The town and car dealer owner was happy that Stephanie was there and smart enough on her toes to say the wrong name to alert the police. The newspaper from the town a little ways away from her tiny town. The car dealer gave her a brand new car of her own.
The newspaper took a photo of her beside her new car. It wasn't two weeks later every news station reporting that she a missing girl who disappeared in the woods some hundred mile up north. That girl's last name was the same as Stephanie.
Grandma Martha showed Stephanie's birth certificate to the authorities. After investigating the authorities told the newspaper this girl is Stephanie Louann Jennings. Finally the newspaper left town. Stephanie wondered why she had thought she was younger.
About a month later one nosy news reporter dug around and found a old tape where he had found the body of a little unknown girl in the middle of the woods thrown down in the well. He kept coming around and asking her at the city market if she had a picture of her when she was younger.
The last time he was there he made such a ruckus that he got Stephanie fired. By the time Stephanie gathered her things in her locker and walked out the door the police had made sure he left the area he had left an envelope on her car.
It contained a picture of a little girl who strangely resembled her and a photo of a bridge in a couple of counties over. On the back of the picture he wrote The Road To Home then the town's name. She wondered if she had been kidnapped when she was small.
That night she decided to really find out the truth. Niether her mother or grandmother would answer her questions. She knew there was something strange going on and had been for a very long time. She didn't like to be lied to by both of them.
She packed her bag and left before either of them woke up. She was on her way to Hawthorne. She saw the bridge just like in the reporter's picture. She stayed to the right after crossing the bridge.
Not quite a half of a mile down the road was the Hawthorne Cemetery. She drove around in the cemetery looking at grave markers. She stopped and talked to one of the ground crew. She was directed to the grave of that little girl.
For some strange reason she felt like that little girl's body was the real Stephanie Louann Jennings and not her. She needed to know more. She went to the newspaper office and wanted to look in their archives.