Double Exposure: A First Daughter Mystery - Hardcover

Susan Ford is the daughter of President Gerald R. Ford and Betty Ford, and spent her formative years living in the White House. She has had a successful career as a photojournalist and has been very active in such organizations as the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Gerald R. Ford Museum, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Program, and the Betty Ford Center. She is in great demand as a public speaker and continues to work for charitable causes. She lives in New Mexico with her family.

Laura Hayden is an award-winning author and scriptwriter who has published seven novels and seen a script she cowrote produced by a major network for a national audience. She lives with her family in Colorado.

Susan Ford, the daughter of President Gerald R. Ford, brings her White House insider perspective to this sparkling debut novel, the first in a series of First Daughter mysteries. Double Exposure introduces us to Eve Cooper, photographer extraordinaire and the daughter of the newly elected President of the United States.

Eve and her family have barely settled into the White House when the first crisis erupts. There's a dead body in the Rose Garden. In the corpse's pocket is a fragment of a photo that features an unclad and unidentified couple in the Lincoln bedroom, clearly involved in very unofficial activities. The story (complete with photos) is on the front page of The Washington Post, and the press is in a feeding frenzy.

With the help of official White House photographer Michael Cauffman, Eve sets out to clear the President by discovering exactly who took those pictures, and when, and why. As Eve closes in on the truth, she opens a vast Pandora's box of new troubles, both public and private. And the body count keeps rising.

Rich in suspense, humor, and mystery, Double Exposure is an auspicious launch for the literary career of First Daughter Susan Ford, and a fresh and exciting new entry in the popular genre of presidential fiction.

Chapter One


After only three weeks, I wanted out.

Badly.

During the campaign, the idea of living in the White House had sounded almost exciting. Almost exotic. Almost fun.

Almost.

But then again, my mother had always warned us to be careful what we wished for; we might get it. I wish she were still alive so I could tell her, ``We got it, all right, Mom. So...now what?''

My name is Evelyn Ann Cooper. Most people call me Eve. The press really loves that--a First Daughter named Eve. Some genius stumbled onto that little story hook back in September on a slow news day. I cringe every time I see it in print.

So now, post-inauguration, I'm stuck here, essentially living in a national monument, surrounded by museum pieces I'm afraid to touch, people I don't know, and legions of Secret Service agents whose faces would probably shatter if they dared to smile.

So far, the only person I've met who seems to be able to smile around here is Michael Cauffman, Dad's hand-selected official photographer. In fact, Michael's constant--and may I say sappy--grin is beginning to get on my nerves.

Jealousy on my part, I guess.

But he can afford to be happy; after his daily duties in the White House, he goes home at night to his apartment. He doesn't have to deal with the same problems my family has facing them. No Secret Service agents. No hovering ushers, afraid that you'll leave a Diet Coke can on a $65,000 antique table. No slinking through the hallways trying to avoid the public areas and hordes of tourists, with Secret Service agents dogging your every step.

What I want to know is--who decided it'd be nice for the President, and his family, to live in a freakin' museum? ar
With armed guards?

But then again, when I look out my window and glance down to see a group of visitors trooping toward the house, the reality of the situation hits me like a fist in the solar plexus.

I live in the White House.

Me.

Eve. The same Eve who came here when she was nine and wrote her ``What I did on my summer vacation'' paper about her once-in-a-lifetime tour of the President's house.

It's times like these that I wonder what weird set of cosmic forces decided I belonged here, rather than in the midst of the tourists taking that famous twenty-minute tour. Somehow I suspect I'd fit in better with them, all those hordes of earnest citizens visiting the White House on vacation, than I do actually living here, dealing with all the rules, the regulations, the ushers, the history, the grandeur, and, oh yeah, don't forget, the antiques. Sometimes it makes me stop in my tracks and I have a hard time catching my breath.

When the feeling hits me, I can't help but sigh.

"Quit sighing," Michael ordered, "and lean a little to your left and tilt your head down a bit."

I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue.

He snapped a picture. "Okay, that takes care of The National Intruder. But Ladies' Home Daily will want something a bit more traditional."

