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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Synopsis

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Bella Books

  Synopsis

  Mattie Pearson has a secret—one that has left her on the run from her life, her friends, and the law.

  As Mattie settles into her new apartment in Washington, DC, her life takes a turn for the better when she meets Alex Holland. The two fall into an easy friendship and before long Mattie finds herself wanting much more from her new friend. Certain that nothing more will ever develop, Mattie is determined to keep her feelings under wraps.

  As she agonizes over being honest with Alex about her feelings and about her past, Mattie soon realizes she may lose Alex no matter which path she chooses. Is losing everything worth the risk of being honest with the woman she’s falling for?

  Copyright © 2017 by Cade Haddock Strong

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  First Bella Books Edition 2017

  eBook released 2017

  Editor: Amanda Jean

  Cover Designer: Judith Fellows

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-572-5

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  About the Author

  Cade Haddock Strong currently lives in Washington, DC. She loves skiing, biking, hiking, running, and playing golf and makes a valiant effort to keep up on current events. She and her wife have lived all over the US and abroad and they love to travel.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my editor, Amanda Jean, for her awesome suggestions on how to strengthen the storyline of this novel.

  Thank you to my parents for giving me a great education that nurtured my love of writing.

  Thank you to my amazing friend Mary Moon Marshburn for inspiring the cover design.

  Thank you to my wife Lisa, who believed in me and supported me while I wrote this book, who patiently listened as I dreamed up plot ideas and who read countless drafts. Mostly though, thank you for being proud of me. That made all the difference.

  Dedication

  For my wife Lisa. You are my rock.

  Chapter One

  There are four of us. We all grew up in Vermont and, although we each wandered off to other places after high school, we all ended up back in the Green Mountain State for one reason or another. We’re all strong, independent women, and we have what you might call a unique “hobby”—we are art thieves. Over the past five years, we’ve successfully pulled off nearly a dozen burglaries and to my total amazement we’ve never gotten caught. We plan each heist meticulously but, even so, there have been a few close calls.

  Without exception, we sell all the pieces we steal, and we’ve made a decent amount of money doing it. Of course, we know it’s all terribly illegal, not to mention wrong, but the thrill of it is completely addicting.

  Currently, we’re hovering around Sarah Finnegan’s large computer screen. Sarah is our de facto leader. She and I have been friends since grade school, and she’s the only person in the entire world allowed to call me by my given name, Matilda. I’ve always despised the name, and I’ve gone by Mattie since I was a little kid. Sarah is also the first person I came out to when I realized I was gay my senior year of high school. She’s the only one of the four of us who has kids, although she and her husband Jake split up a few years ago and now share custody of their two boys.

  Sarah has the floor plans for our next target—the Schuyler House—up on her screen. We’re all staring at it intently as she walks us through its various quirks.

  “As you guys can see, the layout of the house is a jumbled mess,” Sarah says. “It looks like the house was added on to multiple times without consideration for how the pieces fit together.”

  “Yeah, wait till you see the place. There are all these weird passageways that lead to nowhere, and a couple of the rooms are so tiny that you can barely fit a chair and table in them. It’s really bizarre,” Kat says.

  Kat Conroy is the only one of the four of us with any real art background. She has a master’s degree in art history and used to work at a gallery in Washington, DC. She first flagged the Schuyler House as a potential target over a year ago. Its art collection is renowned, and our reconnaissance to date indicated that security was a bit looser than you might find at a typical art museum. Our intel was aided by the fact that Kat scored an invitation to attend an artist’s retreat sponsored by the Schuyler House. While Kat was at the retreat, she was able to fully scope out the property, evaluate the floor plan and study the various security procedures they have in place. She also had plenty of time to confirm the exact location of some of the pieces we hoped to acquire.

  Up until about twenty years ago, Schuyler House was part of the Schuyler Estate—a massive property in upstate New York. Back in the day, the estate was comprised of the main house, multiple outbuildings, and about one thousand acres of land. Eventually, the estate’s upkeep became too much for the remaining heirs. Rather than selling it all off, they sold most of the land but held on to the main house and converted it into a retreat for artists and writers. The retreat quickly became an icon in the contemporary art world, attracting artists from all over the world who came for the enlightening, and often
raucous, retreats but also in order to flock beneath the astonishing art collection adorning the walls of the main house.

