Page 108 of Nobody's Fool

I shrug. “Some kind of amnesia.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you’re, what, still trying to find her kidnappers?”

“Yes.”

Buzzy shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say.”

“If you reveal anything, the weight of this family will come down on you. If you don’t, they will indeed finance your next film.”

“That’s nice,” he says. “I’ll take the financing. I can use it. But between us, I don’t need the threats or the payoffs. Anna and I, wewent through hell together. We survived. If she ever remembers, we will always have a bond.”

“You exploited her.”

“She won’t think that. Either way, tell her if she ever needs me, I’ll be there. But Sami?”

“What?”

“Let this be. Whatever she and I did, it was a long time ago.” And then, using the exact same words I heard from Talia Belmond, he says: “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I check in at the desk at the offices of a charity called the Abeona Shelter and ask for Jennifer Schultz. The building is located on the corner of Hudson and Harrison Streets in Tribeca. It was the New York Mercantile Exchange until 1977, but it’s always looked more like a cool fire station to me.

How did I end up here?

It started with a call from Polly after I downloaded my meeting with Harm Bergkamp to the Pink Panthers.

“I found something strange on the Radiant Allure modeling agency,” Polly said.

“Okay.”

“So the agency closed in 2004 when the two founders, Eunice and Vernon Schultz, retired.”

“Do we know where the Schultzes are now?”

“Both dead. Eunice died of cancer about a year after retiring. That might have been why they retired, I don’t know. The husband, Vernon, died in 2018. He was eighty-two.”

“So what’s the weird part?”

“We found their daughter. Jennifer Schultz. She said she would talk to you. In truth, she seemed anxious to.”

And here I am.

I’m led into a conference room where a woman I recognize asJennifer Schultz from my Google searches awaits me. Without so much as a hello or handshake, she asks, “Why are you asking about my parents’ old agency?”

No reason to pull punches. “You know why.”

“Pardon?”

“Your working here,” I say, spreading my arms. “It’s almost too on the nose, don’t you think?”

The Abeona Shelter is an international organization that rescues children from danger. Abeona was the child-protecting Roman Goddess of safe returns, ergo the name of this place. The charity does a lot of good work, from what I’m told.

“What do you mean,” Jennifer asks, squinting, “by ‘too on the nose’?”