First Lady

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Her head shot back up. “You saw them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You saw them, but you didn’t do anything?”

  “Well . . . I thought about stealing your car myself, but I was afraid of your frog.”

  If she hadn’t been so upset, she might have laughed. His speech marked him as an educated man, which was disconcerting considering his tough-guy appearance. His eyes had dropped to her bulging stomach, and she had to resist the urge to look down and make certain the padding hadn’t shifted.

  “You’d better go inside and call the state police,” he said. “There was a hitchhiker out here earlier. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got tired of waiting for someone to pick him up and decided to take advantage of that free transportation you were offering. I’ll stay around long enough to give them a description.”

  She had no intention of calling the police. “That’s all right. You don’t have to wait.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  He seemed to be trying to place her face. She began to feel nervous. “I don’t want to hold you up. Thanks anyway.” She turned to leave.

  “Stop right where you are.”

  5

  WHERE HAD HE seen her? Mat studied the woman more closely as she looked warily back at him. There was something about her bearing that reminded him of royalty, but her thinness, along with that long, fragile neck, and hands that bore no sign of a wedding ring, spoke of hard times. Her arms and legs were almost comically slender in contrast to her heavy pregnancy, and there was a world-weary quality in her blue eyes that made him suspect she’d seen more of life than she wanted to.

  Those bright blue eyes . . . they were so familiar. He knew he’d never met her, but he felt as if he had. Her reluctance to call the police piqued his journalist’s curiosity. “You’re not going to report the theft, are you?”

  He watched a small pulse pound on the side of her neck, but she remained cool. “Why do you say that?”

  She had something to hide, and he had a good idea what it might be. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you can’t report it because the car didn’t belong to you.”

  Wariness flickered in her eyes, but not fear. The lady was down on her luck, but she still had a backbone. “None of this is your concern.”

  He was definitely on to something, and he took a wild stab. “You’re afraid that if you call the police, they’ll figure out that you stole the car from your boyfriend.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Why do you think I have a boyfriend?”

  He glanced down at her bulging abdomen. “I’m guessing it wasn’t a girlfriend who did that to you.”

  She looked at her stomach as if she’d forgotten it was there. “Oh.”

  “You’re not wearing a wedding ring, and you’re driving a stolen car. It all fits.” He wasn’t exactly sure why he was giving her such a hard time. Habit, he guessed, born out of his professional curiosity about people who tried to hide the truth. Or maybe he was stalling because he didn’t want to get back into the Winnebago.

  “I never said the car was stolen. You’re the one who decided that.”

  “So why don’t you want to call the police?”

  She gazed at him as if she were the Queen of Egypt and he was a stone-hauling slave building her a pyramid. Something about her attitude got his goat.

  “You could just go back to him,” he said.

  “You don’t give up, do you?”

  He noted the combination of intelligence and aloofness in her expression. This lady had developed the knack for keeping people at a distance. Too bad she hadn’t used it on her boyfriend.

  Who did she look like? The answer was right there, but he couldn’t quite grab hold of it. He wondered how old she was. Late twenties, early thirties? Everything about her manner and bearing screamed class, but her situation was too precarious for a member of the upper crust.

  “I can’t go back, “ she finally said.

  “Why not?”

  She paused for only a moment. “Because he beat me.”

  Was it his imagination, or did he detect a certain amount of relish in her words? What was that all about? “Do you have any money?”

  “A little.”

  “How little?”

  She still had her pride, and he admired her gutsiness. “Thank you for your help, but this really isn’t your concern.”

  She turned to walk away, but his curiosity wasn’t satisfied. Acting on the instincts that had made his reputation, he snagged the strap of her ugly plastic purse and pulled her to a stop.

  “Hey!”

  Ignoring her outrage, he lifted it from her shoulder and pulled out her wallet. As he looked inside, he saw no credit cards, no driver’s license, only a twenty-dollar bill and some change. “You’re not going far on this.”

