First Lady (27 page)

“I knew you’d say something crappy like that!” She hugged the dog to her thin chest. “He’s mine! Mine and Button’s.”

“That’s what you think.”

While Mat and Lucy scowled at each other, the dog disengaged himself and hoisted his weak body up onto the couch next to the car seat. Nealy was just moving forward to get him away from the baby when he gave Button a doleful look, then covered her from chin to forehead with a long, slow lick.

“Oh, God! He’s licking her face!” Nealy charged forward to push the dog away.

“Stop it!” Lucy cried. “You’re hurting his feelings.”

Button clapped and tried to grab the dog’s ear.

Mat moaned.

“Get him away from her!” Nealy tried to wedge herself between Button and the dog, only to feel Mat slip his arm around her waist and pull her back.

“Where’s that handy cyanide capsule when you need it?”

“Don’t! Let me go! What if he has rabies?” Even as Nealy struggled to get away from Mat, one part of her was thinking about how good it felt being right where she was.

“Calm down, will you? He doesn’t have rabies.”

Mat drew her toward the front of the Winnebago, then let her go so suddenly she nearly fell. She knew he’d just remembered he was manhandling Cornelia Case and not Nell Kelly. She rounded on Lucy. “Get that dog off the couch.”

“I’m going to keep him!”

“Put him in the back!” Mat jammed himself behind the wheel and pulled back onto the highway. “First it was just me. Exactly the way I wanted it! Then I got stuck with two kids. The next thing I know—”

A Greyhound flew past from the opposite direction and water thwacked the windshield. He made a disgusted sound, then flicked on the radio.

“
. . . reports from citizens across the country who believe they’ve seen First Lady Cornelia Case—
”

Nealy leaned over and snapped it off.

Every surface of the room was covered with knick-knacks. Glass candy dishes sat next to figurines of animals with bows on their heads, which nestled next to ceramic plaques printed with Bible verses. Where was a good earthquake when you needed one? Toni wondered.

“You sure you don’t want some coffee?” The woman that Toni and Jason had driven across two states to question regarded Jason apprehensively. She wore a short-sleeved blue knit pant suit with a rhinestone umbrella pin and white spiked heels.

Jason shook his head, anxious as usual to cut to the chase, and gestured toward a blue velour couch that sat underneath the window in the small second-floor apartment. “Do you mind if we sit down and ask you a few questions?”

“Oh . . . yes . . . no. I mean . . .” She twisted her hands. She’d just returned from church when they’d arrived, and having members of the FBI and Secret Service in her home had clearly undone her. The woman was in her early forties. She had a pudgy moon face, overly permed brown hair, and exquisite porcelain skin.

Toni smiled at her. “I’d appreciate a glass of water, Miss Shields, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I get a little carsick when I ride too long, and water settles my stomach.”

“Oh, no trouble at all.” She scurried toward the kitchen.

Jason shot Toni an irritated glance. “Since when do you get carsick?”

“It comes and goes at my convenience. Listen, pal, you and your steely-eyed stare are making her so nervous that she’s starting to worry about rubber hoses and bamboo slivers.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Witnesses who get too nervous either forget important details or make them up to please the person asking the questions.”

Jason frowned at a ceramic statue of a clown. “I want to get this over with.”

He wasn’t the only one. Special teams all over the country were tracking down tips that had been phoned in from citizens who were sure they’d seen Cornelia Case getting out of a limousine at an airport or lazing on the beach at Malibu. But the tip from Barbara Shields, a grocery store clerk in Vincennes, Indiana, was the one that had caught Toni and Jason’s attention.

Shields had reported seeing a woman who looked like Cornelia Case shopping in the Kroger’s where she worked. The woman had been traveling with a dark-haired man, a teenager, and a baby in a pink cap. The cursory description matched the description of the woman in the celebrity lookalike contest, right down to the short light brown hair.

Toni and Jason had discussed it. They both considered it unlikely that a woman traveling with three other people, two of whom were children, could be Cornelia Case. But they still wanted to talk with her in person, and their boss, Ken Braddock, had agreed.

