The matronly clothes and wig were gone, and when the woman spoke, her accent was big and brash and Southern. “First, don’t be like Pierre here. Y’all call me Maggie.”
“Maggie! Maggie!” the reporters yelled, vying for her attention.
“Well, y’all sure are going to a lot of fuss for one little ol’ rock.” She scanned the crowd, savoring the spotlight, before settling on one especially handsome international correspondent. “Sweetheart, what I can do for you?”
The entire crowd laughed as if on cue.
The man smirked. “Do you believe in the curse, Maggie?”
Again, Maggie eyed the younger man up and down. “Maybe I believe in fate. What’s your name, cutie?” she asked, but didn’t really wait for an answer. “Folks,” she said instead, leaning closer to the crowd and growing serious. “I’m from Texas. I’ve been hunting, shooting, and riding since I could walk. I’ve married and buried four men, each richer than the last—God rest their souls,” she added quickly, almost as if from habit. “So one little ol’ rock doesn’t scare me.”
“Why not keep it, Maggie?” another reporter yelled.
“I’m rich,” she snapped. “And I’m old. Now, they tell me that emerald can’t make me younger, but it can make me richer So one week from today, I’m gonna sell this thing to the highest bidder. And I’m betting someone’s gonna bid pretty high.” She made a move as if to leave.
“The Cold Shoulder,” Kat and Hale said together. It was a classic move. Simple. And very, very effective because the crowd yelled louder, “Maggie!”
“Yes.” She stopped and looked at them as if they were little kids and she couldn’t quite believe they hadn’t run away to play.
“How did it feel knowing your movers had broken a two-thousand-year-old urn?” yelled a reporter near the back of the crowd.
This time it was Maggie’s turn to laugh. “Like maybe I ought to let ’em break everything I own!”
“Do you think the emerald’s real?” one of the reporters yelled.
“Well, I didn’t imagine it.”
When the crowd chuckled again, Kat recognized the sound. It was the laugh of the mark—the sign that they adored you, they believed you, and they would hand you their grandmother’s pearls, the key to the vault. Anything. Everything. Because right then, they…were in love.
Maggie’s Southern accent might have been a fake (then again, maybe it wasn’t), but she was the belle of the ball and not a soul would dare deny it.
“Let ’em run their little tests, boys. I think we all know what they’re gonna find.”
Even after the press conference was over, the four teens sat perfectly still for a long time, trying to understand what they’d just seen.
“People think she’s going to sell the Antony,” Gabrielle said, her voice a mixture of dismay and admiration.
“In seven days,” Simon added.
“In Monaco,” Kat said, turning her gaze to Hale, both of them knowing exactly what they had to do.
“Marcus,” Hale said, pressing a button and calling to the cockpit. “We’re gonna need to turn the plane around.”
CHAPTER 19
The fact that no one had ever heard of Margaret Covington Godfrey Brooks before then was something that, in the days that followed, was never mentioned.
The matriarchs of Atlanta suddenly recalled lunching with her during the years when she and her late second husband had supposedly kept a home in Buckhead. The alumni board of Texas A&M University was not surprised to find a backlog of canceled checks and generous donations even though, until then, the name had not been familiar to a single soul beyond its appearance on an old student roster dating back to the 1950s. The residents of East Hampton seemed to recall a series of grand parties on Maggie’s third husband’s summer estate. And at least two former U.S. presidents were rumored to have been hunting buddies with Maggie herself on eighty thousand acres in the panhandle east of Lubbock (they also said that Maggie was the best shot any of their party had ever seen).
These weren’t lies, Kat knew. They were merely the fruits of the seeds that only a great con artist could have planted and an all-powerful con could have grown.
Within twenty-four hours after the news of the Antony’s recovery, Maggie’s name and photo had been beamed around the world, and so it stood to reason that the woman who had not, technically, existed a mere week before had become a personality of international proportions.
Celebrity, after all, is nothing but a matter of perception.
And perception, Kat knew, was the true heart of the con.
So no one thought to verify the name or the bank accounts or any of the facts that appeared along with the woman with the emerald.