His hand crept back to the radio when he heard one of Mrs. Case’s old college friends being interviewed.

“. . . we knew we could count on Nealy to have the best class notes when it was time for an exam . . .”

Nealy? He’d forgotten that was Mrs. Case’s nickname. The press seldom used it. Nealy. Nell. Close.

Forget it. He was a journalist. He dealt in facts, not fancy. He’d always been proud of having no imagination, and only someone with a big imagination could believe that the First Lady of the United States would take off across the country in a Chevy Corsica, then hook up with a man hauling around two kids who didn’t belong to him so she could change diapers, put up with a teenager’s sass, and practice tongue kisses.

But the nape of his neck was still tingling.

Toni peered through a magnifier to study the proof sheet the photographer for the small West Virginia newspaper had given her. There wasn’t a single clear shot of the Cornelia Case lookalike. A shoulder here, the top of her head, part of her back. That was it.

She handed them to Jason. “Does anything strike you as strange?”

While Jason took his time studying the photographs, she moved restlessly around the newspaper photographer’s tiny office. Their interview with Laurie Reynolds, the promotion manager at WGRB radio and the person who’d been running the contest, hadn’t given them much to go on.

According to Reynolds, the woman who’d called herself Brandy Butt had only spoken Spanish and seemed to have been forced into the contest by the teenage girl who was with her. Afterward, she’d run off the stage and Reynolds had seen her leave the mall with a good-looking dark-haired man, a baby girl in a pink cap, and the teenager.

Jason set down the magnifier. “It looks like she was deliberately dodging the camera.”

“Hard to tell, but it does seem that way.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. A husband, a baby, a teenager. Highly unlikely this woman is Aurora.”

“I agree. But—this is a small town. Why doesn’t anybody know who she is?”

“She was probably just traveling through with her family. The girl said she was from Hollywood.”

“Nobody in Hollywood even knows where West Virginia is. And why did she dodge the camera, then disappear so fast afterward? Even more interesting—why did the teenager give a phony address when she picked up the prize?”

“Because Brandy Butt or somebody in her family doesn’t want to be found.”

She picked up the proofs again. “And she only won second place. Let’s not forget that.”

“Yeah. Pretty hard to forget.” He pulled a tin of Altoids from his pocket and slipped one in his mouth. “So do we agree that we have exactly nothing?”