Twenty Years Later(85)

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.

*

Walt Jenkins drove his unmarked government SUV, the keys to which Jim Oliver had handed him on his first night back in New York. He nearly pulled down Stonybrook Circle after he had seen Avery’s red Range Rover make the turn. Instincts, however, told him not to. It was a good thing. After he spotted her vehicle stopped in the middle of the road in front of a gravel drive, she had turned around and come back his way. The winding, empty mountain roads did not make the best environment to tail someone.

He watched her turn and head back toward the city. Walt was happy to give her a bit of room. He turned onto Stonybrook Circle now and stopped in the same spot Avery’s Range Rover had been a moment before. There was only a single, isolated home on this short stretch of road.

He resisted the urge to park on the shoulder and check the place out. That was not his job. He was on a surveillance operation and his goal was to collect information and pass it on to Jim Oliver. He used his cell phone to take a few photos of the A-frame cabin and the wooded area on either side of it. Then he twisted the steering wheel and pulled close to the mailbox, where he snapped a photo of the address. His mind quickly made the connection between the faded sevens on the mailbox and the numbers that were scrawled on the postcard he had seen in Avery’s hotel room.

Walt dropped his phone on the passenger’s seat, twisted the car around, and accelerated to catch up with Avery.





CHAPTER 55


Manhattan, NY Wednesday, July 7, 2021

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, ONE WEEK SINCE SHE MET ANDRé Schwarzkopf, Avery sat on the F train and bounced toward Brooklyn for her second meeting with the mysterious man she had been put in touch with. The same ripple of worry that had originated when she watched Walt outside her hotel on Monday morning was back again now. This was the crux of the plan. Once she had the passport, everything else had a chance of working. Without it, there was no chance at all. She tucked her purse tight to her side as the subway rocked along the tracks. In her purse was the remaining cash for the purchase. She hoped for a quick exchange this time around. She imagined standing on the front stoop of the brownstone and ringing the bell, André opening the door and handing her the passport in exchange for the rest of the payment. Then she would be off and done with the shady business of procuring false documents. Other things would have to go her way for it all to work, but this was the next critical step in the arduous journey she had started long ago.

Despite an array of empty seats on the subway car, a man sat down in the seat next to her, trapping Avery between him and the window. He wore Bose headphones that barely muffled the music that blistered from them. She tucked her purse closer to her side. The man stared straight ahead and ignored her. The train made a stop and the sliding doors opened. A few passengers exited and were replaced by others who boarded. Avery thought for a moment of telling the man that she needed to exit the train, despite her stop in Brooklyn being thirty minutes away. Before she could muster the nerve, the doors closed and the train rocked back into motion. Music continued to blare from the man’s headphones. A few minutes later the train slowed for another stop. The man reached into his backpack, which rested on his lap, and pulled out an envelope. He dropped it casually onto Avery’s lap, never looking at her.