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André held out his hand and twitched his index finger. “Give me the photo. Let me see what I’m working with.”
Avery produced the photo from her purse and handed it to André, who opened the folder he had taken from the safe and laid the image onto a template to check the dimensions.
“Good quality. Right size.” He nodded his head as he analyzed the photo. “Okay, this’ll take me a week. I’ll need twenty-five hundred now, twenty-five hundred when I’m done.”
“And the five hundred I just gave you?”
“I told you, that got you in the door.”
Avery was in no position to haggle. She produced another envelope from her purse and handed it across the coffee table. André quickly fingered the cash to make sure the count was correct. He stood and walked back to the front door, his silk bathrobe swirling like a cape behind him. He peered through the peephole and then opened the door.
“Out you go,” he said. “Come back in a week.”
CHAPTER 26
Brooklyn, NY Wednesday, June 30, 2021
FRESH ARRANGEMENTS AND BOUQUETS DECORATED THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE the florist. She smelled the hand-tied sunflowers and the amaryllis with baby’s breath as she pulled open the door. Inside, the sweet aroma was even stronger. The scents captured her attention and distracted her from the worry that had settled in since she left the brownstone. Not for the first time, Avery wondered what the hell she had gotten herself into. She was risking everything to pull this off, and the more she allowed the rational half of her mind to consider the possibility of this plan working, the more she worried that her Achilles’ heal—unconditional love—was going to bring her down like the rest of the Montgomery family members. But that unconditional love had forced her to come this far. She knew she could not simply turn it off.
She spent ten minutes in the flower shop, a reprieve where she took in the syrupy scents and admired the arrangements. She finally made her selection, paid at the register, and carried the bouquet of roses out the door. The air was damp with humidity and the sun was warm on this cloudless summer morning. She walked for ten minutes until she came to the entrance of Green-Wood Cemetery. Meandering paths cut through the hills beyond the gate, and the occasional gaudy mausoleum stood out among the headstones that dotted the landscape. Avery walked along the familiar trail until she came to the Plot, as she had come to know it in her mind. It took another minute to gather the courage to approach it. She had traveled three thousand miles—hard, fatiguing miles that took her from one end of the country to the other, making a heart-wrenching stop to see Connie Clarkson along the way, a woman who had been devastated by the Montgomery family—and yet, these last few steps were the hardest part of the journey.
This many years later, it was still a challenge to stare down at a gravestone. It was so nonsensical she could barely read the name it held. She should have cried, but she didn’t. That part of her brain could no longer be triggered. This yearly voyage had become more business than ritual, and mostly she felt the need to get it over with. She stood over the grave for a minute or two before she finally crouched down and rubbed her hand over the front of the tombstone.
She remembered again the day her older brother insisted she take the boat out while storm clouds grew thunderous on the horizon. “Goddamn you, Christopher,” she whispered to her brother’s headstone. Then she stood, took a couple of steps to her right, and laid the bouquet of flowers on the neighboring grave.
“Love you, Mom,” Avery said, before turning and walking back the way she’d come.
* * *
Walt Jenkins was rusty after his three-year sabbatical. There was an art to following someone, be it on foot or in a car, and to do it well required practice and maintenance. The only things Walt had followed over the last three years were the Yankees and the progress of a barrel of Hampden Estate Jamaican rum on which he had purchased futures. It was the local rum distillery about an hour from his house in Negril. The thought reminded him that he needed to check the last time the barrel had been racked. He shook his head and pushed the thought to the side—stray thoughts did not serve a surveillance specialist well, another indication he’d been away too long.
Earlier he had allowed a few morning commuters to exit the train after Avery Mason in order to keep a good pocket of people between him and her. He’d taken down the address of the brownstone she visited, stood down the block when she entered the flower shop, and took his time following her into the cemetery after she walked through the gates. Now, as she hurried away from the grave site where she had spent the last few minutes, Walt was less interested in following her. After she disappeared over a hill, he strolled to the plot where she had left a bouquet of flowers. Crouching down, he read the headstone. Finally, he reached into his pocket, grabbed his phone, and dialed Jim Oliver’s number. It was strange to call his old FBI boss after so many years.
