The Exiles Read Online Free Page B

ringing phone from her pocket. Instinctively she flipped it open.
    Jeanne’s number scrolled across the display. Nine times out of ten, when Emily’s phone rang it was Jeanne. They were best friends the way people were best friends back in high school, gossiping on the phone at regular intervals as if e-mail still didn’t exist. Even now, with Jeanne deep into her medical residency, the friendship hadn’t suffered. It turned out that Jeanne’s schedule as a resident was grueling but irregular, mirroring Emily’s as a full-time mom. While Nate was at work, Emily and Jeanne had spent hours together over coffee and wine and tubs of hummus from the deli, talking about Nate and Emily’s Newport move, their new house, their launch into small-city living.
    “Hey,” Emily said into the mouthpiece. Nate shot her a look. She shouldn’t have answered her phone while dealing with the cops.
    “I just got a call from Taryn Carver,” Jeanne said, sounding breathless, enthused. “You heard about the Barbers?”
    “Yeah,” Emily said.
    This morning Emily had gotten voice mails from three separate friends announcing that Anna and Randy Barber were missing a Matt Rufino painting, an oil-covered canvas the size of a square dinner plate. According to Tania Osbourne’s message, the painting had been missing at least since the Barbers’ party on Wednesday night, maybe earlier.
    Each of the messages made Emily flinch. The Barbers’ was the last party she and Nate had attended before leaving the city. The last time, for a while at least, they’d be in a room full of people they knew, in a neighborhood they could instinctively navigate, eating the kinds of thoroughbred meats and cheeses and feta-stuffed olives that had become so endemic to Manhattan. Jeanne hadn’t been at the party—she was in upstate New York for the week, and for this weekend, too, at yoga camp. Jeanne wasn’t in the Barbers’ usual social loop, anyway, thoughshe and Anna had plenty of friends in common, through Emily and Nate and a short-lived book club to which all three women had once belonged.
    “You heard about it upstate?” Emily said into the phone. Her head throbbed but at least Trevor was quiet for the moment.
    “Art-theft gossip travels fast. It’s pretty unbelievable.”
    “I guess.” But was anything really unbelievable anymore? Scientists had discovered evidence of water on Mars. Grandmothers were giving birth to their own grandchildren. People spoke to one another on phones that were plugged into nothing. Anna and Randy Barber left a quarter-million-dollar painting leaning unwatched against a wall in their study. How stupid could the Barbers be? “It might not have been taken at the party.” Emily said. “Cath Oberling says there aren’t any clues.”
    At the word
clues,
the officer across the counter glanced up. She shook her head (
it’s nothing!
) and he looked down again and continued sorting through his stack of photocopied forms.
    “I need to go,” Emily said to Jeanne. “I’ll call you later.”
    Emily smiled apologetically to the cop and felt a wheeze coming on, her chest tightening. “Everything was in the car,” she said again to the cop. Everything was in the car: The statement felt fake as soon as it was out of her mouth. Everything wasn’t in the car. Emily still had her phone, obviously, and her purse, and the ridiculous stash of junk in that purse. Not to mention all their goods that would be arriving in the moving truck next week. “Everything was in the car,” she repeated (again, again!), sounding more idiotic with each regurgitation. She was surprised her words came out at all. The Barbers were probably talking to the cops right now, too. Their stolen artwork was worth more than the Jeep—by a factor of ten, at least. Even when it came to their thefts, Nate and Emily didn’t stack up. Emily choked at the thought.
    She needed to focus, to keep her head on straight.
Easier said,
she thought. Even on good