She had red hair and blue eyes, like Jessica’s mom, but they were clearly not the same person. Her mother was a woman called Pamela Arnold, who had died in an automobile accident when Jessica was just a baby.

Tony had told her the full story once years ago. The accident had happened on a Friday evening. They’d been out of milk and coffee and bagels, and Pamela had been in the mood for a nice bottle of pinot noir. So she’d grabbed the keys to her VW Bug and headed out to buy some wine and groceries.

She’d never made it to the store.

The car had been found at the bottom of a hillside mottled with rocks and trees, about a hundred feet below a narrow bend in the road. It had been crushed like an accordion, and the police had told Tony that Pamela hadn’t stood a chance. Death would have been instantaneous. They didn’t know what had caused her to veer off the blacktop and hurtle straight through the flimsy crash barrier. Possibly a wild animal on the road or a drunk driver in the wrong lane. They could only speculate.

All Jessica had been left with was a single photo of her mother to remember her by.

She reached into her bag for her wallet and slid the picture out and studied it.

It had been taken in a park on a late fall day, which you could tell from the red, orange, and gold leaves on the trees in the background. Pamela wore an emerald-green crocheted beret and a long matching scarf, and in her arms was a baby of about six months old. On the back of the photo, in Tony’s familiar block handwriting, were the words Pamela and Jessica, October 1989.

Jessica compared the faded picture with the image of Eleanor Lavelle on the laptop screen. Both women shared the same hair and eye color but otherwise were nothing alike.

The same couldn’t be said for Eleanor and Jessica.

If Eleanor had been sitting next to her right now, here in Ace’s Bar, most people would only notice the obvious differences between them at first glance.

Eleanor’s red hair tumbled past her shoulders in thick, loose waves, whereas Jessica’s was chin length and peroxide blonde, courtesy of a ten-dollar drugstore dye carton.

Eleanor’s skin was pale and dusted lightly with freckles, while months spent traveling through some of the hottest states during the summer had given Jessica a deep golden tan.

They both had blue eyes, but Eleanor’s were clear and bright like a desert sky at high noon, and Jessica’s own were the blue gray of the ocean on a stormy day.