The Legacy

PROLOGUE

November 1963

Her real name was Mary Thomas, which she knew wasn't a tag likely to attract the eye of a fast-track Hollywood producer with time in his day for only a cursory scan of a casting sheet. So now she went by Andrea Sage.

A Manhattan native, Andrea had fled the city after completing her studies at N.Y.U., intent upon escaping a tyrannical father obsessed with the idea of her following his footsteps onto Wall Street. She had no desire to commit herself to a lifetime of dealing stocks and bonds. So, the morning after graduation, she slipped out of her parents' Upper East Side penthouse, emptied the trust account her grandparents had set up for her on her tenth birthday, caught a taxi to La Guardia Airport and flew to Los Angeles in search of stardom on the silver screen. Andrea was young and beautiful and, at the tender age of twenty-one, ready to conquer the world.

Six months had elapsed since her freedom ride to the West Coast aboard the Pan Am jet, and things hadn't progressed as quickly as she had anticipated. Her beauty had landed her a few bit parts in low-budget films. However, the roles were nothing to write home about -- and she still hadn't. Her mother had no idea where her only child had gone, and Andrea was beginning to feel guilty about not at least calling to say she was safe.

An unusually cool and rainy autumn had transformed Los Angeles from a sunny sanctuary into a depressing land of exile. So on a whim, to try to forget about the looming inevitability of crawling back to Manhattan to face her triumphant father, Andrea took a few days off from her waitressing job at the Beverly Hills Bistro and bought a plane ticket to Texas. She wanted a respite from her cramped studio apartment overlooking the back of a Chinese restaurant, a chance to explore another area of the country -- and to see this man who had so captivated the public.

Andrea squinted through the lens of the Bell & Howell movie camera she had purchased the day before, practicing with it before the event began. She stood near a small tree, a few feet from a reflecting pool's retaining wall, and aimed to her right, where a crowd was milling about in front of a tall building on the other side of the intersection. Then she panned left and followed the pavement as it snaked away toward the triple underpass at the far end of the plaza. This would be the motorcade's route.