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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 doze
n 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.”