  Schuyler House is extremely secluded. It’s located in a very rural part of New York State that most people don’t even know exists—the Adirondacks, a state park that also happens to be the largest park in the contiguous United States. It’s huge at more than 6.1 million acres, a land area greater than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks combined. Most people think of Manhattan when they think of New York State, yet the vast majority of the state is actually fairly rural. The Adirondacks are unique too in that something like half of the land within the park is privately, rather than publicly, owned.

  The house is located just outside the boundary of the Adirondacks and sits at the end of a three-mile long dirt driveway. The estate itself is nestled at the edge of a forest, and a river runs directly behind the main house. Not surprisingly, that area of New York gets a lot of snow in the winter, much more than other parts of the state due to its proximity to the Great Lakes. As a result, lake-effect snow frequently hits. Lake-effect snow is typically isolated to only a small geographic area, leading to huge regional differences in snowfall. I’ve seen times where the towns near the lake get hit with twenty inches of snow while a town only ten miles away barely gets a dusting. It’s really strange.

  The Schuyler family art collection was started by Duncan Schuyler in the early 1900s. He collected art through his entire life, mostly impressionist and modern art by American and European artists—Cézanne, Gauguin, Bonnard, Matisse, O’Keeffe, and Kandinsky, to name a few. Near the end of his life he, and later his wife and daughter, also started to collect famous photographs. Our goal is to steal five lower-tier pieces from the collection.

  Just like all our previous heists, we’ve spent countless hours researching and planning for the Schuyler House burglary. There’s absolutely no reason to think anything will go wrong, but for some reason Sarah has a bad vibe about this burglary.

  “I don’t know, I just can’t shake this weird feeling I have about the Schuyler House,” Sarah explains after we’re done looking at the floor plan. “The only reason I’m not pulling the plug is because I seriously need the money. I’ve got like three hundred dollars in my checking account and the boys are headed off to college soon…I’ve saved almost nothing for their tuition.”

  I rub her upper back gently. “Do you think we’ve missed something in our planning?”

  “No, nothing like that,” she replies.

  “What is it then?” Kat asks.

  “It’s just that the house is so isolated and its floor plan is so tricky. I feel like we’re walking into a maze and we’re going to get trapped. Plus, we’ve been so damn lucky, and that luck has got to run out sometime, right?” Sarah asks.

  “I hear you, but I’m actually feeling good about this one. The security they’ve got is the weakest I’ve ever seen for a collection of this caliber,” Kat replies.

  “I’m with Kat. This one feels easy compared to some of our other heists. I’m pumped about it,” Ellen pipes in.

  Ellen Church is the fourth woman in our group. She’s nearly six feet tall and is absolutely stunning with long, silky dark-brown hair, dark-brown eyes, and olive skin. Most people think she’s Latina, but she’s not. She went to Harvard Law School and went on to work for a high-powered law firm in New York. She even made partner but finally hung up her power suits for good when her marriage fell apart. I think she did pretty well in the divorce, but she never really talks about it. She doesn’t practice law anymore either. She moved back to Vermont after her divorce and now spends most of her time helping her brother tend to his Christmas tree farm.

  “Plus, our plan is totally brilliant!” Ellen adds.

  “It is pretty brilliant,” Sarah admits.

  I have to agree. We’ve decided to rob the estate in the middle of a massive snowstorm. We came up with idea because a major blizzard hit Schuyler House when Kat was there for the artists retreat and the Schuyler House staff was totally unprepared for the big storm: they only have one snowplow truck and it was not enough to keep up with the unrelenting snow that inundated the long driveway. Kat, along with all the other retreat attendees, was stranded for two extra days. Not that the impassable driveway really mattered that much anyway since most of the flights in and out of the nearby airport were canceled due to the storm.

  At any rate, once we learned that the Schuyler House staff struggled to maintain the estate’s driveway in the winter, we had an “aha” moment—vehicles, namely police vehicles, would have a tough time getting up the private driveway during a major snowstorm. Certainly, beneficial for would-be burglars. Of course, it also means that it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to reach the estate by car, but we didn’t let that deter us. That area of the state is a snowmobile haven, and it has more miles of snowmobile trails than it does roads. It should be relatively easy to approach the house by snowmobile during a major snowstorm. We’re just waiting for the weather forecasters to give us our cue.

