First Lady (21 page)

“We like to keep up with the news shows,” Charlie said. “
Dateline
’s on tonight.”

“We don’t have a television.”

“And you won’t die from it, young lady.” Bertis gave Lucy a hug. “You read a nice book tonight. Something educational.”

“Mat, can I borrow one of your
Playboys
?”

“You’re such a dickens, Lucy.” Bertis regarded the teenager fondly. “Our Megan would love you.”

Lucy gave a long-suffering sigh but made no effort to disengage herself from Bertis’s grandmotherly arms.

“Now, remember, Nell, you’re going to send over Button’s romper so I can mend the seam while we’re watching
Dateline
.”

When Button had torn her outfit, Nealy’d had no idea Bertis would volunteer to fix it, and she was embarrassed. “You don’t have to do that. Really.”

“You’ll be doing me a favor. If I don’t keep my hands busy, I snack.”

Nealy thanked her, then she and Lucy returned to the motor home with the baby. As she went inside, she thought how nice it was to receive a favor from someone who didn’t have a single thing to gain by it.

The baby was dirty from crawling in the grass around the picnic table, something Nealy had tried desperately to prevent, only to have everyone else act as if she were being unreasonably overprotective. Since Charlie had asked Mat to help him with an awning bracket, it was up to Nealy and Lucy to coax the cranky baby through a quick bath in the sink. She was sobbing from fatigue by the time she was dressed in a clean pair of pajamas, and she refused to let Nealy comfort her.

Lucy took her in the back to give her a bottle. As the teenager slid the door shut, Nealy felt vaguely melancholy. She wasn’t exactly jealous, but it hurt to know the baby so clearly preferred everyone else to her. Button probably sensed there was something wrong with her.

The Angel of Baby Death . . . She shook off the terrible image.

The door swung open, and she whirled around. Mat stepped in, looking even larger than normal and more gorgeous. Her mouth felt dry. She turned away and spotted Button’s torn romper. “Would you mind taking this over to Bertis? I forgot.” She thrust it toward him.

“No problem.” He sounded unusually cheerful for someone who could be the world’s biggest curmudgeon. “No problem at all.” He smiled as he reached out to take the romper and his hand brushed hers. “Be back in a few minutes.”

He was deliberately torturing her. And what was the point? He might think they were going to make love with two children only a few feet away, but she knew differently. Frustrated, she made her way to the bathroom and stripped off her clothes.

As the water poured over her, she remembered the way those big hands had cupped her breasts. She’d loved every moment of his urgent, single-minded seduction. It had felt so good to be desired.

She reminded herself that they barely knew each other. They had no common interests, no shared background. But then she’d had those things with Dennis and look what it had brought her.

Her eyes prickled with tears. Despite everything, she missed Dennis. More than anyone, he would have understood her confusion now, and he would have offered wise counsel. Whenever she let herself forget how he’d betrayed her, she also remembered that he’d been her best friend.

She took her time in the shower, so she was surprised to discover that Mat still wasn’t back when she came out of the bathroom. Why did life have to be so complicated? There was only one thing she knew for certain. She loved being Nell Kelly. Living in another woman’s skin had been the best gift she’d ever given herself, and she wasn’t nearly ready for it to end.

All day she’d blotted out images of the hoard of government agents who would be trying to track her down, and now she breathed a silent prayer.
Please. Just a few more days. That’s all I ask. Just a few more days . . .

Toni DeLucca was barely paying attention to
Dateline
as she sat in her hotel room not far from Mc-Connellsburg, Pennsylvania. She and Jason had spent another fruitless morning at the truck stop and an equally fruitless afternoon questioning Jimmy Briggs. Now she was propped in bed munching an apple, instead of the salt and vinegar potato chips she really wanted, while she studied the preliminary lab report on the Chevy Corsica. Cornelia Case’s fingerprints had been all over it, but there hadn’t been any bloodstains or signs of violence. She set the report aside to read through the information they’d just received from Terry Ackerman.