  “You have no right!” She snatched her wallet and purse back and started to walk away.

  He had more than enough problems of his own, and he should have just let her go, but his instincts were on full alert. “So what are you going to do now?” he called after her.

  She didn’t answer him.

  A crazy idea hit him. He mulled it over for all of five seconds before making up his mind. “Do you want to hitch a ride?”

  She stopped walking and turned. “With you?”

  “Me and the kids from hell.” He moved toward her. “We’re heading west to Grandma’s house. Iowa. We can drop you off if you’re going that way.”

  She regarded him incredulously. “You’re inviting me along?”

  “Why not? But the ride’s not free.”

  Her expression grew wary, and he knew exactly what she was thinking. But pregnant women weren’t high on his list of turn-ons. “You have to keep Lucy off my back and take care of the baby. That’s all.”

  He’d expected her to be relieved, but the moment he mentioned the baby, she seemed to stiffen. “I don’t know anything about babies.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you learned?”

  It took her a moment to remember she was pregnant. He was getting the idea that she wasn’t exactly overjoyed about her little bundle of joy. She only thought it over for a few seconds before her eyes began to sparkle with something that looked like excitement. “Yes. All right. Yes, I’d like that.”

  Her reaction surprised him. There was more to this lady than met the eye. He reminded himself that he didn’t know anything about her, and he wondered if too much contact with Sandy’s kids had shorted out his brain. But driving one more mile with Lucy’s sullenness and a screaming baby was more than he could tolerate. Besides, if it didn’t work out, he could give her some money and dump her at the next truck stop. He turned back toward the Winnebago. “One warning.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They both have delicate stomachs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll find out.” He opened the door for her. “What’s your name?”

  “N-Nell. Nell Kelly.”

  Her hesitation made him wonder if she was telling the truth. Her boyfriend must be a real loser. “I’m Mat Jorik.”

  She gave a nod of acknowledgment that looked almost regal, and right then it hit him. Cornelia Case. That’s who she looked like.

  He must have celebrities on the brain. First he’d decided Lucy looked like Winona Ryder, and now this lady reminded him of a pregnant version of Cornelia Case. Even their voices were similar, but he couldn’t imagine the nation’s aristocratic First Lady ending up broke, pregnant, and abandoned at a roadside truck stop in rural Pennsylvania. “Anybody ever mention that you look like Cornelia Case?”

  She blinked. “All the time.”

  “You even sound alike, but you’ve got an accent. I can’t quite place it. Where are you from?”

  “The Carolinas. Alabama. Michigan for a while, then California. My folks moved around a lot. It affected my speech.”

  “Yeah, I guess it did.” The sunlight hit the top of her head, and he saw a small brown stain on the s
kin near her temple, as if she’d recently colored her hair and hadn’t gotten off all the dye. He automatically filed the detail away. Nell Kelly might be down on her luck, but she still had enough vanity left to take the time to color her hair. It was the kind of observation that used to set his newspaper stories apart.

  She smelled good, and, as he moved aside to let her into the motor home, he felt something odd. If she hadn’t been pregnant, he would have chalked it up to desire. It had been a while since he was in a relationship—he thought of the flying copy of Bride magazine—and his sex life had suffered. But it hadn’t suffered enough to make him respond to a skinny pregnant lady. Still, there was something about her . . .

  “After you, princess.” He dipped his head.

  “Princess?” Nealy’s own head shot up, and she was met with a lady-killer grin that made her wonder if she’d lost her mind. Not only had she just hitched a ride with a stranger, but the stranger was a foot taller and a lot stronger than she was. And that smile . . . Although it wasn’t lecherous, it had a challenging quality that she found unnerving.

  “Somehow it seems to fit,” he said.

  She had no idea how to reply to that, so she slipped past him—not that easy to do—and stepped inside. Her decision had been impulsive, but not completely foolish, she decided, as she gazed around the interior of the motor home. Although there was definitely something dangerous about him, it wasn’t a naked-female-left-dismembered-in-a-ditch kind of danger. He’d offered to stay and talk to the police, hadn’t he? And, best of all, her excellent adventure wasn’t over.

