“Thank you,” Natalie said, her voice shaky and hesitant.
“Emma gave me some boxes that contained a bunch of Victoria’s old keepsakes. I found a flash drive that had all of her manuscripts on it. Lost manuscripts stored in an attic for two decades.”
Natalie cocked her head to the side and feigned a smile. “Is that right?”
“Emma told me that Victoria didn’t share her manuscripts with anyone. Not Emma. Not even Jasper. No one, in fact, has ever read them before. So I was a little hesitant to read them myself. It felt like I was intruding on her privacy.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Read any of her manuscripts?”
“Oh, all of them. They’re really good.”
Avery turned and opened the door.
“They remind me a lot of your writing.”
Avery waited for a reply. When none came, she walked out into the hallway and headed for the elevator.
CHAPTER 54
Manhattan, NY Tuesday, July 6, 2021
IT WAS JUST PAST 8:00 A.M. ON TUESDAY MORNING WHEN AVERY TOOK the elevator to the lobby, cut across the marble floor, and pushed through the front door. The valet had her Range Rover parked out front with the engine running. Avery climbed in and pulled away. The streets were crowded. Taxis beeped, cyclists darted through traffic as they transported their packages, and a steady stream of pedestrians filled the sidewalks. The long weekend was over and the city had taken back its role as the financial capital of the world. The relaxed and welcoming looks Avery had received on her run through Central Park Sunday morning were replaced by stoic expressions of those on the way to work.
The sun was low and bright when she made it to the George Washington Bridge, and it filled her rearview mirror until she made it into New Jersey and headed north on Palisades Interstate Parkway. Smooth reggae drifted from the car’s speakers and was Avery’s attempt to calm her nerves. On her mind was the postcard she had ripped to shreds months earlier before painstakingly taping it back together. She had somehow managed to misplace it since she arrived in New York, and she took the card’s absence as an omen that what she was planning was about to go wrong.
She had told everyone—her agent, her friends at HAP News, Christine Swanson, Walt Jenkins, and even Livia Cutty—that she had come all the way across the country to chase the story of Victoria Ford. But this morning’s drive was the real reason. In addition to her rendezvous planned for tomorrow with the German man named André, whom she had paid thousands of dollars to create a false passport, this morning’s trip to the mountains was the reason Avery had come so far. It was the reason she had driven her Range Rover rather that purchased an airline ticket. It was why she had paid in cash for everything she had done on this trip, avoiding her credit card at all costs. She was nearly certain about what she would find, but needed confirmation before she proceeded.
The trip to Lake Placid took over four hours. Avery remembered the tortuous journeys from her childhood. It seemed like days, not hours, to get from the city to the mountains. But she also remembered the joy of finally arriving at her aunt’s cabin. The lineage of the property’s owners had been immaterial when she was a kid visiting the cabin for the last weekend of summer, just before school was to resume—an annual excursion the Montgomery family took each year to celebrate Avery’s and Christopher’s safe return home from sailing camp. It was their salute to the end of summer. Back then, Avery was more interested in swimming in the lake and swinging on the long rope attached to the branch of a sycamore tree that hung over the water. A thousand times over, that knotted rope had sent Avery and her brother off the edge of a rock and out into the lake, where they’d release their grip and splash into the water. Time at Ma Bell’s cabin came only once a summer but represented significant real estate in Avery’s memories because of the glorious time she and Christopher shared there with their cousins.
The cabin was not a Montgomery property. Had it been, it would be three times as large and perched on a lake ten times the size. The latest （and most expensive） trends in architecture would have replaced the cabin’s rustic quaintness. A fleet of powerboats and jet skis would have lined the shoreline. Everything would have been ornate and overdone. It also would have been repossessed by the Unites States government, like every other property Garth Montgomery had owned. But Ma Bell’s cabin was none of those things. It was simple and charming and far removed from anything Avery’s family owned. It was an oasis from the glitz and wealth that followed the Montgomerys everywhere they went. The cabin held for Avery the same appeal as Connie Clarkson’s sailing camp. Avery had never been happier than when she was tucked away for summer nights in cabin number 12 in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. She found the same joy each year when she visited Ma Bell’s cabin in Lake Placid.
As a child, Avery never knew how she was actually related to Ma Bell. The road to get there was too complicated for Avery and her brother to ever explore. Ma Bell was the second cousin of Avery’s uncle, and just far enough removed from the Montgomery bloodline to stay off the feds’ radar. There was no direct link to the Montgomery family, and as soon as the postcard had arrived Avery knew where her father had been hiding. The three sevens written at the bottom of the postcard represented the cabin’s address:
777 Stonybrook Circle, Lake Placid, New York
Welcome to The Sevens, Ma Bell used to say when they arrived each August. How long her father had been there, and in what kind of shape he was in, Avery had no idea. She only knew that she came this far for a reason, and she wasn’t going to allow anything to derail her plans. Not her doubts, not her fear, and certainly not her goddamn conscience.
The mountain roads were as serpentine as she remembered when Avery meandered through the final leg of the journey. She slowed when she made the last turn. The road in front of her, which at its conclusion led to the cabin’s driveway, was speckled with the morning sun and shadowed by the foliage of the forest around her. She drove to the end of the street and stopped. In front of her was the quaint, A-frame cabin sided with cedar and perched at the precipice of a hill that dropped off to the lake behind it. The driveway was unpaved, and the gravel was packed down in two ruts with a shallow mound of rocks between them. She saw a car parked at the end of the drive. She didn’t recognize it. The mailbox, however, held the numbers of the cabin’s address. When she came here as a child the three sevens were bright red and vibrant. Today they were ruddy and weatherworn.
There was motion inside the house. A figure passed in front of the window and appeared to pause for a moment. Avery noticed the curtains flutter and she imagined him peering carefully around the window’s edge at the fire-red Range Rover stopped in the middle of the street. She almost pulled into the driveway. She almost parked behind the car and climbed the front steps to knock on the door. Almost. Instead, she turned right and pulled away. Speaking directly with her father had never been part of the plan. It couldn’t be. But she had to come. She had to see the cabin again. She had to make sure. Confirmation was most definitely part of her plan. The rest, Avery could only hope would work. She pulled a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and started her drive back to the city.