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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.
CHAPTER 37
Manhattan, NY Saturday, July 3, 2021
HER THOUGHTS WERE DISJOINTED AS SHE WALKED THE LONELY streets of Midtown on her way to the Grand Hyatt. Walt Jenkins had called while Avery was racing through the rest of Victoria Ford’s manuscripts and finding, astonishingly, that each had been published as a Natalie Ratcliff novel, starring the portly and loveable private eye named Peg Perugo. Avery couldn’t quite get her mind around what it all meant, other than that Natalie Ratcliff, in addition to being one of the world’s best-selling authors, was also a plagiarizing fraud.
With confusion still clouding her thoughts, she turned on Forty-Second Street and came to the entrance of the Hyatt. She rode the elevator to the twentieth floor and knocked on number 2021. The door opened and Avery quickly forgot about Natalie Ratcliff and Victoria Ford, Peg Perugo and plagiarism. Walt was dressed in jeans and an untucked button-down shirt. Avery noticed a small nick on his freshly shaven right cheek, and for some insane reason had the urge to lick her thumb and press it against his cheek to wipe the mark away. The rational part of her mind intervened with a proverbial slap to the face before she could proceed.
“I think you and I are the only ones left in this city,” he said.
Avery pushed the thoughts away and smiled. “It’s eerie, isn’t it?”
“Very. Come on in.”
Avery walked through the doorway and into the one-bedroom suite. “Nice digs.”
“I got rid of my apartment a couple of years ago,” Walt said, closing the door. “Rent in Jamaica is next to nothing, so I’ve been sitting on a little nest egg. I didn’t know how long I was going to be here, so I splurged. When you and I are done with the Cameron Young case, I think I’m going to stick around and see my parents and brother. It’s been a while.
“The case is over on the desk,” he said, pointing to the corner where a cardboard box rested on the table by the window. “The hard evidence is still in storage, but this is everything else. The original documents have been digitized, scanned, and transferred to the BCI database. These are copies, but they represent almost all the documents that made up the case against Victoria Ford.”
“Almost?” Avery asked as she walked over to the desk and sat down.
“This is everything the Shandaken police had in storage. The Cameron Young investigation was run through their office as a way to keep the peace. The local departments didn’t love when the BCI took over a case from them, so as lead detective I allowed the Shandaken chief to be the face of the investigation. I’m still waiting for a call back from the district attorney’s office to see if they have any additional documents. Twenty years later, they may be long gone. But trust me”—Walt pointed at the box on the table—“this will keep us busy for a while.”
“Can you take me through some of this?”
Walt pulled a chair over and sat next to her. “Sure. We can go start to finish. How much do you know about the murder?”
“Everything you and I discussed last night, plus what Emma Kind told me originally about it. I’ve also talked with Roman Manchester, the attorney who was set to defend Victoria.”
“Sounds like you know a lot then. How much of this stuff do you want to see?”
“Everything.”
“Okay,” Walt said. “Just a warning. The crime scene photos are disturbing.”
Avery nodded. She’d seen many crime scenes in the last few years. “I’m good.”
Walt reached into the box and pulled out a folder of photos. Avery imagined her camera guys and production team laying out the contents of this box and taking stills of the documents, highlighting in yellow the areas of transcript interviews and police reports that pertained to the story she wanted to tell. She imagined startling images of crime scene photos flashing onto television screens across America as Victoria Ford’s story unfolded.
“Here’s the body, the balcony, and the master bedroom of the Youngs’ Catskills home,” Walt said. “This is what I found when I arrived on the scene.”
