CHAPTER 36

Manhattan, NY Saturday, July 3, 2021

AFTER HAULING THE BINS TO HER HOTEL ROOM, AVERY MADE A RUN to Starbucks. She was amazed by the quiet of the city. For a Saturday afternoon, the streets were empty. Traffic lights rotated through their timers, changing from green to yellow to red, sometimes without a single car passing through the intersection. This was, in fact, the first time Avery could remember being in Manhattan around the Fourth of July. Her childhood summers were spent in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. And her adult years had been spent at her family’s house in the Hamptons. Staying in the city for the Fourth was something that never occurred to her. It was simply not something people did. Everyone she knew headed to the country or the beach. But now, as she walked the empty streets, she noticed an elegance to the city she had never appreciated before—as if the city were an antique chest that had been stripped of its peeling paint and coarse primer to reveal the true masterpiece underneath.

She relished the feeling that she had the city to herself, tons of work to do, and very little to distract her. At least, she tried to convince herself as much. As she walked the vacant sidewalks, her thoughts drifted back to Walt Jenkins and the foreign sense of excitement she felt about seeing him later today. With so much to do, she couldn’t afford these tangential thoughts to distract or confuse her. But the more she analyzed these feelings of excitement, the more Avery realized they were her mind’s attempt to shift her focus to something exponentially more thrilling than what waited for her on the other side of the weekend. Her attraction to Walt Jenkins had distracted her, if just momentarily, from the percolating anxiety about heading back to Brooklyn next week to see if Mr. André—she didn’t even know his last name—had come through with the falsified passport. If he did, Avery knew the real—and dangerous—work would then begin. As she entered the Starbucks, she realized that even in a near empty city she could find clutter and garbage. She was a Montgomery, after all.

Twenty minutes later she sipped a venti dark roast—two creams, two sugars—while she sat at the small desk in the corner of her hotel room. The dusty bins Emma had pulled from her attic were now empty, the contents spewed across the room covering the bed, coffee table, and floor. Pictures and yearbooks, photo albums and diaries. Avery had spent some time browsing through the pages of Victoria’s childhood diary and reading the hopes and dreams of an adolescent girl. The entries were sweet and charming, and covered the crushes Victoria had on grade-school boys, teachers she hated, and her dreams of writing novels when she grew up. Avery felt guilty for reading the private thoughts of a teenaged girl and after a while put the journal aside.

She spent an hour looking through old photos, and imagined her documentary about Victoria Ford including images of these albums and diary—the dreams of a woman who had perished before she had a chance to see them come true.

In one of the boxes Avery found an old USB thumb drive. She plugged it into her laptop and waited for the computer to process the ancient technology. Finally, a file folder appeared on the screen and Avery opened it. There were five files in the folder, all Word documents. She clicked on the first file and a document opened. Avery read the cover page:

Hot Mess
by
Victoria Ford

She cocked her head as she scrolled through the document, realizing that she was looking at one of the manuscripts Victoria had written before her death. The manuscript was four hundred pages long. Avery opened each of the files and found four other manuscripts, all written by Victoria and each about the same length. Scrolling back to the original file, Avery started reading. Two pages into the manuscript, she stopped. There was something familiar about the story. She read another page until it dawned on her. Avery knew the story. She had read it before. Scrolling faster now, her eyes blazed through the prose for another minute until she was sure. Until she came to the main character, introduced at the beginning of the second chapter. A quirky, female private eye who was slightly overweight and unlucky with love. A character named Peg Perugo.

Avery whispered the name aloud. “Peg Perugo. Peg Perugo.”

Putting the pages to the side, Avery walked to the closet and took her purse down from where it hung. Inside, she found Natalie Ratcliff’s novel that had kept her up late into the night. The book’s title—Baggage—offered a similar connotation to the title of Victoria Ford’s manuscript. Hot Mess.

Standing in the entryway of her hotel room, Avery opened the novel and skimmed the pages. The chapters, the paragraphs, the words . . . they were identical to Victoria Ford’s manuscript. A manuscript saved on an ancient flash drive and stored in Emma Kind’s attic for the past twenty years.