Shields came out of the kitchen with a frosted blue water glass. Toni was ninety percent convinced they were on a fool’s errand, but she managed a smile. “Do you mind if we sit down?”

“Mind? No, no. Go ahead.” She rubbed her palms on her blue slacks, then perched on the edge of an armchair across from the couch. “I’m just a little nervous. I never met real government agents before.”

“Perfectly understandable.” Toni took a seat next to Jason. He opened his notebook, but Toni left hers in her purse. “Why don’t you just tell us what you saw?”

More palm-rubbing. “Well, it was Friday, two days ago. It was my first day back at work since my surgery.” She indicated her wrist. “I got carpal tunnel from scanning groceries. Repetitive stress injury, they call it. Everybody talks about helping office workers who get it from using computers, but nobody thinks about cashiers. I guess we’re not important enough.” Her expression indicated she was used to coming out on the short end of the checkout line.

“Anyway, this woman came through my line with a really good-looking man and these two kids, and I was so surprised when I saw her that I ran a can of baby food through the scanner twice.”

“Why were you surprised?” Toni asked.

“Because she looked so much like the First Lady.”

“A lot of women resemble the First Lady.”

“Not like this. I’ve always admired Mrs. Case, ever since the campaign, so I started keeping a scrapbook of pictures and articles about her. I know her face nearly as good as I know mine.”

Toni gave her an encouraging nod and tried to decide whether the fact that the woman was a Cornelia Case groupie made her testimony more or less valuable.

“She’d cut her hair. It’s short and light brown, but her face was the same. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any blown-up pictures of her, but—here, let me show you.”

She hurried over to a bookcase and pulled out several fat scrapbooks. After rustling through the pages for a moment, she showed them a head shot of the First Lady taken last year for the cover of
Time
.

“Look. Right there. Next to her eyebrow. She’s got this little freckle. I’ll bet I stared at this picture a dozen times before I saw it. The woman in my checkout line. She had a freckle in the exact same place.”

Toni gazed at the place where she was pointing, but the spot looked more like a blur on the negative than a freckle.

“Her voice was the same, too,” Barbara Shields went on.

“You’re familiar with Mrs. Case’s voice?”

She nodded. “Every time I know she’s going to be on television, I try to watch. This woman sounded just like her.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the man about what he liked on his sandwiches.”

“She was speaking English?”

She seemed surprised by the question. “Sure she was.”

“Did she have any kind of foreign accent?” Jason asked.

“No. She sounded just like Mrs. Case.”

He and Toni exchanged a glance. Then he leaned forward. “Tell us as much as you remember of the conversation, right from the beginning.”

“She asked the man what he wanted on his sandwich, and he said he liked mustard. And then the teenager said she wanted to buy this little paperback we had in the display with the astrology books.
Ten Secrets to a Better Sex Life
. The woman said no, and the teenager started to argue. The man didn’t like that, and he said something about how the girl had better listen to Nell or she was going to be in trouble. Then the baby—”

“Nell?” Toni gripped the water glass tighter. “That’s what he called the woman?”

Barbara Shields nodded. “I thought right away about how much Nell sounded like Nealy. That’s what Mrs. Case’s friends call her, you know.”

A similar name. A freckle that might have been a negative blur. Not enough to build a case on, just enough to keep them interested.

They continued their questioning, and Shields provided them with more detailed descriptions of the man and the teenager, but it wasn’t until they were ready to leave that she recalled her most useful piece of information.

“Oh, I almost forgot. They were driving a yellow Winnebago. I watched them leave through the window. I don’t know much about motor homes, but it didn’t look real new.

“A yellow Winnebago?”

“It was pretty dirty, like they’d been driving it for a while.”

“You didn’t happen to get the license plate, did you?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” Barbara Shields went for her purse.

Willow Grove, Iowa, sat on a bluff looking down over a branch of the Iowa River. It was a town of church steeples and antiques shops, a town where red brick houses alternated with white clapboard and where mature maples shaded the narrow streets. A small private college occupied several blocks near the center, and an old inn sat across from City Hall, which was topped with a copper cupola. The rain had ended, and the copper glinted in the frail streaks of late afternoon sunshine that managed to peak through the cloud cover.