Dennis Case’s chief advisor had reported that he’d talked to Aurora the night before. According to Ackerman, she hadn’t used the code phrase
John North
during the conversation, nor had she led him to believe her disappearance was other than voluntary. It was a relief to know that Jimmy Briggs hadn’t harmed Mrs. Case, but she wished Ackerman had pressed harder to find out where she was.

“
This is Ann Curry with a special report from NBC News . . .
”

Her half-eaten apple rolled off the bed as she found the remote and turned up the volume. Thirty seconds later, she grabbed the phone and dialed Jason Williams’s room.

“NBC just reported that Aurora’s missing. CNN’s coming on right now.”

“Got it.”

She heard the television go on in his room, and they both listened.

“Just where is Cornelia Case? Reliable sources in Washington are saying that the nation’s First Lady, who was reported to be in bed with the flu, has, in fact, disappeared. No one has seen her at the White House since Tuesday morning, three days ago. She isn’t at the home in Middleburg, Virginia, she and President Case shared or the Litchfield family estate on Nantucket. While there’s been no official confirmation of her disappearance by the White House, unofficial sources are saying that Mrs. Case left of her own volition. Apparently she told no one of either her plans or her destination. Most alarming, she left without Secret Service protection.”

The screen showed James Litchfield hurrying into a limousine.

“Her father, former Vice President James Litchfield, refused to answer questions today when . . .”

Toni turned down the volume as the report began to speculate about foul play. She propped the telephone receiver in the crook of her neck and frowned. “It was bound to come out.”

“Does it make our job easier or harder?”

She’d been wondering the same thing. “It’ll be harder for her to hide, so there’s a better chance she’ll be forced to surface. But it also raises the stakes. Now every crackpot in the world knows that she’s vulnerable.”

“Come down to my room, will you?”

“Why, babycakes, I didn’t know you cared.”

“Cut the crap. I’ve got something I want to show you.”

“How big is it?”

“Sexual harassment can work two ways, DeLucca,” he snapped. “And you just stepped way over the line.”

“Well, excuuuze me.” She hung up the phone and smiled. Jason might not have much of a sense of humor, but she had to respect his professionalism. She pulled on a pair of baggy sweats that were held together at the waist with a safety pin, picked up her room key, and headed down the corridor.

When he opened the door, she flicked her fingers against his chest. “Mommy’s here. Did you want me to fix your night-light so you won’t get scared in the dark?”

He rolled his eyes in exactly the same way her twenty-three-year-old daughter Callie did when Toni was annoying. Only young people could manage such an extreme degree of eye rolling.

“Take a look at this.” He gestured toward the laptop computer sitting on the desk.

She’d forgotten her reading glasses and had to squint at the screen to see that he’d pulled up the web site for tomorrow morning’s edition of a small West Virginia newspaper.

“What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Right there.” He jabbed his finger at the screen.

“ ‘Santa Wins Celebrity Lookalike Contest’? Why would I be interested— Whoa.” She readjusted her distance from the computer and went back to the beginning of the article to read more slowly. “How did you find this?”

“Just surfing around. I’ve been checking the newspapers in a hundred-and-fifty-mile radius of Mc-Connellsburg. It says the woman was Hispanic, so it’s probably not important. Besides, why would anyone who was trying to hide enter a lookalike contest?”

“Still . . . Damn, I wish there was a photo. Get into the telephone directories and see if you can find a . . .” She squinted at the screen. “Brandy Butt. Doesn’t sound Hispanic to me. And most Hispanic women don’t look like Aurora.”

“So far I’ve come up empty, but I have a few more places to check.”

“Let me see what I can dig up.” Toni began to head for the phone, then paused. Normal procedure would be to hand this off to a West Virginia field office, but there was nothing normal about the task force assigned to find Aurora. She and Jason, for example reported directly to Ken Braddock, the assistant director in charge of the National Security Division, and they could either follow their own leads or pass them off.

She picked up the phone, cradled it in her neck, and regarded her partner. “I intend to head for West Virginia first thing tomorrow, Boy Howdy. How about you? Is seven o’clock too early?”

“I was planning to leave at six, but if you need a little more rest, I understand.”

Oh, she was starting to like this kid.