“Oliver,” the voice said over the phone.
“She left her hotel this morning. I followed her to a brownstone in Brooklyn.”
“Address?”
Walt read the address from a slip of paper he had scrawled it on. “From the brownstone, she headed to Green-Wood Cemetery.”
“Yep,” Oliver said. “She goes there every year.”
CHAPTER 27
North Carolina Wednesday, June 30, 2021
NESTLED IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS AND sporting six bedrooms, eight thousand square feet, and majestic views of iconic Lake Norman, the house was one of the most well-known properties in the area. Recently renovated, it was featured in Architectural Digest and had graced the pages of Magnolia Journal. Originally purchased for $6 million, if sold today it would snag twice that much. A Cadillac Escalade pulled through the front gates and parked in the circular cobblestone drive. Its passengers included the editor-in-chief of Hemingway Publishing, the largest publishing house in the world, as well as the company’s chief executive officer. They each had one goal today: lock their largest-selling author into a multiyear deal that guaranteed her novels would continue their mind-blowing run with Hemingway for the foreseeable future.
The first Natalie Ratcliff book, Baggage, hit shelves in 2005. Hemingway Publishing put out a modest initial press run for the debut, but threw a weighty promotional campaign behind the book. A quirky mystery featuring Peg Perugo—an out-of-work, heavy with Baggage female protagonist who finds love in all the wrong places as she stumbles her way through criminal investigations before nabbing the bad guy—Baggage found an audience. Natalie Ratcliff’s debut became a word-of-mouth publishing phenomenon, and six weeks after it was published the book found the best-seller list. Three weeks later it made it to the top. Foreign rights poured in and the book marched around the world, climbing best-seller lists in every country where it was published. It sold a staggering eight million copies, and made Natalie Ratcliff (and Peg Perugo) a household name. The only book mighty enough to knock Baggage from the top of the New York Times list was its sequel, Hard Knox, which went on to sell eleven million copies. Natalie Ratcliff, once an emergency room physician, quickly grew bored of medicine and waiting rooms filled with sick patients. Concentrating on writing, Natalie pumped out one novel a year and became the best-selling fiction author of the decade. Today, over one hundred million Peg Perugo novels had sold worldwide.
Natalie was spending the summer finishing her sixteenth manuscript, the final in a three-book deal with Hemingway Publishing. Each time Natalie neared the end of a contract, publishers made pitches to Natalie’s literary agent about why she should leave Hemingway and publish with their imprint. Hence, the Escalade parked in front of the Lake Norman mansion. Hemingway Publishing had no intention of letting their top-selling author slip through their fingers. Hemingway had discovered Natalie Ratcliff and her peculiar but lovable protagonist, and Hemingway planned to keep them both. The Escalade may as well have been a Brinks truck.
Kenny Arnett had been the CEO of Hemingway Publishing for more than a decade and had an impressive knack for retaining his A-list authors. Diane Goldstein had edited every Natalie Ratcliff book ever published and felt that she knew Peg Perugo personally. Years before, Diane had taken a chance on Baggage after several other houses passed. Many industry insiders scoffed when Hemingway offered $2 million for Natalie Ratcliff’s third and fourth books, believing Peg Perugo had run her course and that the follow-ups would go the way of many overpriced genre books—big price tag and little return. In retrospect, $2 million turned out to be a bargain for what the books returned. Fifteen books later, Peg Perugo was an unstoppable force with a massive following who loved her flawed personality, her padded midsection, and her ability to outsmart—by accident or otherwise—the baddest of the bad guys.
Kenny stood on the front porch and rang the bell. Diane stood next to him. Today, they were a united front, having dropped everything in New York to come down to North Carolina and resign the publishing house’s most important author. The door opened and Natalie Ratcliff smiled.
“What the hell is going on?” Natalie said. “Diane didn’t tell me you were coming with her, Kenny.”
