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an easy connection? Something only someone close to her might guess…. His mind picked over and skimmed ideas but nothing hit him right away. He was almost ready to give up when his thoughts took a different route. “Try Amy Anderson,” he suggested, hoping the hunch panned out.
    “What do you know, there is an Amy Anderson ticket purchased two months ago and used last night. Is that all?”
    “Destination?”
    “Newark, New Jersey.”
    He smiled. “Thanks for your help.”
    “Sure.” The withering response came as he hung up. Nothing like a New York public servant to brighten an early morning.
    Why Newark? No matter. He had her secret name. This was likely the name she used as a blank slate before she created her next identity. He didn’t know why he didn’t think of it before. Now he could track her as easily as following a light in the dark.





CHAPTER SIX
    M AMA J O’S MIND WAS FULL of odds and ends—which in itself wasn’t unusual—but there was something lurking at the edge of her thoughts that made her want to do a double check over her shoulder for shadows.
    She adjusted the shawl over her thin shoulders and surveyed her hands with the critical eye of someone who’d seen a lot and done even more. She was getting old. Even if her mind was still sharp, her body was giving little signals and signs that she was no longer twenty-five.
    She ambled outside, shivering as the winter air invaded her bones, and made quick work of grabbing an armful of wood to bring back inside.
    Was it so long ago that her foster boys once ran amok in the little farmhouse? Was it even longer that her own boy died? The breath hitched in her chest for a painful moment and she waited for it to pass. Ah, Cordry, she thought on a sigh. Would he have grown to be a better man than he had been as a misled teen? Only God knew for sure. She tried not to dwell on the past but there were ghosts in the house it seemed.
    She remembered his smile, fleeting though it was, and his love for strawberry pancakes. The rest of the details of his thirteen-year-old life were fading from her memory, slipping into a fuzzy void that sucked up the moments that gave her pain. And that’s how it should be, she realized. There was little that could be done to change the past. She knew that better than anyone and she tried to pass that on to her foster boys; Lord knew they needed to hold that lesson to their hearts. Bless them, each had been given a rough row to hoe.
    A knock at the door interrupted her musings and revealed a man she’d never seen and would’ve figured for a salesman if not for his fine clothes and fancy wheels parked out front. Still, she had no desire for company at the moment so she attempted to shoo him along.
    “Sorry, son, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. Ain’t nothing in the cookie jar but a few crumbs these days,” she said, moving to close the door. He stopped her with an apologetic expression.
    “Excuse me, Ms. Bell, for intruding on this fine winter day but I obtained information that you once knew my daughter,” he said as his mouth tipped in a disarming smile that Mama Jo didn’t trust one bit. She narrowed her stare at him, and he hastened to add, “I’m Lionel Vissher. My daughter is Cassandra Nolan.”
    “You mean your stepdaughter, don’t you, because I remember her father and you ain’t him.”
    His mouth turned down. “Yes, of course. Stepdaughter. Do you by any chance know where she is? I heard at one time she used to be very close to your foster son and spent a lot of time here in your house.”
    The way he said it made her feel as if she’d transgressed for allowing a young girl to find solace and companionship at her hearth. She tightened her shawl around her shoulders but didn’t invite the man in. She’d rather stand there and shiver to death than give this Lionel character any comfort. Mama Jo found him distasteful and didn’t mind letting it show in her expression. She didn’t know where