The nape of Mat’s neck was still prickling. It had been so weird, standing there in the middle of the Waynes’ motor home with Button’s yellow Bo Peep romper in his hand and listening to
Dateline
report Cornelia Case’s disappearance. The whole thing was one of those weird coincidences, but as he walked back to Mabel, his neck still tingled. It was the same feeling he got when he was working on a big story.

He couldn’t help but make a mental comparison between Nell Kelly and Cornelia Case. Despite their surface similarities, Mrs. Case was cool and sophisticated, almost ethereal, while Nell was funny, approachable, and very real. After the first impression, they didn’t even look that much alike. Nell’s hair was different, and even though she was thin, she didn’t have that upper-class clothes-hanger look Mrs. Case had. Mrs. Case’s forehead was higher, she was taller than Nell, and her eyes weren’t as blue. And, most of all, Mrs. Case wouldn’t have let Mathias Jorik kiss her.

He chuckled to himself. If Nell put on a wig, spruced herself up a little, and wore higher heels, she might be able to walk right to the doors of the White House and pass herself off as the First Lady. Then, when the real Mrs. Case came back, no one would believe it was her. It’d be a chick version of
The Prince and the Pauper
. What a great story!

He opened the door and stepped inside the motor home all ready to tell her about it when he saw her sitting on the couch, and his smile faded. She was wearing her blue cotton nightgown with her feet tucked beneath her. All the lights were out except one small lamp. The light spilled across her face. She looked as delicate and ethereal as a fifteenth century Madonna, and he found it impossible to imagine her doing anything as silly as buying a ceramic frog, driving a motor home, or mooing to a cranky baby.

The skin at the back of his neck prickled. She looked very much like Cornelia Case.

She lifted her head and smiled. “You took a while. Did Bertis offer you another piece of her fruit cocktail cake?”

“Cake? No. No, we were just . . .” The wide cotton strap on her nightgown slipped on her shoulder, and the impression faded. She looked like Nell again, the woman he’d been thinking about all evening. “We were just talking.”

As he sat on the edge of the banquette, the idea of making love with her passed from desire into a consuming need. “Are the girls asleep?”

“Out cold.” She studied him for a moment. “Is something wrong?”

“No, why?”

“I don’t know. You looked odd when you came in.”

He started to tell her about Cornelia Case, but came to his senses just in time. He had seduction in mind, not a discussion of current events, and the news could definitely wait until later. “Must have been that fruit cocktail cake resettling in my stomach.”

She stood, and the light provided a hazy silhouette of her body through her nightgown. “Do you want something to drink? Another root beer?”

The most he could manage was to shake his head. He found himself rising, taking a step toward her.

She gazed up at him, and he saw wariness in her eyes, the last emotion he wanted her to feel.

“Mat, we need to talk about this. There are two children just behind that door.”

“Yeah, I know.” He had been thinking of little else. It was one thing to tell himself they were sound sleepers, but now he realized how thin that door really was. Time to improvise. “It’s hot in here. Let’s go for a walk. ”

“I’m in my nightgown.”

“It’s dark. Nobody’ll be able to see a thing. Besides, that nightgown covers up more of you than the clothes you were wearing all day.”

“Still . . .”

“There’s a path right behind us that heads into the woods a little way. We can keep Mabel in sight.”

Unexpectedly, her mouth curved, and he remembered her delight in simple pleasures. “I’ll get my shoes.”

A few minutes later they were walking down a path strewn with mulch chips. Just enough light penetrated the trees from the campsites to show the way. Nealy took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of woodsmoke and rich, damp vegetation, absorbing the idea that she was wandering around outside in her nightgown. “Isn’t this wonderful?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty nice. Give me your hand so you don’t trip.”

She didn’t believe she was in danger of tripping, but she slipped her hand into his. It felt big, solid, and unfamiliar. Although she was the veteran of tens of thousands of handshakes, the only hands she held for long belonged to children. “I had a good time tonight.”

“I hate to admit it, but I did, too.”

“They were nice to Lucy. She didn’t swear once while we were with them?”

“I noticed. And she had provocation with the way Bertis kept fussing over her.”