  She hoped he’d bought her explanation about her accent, and she reminded herself to be more careful so it didn’t keep fading in and out. She also reminded herself that she was now Nell Kelly, the first name that had popped into her head.

  The baby was perched in a car seat sitting on a couch with worn blue and green plaid upholstery. Across from the couch and immediately to Nealy’s right was a small banquette. The table held an open bag of potato chips, the remnants of a donut, a hairbrush, and a Walkman. A small refrigerator stood to her left, and beside it, a peeling veneer door led to either a closet or a bathroom. There was also a tiny kitchen with a three-burner stove, a microwave, and a sink littered with some Styrofoam cups and a Dunkin’ Donuts box. At the very rear of the motor home, a sliding door that was only partially closed revealed a double bed piled with clothes and some towels. There were two bucket seats at the front, one for the driver and one for a passenger.

  A challenging voice interrupted. “What are you doing here?”

  Reluctantly, she turned toward the surly teenager named Lucy, who was sitting on the couch feeding the baby green peas from a jar. The girl definitely wasn’t pleased to see her.

  Nealy remembered seeing something needy in her eyes when she’d been arguing with Mat. Maybe she didn’t like the idea of another woman horning in on her territory.

  “I’m hitching a ride,” Nealy replied.

  Lucy stared at her resentfully, then looked toward the driver’s seat. “What’s the matter, Jorik? You couldn’t go without sex so you had to bring her along?”

  Definitely proprietary.

  “Ignore her.” Mat picked up a road map and began to study it. “Lucy thinks if she talks dirty she’ll make me cry.”

  Nealy gazed at Lucy and thought about the dazzling group of teenagers she’d hosted at the White House just last week. They were all National Merit Scholarship winners, and their contrast with this girl couldn’t have been more pronounced. Well, she’d wanted a glimpse of ordinary life, and she’d found it.

  Lucy set the jar of baby food down on the couch. The baby, whose mouth was rimmed in green, immediately let out a demanding shriek. The teenager rose and went to the banquette, where she slouched down. “She’s not done eating, but I’m done feeding her.” She reached for her Walkman, slipped the headset over her ears, and leaned back into the corner.

  Mat glanced over his shoulder at Nealy and shot her a pointed smile. “Time to earn your keep, Nell.”

  For a moment Nealy couldn’t think whom he was addressing.

  “Finish feeding the baby so we can take off,” he said.

  Lucy was shaking her head to the music coming from the Walkman, but the watchful eye she kept on the baby indicated she was listening to every word. Nealy had the distinct impression she was being put to some kind of test.

  She turned to the baby and felt the familiar dread. Although she related well to children, being around babies was torturous. It was one of her most closely guarded secrets, especially ironic in light of the disguise she’d adopted.

  She didn’t need a shrink to figure out why she had a problem. The famous Time magazine cover photo taken when she was sixteen didn’t show that the starving Ethiopian baby she’d been holding had died in her arms moments after the photographer had walked away. The memory had never left her.

  Although she picked up a lot of healthy, smiling babies for photo ops, those contacts were always brief. Instead, it was the desperately ill babies her job so frequently required her to spend time with. She’d gazed at dozens of crack babies in isolettes, cuddled a hundred HIV babies, cooed to babies suffering from unspeakable diseases, and brushed flies from the empty eyes of those who were starving. In her mind, babies and suffering had become inexorably linked.

  “You have to distance yourself,” Dennis had said before their marriage when she’d tried to explain it to him. “If you want to be of any use to those children, you have to detach.”

  But how could anyone detach from the tragedy of watching innocents die? Images of their swollen bellies and crippled limbs haunted her dreams. These babies had become both her cross and her crusade, and she’d ordered her staff to look for as many opportunities as possible to showcase their plight. It was the only way she could honor the memory of the Ethiopian baby she hadn’t been able to help.