  Chapter Two

  The four of us weren’t always art thieves. In fact, most of us have day jobs. I, for instance, am a partner in a small forensic accounting firm in Burlington.

  The road to becoming art thieves started more than five years ago. Sarah and I were in New York City for our friend Sandy’s wedding, and while we were there, thieves slipped into an Upper East Side row house and made off with two incredibly valuable paintings.

  Sarah read about the burglary in the New York Times and became completely fixated on the story. She couldn’t believe how simple the plot seemed. In the weeks that followed the wedding, Sarah obsessively combed the Internet for recent burglaries from private collections, amazed at how many had taken place in just the last few years, even in this age of supposed high-tech security. Not surprisingly, the burglaries she read about took place all over the world—wherever rich people lived. Further, a pretty low percentage of the stolen pieces were ever recovered and an even lower percentage of the culprits were ever apprehended.

  Over the next few months, Sarah decided she could do it—slip into someone’s house and make off with some high-priced piece of art.

  * * *

  Sarah confessed her plan to me one summer night when we were at a beach party and three sheets to the wind. I just laughed when she told me because we were both drunk and I didn’t think she was even remotely serious.

  A few days later, I ran into Sarah on the bike path in Burlington and she asked if I remembered our conversation at the beach party. I told her that I thought she was kidding, and she made it clear that she was dead serious. I still didn’t believe her because she’s about the most law-abiding person I know. She doesn’t even drive over the speed limit. I pressed her to explain this sudden desire to become a criminal, and she told me she was sick of being boring and that she was having a midlife crisis a little bit early. She also admitted that money was pretty tight and a little extra cash wouldn’t hurt.

  When I was still non-committal, Sarah chided me and brought up the fact that I’ve always had a wild side and that stealing art should be right up my alley. I’m not sure about the “right up my alley” part, but she was right about me having a wild side. I may be an accountant, but I’ve done crazy stuff my whole life: I stole my parent’s car on numerous occasions well before I was of legal driving age; I hitchhiked to Florida for spring break when I was in high school; I nearly died on a back-country ski adventure when I got lost and had to spend the night in the woods in the dead of winter.

  It took a while, but finally Sarah convinced me to join her. From then on, Sarah and I met regularly to either jog or bike. While we worked out, we began to build a plan. One of the first things we did was to establish two fairly basic guidelines to help direct our future decisions about what to steal and from where.

  In terms of what to steal, we decided to focus on lower-tier pieces from impressi
ve collections. In other words, we wanted to target pieces of significant value, but not “trophy” or standout pieces like those stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In terms of where to target, we decided to avoid major museums and instead focus on small private collections.

  We aim for lower-tier pieces in impressive collections because it’s possible to make decent money stealing the lower tier-pieces but law enforcement is likely to be hesitant to throw major resources into finding them and institutions are less likely to offer large rewards for their return. Some thieves actually target pieces they think they can then turn around and “return” to the museum for a reward, but quickly we decided we’d leave that MO to low-level criminals, especially because a large reward usually inspires more people to expend resources to locate stolen works.

  The decision to avoid major museums was a no-brainer since big museums are likely to have more sophisticated security than private collections. Furthermore, many large museums now attach RFID tags or GPS tracking devices to many of their pieces. Not surprisingly, most small private collections just don’t have the resources for this kind of technology.

  Given that there are literally thousands of places in the United States alone that house incredibly valuable art, we figure these two guidelines would, if nothing else, help us to whittle down the list of targets on which to focus our research and scouting. Of course, we also hope these guidelines would help keep us out of jail, but we try to avoid even thinking about that possibility.

  * * *

  Sarah and I decided we needed to expand beyond our gang of two and try to recruit someone else to join us.

  “What about Kat?” Sarah asked while we were debating who to recruit.

  Kat seemed like an obvious choice to me. She’s been our friend for eons, and her extensive art background would bring a whole new level of the art expertise to our discussions.