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

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.