"The Ladies' Home Daily can kiss my rosy rump."

Michael laughed. "Don't be surprised if they offer. They're begging for the lowdown on the Cooper administration, and they might sink that far to get it." He drew an imaginary headline in the air. "'President Prefers Oatmeal for Breakfast. Poultry and Pork Markets Suffer Unprecedented Drop.'"

"Forget the pork." I stretched cramped muscles. "I'm going to be the one dropping if I don't get some fresh air." I stood up and yawned.

Michael reached down by his feet for his camera bag. "Then let's go outside and grab some shots. I'm ready for a change in venue, too."

"Outside? Sure. Anywhere but"--I paused to shudder-"the Rose Garden. There's nothing worse than a cheesy picture of the First Daughter admiring the roses."

So far, every First Daughter since the invention of film has posed for a beauty shot like that, and the press always run the things forever. Heck, those carefully posed portraits even show up in their obituaries.

"I'd just as soon be different," I added. Lord knows I felt different--like I didn't quite belong here, even if my father did.

Michael packed away his Nikon. "Trust me, Eve, this picture will be different. Besides, it's February. The snowstorm yesterday buried most of the greenery. No roses in bloom. Not even an apple tree to tempt you." He laughed at his own joke. "In fact, the Democrats will be the first ones to tell you there's no Tree of Knowledge anywhere on the White House grounds. Not for the last four years and not for the next four, either."

"Very funny," I said with a muffled snort.

All right, so it was funny. But I wasn't going to give Michael the satisfaction of letting him know I thought so. I hadn't figured the guy out yet. Dad had latched onto him somewhere along the campaign trail. Michael appeared to be a stand-up guy, and even I had to admit he was a good photographer.

In any case, my father sure seemed to be fond of him. Maybe it was a matter of Dad missing his own kids while he was on the campaign trail. After all, Michael wasn't that much older than me. Somewhere between the primaries and election race, Dad sort of "adopted" Michael.

I guess it was our fault--my brothers' and mine. Certainly the three of us had done our best to stay out of the pre-election madness when we could. My brother Charlie, one year my junior, avoided politics as much as possible, just like me. But he'd been more successful than I had in his avoidance techniques. Charlie had a very satisfying life in Vermont, where he ran an Internet software business that he'd built from scratch and that was making money out the wazoo. Thanks to his cyber fortune, he was living the life of a comfortable Net hermit. But even if he were dirt poor and destitute, there wasn't enough money in the world to bribe him into playing the candidate's son during the campaign.

The only time he willingly left his self-imposed hibernation was when Dad asked him to make an appearance. And then Charlie'd grumbled constantly how he'd rather be back home with his computers. But he didn't fool me; I knew how much Charlie loved Dad and how he'd do anything Dad asked him to do. Then again, Dad respected Charlie's need for privacy and didn't ask my brother to violate it too often or too much.

Dad even knew not to suggest that Charlie live in the White House.

But my younger brother, Drew, didn't have the same freedom.

Drew was only fifteen, so he couldn't have tagged along on the campaign trail because of school, no matter how he felt about it. Lucky stiff. Of course, now that we were in the White House, Drew wasn't feeling too lucky. He'd had to change schools and currently had the distinction of being not only the new guy in class, but the President's son as well.

Poor kid. I tried to give him an outlet to vent at, to be a safety valve for him, but he's at that age....Could you imagine having to suffer through driver's ed class with two Secret Service men in the backseat of your car?

And think about a teenaged boy asking a girl for a date with a couple of grim-faced security types hovering in the background.

As I said, poor kid.

As for me, during the campaign, I used graduate school as my excuse not to tag along with Dad, but because I worked part-time as an NPS wire service photographer, our paths crossed frequently enough for him to be happy. NPS liked it because, as the candidate's daughter, I had access to photo ops that few other photographers could even dream of.

Except for Michael Cauffman.

Michael had taken some candid shots of Dad during the early part of the campaign--shots that had ended up on the front of several magazines, most notably Time and People. The photos had...