  First Ladies traditionally had a cause. Lady Bird had her wildflowers, Betty Ford fought substance addiction, Nancy Reagan Just Said No, and Barbara Bush wanted everyone to read. Although Cornelia hadn’t planned it that way, she became the guardian angel of the world’s most vulnerable victims.

  Now, as Nealy gazed down at this healthy, screaming, golden-haired little girl with bright blue eyes and peas smeared all over her face, she felt only dread. The dark side of her crusade was her panic when she saw a healthy one. What if her touch brought this beautiful child harm? The notion was illogical, but she’d felt like the Angel of Baby Death for so long that she couldn’t help it.

  She realized Mat was watching her, and she managed a shrug. “I’m—I’m not good with babies. Maybe you’d better do it.”

  “Afraid to get your hands dirty? In case you forgot, helping out is your ticket to ride.”

  He had her over a barrel, and he knew it. She took in the messy motor home, the surly teenager, and the fussing infant. Then she gazed at the big, roughneck of a man with his broad shoulders and devil’s smile. Did she want to stay on the run badly enough to put up with all this?

  Yes, she did.

  With grim determination, she picked up the gooey spoon, dipped it into the jar, and brought it to the baby’s mouth. The baby devoured the peas, then opened up for more, her eyes glued to Nealy’s face. As Nealy brought the next spoonful to her mouth, the baby grabbed her fingers.

  Nealy flinched, barely able to resist the urge to shake off her touch. “What’s her name?” she managed.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Lucy lifted one earphone. “Her name’s Butt.”

  “Butt?” Nealy gazed down at the adorable pea-smeared face with its soft features and healthy skin. Her straight blond hair rose like dandelion fluff around her head. The baby smiled, exhibiting four small teeth, then blew a green-flecked spit bubble.

  “I didn’t name her,” Lucy said, “so don’t look at me.”

  Nealy looked at Mat instead.

  “I didn’t name her, either.”

  She qu
ickly fed the baby the last spoonful of peas. “What’s her real name?”

  “Got me.” He began folding the map.

  “I thought you were a friend of her mother. Why don’t you know her name?” And how had he come to be on the road with two children who weren’t his?

  Instead of responding, he turned the key in the ignition.

  “I wouldn’t take off yet, Jorik,” Lucy said. “Butt needs a good half hour for her food to settle or she’ll hurl again.”

  “Damn it, we’re never going to get out of here.”

  Nealy didn’t think he should be using that kind of language in front of a teenager, no matter how foul-mouthed she might be herself. Still, it wasn’t her concern.

  Lucy yanked off her headset. “Turn on the air-conditioning. It’s hot.”

  “Have you ever heard the word please?”

  “Have you ever heard the words I’m hot as hell?”

  Lucy had pushed him too far. Instead of turning on the air-conditioning, he shut off the engine, got up from the driver’s seat, and calmly pocketed the keys. “I’ll see you ladies in half an hour.” He let himself out of the Winnebago.

  It was warm inside, and Nealy lifted an eyebrow at the teenager. “Nice going.”

  “He’s an ass.”

  “He’s an ass who just left us without air-conditioning.”

  “Who cares?”

  When Nealy had been Lucy’s age, she’d been expected to dress neatly and carry on polite conversation with world leaders. Discourtesy would never have occurred to her. The teenager was beginning to fascinate her.

  The baby had begun to smear her gooey fists into her blond fuzz. Nealy looked around for some paper towels, but didn’t see any. “How am I supposed to clean her up?”

  “I don’t know. With a washcloth or something.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Someplace. Maybe in that drawer.”

  Nealy found a dish towel, wet it at the sink, and, under Lucy’s watchful eyes, began wiping up the baby’s hair, only to discover that she should have started with her hands. As she worked, she tried not to notice the drooly smiles coming her way. Finally, the child was reasonably clean.