Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,24
is blowing sixty miles an hour. I really had to hang on to the steering wheel, the car was all over the road. Hi, I’m Maggie, and you must be Bella; pleased to meet you. I need coffee.” She continued to babble as she surprised Bella by hugging her. “By now, you must realize that we’re all huggers.”
Bella laughed out loud. “Nice to meet you, too. Hello and goodbye.”
“Was it something I said?” Maggie looked baffled as Bella closed the door behind her.
“It’s complicated. Who wants a ham sandwich? It’s all there is in the refrigerator unless we cook up some pasta, but there’s no cheese. Someone needs to go food shopping,” Kathryn said. The irritation was back in her voice. Kathryn had the same ginormous appetite as Maggie.
“It’s on my to-do list,” Myra muttered. “We’ll all take a ham sandwich, dear. There’s a loaf of bread in the freezer. Thaw it out in the microwave. I must say it has been a taxing afternoon for all of us. As I said earlier down in the war room, we need to fall back and regroup, and I think that will be easier once we relax and eat a little food. So let’s get to it. A caffeine fix will go a long way to settle us down. I can’t remember the last time we went six hours without coffee.”
“Try like never,” Nikki said, laughing.
Things did indeed fall into place with Myra’s words, and the coffee was poured. The girls did what they always did then, worked in tandem as an assembly line. Or as Annie put it, “Now we’re back in our own groove.”
Within minutes, the women had all relaxed and were bantering back and forth, with Maggie doing most of the chattering as she waited to be brought up on everything that happened down in the war room. “I want to hear everything, and don’t leave anything out no matter how trivial it may seem.”
“This is on me,” Alexis said. “I never should have brought Bella out here to Pinewood, much less suggest we take her down to the war room. It’s not that I don’t trust her, I do. It’s just . . . I don’t know, it didn’t feel right. And then she was there, and it was too late. I just want to say I own it, and it will never happen again. I’m sorry I wasted all our time.”
“Something other than what you all said went down in the war room seems to have a running undercurrent here. Did I miss something, or did you all forget to tell me something? What is it that’s bothering you? Is it the case overall? Is it Bella? What?” Maggie demanded, as she bit down into her sandwich and rolled her eyes in delight. Maggie did love her food.
The room was silent for a few minutes while everyone stopped eating to think about Maggie’s question; then they all started to jabber at once.
Nikki flexed her lips, then whistled sharply between her teeth the way Jack had taught her to do when they first met. She remembered how impressed she’d been to know she had the capability to let loose such an earth-shattering sound. “Whoa! Whoa! One at a time. Sounds to me like we’re all saying the same thing with a few added words of our own. If I’m wrong, tell me, but I think we’re all bothered by what Bella wasn’t able to tell us. She knows she heard something she thought was important, not at the time, of course, but she knows now that she can’t remember what it is. I, for one, can buy into that. We all understand how that goes, been there, done that kind of thing. She probably has information locked in her mind that we could use, but she can’t remember. Eventually, hopefully, she will.”
Yoko reached for a pickle spear and bit down. “It’s probably the one piece of information that will really help us, but you’re right, eventually she’ll get around to remembering it. As we all know, the more you try to force yourself to remember, the less likely you are to succeed. With luck, we might be able to work without the missing piece of information, whatever it turns out to be. But I suspect that it would be a whole lot easier if we had it.”
“I find this whole thing really sad,” Maggie said.
“We all do, dear,” Myra said. “First, Bella loses her husband. She is just