First Lady (3 page)

She managed to make it through the turnstile to the platform. Then, with her nose tucked into her guidebook and her heart pounding, she waited for the train that would begin her journey into the Maryland suburbs. When she got to Rockville, she intended to pick up a taxi and head for one of the used car dealerships along Route 355. There she hoped to find a salesman greedy enough to sell an old lady a car without seeing her driver’s license.

Three hours later, she was behind the wheel of a nondescript four-year-old blue Chevy Corsica heading toward Frederick, Maryland, on I-270. She’d done it! She’d made it out of Washington. The car had cost more than it should have, but she didn’t care because nobody could link it with Cornelia Case.

She tried to relax her cramped fingers, but she couldn’t. The alarm would have been raised at the White House by now, and it was time to make her call. As she got off at the next ramp, she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d driven on a freeway. Sometimes she took the wheel when she was on Nantucket or at Camp David, but seldom otherwise.

She spotted a convenience store on her left, pulled in, then got out of the car and made her way to a pay phone mounted on the side. She was accustomed to the efficiency of the White House operators, and she had to read the directions carefully. Finally, she punched in the number of the most private of the Oval Office telephone lines, the one she knew couldn’t be intercepted.

The President himself answered on the second ring. “Yes?”

“It’s Nealy.”

“For God’s sake, where are you? Are you all right?”

The urgency in his voice told her she’d made the right decision by not delaying this call. Her letter had obviously been found, but no one at the White House could be certain she hadn’t written it under duress, and she didn’t want to raise more of an alarm than she had to.

“I’m fine. Never been better. And the letter’s genuine, Mr. President. Nobody was holding a gun to my head.”

“John is frantic. How could you do this to him?”

She’d been expecting this. Every member of the President’s family was given a code to use in the event they were being coerced in any way. If she uttered a sentence with the name
John North
in it, the President would know she’d been taken against her will.

“This has nothing to do with him,” she replied.

“Who?” He was giving her another chance.

“I’m not being coerced,” she said.

He finally seemed to realize she had done this of her own free will, and his anger crackled over the line. “Your letter is filled with rubbish. Your father’s frantic.”

“Just tell him I’m taking some time to myself. I’ll call in occasionally so you know I’m all right.”

“You can’t do this! You can’t just disappear. Listen to me, Cornelia. You have responsibilities, and you need Secret Service. You’re the First Lady.”

It was useless to argue with him. For months she’d been telling both him and her father that she needed a break and had to get away from the White House, but neither would listen. “You should be able to hold the press off for a while by having Maureen announce that I’ve got the flu. I’ll call again in a few days.”

“Wait! This is dangerous! You have to have Secret Service. You can’t possibly—”

“Good-bye, Mr. President.”

She hung up on the most powerful man in the free world.

As she walked back to the car, she had to force herself not to run. Her polyester dress seemed to be permanently glued to her skin, and the legs beneath her elastic stockings no longer felt as if they belonged to her.
Breathe
, she told herself.
Just breathe
. She had too much to do to fall apart.

Her scalp itched as she turned back onto the highway. She wished she could take off the wig, but that had to wait until she’d purchased her new disguise.

It didn’t take her long to find the Wal-Mart she’d located last week through the Internet yellow pages. She’d only been able to escape with what fit into her purse, and now it was time to do some serious shopping.

Her face was so familiar that, even as a child, she’d never been able to go into a store without people watching her every move, but she was too tense to appreciate the novelty of shopping anonymously. She finished up quickly, stood in line to pay, and headed back to her car. With her purchases tucked safely in the trunk, she returned to the freeway.

By nightfall, she planned to be well into Pennsylvania, and sometime tomorrow, she’d get off the freeway permanently. Then she’d begin roaming the country that she knew both so much and so little about. She was going to travel until her cash ran out or she was caught, whichever came first.

The reality of what she’d done sank in. She had no one looking over her shoulder, no schedule to stick to. For the first time in her life, she was free.

A
S MAT JORIK
shifted in the chair, he bumped his elbow against the edge of the attorney’s desk. Mat frequently bumped into things. Not because he was ungraceful, but because most of the indoor world had been built too small to accommodate a man of his size.

At six feet six inches tall and two hundred and ten pounds, Mat dwarfed the small wooden chair that sat across from the desk of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, attorney. Still, Mat was accustomed to chairs that didn’t fit and bathroom sinks that hit him just above the knees. He automatically ducked when he walked down a set of basement steps, and the coach section of an airplane was his idea of hell. As for sitting in the back seat of nearly every car on the road—fuhgetaboutit.

“You’re listed on the birth certificate as the children’s father, Mr. Jorik. That makes you responsible for them.”

The attorney was a humorless tight ass, the kind of person Mat Jorik most disliked, so he uncoiled a couple vertebrae and extended one long leg—more than happy to use his size to intimidate the little worm. “Let me spell it out. They’re not mine.”

The attorney flinched. “So you say. But the mother also appointed you their guardian.”

Mat glared at him. “I respectfully decline.”

Although Mat had lived in Chicago and L.A., the blue-collar Pittsburgh neighborhood where he’d grown up still clung to him like factory smoke. He was thirty-four years old, a steeltown roughneck with big fists, a booming voice, and a gift for words. One old girlfriend said he was the last of America’s Real Men, but since she was throwing a copy of
Bride
magazine at his head at the time, he hadn’t taken it as a compliment.

The attorney pulled himself back together. “You say they aren’t yours, but you were married to their mother.”

“When I was twenty-one.” An act of youthful panic that Mat had never repeated.

Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a secretary with a manila folder. She was the no-nonsense type, but her eyes started crawling all over him the moment she entered the room. He knew women liked the way he looked, but, despite having seven younger sisters, he’d never figured out exactly why. In his eyes he looked like a guy.

The secretary, however, saw things a bit differently. When he’d walked into the office and announced himself as Mathias Jorik, she’d noticed that he was both lean and muscular, with broad shoulders, big hands, and narrow hips. Now she took in a slightly crooked nose, a killer mouth, and bluntly aggressive cheekbones. He wore his thick brown hair in a short, serviceable cut that couldn’t quite subdue a tendency to curl, and his tough, square jaw had
just-try-and-punch-me
written all over it. Since she generally found outrageously masculine men more annoying than appealing, it wasn’t until she’d given her boss the folder he’d requested and returned to her desk that she figured out what was so compelling about this one. Those flint-gray eyes reflected a sharp, unsettling degree of intelligence.

The attorney glanced at the folder, then looked back up at Mat. “You admit your ex-wife was pregnant with the older girl when you married her.”

“Let me run it by you one more time. Sandy told me the kid was mine, and I believed her until a few weeks after the ceremony, when one of her girlfriends told me the truth. I confronted Sandy, and she admitted she’d lied. I saw a lawyer, and that was it.” He still remembered the relief he’d felt at being able to leave behind everything he didn’t want.

Once again, the worm glanced down at the folder. “You sent her money for a number of years.”

No matter how hard Mat tried to hide it, sooner or later people figured out that he was a soft touch, but he didn’t believe a kid should have to suffer for her mother’s bad judgment. “Sentiment. Sandy had a good heart; she just wasn’t too discriminating about who she slept with.”

“And you contend you haven’t seen her since the divorce?”

“There’s no contention about it. I haven’t seen her in nearly fifteen years, which makes it really tricky for me to be the father of that second baby she had last year.” Naturally it was another girl. His entire life had been haunted by female children.

“Then why is your name on both children’s birth certificates?”

“You’d have to ask Sandy that.” Except no one was going to ask Sandy anything. She’d died six weeks ago driving drunk with her boyfriend. Since Mat had been on the road, he hadn’t learned about it until three days ago when he’d finally gotten around to checking his voice mail.

There’d been other messages as well. One from a former girlfriend, another from a casual acquaintance who wanted to borrow money. A Chicago buddy needed to know if Mat was moving back to the Windy City so he could sign him up for their old ice hockey league. Four of his seven younger sisters wanted to talk to him, which was nothing new, since Mat had been in charge of them from the time he was a kid growing up in that tough Slovak neighborhood.

Mat had been the only male left after his father had walked away. His grandmother had kept house while his mother had worked fifty hours a week as a bookkeeper. This arrangement had left nine-year-old Mat in charge of his seven younger sisters, two of whom were twins. He’d struggled through his childhood hating his father for being able to do what Mat couldn’t—walk away from a house that held too many females.

The final few years before his escape from the Hell House of Women had been especially bad. His father had died by then, putting an end to the fantasy Mat had entertained that he’d come back and take charge. The girls were growing older and more temperamental. Somebody was always getting ready to have her period, going through her period, getting over her period, or sneaking into his room late at night in quiet hysterics because her period was late, and he was supposed to figure out what to do about it. He loved his sisters, but being responsible for them had suffocated him. He’d promised himself when he finally got away that he’d turn his back on family life forever, and except for the short, stupid time with Sandy, that’s exactly what he’d done.

The last call on his voice mail had come from Sid Giles, the producer of
Byline
. It was another plea for Mat to come back to the L.A. tabloid television show he’d left last month, but Mat Jorik had sold out his credibility as a journalist once, and he’d never do it again.

“. . . first step is to bring me a copy of your Judgment for Dissolution of Marriage. I need proof that you were divorced.”

He returned his attention to the attorney. “I’ve got proof, but it’ll take me a while to get my hands on it.” He’d left L.A. so fast that he’d forgotten to empty out his safe-deposit box. “It’ll be quicker if I get a blood test. I’ll do it this afternoon.”

“ DNA test results take several weeks. Besides, there’ll have to be proper authorization before the children can be tested.”

Forget that. Mat wasn’t going to have those birth certificates come back to bite him in the ass. Even though it wouldn’t be hard to prove he was divorced, he wanted the blood tests to back him up. “I authorize it.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Jorik. The girls are either yours or they’re not.”

Mat decided it was time to go on the offensive. “Maybe you’d better explain why this is such a mess. Sandy’s been dead for six weeks, so why did you just get around to letting me know about it?”

“Because I didn’t find out myself until a few days ago. I took some diplomas into the frame shop where she’d been working and heard what had happened. Although I’m her attorney, I hadn’t been informed.”

Mat considered it something of a miracle that Sandy’d had an attorney, let alone that she’d bothered to make out a will.

“I went to the house right away and spoke to the older girl. She said a neighbor had been watching them, but there was no neighbor in sight. I’ve been back twice and still haven’t seen any sign of adult supervision.” He tapped his yellow pad and seemed to be thinking aloud. “If you’re not going to take responsibility, I’ll have to call Child and Youth Services so the girls can be picked up and put into foster care.”

Old memories sifted over Mat like steeltown soot. He reminded himself that there were lots of wonderful foster parents, and the chances of Sandy’s kids ending up with a family like the Havlovs were slim. The Havlovs had lived next door when Mat was growing up. The father was chronically unemployed, and the family survived by taking in foster kids, then neglected them so badly that Mat’s grandmother and her friends had ended up feeding and bandaging them.