The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb

extent the father too. But later that night, while alone in her rented room, a searing rage at her father came over her, followed shortly by waves of tears so violent that her stomach began to cramp. On impulse, she shut off the television, lay down in bed fully clothed, put her sleep mask on, and thought hard for about a half hour. When she got up, taking off her mask, she had made up her mind.
    The next morning, she called in sick to work and caught an early morning bus out of Northampton. Her father’s house was two hours away, and during the ride, she meditated on the plan that had come to her wholly formed while lying in bed with her eyes covered. Years earlier, in an effort to evade detection, her father had begun paying his multiplying numbers of “girlfriends” in disbursements of $200 and $300 out of a bewildering variety of accounts, and he had never consolidated them. To hear him say it, he was “flat broke,” but she knew he had many small sums of money scattered around various banks in a galaxy of mostly inactive accounts. These accounts would be her target.
    Everything went exactly as planned. She’d phoned her father from the bus to make sure he’d be at work. A taxi took her to the deserted house. Once inside, she moved with a dowser’s intuition in a widening spiral through the rooms with their various caches and hiding places till she found the object of her desire: a wooden box containing a collection of ancient flapping checkbooks. From there it was but a signature forged, a friendly handshake with the elderly teller at the local credit union where her family had banked for years and she was heading back to campus with a thousand dollars in her bag and a cushion of several weeks or months before her father figured out what had happened.
    As the bus on giant tires advanced over winding sunset roads she told herself she felt like a seed being borne on a river to a sacred patch of soil. This she would make flower into a plant of deep importance. The secrecy of her mission lent it power. The illegality of it lent it extra life. She felt calmer and more centered than she could remember feeling in years. Shit, she thought, staring out the window, I could get used to this.
    “Get used to what?” Dan France now said directly into her ear.
    She opened her eyes.
    “What?” she asked, slowly.
    “You were muttering to yourself in your sleep,” he said, clearly very pleased with himself.
    “I—”
    “I couldn’t make much out, but I did hear ‘get used to this.’ ”
    “Oh, God,” she said softly.
    “No worries!” He laughed delightedly. He was out of his normal suit, and dressed casually in chinos and a T-shirt. He moved around her bed, raised on the balls of his feet, and smiled with his catlike lips.
    “So, how’s tricks?”
    “Fine,” she said automatically, and then with an effort, correcting herself: “Tired, actually. Very tired.”
    “That’s good that you’re tired. Before you were so tired you didn’t even know you were tired.”
    She yawned.
    “Tired is as tired does,” she said, “or something.”
    His smile was steady; it seemed as if fed from some internal spring.
    “You wanna take a ride?” he asked.
    “I don’t under—”
    “A little spin around the grounds?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Just this.” He stood up and retrieved from behind him a wheelchair, which he brought around smartly to the side of the bed.
    “Seriously?”
    “I’ve already cleared it with the powers that be.”
    An hour later, he was pushing her slowly along the flagstone paths. The wheels crackled over the leaves. The daylight, sunshine, and smells flowed across her senses with shocking vividness.
    “The world,” she said softly, “is kinda intense.”
    “After your ‘accident,’ almost anything would probably feel like that.”
    “Why do you do that?”
    “What?”
    “Say the word like that, ‘accident.’ ”
    “Ah.” He stopped pushing and came around the front