“Don’t you miss it?” Frances challenged her.
Edie hesitated. She could feel the truth swirling around the pit of her. How many times in her life had she asked herself if she was a bad person? If she was missing some moral fiber that everyone else had? Because she did miss it. She had missed it from the moment they disappeared from her life. “Yes,” she said softly. “Sometimes. Back then, I felt like I was in control of me. Like I called the shots for me.”
“Exactly,” Frances said softly. “The world was ours for the taking.”
Still, Edie shook her head. She was different now. “I mightmiss it, but I’d never consider it. We’re not in our twenties, Fran. And we have so much more to lose.”
“Do we?” Joan asked. “Do we really?”
“Why is that even a question?” Edie asked. “We made it this far. Would you really trade freedom? Would you really risk your peaceful twilight years for three hots and a cot?”
“I don’t like to enter new ventures with a negative outlook,” Joan said. “But yes, maybe.”
Edie considered that. What did she have to lose, other than this house? Her strange marriage? Her kids were grown, her grandkids almost grown. What did she have, but her garden? Who even was she anymore? “What’s the heist?”
Irene immediately poured more champagne into her glass.
“Well … we’re a little stuck,” Joan said. “We don’t exactly have one.”
“You don’thaveone?”
“See, we thought, or rather,Ithought,” Frances said, “that we should just see if everyone was up for it first and go from there. You know, figure out what we can handle, based on our physical abilities, and knowledge of technology, and so forth.”
Edie instantly thought of Rocco. But that was an outrageous idea. How could they possibly take him on? “Are you telling me you came here and risked Simon seeing you without even knowing what the job was?”
“That’s what we are telling you,” Joan said. “And also … to see if we could trust you.”
“Okay, all right, I’m the devil. If you believe that, then why did you come for me?”
“Because we need you,” Frances said, giving Joan and Irene a look. “We can’t do it without you. We don’t want to do it without you. We’re like the Musketeers.”
Edie frowned. “Weren’t they honorable men? I don’t think they were a den of thieves.”
“Semantics,” Joan said. “Come on, what do you say? Onefor all and all for one, this time without anyone turning the others in?”
Edie groaned. “You all realize, don’t you, that the odds of us pulling anything off at this age are slim to none, right? That we could very well be caught and hung out to dry? And that if we were caught, the chances that Simon would rat us all out is guaranteed? I, for one, don’t want to give up all that I have just for old times’ sake.”
The three idiots looking back at her nodded, as if in agreement. They waited.
Edie groaned again. She downed the champagne. “This is so dumb. So stupid. I am strongly against it, and I willnothave my granddaughter anywhere near you three. But the thing is … I have someone who needs to be taken down. And I might have an idea how.”
Fifteen
Frances was beginning to be truly annoyed with this Wilma Thinstone thing. No one seemed to get the joke, which meant no one thought it was unreasonable that she would have been assigned a name like Wilma and kept it all these years. She liked to think she looked hipper than that. In her head, she was a cool old lady, like Diane Keaton. Not a Wilma.
When she used the name to rent an Airbnb in Hunterville, the woman renting it acted as if she was talking to a doddering old woman on the other end of the line. But she bought that Wilma wanted to pay cash because she didn’t “trust the computer.”
“Why are you complaining?” Joan asked. “It worked, didn’t it? We have a rental now.”
They had decided on an Airbnb after Frances said she wasn’t willing to talk about a big bad heist while seated on hay bales, no matter how cute and festive the setting. Edie said they couldn’t talk at her house unless they wanted to be arrested. “And it can’t be just anywhere in Hunterville because everyone knows me.”
After some discussion of basic requirements, they found the house. It was across town from where Edie said her friends would be (meaning, Frances quickly figured, the wrong side of the tracks).
“How many bedrooms?” Irene asked.
“Three,” Joan confirmed.
“Well … Joan and I can share,” Irene said.
