeated with a chuckle of amusement.
A cab pulled over, and Frances made Marcy scoot across the seat. She gave the cabbie an address and settled back. The cabbie turned up the radio and the baseball game he was listening to.
“Is that what you’re going to do now? A heist?” Marcy whispered.
Frances put her finger to her lips.
“Because you’re all old now, so you can’t really do what you did back then, right? I mean physically. Probably mentally, too. Nana can’t find her keys half the time.”
“You’re being annoying again,” Frances said, her gaze narrowing. “We are older, not old. But even if we were ancient, you could sit back and take a few notes and maybe learn a thing or two.”
Marcy snorted, which, Frances was learning, is what she did when she thought one of her elders was being ridiculous. Aw, youth—so fearless and so fucking annoying.
At the car lot, as a salesman barreled toward them, Marcy asked what they intended to do. “Like, the plan,” she said, looking for details of the actual heist.
Frances was not about to share that with her. “Can’t say. We’re thinking things through. Tell me something—What happened with Rocco?”
Marcy was wearing a pair of ridiculously large sunglasses, so Frances couldn’t see her expression, but she imagined her blinking, wide green eyes. At least the question shut her up for a moment.
“Ladies!” The salesman in a brown sport coat and wire-rimmed glasses had reached them. “Looking for a car today?”
“Obviously,” Frances said. “What’s the cheapest thing you’ve got?”
“Cheap! We don’t like that word. You look like a Buick kind of gal. Let me show you a couple of options.”
They followed him across the lot to a Buick with bright yellow numbers 6999 splashed across the windshield. “Let me tell you what you’re looking at here,” the man said, and began to point out the features of the car.
“I met him in college,” Marcy muttered.
For a moment, Frances thought she meant the salesman. Then she realized that Marcy was talking about Rocco. “He was interested in me. You know, like to date.”
“Only 150,000 miles on her,” the man said.
“But I wasn’t interested. Still, I let him flirt with me. I always like flirting.”
Didn’t they all.
“What kind of budget are we looking at, ladies?” the man asked.
“I don’t like it,” Frances said. “What else have you got under ten?”
“Glad you asked,” the man said. “If you will follow me.” He took off at a clip across the lot again.
Frances looped her arm through Marcy’s. “Flirting is nice,” she said. “Then what happened?”
“I didn’t see him for a while, but then, he popped up on text one day, and what happened was that I was incredibly stupid and he was a fucking swindler.”
“Sounds juicy.”
“Everyone looks good in a Ford,” the salesman said, pointing to a red Ford sedan. “All-wheel drive. Great gas mileage. Heated seats.”