Page 35 of Go Under

A birth record came up, confirming that Daniel Avery was born at St. Mary’s Hospital of Philadelphia to Georgia and Theodore Avery on July 13, 1969. He looked at the desktop computer where two driver license images revealed the weathered, haunted images of Georgia and Theodore Smith.

Kate and Marcus shared another look.

“Search for Nora Avery,” Kate said. “See if anything pops up.”

Marcus entered the name into the search. Two hundred nineteen results populated. He filtered the results to the Philadelphia area, narrowing it down to sixty-four birth records between 1900 and the present day.

Nora Smith was fourteen in 1994 when Donna Frick launched her crusade to ruin the Smith family’s life. He narrowed the year range to 1992 to 1996, allowing a margin of error in case her date of birth was changed when the family changed their names.

That yielded three results. The first two were duds, but the final result was a birth certificate for Nora Avery, daughter of Georgia and Theodore Avery on May 7th, 1980.

Kate and Marcus looked at each other. Kate’s eyes were bright with excitement.

“That’s it,” she said. “Nora Avery is Nora Smith.”

Marcus did the math in his head. “She would have been eleven when Daniel was convicted of murder. He would have died in prison the summer she moved to Delaware.”

“That’s when she suffered cruelty at Donna Frick’s hand.”

“Her whole family suffered cruelty,” Marcus said, “and I’m willing to bet they had a hard time of it in Philly after the murder conviction, too.”

“So, they leave Philly, change their names, and start over. Only somehow Donna Frick knows who they are and attacks them constantly until she drives them out of Wilmington. After that…”

“Let’s find out.”

They kept working throughout the night, downing coffee steadily. The records were scattered and buried deeply, but slowly, they painted a picture of the life of the Avery family after Daniel’s murder.

The Wilmington events were repeated over and over throughout their lives. They’d change their names, move to a different town, and eventually, people would find out who they really were. They moved four times during Nora’s high school tenure. Nora Smith became Nora Jones became Nora Jackson became Nora Montgomery.

Finally, Nora Montgomery graduated from Norwalk High School in California and joined the Peace Corps. She disappeared after that. There was a record of her return to the United States a year later, but after that, nothing.

“She probably changed her name again,” Kate mused. “Left her parents behind and tried to wash her hands completely of that life.”

Indeed, there was no record of Nora’s presence at either funeral of Georgia Montgomery, deceased April 20th, 2024, or Theodore Montgomery, deceased May 16th, 2026.

Kate and Marcus looked at each other. Only a few months later, Cox broke out of prison. He spent over two months murdering people who broke the eighth commandment with the help of a currently incarcerated accomplice.

And maybe he had discovered Nora, fragile, broken, alone, bitter at the destruction of her family that she was helpless to stop. Maybe he had offered her guidance, comfort, purpose. He had fueled the rage burning in her heart and set her on a mission to kill the people she believed responsible for her brother’s wrongful conviction, the event that started her family on their path to destruction.

That was Cox’s specialty after all: finding people who were hurting and twisting that hurt to his advantage.

Now all that remained was to find her before she lashed out in her anger and took another innocent life on his behalf.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Friday, January 22nd

The following day was a flurry of procedural activity that would have made any Hollywood show-runner proud. Analysts at the field office created three different possible descriptions for a forty-six-year-old Nora Avery and distributed them to law enforcement in the Philadelphia and Trenton Metropolitan areas. Researchers sifted through the records Marcus and Kate had discovered the night before, digging for details of the Averys’ lives after their persecution at the hands of Donna Frick in Wilmington. Detectives, both with the field office and about a dozen local police agencies, scoured an eighty-mile radius for any sign of Stuart Pelham, almost certainly one of the targets on Nora Avery’s list.

The other potential targets, the DA, Assistant DA, and the judge, were all deceased. After much deliberation, it was decided that the jurors were not at high risk, since they had acted in good faith based on the evidence available to them. Kate continued to work on the remainder of the Ray Castillo cipher without success.

Without success was a good way to summarize that Friday. A lot of activity, very little in the way of results. They still lacked the most crucial details: where was Nora Avery, and where was Stuart Pelham? Had Cox indeed contacted Nora Avery after her father’s death, and if so, how? What had he told her?

Why did he accuse Kate’s father of being a false healer?

By lunchtime, they had a more complete image of the case, though the most important questions remained unanswered. They discovered that after Daniel’s conviction was officially overturned in early 1997, life got much better for the Avery’s, now living as the Montgomery’s. Theodore and Georgia retired and purchased a home in a middle-class neighborhood in Norwalk. Nora attended Norwalk high school for her junior and senior years and graduated with a respectable three-point-six grade point average. The settlement amount might not have been disclosed, but it was clearly considerable. And, as far as Kate could tell, the elder Averys were satisfied with that.

That could explain why Nora cut off contact with them when she left. They were happy with the money they received, but that provided no closure for their daughter. She wanted justice. The very last thing she wanted was hush money.