Nealy told herself there couldn’t be a more perfect place for children to grow up, and apparently Mat was thinking the same thing. “This is going to be great for the girls.”

He’d stopped at a store on the outskirts to buy dog food and get directions to the street where the girls’ grandmother lived. It was close to the downtown area and ran along the top of the bluff. In the spaces between houses, she caught occasional glimpses of the river below.

“Number one-eleven,” he said. “There it is.”

He pulled up in front of a red brick two-story with white trim. All the houses on the street seemed to have front porches and detached garages. This one was square and solid, the kind of house that generations of families all over the Midwest had grown up in.

It looked a bit more neglected than the others on the street because there were no summer flowers blooming by the shrubbery or growing from pots on the front porch. The grass needed mowing, and the white trim didn’t look as fresh as its neighbors’. But it wasn’t rundown. Instead, it simply appeared as if its inhabitant had other things she’d rather do.

“That mangy mut’s staying locked up until Grandma’s had time to get over the shock of the girls,” Mat said.

She realized he was nervous. So was she. At least he’d stopped snapping at her.

Button had calmed down when they’d entered the town, almost as if she knew something monumental was about to happen to her life, and Lucy had sealed herself in the back with Squid. As Nealy began to unfasten the baby from the car seat, she noticed the old food stains on her romper, a small hole in the sleeve, and the fact that her hair could use a fluffing. “Maybe we should fix Button up a little before she meets her grandmother. For all we know, this might be the first time she’s ever seen her.”

“Good idea. I’ll get her out of this. See if you can find something decent for her to wear.” Then he remembered who he was talking to. “If you don’t mind.”

“I’m the one who suggested it,” she snapped.

Lucy lay stretched out on the bed with the dog curled against her, dirt and all. She pretended to be reading her book, but Nealy wasn’t fooled, and she squeezed her ankle. “It’s going to be all right, Lucy. This is a great place.”

Lucy pulled the book closer to her face and didn’t answer.

Nealy chose the little peach denim jumper she’d bought at Baby Gap. It had a row of tiny blue flowers embroidered across the yoke and a matching knit top with puffy sleeves. As she emerged with it, she saw that Mat had stripped Button down to a diaper and was giving her a pregame pep talk.

“I want you on your best behavior, Demon. No b.s. And not too loud, okay? No yelling. No hurling. Just be a regular baby, for a change.” He frowned at her as he fastened the tabs on a fresh diaper, and she cooed back at him. “Yeah, yeah . . . save the goo-goo eyes for Grannie.”

Nealy handed him the outfit, and he had the baby dressed in less than a minute. “You’re so good at that. It takes me forever to get her into her clothes.”

“You’re too tentative. With babies, you have to take charge or they’ll walk all over you. Just like with women.”

“Oh, yeah?” This was more like it, and she shot him a challenging grin, only to see the mischief fade from his eyes.

“You want to see if you can find her shoes?”

She turned away without a word. She wasn’t going to beg for his affection. Not that she wanted his affection, exactly. She wanted his . . . well, she wanted his body, no need to lie to herself about that. But she also wanted his friendship, his irreverence, even his annoying male chauvinism.

The words to an old Sheryl Crow pop song skittered through her head.
Was he strong enough to be her man?
Had she really thought he might be?

She was skirting dangerously close to self-pity, and she pulled herself together. “Lucy doesn’t seem to want to come out.”

“She probably knows her grandmother’s going to run a lot tighter ship than Sandy did.”

“Maybe.” She slipped the hairbrush through the baby’s fluff. To her astonishment, she found herself the target of the megawatt smile Button normally reserved for Mat. Her heart ached. “No way,” she muttered. “You’re not going to start flirting with me right before I have to give you up.”

Button gave a shriek of delight and held out her arms for Nealy to pick her up. Her throat constricted, and she turned away.

Mat lifted her from the couch. “Too little, too late, Demon. Some people can’t be bought.” He bent down, opened one of the built-in drawers underneath, and pulled out the Wal-Mart pillow. “As much as I hate to say it, you’ll need to wear this.” His expression showed his distaste. “Other than me, it’s the best protection you have.”